The Savage Girl - Alex Shakar [111]
The car alarm issues two subdued chirps and stops. She sits down on her couch and takes off the sweatshirt she’s been wearing for the last few days. She’s already shaved her underarms to make sure she’ll be able to see what she’s doing. The bottle of rubbing alcohol sits ready on the coffee table. She opens the bottle and pours some alcohol out over the blade, letting it spill onto the table. It’s good to have a plan finally. After she does this, she thinks, maybe she’ll have the strength and presence of mind to get her life in order, to get her place cleaned up, to wash and dress herself, to get a new job, a nicer apartment, new furniture, a nice, normal friend or two.
Almost immediately the car alarm takes up its familiar tune again. She sings along with it this time.
The tremulous wave.
The glottal stutter.
The dancing octaves.
The hopeful risers.
She picks up the blade, still singing. But then stops, wondering what the scar will look like. Still holding the blade, she gets up and walks around her desk into her little home-office space. On the monitor is a screen saver of Middle City being decimated by a steady bombardment of meteors. She presses the space bar, and the screen becomes a window into her sister’s bedroom. Ivy sits on the floor on a pile of money, wearing a short silk camisole. Her hair is festooned with dollar bills, ruffled and knotted like little bows. To the right of the picture window a long list of names scrolls upward, taxonomized into their various levels of sponsorship by a series of headers:
Ivy’s Fellow Shamans ($5,000 and up)
Ivy’s Soul Warriors ($2,500–$4,999)
Ivy’s Time Scouts ($1,000–$2,499)
Ivy’s Glamour Shock Troops ($500–$999)
Ivy’s Past-Life Lovers ($100–$499)
Ivy’s Spirit Familiars ($50–$99)
Ivy’s Tribespeople ($5–$49)
For the most part the sponsors are individuals, though a few Internet start-ups have contributed as well, probably as a form of advertising. Beneath the scrolling list a message runs horizontally across a ticker:
Join the Fight. . . . Help Ivy Help You. . . . Join the Fight. . . .
Meanwhile, above the list, the counter flickers: 446,737 people watching Ivy hold a flaming twenty-dollar-bill up to her face and light her cigarette with it; 446,802 people watching her toss the burning bill into a big metal salad bowl filled with ashes and butts; 447,010 people watching her light up another bill and walk toward the camera, her bare midriff filling the screen, watching her pass the flaming bill in a ritualistic circle around the long scar below her belly button. The scar is thin and pink. It is vulgar and delicate. Indelible and ethereal. Ugly and beautiful.
Ivy turns around, takes one step away from the camera, and pulls down her underwear, doubling over at the waist.
She pulls the panties back up, straightens out, walks away.
447,181 people watching.
Ursula grips the handle of the blade. A fiery metal ingot throbs in her chest. She will carve it out and feel light and cool again. She will become a brand-new person, a better person, transcendent, mystical, spiritual, shorn of cynicism, the person she always wanted to be. Like the savage girl, like Ivy, she will achieve a spontaneous, unreflective existence within her fantasies, living as simply and perfectly in her lies as a goldfish in its goldfishiness, a pebble in its pebblitude, a rhododendron in its rhododendrocity.
She raises the blade, but at that very moment Ivy turns and stares at her, looking suddenly so tired and old, like a tired-out old elephant locked in a lifelong cage. Her sister keeps staring into the camera, frame after frame of vacant eyes, darkly ringed, and with a chill Ursula begins to wonder if she’s been totally wrong about Ivy all this time, wrong about her and about the savage girl, too. What if they don’t live simply or perfectly in their delusions? What if neither of them, in fact, really believes her delusions at all? What if detachment, and not immersion, is the actual