THERE WERE seven of us. I’d already given them all nicknames for easy reference, just in case I had to choose which one of them should be killed instead of me, in some sort of horrifying turn of fucked-up events. I had also decided I would have no mercy.
There was Jumbo—of course there was Jumbo. Every fucked-up situation has a Jumbo, a man so large you are awed. A man so large you can feel a very slight but definite gravitational pull. Pencils and paper clips on nearby desks fluttering as if in a stiff breeze when he enters the room, thisclose to being sucked into orbit around him. Jumbo wore a faded and somewhat sordid looking track suit, a huge pale man whose head seemed far too small for his body. A pinhead. Looked like he’d been sweating since he woke up, salt deposits on his skin and a creeping stain on his jacket that waxed and waned like the tide. Jumbo’s head was shaved very close, and you could see the drops of perspiration on his skull, clinging with a jittery urgency. He clutched his checkbook in one meaty hand and quivered, ever so slightly, where he sat, a perpetual motion of jiggling fat.
I liked Jumbo. He looked like an entertaining guy. Plus, if the fucked-up situation got even more fucked up, I figured we could eat him. For weeks, if need be.
There was Dessicated Lady, a woman so old and dry I imagined dust and pieces of lint being blown through her leathery veins, eventually settling in the empty space of her skull and pushing out through her scalp, becoming an amazing swirl of battleship gray hair, kindling-dry. Just looking at her made me want a drink of water. She was wearing a bright green pantsuit and a heavy cloth coat, and had the peculiarly perfumed smell of very old women. Despite the slow increment of hours piling up around us like husks of dead bugs, she’d so far refused to remove her coat. It was hot, stifling, and she remained in her heavy coat without a drop of sweat. My head hurt when she flicked into my peripheral vision—she must have a core temp of about five hundred degrees, the dust in her veins turning molten.
She looked like the sort of woman who cut up your rubber balls when you played stickball in the street and accidentally launched a dinger over her garden wall.
There were the Sorority Twins, tall, leggy girls in tight jeans and turtlenecks, coked-out expressions and bottled tans, their bracelets jingling with every movement they made. Their huge, brown sunglasses remained on, giving their faces distinct fly-like appearances. They were attractive in a bizarre, repulsive way that kept me imagining their thong underwear despite being pretty much convinced that said underwear would instantly convey several venereal diseases in my direction.
For a while the Sorority Twins had done nothing but complain, an endless chain of bitching that encouraged violence. Their vapidity and ignorance was obvious from the moment that they opened their mouths, and constant repetition was not necessary to prove the point—but, their sorority ethic refused to let them do a half-assed job in any aspect of their lives, so they persevered, repeating inanities that exponentially increased my desire to pop them both in the mouth, over and over again, screaming something terrible as I did so.
There was Boogie Down, a skinny black kid in baggy clothes and a lot of gold chains, dark glasses, attitude. Here we had evolution, because when Boogie had entered the bank all so long ago, he’d been all about the Pimp Roll, his headphones, and ignoring the rest of us. As his batteries had run down, though, so had his attitude, and when his sunglasses had come off he’d suddenly become a frightened fourteen-year-old kid whose pants wouldn’t stay up. And I found myself unable to hold his poor fashion sense against him, especially since if I were in his shoes I’d be pretty pissed about being stuck in those pants during a crisis. If you suddenly find yourself needing to run away and you’re tripping over your own pants, it can bring you down. I felt him.
There was, of course, the manager and the one poor unfortunate teller who’d been on duty. The manager was a Bowling Ball, a round ball with spindly arms and legs, dressed in a nice suit that was undermined by his ridiculous spherical shape. His head was a round ball, too, balding and shaved close, leaving him stuck with a rather disastrous Michelin Man appearance. He was high-waisted, too, and as always I became fascinated with what his physical experience must be. How did people who looked like uncomfortable feel, day-to-day? Myself, I was the Princess and the fucking Pea, any little thing that went out of whack concerning my body left me whiny, depressed, and obsessed. If I’d had the Bowling Ball’s body, I doubted I’d be able to function, so distracted by my own hideousness would I be.
The teller turned invisible every time I stopped thinking about her. She was tall and gangly, one of those tall, gangly, breastless women who’d undergone some sort of trauma during adolescence, leaving her to embrace her tortured skinniness. Her hair was pulled back in an extreme ponytail, and she wore plain, long clothes and plain, nerdy glasses. She had remained remarkably calm, sitting next to Bowling Ball with a dazed, placid look on her face. I had little doubt that if she were asked to perform her job duties she would simply and wordlessly rise up and float over to her window, smooth some papers down, and look up to request that the next person in line step forward.
These were the people I would quite possibly die with.
(more…)
