The Evil B.B. Chow & Other Stories Read Free Page A

bookshelf, and puts this big clinch on me. The whole thing feels so . . .
staged
. As if I’m playing the role of B.B. Chow’s New Girlfriend and he needs scenes like this to keep the action rolling.
    â€œI T ’ S LIKE A VORTEX . I’ve been sucked into the B.B. Chow Vortex.”
    â€œHow does he make you feel?” Marco says. He’s camped on my love seat, disemboweling a turkey wrap.
    â€œGreat,” I say. “Horny. Desirous. He notices my shoes.He tells me my feet are beautiful. I mean, you’ve seen my feet.”
    â€œThe admission of desire always entails a larger wish,” Marco says.
    â€œWho the hell are you, Kung Fu? Quit being so goddamn wise.” He’s right, of course. My body has started yearning dumbly for permanence. My cheeks are hot all the time and I’ve stopped obsessing over the skin around my eyes. I feel like the heroine of one of our features: “How I Fell for the Doc Next Door.” But it’s not just the hormones with B.B. There’s something else at play, the terrifying possibility—after years of betting on dumb sexy long shots of the heart, half-knowing how the ride will end—that I’ve finally found the guy who will love me back. It’s enough to send my thighs into rapture.
    â€œDon’t tell me how I feel, okay? Tell me what to do.”
    â€œWhat do you want to do?”
    â€œI want to be able to trust this guy,” I say quietly.
    Marco drops his slice of turkey and looks at me for a long moment. “Maybe you can’t handle this guy because he’s able to take care of you.”
    W E ’ VE BEEN TOGETHER for a month now and for the first time, on a muggy Friday night, something is wrong. B.B. says the right things, but without conviction. He’s just present enough to avoid a direct confrontation. But theslow poison of distance hangs around us. When we get back to my place, he climbs onto my bed without undressing.
    I lie down next to him. “What’s wrong?”
    â€œNothing.”
    I place my mouth very close to his ear. “Either you talk about what’s going on,” I murmur, “or get the hell out of my bed.”
    B.B. takes a deep breath. “There’s this girl,” he says.
    The back of my neck bristles. “What girl?”
    â€œLast night,” he says quickly. “At the hospital.” B.B. stares at the ceiling and sighs. “She had what we call craniosynostosis. The sagittal suture fuses too early and the fetal brain distorts the calvarium into an aberrant shape.”
    â€œEnglish,” I say. I’m looking at B.B. in profile, the black sheen of his eyes, the wet budding of his lips.
    â€œThere’s no room for the brain,” he says. “It grows in the wrong direction, you know. But there’s this surgery. To correct the situation.”
    â€œWhat happened?”
    â€œThe chief of the unit, you know, he performed the operation. Dr. Balk. He let me assist. It was going fine. You know, they have to cut the cranium and fuse the bone. Then all of sudden her vitals started to drop, you know, the vitals . . .” His voice does a little choked thing. “The respirator, something, there was something wrong. Balk was busytrying to reshape this girl’s skull, threading the bone mulch. Her skull, you know, she looked great. But her numbers kept dropping. It wasn’t the blood; they gave her another unit of blood. Once the bone is cut, you know, there’s no way to control blood loss through the marrow.”
    The smell of B.B. is suddenly overpowering: a rind of surgical soap soured by sweat. In the park across from my place, the skate rats have gathered under the willows to tell lies. I can hear them spitting at one another and laughing. Farther north, on Tremont, jazz is reeling out from the cafés.
    â€œShe looked fine, you know, but she wasn’t, like, strong enough. It’s what we call operative