Cogitor, Ergo Sum
Ten to seven. She peeked down the hall. Closing the door, she nevertheless left it unlocked. Was there someone she could call? Someone to visit? She raced frantically through names and faces. It was what she always did when finally she had nowhere else to be but at home, by herself, alone. There was no one she could think of whom she had the slightest excuse to call. She could, of course, pick up the receiver and begin dialing someone out of the blue. But what if at that very moment someone else was trying to call her? Wasn’t there someone, somewhere, at this very moment, thinking of her? Projecting her living image onto the screen of his/her mind?
Five to seven. That man whose desire for her had shriveled in the smell of his fear, in the thing they exuded in common-she knew he would not be coming. Was her flesh beginning to sag? So soon?... Had she set the alarm? Yes, yes. That was definite. At seven a.m. she would be up and have coffee and a roll.
But what if the alarm failed to ring? What if a heavy night rain momentarily knocked out the power? That was something she had never thought of before. How extremely careless of her. First chance she got after awakening in the morning she would go out and buy herself a wind-up alarm clock.
Vera stalked rapidly from room to room, around and around again, as if chasing herself. She stopped before the bathroom door and clutched both her breasts and squeezed. Were they already beginning to go spongy? She dug her fingers into them, lunging after their fading firmness. Fool! she screamed in her mind at that stinking coward at Louie’s. He could be here now making them firm, the press of his solid body ensuring the answering resistance of her flesh.
That far too early sagging… surely it was her fear-riddled imagination. Making her anticipate. There still had to be plenty of time. It seemed far too soon to feel like a balloon losing its air, like a sponge, like a dissipating cloud. She would check. Only the mirror could reassure. She pushed at the bathroom door and it responded slowly to the weakness of her thrust. The clock, though, she remembered quite clearly, was set for 7 a.m. sharp.
Vera stared at her face in the mirror. She dared not blink. What was important, first, was to keep the pale, pinched oval of her face in focus. Whenever she allowed the image to blur, even for a moment, it was already too late. Second, she must dredge up the thought of someone who might now be thinking of her—like that stinking mechanic—and picture him in the mirror of her mind stealing up behind her, enfolding her in his smudgy tattooed arms, testing in his cupped hands the solidity of her breasts…
Again she scurried desperately around the apartment, straining to prolong the vivid lie that the hands on her breasts were another ’s. But the image of that other was immensely hard to sustain. How long, she wondered, had her image persisted in his mind after he left Louie’s? Five minutes? Ten?
Her fingers probed more urgently to keep in contact with the solid surfaces of her flesh. Her breasts, her hips, her thighs, puckered back and dimpled away from the insistent, ceaseless thrusting of her thumbs. Under the press and slide of her hands—hands she could no longer pretend were coated with reassuring grime—her body quickly grew pitted with wells like the surface of a batch of boiling rice.
