Hummingbird Read online

  I refreshed. Nothing changed.

  “Fuck!”

  I navigated to a search engine and punched in keywords, anything I could think of.

  stripper webcam Jasmine pink

  I scrolled through the results: dozens of websites with hundreds of women, some even sharing her name, but none of them could give me what I needed. I tried again.

  redhead webcam hummingbird tattoo Jasmine

  Nothing.

  I attacked the keyboard.

  fuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuck

  Dusk was approaching. I sat in the semi-darkness, listening to the neighbours. A couch spring expanding. A knife scraping a plate. A suppressed cough. Sound after sound bombarded me, a steady crashing overriding them all, like someone pounding on a garbage can with a bat. I clapped my hands over my ears, and still the noise bled through. On my laptop screen, the search engine was waiting. I leaned forward and typed two final words, as if the machine itself might hear me and respond.

  Help me.

  CHAPTER THREE

  From the empty glass in my hand, I concluded that I needed another drink. I went into the kitchen, and paused, looking at the bottle on the counter. Wine. I never drank wine. Just then, keys rattled in the door, and a woman with curly black hair blew into the apartment, all hectic and dishevelled.

  “Sorry,” she said. “Traffic was heavy.”

  She dropped a bulging paper bag on the counter and gave me a distracted kiss before rummaging in the cupboard for dishes.

  I stared at her.

  “Everything all right?” she said.

  “I … I’m not sure.”

  The woman was on the heavier side, wearing jeans and a white peasant blouse. She moved through the apartment like she owned it, touching things, disturbing them. She unpacked the Chinese food, set two places at the table, and looked at me. “Aren’t you going to sit down?”

  I joined her at the table, and she began heaping food onto my plate. Stir fry. Egg rolls. Ginger beef. “So, you’ll never guess what happened to me today.”

  I nudged an unfamiliar vegetable with my fork.

  “I met Spencer Ford,” she said.

  “Who?”

  “Spencer Ford! The poet.”

  I shook my head.

  “I Dream a Hidden House?”

  “Um… . .”

  “Well, it turns out he lives down in South Harbor, and his Golden’s a chewer. Shoes, electrical cords, furniture. Anything he can get his mouth on …”

  I smiled and nodded, scraping the walls of my mind for traces of this woman. That we were dating seemed obvious from her tone (and the fact that she had a key to my apartment), but while she felt eerily familiar, I had no distinct memory of her. Whoever she was, she didn’t expect much of a contribution from my side of the table. After telling me how she’d worked with Spencer Ford’s dog, she described all the other animals she’d visited that day, from a yappy chihuahua to an anxious Irish wolfhound named Jack, whose owners she’d come upon in their backyard, squabbling over a half-built gazebo. Rather than minding her own business, she’d waded in between them to moderate the affair. The way she told the story, the couple welcomed the intrusion, confiding in her, speaking through her to one another, as if to a therapist. She heard them both out before informing them that the gazebo wasn’t the real problem. The real problem was that they weren’t having enough sex.

  I nearly choked on my barbecue pork. “You said that?”

  She’d segregated her food into neat piles, none of them touching, and begun to clear them away, one by one, counterclockwise from the top. My own plate was a mess of fried rice, vegetables, and animal parts.

  She shrugged. “It was obvious. I’d seen them before and they did everything a good couple was supposed to do. Teased each other, finished each other’s sentences. But there was one important thing missing.”

  “What?” I asked, interested in spite of myself.

  “They never touched. Well they touched, but they never touched. I’m talking love-touching here. There’s a kind of touch—on the wrist, the shoulder, wherever—that signifies genuine intimacy.” She reached out and grabbed my hand. “Like that. A touch that says I see you. I recognize you. I don’t take you for granted.”

  Had I been pressed to put a word to what she was doing it would not have been “love-touching.” Her grip was actually a bit painful. She burst into tearful laughter to recall how the chagrined couple had admitted that she was right, that maybe they did need to give their love life some attention. The story ended with the three of them sipping lemonade on the porch, then setting about building the gazebo together.

  She set her fork down and looked at me expectantly.

  “Well,” I said after a moment.

  She sighed, then got up and walked over to the sliding door. “I’m sorry I bored you.”

  I shook my head. “I wasn’t—”

  “We can’t all have lives as thrilling as yours, you know.”

  “I didn’t—”

  “I’m out there helping people, Felix. Making a difference. You know, sometimes I just want to—” She broke off. “Oh my god!”

  “What is it?”

  “Come over here! Come here right now!”

  I hurried over, not seeing anything unusual. The parking lot. The low-rise across the way. “There.” She pointed. “On the top floor. Is he …?”

  The pale man was sitting in his apartment, looking at something out of sight, his hand in his lap, moving rhythmically.

  “Yes,” I said. “He is.”

  “Oh my god!” she laughed, covering her mouth.

  “We shouldn’t be watching him,” I said.

  “He’s sitting right by his window.”

  “I’m sure he doesn’t know we can see him.”

  “I’m sure that he does.”

  “Can you close the drapes, please?”

  She rolled open the sliding door and shouted: “We can see you! Hey! We can see you!”

  The pale man didn’t seem to hear, or to care. The intensity of his arm increased and he arched back, then slumped.

  “Oh,” she said, her voice softening. “Oh, that’s so sad.”

  “Can we close the door now?”

  “He looks like he’s about to cry.”

  “Close the damn door!”

  She looked surprised, then her face shut down.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t know what’s happening right now.”

  “What’s happening,”—she closed the door and turned to me—”is that you think you’re him. You’re not, you know.”

  I forced myself to look at her. “Then who am I?”

  She grabbed my hand and pulled me towards her. She was walking through a very different movie than the one I’d been cast in, a movie in which violins crescendoed as she kissed me hard. Our teeth banged together. Her tongue forced its way into my mouth. By the time we’d made it to the bedroom, my pants were down. “Wait,” I said, but she put a hand on my chest and shoved. I fell back on the bed and my head hit the wall. She stripped quickly, then climbed onto the bed and roughly put on a condom. My socks were still on, my pants around my ankles. I stared at her in confusion, physically aroused, yet terrified as she climbed on top of me and guided me in, bending me back at a painful angle and slamming her full weight down on my body, using one hand to stimulate herself. I moaned in pain and she moaned in pleasure. Her hand became a blur. Her body shuddered. She tensed, making a low keening noise, then collapsed, breathing hard against my neck.

  “Did you …?” she panted.

  “Yes,” I lied.

  “Wow. Oh, wow. That was something. Wasn’t that something?” She lay with her elbow on my diaphragm, wisps of hair irritating my face. Next door, I could have sworn I heard the old man applauding. When she finally rolled off, I disposed of the empty condom, disheartened to see that she had no intention of leaving. I didn’t care who she was anymore. I just wanted her gone. I lay back down beside her and shut my eye
s. After a minute, she put a hand on my chest. “Felix?”

  I made a humming sound, pretending to be half-asleep.

  “I want to take you shopping tomorrow,” she said.

  I opened one eye. “Why?”

  She shifted up onto her elbow. “You’re a famous author. You should look the part.”

  “I’m not famous.”

  “Stop being modest.”

  “I’m not being modest. I’m not remotely famous.”

  “You will be soon. We just need to work on your presentation. No one’s going to listen to you if you’re dressed like … well, I’m sorry, but like a homeless person. You might get away with rumpled. But sloppy won’t get you anywhere. And your hair.” She pawed at my hair, smoothing it straight back. “I think I like it like this.”

  I shut my eyes again as she rubbed at a spot on my arm with her thumb. “I mentioned you to Spencer Ford today. He gave me the name of an agent. Maybe you could get in touch.”

  “With Spencer Ford?”

  “No, silly. The agent.”

  The spot on my arm felt raw, as if she’d rubbed off the first few layers of skin. The next time she said my name, I didn’t answer. She sidled up close and roped her arm around me. I took deep regular breaths, afraid she’d start talking again if she knew I was awake. After a few minutes, a vague pain settled into my legs. I tried to ease away but her hold on me tightened. I lay perfectly still, waiting. The pain was becoming unbearable. Just when it seemed that she’d never let go, she flopped onto her back and began to snore.

  I quietly moved to the darkened living area. She’d left her purse by the door, a handmade-looking thing holding a small assortment of personal effects: lipstick, loose change, business cards for the Well-Heeled Dog Trainers. The name on her driver’s license was Kim Penn. My math put her at twenty-nine years old. In a little hidden compartment on the side of her purse, I found an unmarked vial of pills and a neatly folded note from a fortune cookie that read, Your future will exceed your expectations. I carefully put everything back, then patted my own pockets, surprised to find that not only did I not have any cigarettes, I had no desire for a cigarette. I sat in the dark for a while, then opened my laptop and squinted in the sudden light, the search engine greeting me like a stone idol in a cave. I reached for the keyboard and stopped, feeling oddly tentative. I’d forgotten how to interact with it. I didn’t have a thing to say.

  When I was eighteen years old, Dad drove me halfway across the country and dropped me outside the twin dorm buildings of the West Coast College with a look of barely concealed relief on his face. Within a few weeks, a strange disorganization had crept into my life. I’d ask my roommate, a Vietnamese exchange student named Henry, if he’d seen my watch or my keys or my calculator, and he would give me a brief, horrified look, as if I’d offended not only him but his entire family, before shaking his head and returning to his homework. By the winter term, I was losing blocks of time. At first, I attributed it to fatigue, but as the semester wore on, the gaps widened from hours to days. Sometimes it was relatively easy to catch up on what I’d missed. Other times I’d be utterly lost, with no one to fill me in but Henry, who’d begun to regard me warily, as if the structure of my face were changing in some small but perceptible way.

  I learned to adapt to these leaps in time, accepting them as a normal part of my existence, a phenomenon that came and went, with no discernible pattern. But Kim’s appearance in my apartment marked the biggest shift I’d ever experienced. I’d lost more than a month, long enough for us to have not only met but fallen into something of a routine. Two or three times a week, she’d stop by after work, talk about herself for an hour, then drag me to the bedroom—dominating me, my arousal a joyless autonomic function that I’d actually started to dread. When I woke the next morning, she’d be gone. I couldn’t say just how we’d met, but she had definite ideas about who I was, or more precisely, who she wanted me to be, bringing me uncomfortable shirts from upscale second-hand clothing stores, leaving moody compilations in my CD player, forcing me to watch films that were either infuriatingly experimental or pointlessly disturbing. I’d only published one book (which I doubted she’d even read), but she possessed an unwavering faith in my abilities as a novelist and assured me that she’d been working hard to increase my visibility around town, promoting my “brand” in her sprawling network of clients and friends.

  When she insisted that I write something new, I started work on a romance novel about an English professor and an exotic dancer just to spite her. I wasn’t writing about Jasmine. I was writing to her, letting her know that I was still out there, that I would wait for her. The message couldn’t have been clearer. These are your instructions. Find me.

  Kim, meanwhile, was spending increasing amounts time at my apartment—reorganizing the kitchen, learning my pincodes, introducing a houseplant and an incense burner to the bedroom. Like any shrewd invading general, she befriended the locals, chatting with my neighbours when I wasn’t around, dispensing dog-related advice. But it wasn’t enough. She wanted more. She wanted me to change, to accompany her out into the world. When she showed up one evening with tickets to a play at an amateur theatre, my anxiety levels instantly spiked.

  “I have work to do,” I said, edging towards my laptop.

  She pulled a yellow pill vial from her purse and rattled it in front of my face with a grin.

  “What’s that?”

  “Diazepam.”

  I gave her a blank stare.

  “Valium,” she clarified. “I got them from a vet friend.”

  “You want me to take dog meds?”

  “It’s the same stuff they give humans.” She shook out two pills. “It’s fine. I’ve taken them myself.”

  The pills had heart-shaped holes in them, as if they were meant to be strung onto a little girl’s necklace.

  Kim went over to the sink and came back with a glass of water. “Open.”

  She tucked the pills into my mouth. I swallowed them and grimaced. She rubbed my back. “Good boy. Now go lie down. I’ll come get you when it’s time to head out.”

  To my surprise, the Valium helped. I went to the theatre. I watched the performance. I applauded with everyone else. When we got home, I felt invigorated, inspired to create. I shuttered myself in the bedroom with my novel and wrote for twelve hours straight, ploughing my way to the end of a first draft. The moment I stopped typing, Kim tapped on the door.

  “How’s it coming in there?”

  “I think I’m done,” I said.

  “Really?” She peered over my shoulder. “Did you save it?”

  “Of course.”

  “Did you back it up?”

  “No, but—”

  “Which file is it? This one?” She reached over me to plug in a jump drive and copied the manuscript onto it. “There. I’ll print out a hard copy at my place.”

  “You don’t need—”

  “I don’t mind.” She slid the jump drive into her purse and looked at her watch. “Wow, is it ten o’clock already? I’d better get going. Talk to you later, Felix!” She breezed out of the room and the front door slammed. I closed my laptop, feeling as if I’d just handed my life savings over to a stranger. I wanted the book back, but incredibly, had no idea how to find her. Kim had always been the one to initiate contact. With no phone number or address to refer to, I was going to have to wait.

  Three agonizing days later, Kim called from a coffee shop, a strumming guitar and chattering voices in the background.

  “I’m here with David,” she informed me.

  “Who?”

  “David Cavendish. Spencer Ford’s agent? I showed him your book.”

  “What book?” I asked, confused.

  “The one about the dancer.”

  It took me a second to understand what Kim was telling me. “You showed my manuscript to someone else?”

  “I didn’t think you’d mind.”

  “It’s a rough draft!”

  �
�He’s upset,” I heard her tell David.

  My hand tightened around the phone. I had no idea what David looked like, but pictured a thin man in suspenders and dark-rimmed glasses, smirking as he noted clumsy passages, bad grammar, and inconsistent character names—all of it permanently saved on the hard drive of his brain. There was no way to undo the damage, short of murder. I saw myself storming the coffee shop with a gun, a kitchen knife, a pen—rammed into his esophagus, my words gushing from his body and pooling all over the floor. Kim was talking again.

  “I missed that,” I said, putting my free hand to my suddenly throbbing temple. “What did you just say?”

  “Sorry, it’s loud in here. David says he wants to represent you. He has some publishers in mind. He expects you’ll get a good advance.”

  “Advance?” I said weakly, wondering if she was making fun of me. My first book hadn’t made any money at all. I was actually in debt to the small press that had published it. At any moment, I expected her to explode with laughter and hang up the phone.

  “Hold on,” Kim said. “I’ll pass you over to David. He can explain better than I can.”

  Before I had the chance to protest, the phone changed hands and a new voice came on the line, a hearty voice that managed to sound both enthusiastic and condescending at the same time. “Hello, is this Felix?”

  “Yes.”

  “Felix, this is David Cavendish, from the Whitson Agency. How are you today?”

  “Fine.”

  “Glad to hear it! Glad to hear it! So I had a look at this manuscript of yours. The Pole? It’s really quite good. Sexy but not tawdry. Suspenseful in places. The ending actually moved me a little. Anyway, there’s a solid market for literary erotica right now and I’m fairly confident we can find a home for this. I was hoping we could get together in person and hammer out the details. Assuming you haven’t signed with anyone else.”