I stop walking about three stores down. My feet just refuse to keep going. Standing there in the rain, I wonder how to restart my pedestrian engine and wish there were some kind of gas station for the energy I require. Unfortunately, fortitude is not something you can pump into somebody, and besides, no matter the price per gallon, I have no more money on me.
A car goes by heading out of town. A car goes by heading into town. I imagine the shop owners across the street staring out around their meager wares, pointing to the black-dressed girl who’s turned into a statue.
I imagine me still here at Halloween, dogs passing by and lifting their legs to piddle on my ankles, birds sitting on my head and pooping down my back. I am here at Thanksgiving. Christmas. New Year’s. Snow accumulates upon my straight and angled parts, concentrating on my shoulders where the birds perch and on the tops of my boots, over my toes. I am still here in the spring when the snow melts and the birds and the dogs come back, the former free to fly wherever they want yet subject to the cruelties of nature, the latter chained and licensed to masters who feed and care for them, lives extended through beneficent imprisonment.
As all of this rolls out not as a hypothetical, but as history about to be discovered, I am aware that my foundation is quaking again, and this scares me, especially as I feel myself step out of my body and walk forward, turning back to inspect the me statue. Especially as I picture nothing about my stance or my expression changing for decades, yet in this unaltering, altered-state reality, my hair continues to grow.
I watch as the brown roots push down the dense black ends, the length extending from my head on a fast-forward reel that has pedestrians and traffic going by at blurring speed. The ends curl up, the roots stay straight, and I see it reaching my hips, my knees, the pavement, the false black color now a minor footnote to the brown, dominant whole. I watch a municipal worker with a hose wash me down and the weight of my hair ropes with the water. I watch the water dry. The length continues to extend, even as my clothes rot off of my body, ragging away, falling free in strips like the flesh of a zombie.
My hair grows out down the sidewalk, following the gentle undulation of the storefronts. It reaches the traffic light and ignores the red signal. It grows like a tsunami, filling the valley created by the two sides of the street, and then overflowing the ten blocks of retail to submerge the tiny houses with their old cars and cheap garden gnomes. It rushes toward the border of New Hampshire. It becomes a national emergency. I must be eliminated by the government before my hair weighs so much it cracks this land mass off at the seam of the Continental Divide, this part of the country falling into the ocean and sinking down under saltwater depths—
How ironic. I’d be surrounded by the stuff and yet only need four cups.
With the snap of a rubber band, the hallucination’s tensile strength fails and I reenter my body, my consciousness returning home with the sound and sensation of a door being slammed.
My head whips up to level, the muscles in my neck straining to catch the weight of my skull. I wobble in my boots and put a hand up to my head. I breathe shallowly through my open mouth, my heart playing castanets in my chest.
That is when I hear the laughter, that is when I see the bright colors and the blond hair flanked by two brunette side stones.
Up ahead of me, Greta and Francesca and Stacia have come out of a store. The music store. And by some stroke of luck, they’re walking away from me and do not know I am here.
The three of them are giggling in the rain as they hold the little plastic bags that their freshly bought CDs are in over their heads, umbrellas that don’t help much. As they start to run, their legs kick up the short hems of their skirts, flashing tanned thighs, and their hair, which will never, ever threaten the national security of this country, swings from side to side across their slender backs.
Their departure is perfectly timed and I thank them. Their giddy outburst brought me back to the real reality—and I have to give my madness credit. It’s like a parasite that’s self-aware. If I’m destroyed, the insanity will lack a host, and therefore it needs me alive and requires my rational side’s help on that, at least at this point in my life.
I peel the sole of one boot free of the bolts that have kept me in place, and I studiously ignore the soft pinging sounds of screws that I know do not exist falling on the sidewalk and bouncing away. I repeat this on the other side. As I begin to move, rusty, grinding noises percolate from my joints. I am the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz, needing oil after the rain froze me in position. I am the statue that should not be able to ambulate. I am…
Lots of things that make no sense.
And I therefore keep plenty of distance between Greta and the Brunettes and me. I am also careful that as I go along, my bag of dye and ColorStay swings in relative silence at my side. I don’t want to attract any attention, and my fear at being caught in the wake of those girls means that every sound I make is loud as a marching band.
A car passes me, hits a pothole, and throws up water that smells like motor oil, the spray speckling my left side. As I glance at what turns out to be a pale blue two-seater, I recognize the high, ticking motor, the charming color, the sloped rear end. I don’t need confirmation on who’s driving the vintage Porsche.
And I am somehow not surprised when it slows down three blocks ahead and beeps its horn at Greta and the Brunettes.
As the two-seater comes to a stop, Francesca and Stacia laugh and run forward, bending down and clustering around the window that is lowered. Greta is no longer laughing and she stands back, her chin lifted. I imagine Hot RA leaning across the emergency brake and the camel-colored leather seats, one tanned arm propped on top of the steering wheel, even white teeth out on display as he chides the girls for not thinking to bring umbrellas. I wonder if he is noticing their wet shirts and measuring the curves of their padded bras. I decide he is not. He’s got a Miss America wife who is saving the world.
When Greta finally saunters over to the window, the Brunettes lose their excitement and their smiles collapse. Now Greta grins, but it’s not a girlish expression. It’s much older. It’s much more knowing.
It’s the kind of thing I refuse to dwell on.
The door opens from the inside.
She leaves her two best friends in the rain.
As the Porsche takes off, Greta gives the Brunettes a wave from the dry interior of the Porsche, her hand a flag of victory.
I am forced to stop walking. Even though Greta is my apex predator, Francesca and Stacia are just barely beneath her on the ascending triangle of social carnivores. I don’t want their attention, either. Fortunately, I don’t have to wait long. The two of them resume walking, slower now, and without the giggling or the bags on their heads. I imagine they’re cursing Greta under their breath. But this is the way of things, I decide. To retain her position, Greta must, from time to time, remind the other two that she will always be uphill of them. And jettisoning them in this storm by going off with Hot RA is a great trailhead on the way up that mountain.
I follow the Brunettes to the Ambrose gates, maintaining a four-to-five-block decontamination zone in the rain. I watch their heads turn to each other from time to time as they slash their hands angrily, their CD bags—which I am certain contain exactly what is in Greta’s—jerking back and forth. I decide that this is probably the only time I will ever have anything in common with Francesca and Stacia.