The Savage Girl - Alex Shakar [108]
The cops don’t move, perhaps waiting for the two more police cars that are now making their way down the park paths. For a moment the sirens drown out the screams of the combatants, and then the cars stop and the sirens stop and two more cops emerge from each car, and the six of them move in together. For a moment Ursula can see the two women being dragged apart, and then they disappear again underneath the blue pants and black leather jackets. The women have stopped screaming, and now it’s the cops’ turn to scream, shouting instructions and threats, and then, all at once, the cops stand up, leaving the savage girl and the berry woman lying prone with their hands and ankles cuffed. The savage girl wriggles around, testing the strength of her restraints. Her cheeks and neck are streaked with bleeding fingernail welts. Ursula can’t make out the berry woman’s face, but her hair is a tangled, snowy mess, and her body convulses quietly with sobs.
“What happens to her now?” Ursula asks the original male cop, whose small teeth are again visible in the middle of his red, panting face.
He looks down at the savage girl, considering. “If she’s on drugs, they’ll get her off. If she’s not on drugs, they’ll put her on,” he says.
Another cop within earshot smiles at the joke. Ursula pictures the savage girl in a dull green gown, queuing in a dull green corridor for her daily paper cup of brightly hued pills. Before long the right combination of pills will be found, enabling her to dress herself, albeit in mismatched clothing, and wander the streets aimlessly for three hours every afternoon. Eventually perhaps an even better combination of pills will be found, one that will push just the right buttons: a neon-blue pill to activate in her a desire to window-shop on Haro Avenue, a fluorescent-yellow pill to trigger the urge to work out at Bally’s health club, a nuclear-orange pill to spark an interest in surfing the Internet, a kelly-green pill to make her want to drive a forest-green Saab convertible. And all she’ll be lacking at that point is the one pill that would really finish the job of making her like everyone else: the pill to make her love a dog, to love a dog more than she could ever love a human being, to love a dog so much that she’ll never need to love a human being, so much that she’ll risk her life for it, or even just for the idea of it, just for the pure, shining, untarnished principle of the dog she loves.
Jellybeans
The theme is apocalypse fashion today on the Ricki Lake Show, and the prostitutes saunter onto the set in catsuits accessorized with thigh-high thermal stealth boots and matching over-the-elbow gloves. These draw excited applause from the studio audience. And when plush gray-white winter camouflage–patterned capes with especially tall collars are added to the ensemble, there are even gasps. But when one statuesque black woman appears on the stage in a galvanized-rubber cloak with a velour-lined burlap hood, and throws the cloak open to reveal a silver, form-fitting, décolleté radiation suit, people begin to rise from their seats to get a better look, starting a chain reaction that turns into a standing ovation. Heedless of the adulation, the tall prostitute calmly goes on showing off the accessories: an elegant pair of wraparound infrared goggles, the lenses no bigger than her eyes; a low-slung side holster, accentuating her hips, from which she draws a chrome-plated .38 special; and finally a hard-plastic bubble helmet that gleams iridescently in the spotlights as she puts it on. It gives her dark-eyed, angular face the look of a rare delicacy under glass. The winter-fashion purveyors have all adopted apocalyptic themes; whether it will