Here's something I wrote a while ago about a friend of mine, back before I settled down. Somewhere along the line I lost track of Lola. I wonder what she's doing now:
I have a friend named Lola. She has brown hair and brown eyes and a five-inch needle that spring-loads out from under her right middle fingernail and retracts into her hand on command, into a tendon sheath reaching from her fingertip to the center of the base of her palm where it connects to the wrist. A disinfectant anti-viral fluid bathes the needle, wire-like, inside the hand, where it bends and curls easily whenever she flexes fingers into a grip — around the steering wheel of the car she drives without headlights, around the cold copper doorknob of a target's apartment in the wee hours of morning, around a kitchen knife tilted at his throat as she commands him to silence, to a grim acceptance of the inevitable.
When she opens her hand the fine, crystal-tipped metal shaft snaps back into straightness under her skin. With a cotton-ball soaked in rubbing alcohol she swabs around her man's tearing eye — extra careful with her work on these professional matters. It is surgery, after all. As the poor shaken soul (had it coming, of course) trembles in his kitchen chair, she softens, sings to him that old Celtic song about the tree-elf's first love. It's the one her grandmother taught her, the ballad she sings in the pubs to cheer me up after she's told me for the thousandth time that she won't go home with me. All this makes up her ritualistic preparation of her patient-victim.
Lola would hardly approve my representation of her. She detests my melodrama, the whining, the emotional appeals I make to her when I'm five or six beers deep — probably because she has to hear so much of it during the workday: she doesn't gag her victims because it contracts muscles in the face and makes the needle's entry more difficult. At times, when I know I've annoyed her, I fall back into line at the thought of a
correction from her. Not the usual cajoling or "come off it" from one good friend to calm another, but instead a neural invasion, a literal mind-changing: she steps up to me, runs fingers through my bangs and down the length of my face, stopping to tweak my nose with a flirt. A tap on my chin signs to me (duly initiated into her mysteries) that she's done me, projected into and withdrawn from my brain. Depending upon the intensity and depth of her needle-scratch I'll struggle to piece together subjects and verbs twenty seconds later, or I'll be on the floor, completely disconnected, muttering, possibly scratching at my face like schizophrenics I've seen in movies, jacked completely out of the system, for better or for worse.
And Lola would be long gone out the door, on the next bus or train, and my last coherent thought — my last effected assembly of neural transmissions of any consequence to mind, body, heart — would be that with her needle-swipe she had told me, for the final time already, that she won't be going home with me.
Lola says she will never turn on me like that, but it's her casual, almost unnoticeable way about it that I find disquieting: a casual dance of her hand across your face — oh! did you cut yourself shaving? — and she's already switched out her needle, inserted it, just under the top eyelid, whipped a smart incisive arc across the left frontal lobe with her metal prosthesis, and pulled out cleanly, sheathed her weapon. So quick, so precise, so skillful, you don't feel or know a thing, because she never cracks a single visible vessel during the procedure, and she doesn't strike any nerve she doesn't instantly kill.
She toys with me at parties, picks a single target, tells me she'll do him/her while I watch, challenges me to catch her:
"I can get under Clarkie's Oakleys, she promises. Keep an eye on me."
Three times she's there and back. When she's with him I don't dare blink. It's so like her to watch me, to time her assault when my eyelids are down, and by the time I have my guard up and posted again I will have missed her attack. Back at my side a fourth time, she smiles as Clarkie steps out of his corner, wanders off to throw up.
"Just now — when you fixed his tie," I tell her. "I saw his eyebrow flash up, twitch a little. That was when you got him."
She shakes her head, sets her drink down on its host coaster. "Hardly. He's been down twenty minutes now. I got him when I borrowed his cell phone. Right at the end of
London Calling, before the stereo started with this miserable folk rock."
"Down twenty minutes, and you've been playing me all this time? When you used Clarkie's phone . . . ?"
"When I pulled the antenna up," she says, sparkling. The closest I've seen her to happy — well, around me, anyway. Always so outspoken about economy, of course she was going to bag him on her first trip. Yet she was still able to make sure I didn't catch her. All the time while she worked him for that cell phone I wondered to distraction who it was she needed to call so badly. In shambles, my mind could think of nothing else — certainly not our bet.
"Not only did I miss you doing it," I gush, "but I still can't read the difference off Clarkie."
"Nobody will until Monday morning — maybe not even then," she jokes. Clarkie steps out of the bathroom with dribble on his chin, repeats the word lactose until he's handed a cocktail napkin. He bites off a corner, tucks the rest into his shirt and slumps back in his corner. Directionless.
At home alone I find a message on my answering machine:
"It's 10:26 and I've disconnected Clarkie. I'm looking across the room at you, standing up against the wall eating
hors d'oeuvres by yourself, wondering why I can't ever bring myself to go home with you . . ."
I can hear "Revolution Rock" behind her, loud enough that the Clash's heavy bass boom and horn arrangement almost break up her giggling transmission.
"Your eyes say you're still waiting for me . . ." She seems to trail off — she gets quiet for a second. "Your eyes are still waiting for me to start and finish him. If I'm right you owe me twenty bucks."
I erase the tape.
