They called me Lilly when I was born, although I’m not sure that it was the right name for me. The name ought to belong to someone who can identify with it, or who can at least see it. When I look into a mirror, one eye green as fungus, the other red like blood, I see a Gertrude, a Frambruka, a Brumhilda.
My dad worked the local airport grounds handling the arrival and departure of little jet planes. One day, he left a note at home saying “I am chocking,” and never came back. I heard my mom say that he was sucked in by the vacuum of an engine. I knew he didn’t want to be around anyway, so I was glad he was gone. But sometimes, I wished he had taken me with him so we could solve one-thousand-piece puzzles together like we used to, but I never said a word about that because I didn’t want anybody to worry. I knew death was not something to wish for if you wanted everybody to think you were fine.
When I was fourteen, I used to have this strange dream night after night. I was in a black room, watching a pair of pale hands strapped around a child’s neck, choking the life out of his eyes. Emptied lungs and cries sounded like nails scratching on cobbled floors, then a silence, and I woke up.
This morning, like the past four hundred and seventy mornings, I woke up to the white cat mewling by my leg. It’s been my wake up call ever since my brother George drowned in the public pool and my mother decided to kill herself. These two deaths happened a little after the dreams began, but I know for sure that the dreams are not to blame. Three days after I found mama dead, nose plugged with a cork and hair-balls stuck down her throat, the white cat started following me.
Aunt Jenny, who had taken me in (“poor orphan,” she sobbed), was too much to handle and I knew she was lying when she said that reciting a bunch of Hail Marys would make sure I’d go to heaven when I died. “That’s where your mommy and brother will be waiting,” she said, voice tuned in “baby mode” and lipstick smirked from one ear to the other. I told her that as long as she wasn’t in hell, I’d be just fine there. Aunt Jenny was a bitch, and I never looked back after walking out the front door.
I was a call girl for the colder part of the year, when raw body warmth was necessary to stay alive. Men in suits, nuns in gowns, weightlifters, and old ladies with peculiar carnal wants were among passing customers, and I did all that they asked for. A scrawny man who was on a lunch break from his Santa Clause job came to me one day telling me he had a retrograde ejaculation disorder, and I healed him. He said I was a miracle worker and that he’d make sure I’d get what I wanted for christmas. I satisfied these strangers and their urges, and they kept me warm when the icy air outside stung like needles. They would call me sometimes, after we were done. They would say “Lilly, Lilly, I need you tonight,” but I never answered because it was a one time thing, and who was Lilly? In the winter, I spent most of my time at Mrs. Flench’s humid apartment, sorting the spiders she’d caught by the size of their eyes, and sometimes their eye color too. Some had purple eyes, others blue.
Mrs. Flench, an old glove seamstress, did not approve of any cats lingering around. Her mouth, containing a machine within that continuously wrestled with tobacco, was always dry. It shed skin like the shell of a coconut, and on Sundays I was told to collect the mouth debris. “Feed it to the white cat outside,” she snickered, “that oughta kill’it!” Her fingers, impaled by the needlework, were always moving, as if each finger had a heartbeat of its own. A carpet that felt like lizard skin crawled under our feet in her living room. It gathered dust, and gargled on our words.
I’m in a town square, watching the wind caress the curves on the buildings and faces. A plastic bag floats adrift from one person’s head to the other. I feel like I’ve been infused into that scene in American Beauty, except I am that bag, elastic, in constant metamorphosis, swimming from one head to another, a mask. An aging man sings along to some seventies music on his way back home from work. I am not Lilly. I am not Lilly. They say my name as if it were a carrier of some sort of truth. If there was any truth in my name, I’d be a peaceful flower in a pond. My case is static. My case is branded in iron and gold, woven into my pores, tattooed into the way I breathe, the way I eat, the way my heart beats. It is a running film in my head, constantly rewinding, and constantly reminding me, I do not exist. Because if I did, I’d be long gone by now.
