"Do I detect a British accent?"
"Nope. Sorry to disappoint. No hablo ingles. I so' sorry."
The blonde laughed.
"But seriously: Is it?"
"Why, yes, yes it 'tis. Guilty as charged. Because I'm British, I should say 'guilty as adjudged' to make myself sound smarter. Guilty as adjudicated. Ad-jood-eh-cated."
Josh swirled around his hardly-touched drink, treating it as his membership pass to the stand around in a bar circle and chatclub.
"Well, Mr. John Bull," began the squat brunette, the lesser light in the bar girl trio, "that's a Jack and Coke. That's a very un-British drink you're drinking there."
The tall blonde and the short blonde tried to brush off a laugh, but even these drunken Americans knew to be embarrassed. The two blondes played with their hair and scratched the back of their hands, all the while sending dagger flicks of the eye to the sloppy brunette.
"Well, what options do you suggest." Josh didn't frame it as a question.
"Yeah, I know, I didn't mean it like . . . ." The brunette trailed off, slinking away, sensing her chances were shot. The two bold blondes leaned in, crowding out the retreating brunette, whose broken gaze now surveyed the rest of the bar: the transparent, purgatorial ritual of the face-saving recently rejected.
Now only the two blondes remained, smiling and talking, communicating fully with their hands, each softly touching his shoulder or even his stomach whenever he said something funny.
"So, where in the States are you from?"
"Were both from L.A., originally."
"Oh wow. Hollywood. We knew that, in England. New York, D.C., L.A., San Francisco, New Orleans. The only places we knew. And Texas, of course, but only in infamy."
"Mhmhm."
He wondered how many conversation threads he needed to weave before he could fuck one of them. He knew the dance well. Back and forth, the old ersatz ritual, spitting back superficial dead letters to pretend there was some kind of connection, as if they don't fuck for status. But status is a two-way street, and he knew American girls needed to avoid looking like sluts. So here they were, going through the motions, the extended conversation signaling to polite society that the girls took their time and assessed their options and didn't run home willy-nilly with just any guy, even though everybody and their mother knew that when these girls heard his accent the deal was sealed.
"I bet you girls were bloody-well connected back in L.A. I bet you girls knew all the hot trendy bars and parties in all, lookin' the way you do. Must be, ah, culture shock for you. It really is like Fargo up here."
The two blondes spoke into each other:
"Well, it is a great school here," began the taller, bustier one.
"Must be shock for you too, with all these Scandinavians," interrupted the petite one.
The girls stopped, met with their eyes, laughed, hesitated . . . .
Josh liked the tall busty one, so he cashed in on whatever the other blonde had said.
"Well, yeah, I never knew too many Norwegians. But it's nice to at least be around Europeans, I guess, like ethnic, ethnic native Europeans, or I mean, people with a strong connection to Europe. Never got the chance myself, really, you know."
"Well," began the taller blonde, jockeying for position and patting her hair, "we have the Scandinavian look." She faux bowed in her skirt like a Swiss-Miss.
"I'll call you Swiss-Miss."
The tall one laughed. The petite one's hands touched her chest, just for a second. Josh noticed, but resolved to stick with his first choice.
"So, meet any other Britishers before me?" He stared at Swiss-Miss's skirt, but no forthcoming bubbly blonde voice forced his eyes up in the usual pantomime of interest.
He should have thought that question through; he had phrased the question solely to pique their interest with "Britisher," a word exotic enough to impress these Minnesota-by-way-of-Los Angeles girlies.
He shuffled, smiled, sought to maneuver his way out of this. To compound his discomfort, he spotted the Romanian girl he had spoken with earlier. She saw him and the blondes, and gave him the meek smile of mild pity Europeans give to the British. Correction: the look of mild pity Europeans now give British lads talking up American girls in American bars.
He rubbed his neck. There was sweat back there.
"Well," Swiss-Miss started, "you are the first Britisher I've met. Although, I've heard, there is a fair amount--"
"Relatively," interjected the forgotten other blonde.
"Yes, a relatively fair amount, of British people who've made it to L.A."
He looked for the Romanian, but she had already floated out of vision.
He looked up briefly at Swiss-Misss encouraging face, the type of fresh, young face that would have found itself spread, wrapped and bound like a pillow case across the bathroom mirrors back in England.
"You're so beautiful," he said, only to Swiss-Miss.
"Awww, you're so sweet. She must have given off some kind of sign, because the other blonde went away (although--because the departing blonde was cute and pert--she left with her dignity intact).
"Do you want to get a drink, somewhere a little more private. Maybe some coffee to keep the night young?"
"I'd love that."
They made their way out. He didn't turn around, but saw in his mind's eye little Swiss-Miss looking back at whatever friends she came with, her lips pursed, eyes wide in excitement about the prospect of going home with a Britisher.
The café was just down the street. She held his arm to insulate herself from the cold. He put his arm around her. She smelled like effervescent oranges, like the super-sweet spectral essence of citrus. Concentrated citrus. He liked it. Because he considered himself just an American, enjoying nice American-style uber sweet perfume.
They made their way to the café door. Three overweight females were leaving, the type of girls who need to try just a little bit harder to get attention -- the type where all the ingredients were right, but God just screwed up the directions and added a little too much of this and not enough of that. Josh was always real nice to them
He had been in America for as long as he could remember, but this made him feel home. Fat girls and overpowering perfume. Because only the pretty girls corpses had been recognizable in England, sans faces, a natural resource used to beautify the mirrors and walls. The fat girls were never as lucky; they were never dispatched as intimately. No, the fat girls always attracted a crowd, a crowd whose first weapon was scorn, then sheer weight, then hands and fists and talons and spit. A crowd that would make the fat girls thin with its claws, until every member had gotten his fair share of cooking fat for the night; their heads paraded above the crowd, rested in the hands of the tallest attacker, extended thirty-feet or so in the air, Deinoychus claws surrounding the heads like a crown, displaying them like some obscene Thanksgiving cornucopia.
"Josh?"
She was in the doorway, keeping the door ajar for him.
"Sorry."
They ordered coffee in a little nook. Josh was close enough to see delicious red flush butterflying across her cheeks, a gift from the cold, another way the beautiful turned cruel weather to their advantage. A pretty blonde with straight teeth, a clean face, and a full fulgent body: society's eternal sinecure. Even the British -- his family, his friends, the people who could have been his neighbors, had his life been just a little bit different -- had made pains to preserve a beautiful face: an unstudied but significant phenomenon that, to Josh, spoke volumes about humankind's values, even after whatever imbues humanity with its humaneness gets lost over the horizon.
Josh's mocha filled him with vigor.
"Josh, can I ask you something?"
"Sure," he responded.
"Were you in London, when it happened?"
"No, I was here, in the States, studying."
"Oh."
"My family, however, I'm not sure what happened to them. With the blasts it makes no difference."
"Oh, oh my god. I'm . . . I'm so sorry."
He felt no legitimate connection to the United Kingdom. As solace, he often forced himself to replay a mental image, which, out of some oft-forgotten British pride, now recrudesced in his mind like blossoming fungus. No, not the image of his sisters vagina carved out like a Halloween pumpkin. That never happened, no matter how many times the thought visited him during his sleep. She likely died in the bursting, in the flames that swept the country from above when the Western World graciously issued its merciful ukase, when it finally understood that no one in England would get out uninfected, the flames billowing over ballast buildings and crisping the mobs on the street, igniting the discarded skins of the dead, erasing them, and in the process providing them a dignity their blind attackers could not fathom, with the flashing lights from the blasting failing to reflect off the skin-coated apartment mirrors but capturing the outlines of the diseased men swinging across their apartments like monkeys with vines for arms . . . .
Her touch on his hand brought him back to the present.
"Josh, I'm so sorry."
This was too much. He shouldn't have brought his family into this, lest he lose everything. He was already upset over her conflation of London with England, as if anybody from Bristol or Essex had made it out alive. Stupid, he thought, upset at himself for not recognizing and treating her question for what it was: the typical denouement, the culmination of her deluded attempt for a "deep" connection to rationalize her casual hook-up. He resolved to avoid eye contact but gave in, like always, likely making his eyes even icier and more mournful, no doubt complementing the British-shoe-gaze image fetishized by people like her so as to give her the Ian Curtis of her dreams.
He lay next to her in her bed, in the dark, being a gentleman and laying on the wet spot, after he cashed in on the dying screams of his heritage for the self-satisfied moan of another American blonde.
"Can I ask you something, Josh. I know, officially, like, they don't know, but, do you think, in your opinion, it was terrorism?"
"I don't know. Everything was destroyed, so it's hard to test the bodies or even the water or anything to know for sure. Maybe some virus, I don't know."
"But . . . what, what made their arms like that?"
"I don't know. I'm sorry, but I dont want to talk about it, really."
"I'm sorry."
He got up. She lay still, probably thinking he was looking for the bathroom. He searched with his foot, felt the denim mound and cool, cold metal button of his jeans, looked back at her, and tacitly put his jeans on. In the dark, he could admit to himself that he was too weak and skinny for a girl like this to really like him as anything other than a once-in-a-lifetime novelty import. Too weak and skinny. She was about five feet away from him, elegiac under her sheets. He extended his arm, wondered what it would be like if it extended thirty-feet, coiled up and folding upon itself like elegant drapes, claws dancing over her face. But no, fortunately, he'd been in the States the whole time, so he was safe, safe to go back to his apartment and get some studying done, to leave and let Swiss-Miss turn back into another American and wait for next weekend to sell his British-ness to an ever-demanding public.
