"Why did you ask if I could see you?"
She casts her eyes down. I know I'm tripping, now—her eyes are glinting like a fistful of wet olives. I can see houses of cards bobbing around her on the lake surface, made of human skin.
"I wanted to stop being real. Just for as long as it took you. I'm good at serving. And waiting."
The girl smiles again, had and jaunty and drenched with light, then says, cheerily: "Soon, it'll be the longest day of the year. Did you ever watch for the longest day of the year and then miss it? I always watch for the longest day of the year and then miss it."
"That's from The Great Gatsby."
"And so are you."
She was either a brilliant actress or indeterminably insane. Her smile was wide; her teeth were bright and pristine as a cadaver's.
She spoke again while unhooking the top of her dress. "Your daughter. Has she seen you and your wife fight?"
"Yes."
"That could be traumatic for her."
"I know."
"I feel terrible for her. Don't stay together just because of her. Kids hate that. Better to split up so she doesn't have to witness the fighting."
"That's—I guess you're right."
"You're in love with your wife, even with everything she's done to you."
"Yes."
"You're capable of love," she says, pulling down the front of her dress so I can see the faded navy of her bra over small breasts. "But is she?"
"That's a very good question."
"See? I'm an angel. I'm brilliant," she says, grinning. "I'll be an Ivy Leaguer in a few months."
For a moment she doesn't say anything. Her face sort of swims and flickers across my line of vision—and then it's like the whole world is turning into melting wax.
The leaves begin to drip from their limbs, the waves turn to a thick, molten substance that threatens to burn me alive. And I try to stay calm and to tell myself it's just the drugs but my hands keep shaking and I want very badly to tell her to put her clothes back on.
"Don't do that," I command. "Get dressed."
She does what I tell her, and then: "I do have a name. It's Kara."
"Nice to meet you, Kara."
"If I could," says Kara, "I'd erase the 2000s from my memory, just blot out those ten years and replace them with something lovely and blinding, like hot white cotton dipped in arsenic."
I nod and press her brown left leg into the sand, running over the pale stubble with my fingertips.
"I'm scared," Kara says to fill the silence, rotating her body on the thin layers of shifting sand. "I'm scared this has all been a dream, and when I wake up I'll be eight years old again."
I just nod.
"I'm six years old," she says with her eyes closed, sinking her right hand into my lap, "and I'm in that play, the Egyptian Cinderella. And I'd imagine that I was another girl, with shinier copper skin and two silk braids. The same boys who'd call me ugly would suddenly clamor to touch me, and I'd smile and let them slip their hands up my dress and I'd open my mouth wide for them like in the book. Because I'd rather be loved for something I can control than hated for something that I can't. And then I'd move on to other men, scores of them..."
"And they'd love you," I say, and already the universe was ending for Kara, the delicate pieces of her dream world were crashing about her ears.
"And they'd love me."
I trace the outline of her body through her hospital gown; her eyes close and she shivers visibly.
"I think about sex too much," she says.
She was re-hooking the gown; I watch the navy bra and the patches of wet brown skin disappear under the thin white fabric. "All of the time. Can't I kiss you? Please, just once—just touch me a little bit, I need it so badly—"
I can see her delicate face contorting with reckless biological desperation. Another woman throbbing for a match.
And it's the realization that I can do whatever I want to her that makes her so repulsive. I can tear through her like a child ripping apart the pages of a coloring book. I can make her come and I can bring her close to death, leave her limp and gasping...
I can take my pocketknife and tear her mouth open at the seams.
I start to picture what that would look like, with all the blood and the world turning to wax around her corpse, and I tell her I think I should go.
I start to walk away from the girl and back up the path, where joggers march in endless circles about the lake.
"Did you hear what I just said?" she's screaming from the shore. "All I want is for you to hurt me."
I wish I can close her eyes and return her to the melting water. I'd bathe her in cataracts.
"Go see your psychiatrist."
"Don't go. If you go, I'll drown myself. Don't think I won't do it."
"I'm leaving now." I begin to walk more quickly, dodging yuppie parents with strollers and elderly couples in bicycling attire, all of whom are staring at me with bright, vacant eyes.
She follows me up the path like a snake.
"I won't leave you alone until you kiss me. Please." She's gripping my left hand with her tiny child's palm. "Just once."
I shuddered, loosening myself from her palm's insatiable grip. I watch my hand drip momentarily with thick wax.
Kara stares at me. Flecks of newspaper shreds—gossip columns, religious advertisements and green-washed obituaries—circle around her bare ankles. Shadows play at the edges of her eyes.
"I'll follow you," she murmurs. "Don't think I won't."
And I'm thinking about the thousands of things I can do to this girl, all of which begin with ripping off the gown and fucking her, hard, on the sidewalk before returning her to whatever institution she's just escaped from. And passersby are staring. I start to laugh.
She makes a pass for my lips but I turn my head; instead she kisses at my cheek.
"I hate you", she says. "I hope your daughter turns out like me."
"She probably will."
"Adam?" She's several feet away, back on the shore—I don't remember her walking away. Just the drugs.
"What?"
"You should change her name. Your daughter's, I mean."
"To what?"
"Kara. Chloe's the worst."
"I'm leaving, now."
"If you go, I'll kill myself. I'm insane, I really am." Now her lungs are shining a hot transparent yellow; her mouth leaks kerosene.
I imagine tilting her head back a little harder, forcing myself into her mouth, just until she tastes the salt.
"You're an angel, right? Just go back to the water where you belong; you'll be fine."
Sirens, from far off.
Kara stands still in the water. She bites her lower lip. She's shuddering, the dark coiled mess of hair backlit, a sort of urine-drenched halo.
The girl had risen from the lake like Aphrodite in Botticelli's accidental masterpiece, splashed with carbolic acid and self-indulgent fantasy.
Kara's posture reminds me of my wife. Lydia. She bites her lower lip, too—she almost always smells of candied detergent.
My wife will toss blue glances at the child asleep in the next room, and then she'll push me against the bed and sink into my sternum...
And as the men in white unload themselves from their van, I hear a scuttling in the water, like a desperate aquatic bird flapping at the lake surface.
I keep walking.
She's back in the ambulance. And a pair of concerned parents are probably stroking sweat from her forehead while she looks restlessly towards the hidden sky.