“Bring me a guitar,” I say.
“Why did you go without me?”
“I had to do it alone.” The music is fading. It’s a labor to keep hearing the notes. “A guitar!” I say.
Rosita exits and returns with the acoustic. She lays it in the empty spot on my bed a lover might occupy. I pick it up and my hands become possessed. I’m a part of the old traditions of creation. Muses singing through my digits to play the dying troubadour’s last song. Rosita listens for a minute before the sheriff calls for her. I can tell she wants to linger, but Sheriff Saunders calls again.
The women begin a conversation in the hall. Their whispers rise, occasionally punctuated by Rosita’s sharp swearing. I hope she isn’t confessing her theft. If she is, there’s nothing I can do. My hands won’t cease composing.
* * *
• • •
Once Sheriff Saunders has gone, I sit on the couch and transcribe the work into a notebook while Rosita changes the dressing on my neck. The room is basted with the stink of our unwashed bodies. The windows in the kitchen stay open but have little effect against the days of our accumulated sweat. The last of the food in the fridge is gone, so we sustain on canned fruit from the cupboard. Rosita drinks a warm Coca-Cola. I forgot to refrigerate the bottles and we’ve eaten all the ice.
The television segues into another update about the police officer’s murder and how the manhunt for Victor Lawton has intensified. A member of the Watchmen environmentalist group is being interviewed. The man’s identity stays hidden by the triangle of a red bandana tied over his face, a ball cap and sunglasses concealing the rest of his features. He says Victor was a member of their organization, but maintains they are peaceful whistle-blowers. Victor was excommunicated for plotting terrorist acts against polluters. Watson Chemical was a name he frequently mentioned.
The reporter grills the man. She wants to know why he didn’t come to the press or police sooner. He stutters through excuses as Rosita peels the bandage off my neck.
“How bad?” I ask.
“You’ll have a scar. I really think you need some antibiotics.”
I should be on guard after the stolen tracks, but I remain softened by her company. Just watching her descend the stairs the other morning, the way she stretched and scratched bed-tussled hair felt like a gift. This companionship is the normalcy better-made men get to experience. The beginning of each day punctuated with a sleep-tinted kiss and a groggy smile. This is what I used to have and lost.
Rosita turns the TV off. “Asshole could have killed you.”
The pessimist inside tries to dismiss the concern in her voice. I can’t let myself believe she could desire me. Not after the theft. Perhaps The Body Book has made her more comfortable with the misshapen, but she still wouldn’t want to roll over in the night and see me sharing the bed. Just like my theory regarding the blue-tailed lizards, she’ll leave and take something with her.
“Do you wanna talk about it?” Rosita asks.
“I can tell you do.”
She pulls at one of her toes until it pops. It’s a nervous fidget I’ve noticed. As she hangs her head low, fallen bangs cut across her eyes. Perhaps she doesn’t want to look at me while saying whatever comes next.
“I’ve told you I’m sorry more than once,” she says.
“I forgive you,” I say. “But it doesn’t keep Angela from having heard.” It also doesn’t mend my feelings, but I don’t see the need in telling her that.
Rosita nods. “What did you two decide?”
“I told her these songs were mine and promised to fill my quota with the tracks I originally wrote for her. I’m not sure that will keep her from playing whatever she wants. The only way to be sure is to go public with what I’ve already written.”
“Maybe you should,” she says. “I think you underestimate your audience. There are plenty of shallow people out there, but that’s not everyone.”
She dabs the crusted wound with a damp cotton swab, applies some ointment and wraps the new bandage around my neck. It stings, so I wince and knock the guitar off the end of the couch. Rosita rests it against the plush cushions.
“What would you know about most people?” I chuckle. “You take naked pictures of freaks.”
“They’re not freaks. Anyway, I believed in it enough to steal your music.”
I believe in it, too. I keep thinking about one man she interviewed in Denver with tumors growing on his face. Each mass looked like ripe fruit ready to drop. There is a single picture toward the end of the session where the man grins. Some of his teeth are obscured by a bulbous growth dangling from his upper lip, but the smile is still more genuine than any I’ve cracked in years.
“The people you interviewed?” I ask. “Did it help them afterward?”
“You wanna talk about it now?”
“Yeah, if you don’t care.”
She lights a cigarette. “I just want you to make up your mind.”
“Does it help them?” I ask again.
“I started it hoping so. Now, I’m not sure I’m qualified to answer.”
“Let’s just hear your opinion.”
Rosita inhales her cigarette. “Some of them. It might help break them out of the cycle of self-loathing, all those feelings of self-hate, but they’ll slide right back down if they let themselves. I can try and show them their worth, but they are the ones who need to believe it. That’s hard to admit, but I think that’s the truth.”
“I’ve been thinking some of the questions might help me.”
Rosita shakes her head. “I don’t want you making rash decisions. Not while you’re fucked up.”
“I’m no more fucked up than usual.”
Part of it may be an olive branch, but it’s also a hope for something I can’t quite articulate. A last chance to revise how I see myself. Rosita’s poker face is solid, but the opportunist rises inside her. My exposed body is the logical progression from the photos she’s already taken. We both know it’s a necessary addition to the book. Not just stationary nude spreads, but my body engaged in the acts she’s already documented. Without both, the project is incomplete.
“If you feel different later, we trash the photos. Deal?”
“Deal.”
Rosita leaves to gather her equipment. I watch the trail of cigarette smoke disappear in her wake and run a hand over my lower back trying to feel the first spot where the vertebrae went awry, snaked out on an alternate course.
Rosita comes back to position me on the couch. She sits in the chair across from me, readying her cameras. Aside from her Nikon, there is a camcorder to record the session.