Issue 20

Keith Carver

Mehmet first saw tits at Kiki Damron’s trailer, in Gobles, deep into summer vacation, between grades five and six. They were hers to show, and nothing seemed wrong with it.

Naushad, his friend, doesn’t really matter for this story. He’s just a middleman to Kiki. A middle-school man—a second-try eighth-grader that coming fall. Mehmet wasn’t sure if Naushad had done it with Kiki yet—sex—but he hinted at the possibility, and Naushad was the only link, besides television, that Mehmet had to the outside world, to the trailer park, to anything.

Walking the old state highway, the only road connecting their neighborhood to Sunshine Waves Mobile Home Court, Naushad stopped Mehmet to warn him that Kiki was a psychic. Well, a mind-reader. Naushad didn’t know if they were the same thing.

“She said she knows what I’m thinking before I even open my mouth,” Naushad said. “So be careful what’s going on up here.” He tapped Mehmet’s skull with his finger.

“And you really believe her?”

“Just wait until you meet this woman.”      

A psychic knew the future, and a mind-reader could watch your secret life like a movie. He did not like the idea of someone rooting around his psyche. He pictured a beautiful woman with a crystal ball. He imagined her wheeled off in a straightjacket, traumatized by his pornographic daydreams.

“I have to tell you something else,” Naushad said. “She takes her clothes off sometimes.”

“Doesn’t everyone?”

“She does it right out in the open.”

“Big deal,” Mehmet said. He had never seen a naked woman.

“Another thing.”

“Good grief,” Mehmet said.

“She’s very sick. It’s in her skin, her eyes, everywhere.”

Inside the trailer, Mehmet knew by the darkness that Kiki was a mother. Mehmet’s eyes adjusted to a room larger than he’d expected. At first, he hesitated to look at Kiki directly, and what stood out most was a heap of stuffed animals piled on a La-Z-Boy. Mehmet imagined Kiki moving into the trailer in a hurry, dumping the animals there, and occasionally putting her face in the pile to breathe in the smell of her children, who were, by now, far from Gobles and Sunshine Waves. Anyone, even Mehmet, could see that no kids lived here.

Mehmet saw himself in his mind’s eye, his pink skin, with patches of red where he’d skinned his knees, too small for his T-shirt and too big for his shoes, itching and stinging with sweat, clawing at his skin with his stupidly big hands. He wondered why people bothered to wear clothes at all when the heat made it so miserable. He’d fidgeted all through church that morning, aroused by the women in towering heels and thin sundresses, the doomsday service, the vibration of the organ in his pew—in fact, the whole world buzzed with pleasure that day, even the timbre of the pastor’s voice, even the way the blue of Kiki’s trailer popped in the Sunshine Waves’ sea of gray and off-white.

The inside of the house put an end to these summertime pleasures. Would Kiki, who read thoughts and lived beyond the bounds of her own mind be able to tell that Mehmet had never touched a woman? That in all his life he’d only made seven baskets in his backyard hoop after hundreds upon hundreds of shots attempted? He imagined a garbage truck hauling his brain off to a dump somewhere on the edge of Marshall County and a new one arriving in a crisp white box.

And holy shit was Kiki ever topless. She let the boys in and sat down on the sofa. She held one hand in the air and one over her heart as though taking an oath. “I’m having a hot flash,” she said. She hefted her left breast, gritted her teeth, and pointed to her stomach. “It’s like I drank lava.” She leaned toward Naushad, who’d sat down in the opposite corner of the room. When she tried to speak again her whole body was seized with a spasm of pain that Mehmet mistook, at first glance, for laughter.

She turned her attention to Mehmet. “You seem sad. What’s wrong?” She patted the spot next to her. “You can sit next to me if you want. I’m not contagious.”

“I wouldn’t trust her,” Naushad said. “First, you’ll feel everything, and then you’ll feel nothing at all.” He seemed older in Kiki’s presence, in that dark trailer.  Mehmet still remembers his voice but can’t see his face.

Kiki glared at Naushad. “You, the short one in the corner—don’t speak for the next half hour.”

And he didn’t. It was like Kiki had a remote control, and she changed the channel from one boy to the other. And who knows whatever happened to Naushad? He skipped off to another town, he withered away, he won the lotto, he was covered in sores, he moved to Florida. It took him no time to sink so low he became a footnote in Mehmet’s memory, just a link in the chain of events that led to the afternoon in Kiki’s trailer.

Mehmet didn’t actually know if he wanted to sit next to her, but he didn’t have a choice. He knew that much. This was the nature of grief. If a sick mom called you close, you gladly went. A sick mom presents love as an option where no options exist. A sick mom needs you, and for this you feel grateful. That seemed to Mehmet the sweet kind of sadness, the good kind of grief.

“Come here,” Kiki said. She couldn’t have had a self-conscious bone in her body, not the way she eyed Mehmet then.

He joined her on the couch. She whispered in his ear, “I’m scared, too.”

This is when Mehmet realized she was reading his mind.

She seized again, and this time she grabbed his wrist. Her nails dug into his skin. She made a small percussive sound like, “huh?” Her hands were hot but the tiny hairs on her arms stood on end.

Mehmet learned later that feelings were just little chemical charges in the spine, and pain wasn’t real in the way that Kiki’s tiny hairs were real, the way the tumors in her stomach and her breasts were real. Tumors declared themselves to Kiki via pain, just an exchange of information between mind and body.

Kiki’s face flushed. Before Mehmet knew it, she was wiping tears from his face with a tissue. He felt the ducts clench and release. His mouth watered. His sinuses burned. “It’s just the animal dander. My hay fever. You pinched me. I—”

“Stop,” she said. “Touch this.” She eased up on his wrist and moved his hand to cup the underside of her breast, heavy and uneven, a lump of dough with coins in it.

The future opens up to Mehmet, and it’s whatever is the exact opposite of this touching, and he knows then he’ll never see Kiki after this. He misses her already, and he doesn’t want to get to know her.

A breast felt like this, and he loved it. But they were sad, too. Her nipples were swollen, and Mehmet could feel his own puckering despite the heat.

“Is this not what you came for?” She put his hand on her stomach. He knew he’d come from inside a woman. He knew that, not unlike a head of lettuce, he’d been stuck in a clear sack. That he’d lived in his mother’s gut—and now his mother was just a door and some shadows.

Kiki, though. Her stomach felt hot and hard and dense like bike tires. “That’s just a tumor,” she sighed. “I miss having a little kid around to say stupid shit.” It sounded like a compliment, so Mehmet took it that way. Grownups talked like this, with daylight between the words said and the meaning. Mehmet never wanted to get old.

He can spin it any way he wants, and he does, but he can’t corrupt her, and he doesn’t bother trying to explain her to anyone else. Kiki wears expensive jewelry and real perfume, and she lives in this trailer as an act of humility. She refuses healthcare. She’s undercover royalty on the lam.

One of her eyes swells with what grows inside her. Her face is not unlike Naushad’s, with gobs of acne nested in the scars of previous breakouts, splotched and bulging, tiny black veins spider-webbed across her forehead, pustuled and picked-at and mottled, a low-intensity red—not a side effect but the outer edge of the thing killing her.

“Where are you from?” he asks. It’s a bit of small talk he thought he’d mastered, but the sentence comes out all wrong, like which planet beamed you here.

“Everywhere,” she says. Mehmet recalls the names of far-off places: Paris, the Galapagos, the cosmos. She says, “Three Rivers, Oshtemo, Dowagiac.”

They stay in the trailer for years, just Mehmet and Kiki. Even after she’s gone, she flits in and out of his mind. The soles of Kiki’s feet are bare and incredibly soft as though she’s been carried around her whole existence in a sedan chair from one memory to another.