Althea Parker: Moxie

In which Althea has a crush and handles it with grace and rationality.

I’m 23 24 25 and I am definitely not stalking the new girl at the Nine.

Deny deny deny.

I’m Althea Parker. I’m the goddamn fucking Alchemist. People only know I’ve been there if I want them to know.

I once killed a man with a coffee mug and a candy wrapper. I murder long distance, send out little gifts to a world that doesn’t exist. Potions and brews and chemicals.

Sometimes licking an envelope or using a new lipstick can be the final act.

I do what needs to be done, with a syringe or a knife for preference, and I do it well.

What I don’t do is lurk in hallways like a half-rate hitman then bolt when I hear her door open.

And I definitely don’t linger at the bar, enduring Bishop’s insufferable bullshit, just so I can watch her do shots of vodka. Flirt with the thugs selling weapons on four. I dream of dissecting them, enormous frogs pinned down with swords. I imagine taking the pieces and fashioning them into a gift a talisman an offering.

I’ll adorn her slender neck with a necklace made from their wandering eyes.

Christ, but she’s a looker. Distracting in her perfection, in the subtle ways she moves and the casual violence that surrounds her like an expensive perfume. I watch her turn the pages of a book, clear brown eyes intent and focused. I want to be her papercut.

I nurse a cheap beer with a nasty undertaste and study her from the corner of my eye. The Proprietor never thought I’d use these skills like this.

Moxie is small and lithe and lean, all taut muscle and deadly intensity hidden under layers of black clothes. The black hooded poncho she favors is pushed down around her shoulders. I admire the stubborn jut of her chin. Her dishwater brown hair I suspect is a wig. Haven’t gotten close enough yet to confirm. Startling eyes that make me think of starlight and cyanide and a scanner darkly.

She holds the shot glass the way she holds a knife the way she holds a gun. Her fingers are fine boned, elegant, confident. Moxie moves like a dream like a hellhound like a panther all coiled muscle and quiet murder.

Moxie is a thief a killer a cut throat a mercenary a shadow walker a spirit. I watch her drink vodka and she can’t be real, she can’t she can’t. Nobody exists like her. She’s a dream a delusion and gift from the Nine.

She’s perfect in ways I never knew could exist. I want her in ways I don’t understand.

I kind of hate that about her.

When she’s gone, outside the walls of the Nine in a world that barely exists, I crouch like a gremlin by the front doors of the Nine, hidden by a geriatric spider plant.

It needs to be watered.

I wait for her to return from outside. She’ll come back, I tell myself. She’ll come back and I can be her shadow again, trail after her like a self-destructive baby duck. I wait and I wait and the Nine holds its breath and waits with me.

When she returns, hood pulled over her maybe fake hair and hiding those cyanide sweet eyes, I’m already gone. Hidden away like a secret or a body. Like a love letter written in blood across a cement wall.

I want to know where she goes. I want to know what makes her leave.

I want to be the reason she stays.

I don’t know what to do about this. This shit has never happened.

Arthur seems to think I want to kill Moxie. Given my history, this is a fair assumption. I don’t correct him. Arthur knows enough of me. I don’t want to give him any more pieces, leverage, power.

He warns me to steer clear of her. Look away go away walk away. Give her a wide berth. Don’t bother the guests he says. As if I haven’t been told some version of this for twenty years.

‘She’s the most dangerous person in the Nine,’ Arthur says to me with grim satisfaction as I help him toss a body into the vats down in the boiler room. The hiss of steam and the soothing smell of chemicals working their magic. The heavy weight of something that once was a someone.

That’s a pretty big compliment, coming from him.

I don’t want to kill Moxie, even if I could. I don’t think. It’s hard to tell. I want her with a violence I can’t express, can’t fuck or medicate or kill it away.

I do some of my best work when I’m under stress.

Shadows swirl around her and the ground cracks beneath her feet with barely contained fury and she is a thunderstorm a cyclone a force to be reckoned with.

You could sooner kill a typhoon or an asteroid shower than Moxie.

I consider asking Malick for advice for about half a second. Can’t imagine the words. There might not be words for it. The want and the hunger and the sharp, unfamiliar pain in my chest when she laughs, when she eats.

I want to drown in the tides of her voice, that posh British accent that has no place in the Nine but is perfect perfect perfect.

Moxie knows I’m not a threat to her. I’m dangerous, but Moxie is a killer queen dream machine. She is become death, destroyer of worlds. She takes what she wants and what she wants she claims.

And I want that. I want to sit by her side while she presses the red button on the nuclear warheads and ruins it all forever and ever amen. I want to kill the men and women who look at her and bury their skulls in a shallow grave so they can see what they’re missing.

I imagine sending her red roses, the thorns tipped with kerosene. I imagine licking blood from her mouth, open and pink and vulnerable. I imagine waking up next to her a mess of limbs and flesh.

To distract myself I fuck a nervous businessman. I pick him up at the bar at eight. I’m home before midnight. He’s twitchy and high-strung, distracted and jumping at every noise. Fucks like he thinks he’s dying. I don’t tell him he is dying, will die, is dead already.

I don’t think he wants to hear that. So I go to his room and we fuck and it’s fine fine fine forgettable but fine, a diversion a distraction a way to get out of my body and mind for a while.

It doesn’t help.

The nervous businessman disappears two days later. Arthur is annoyed because he had two more days booked.

Malick is pleased there’s nothing to clean up. Empty room. Bed made. Clothes neatly folded in his suitcase. No signs of a struggle.

Just gone. Sometimes people are gone. Sometimes I’m gone. I know a lot of people who are gone.

You don’t always come back from gone.

Rumor has it he’s trapped in the dumbwaiter, screaming for help.

If he is I can’t hear him.

I do my work and I train and I research and I follow Moxie. See me notice me I want to tug her pigtails and tell her everything. I want to pin her against the wall and confess my sins, outline my flaws, diagram all the pieces I am missing. I want to flay myself before her. I want to send her a bouquet of living shit-covered worms adorned with rubies.

I want to play her romantic music and wine and dine her and fuck her on the piano in the ballroom so I can appreciate the acoustics of her voice.

It’s only when Mr. Valentine starts to call me Boo Radley I realize I need to get my shit together. This is unprofessional. I’m a fucking force of nature. I’ve been down in the basement and lost in the tunnels and I’ve survived the eleventh floor and the eighth floor. I’ve been places no one else has gone and seen things none of us could ever understand.

For fuck’s sake.

And then I’ll catch a whiff of her perfume - spicy honeysuckle, something that leaves me feeling primal and unhinged, and I’m a teenage boy trailing after her with a boner.

I didn’t realize you could want someone so badly.

I don’t know what to do with this.

Finally, I’m done. I’ve taken some homemade xanax I whipped up in my lab in the basement. Mild enough that I can still function but strong enough to soften the edges, dull the visions.

The Nine pulls back from me like a tide, and I approach Moxie at the bar. She’s got a book in her hand and a dirty martini by her side and all I want is her to see me, any version of me.

I don’t want to be your ghost.

I sit down next to her and order a beer. I don’t make eye contact. Stare straight ahead. Bishop comes over with that knowing grin I want to cut off his smug fucking face. Hang it around my wrist like a bracelet, a warning, an invitation.

‘Now what’s got you all in a snit, Althea?’ he asks, leaning heavy on the Cockney accent. Like we’re friends like he cares like he doesn’t eyefuck me and Moxie whenever he’s bored. Bishop is a remora fish, clinging onto the Nine for sustenance. He can’t function without it. The Nine lets him live, and he serves it. That’s the agreement. Those are the rules.

We have that in common, at least.

Instead of answering, I flip him off and hunch my shoulders. Glance at Moxie. She has a smile curving her thin lips, pale and knowing, but her eyes are still on her book. She hasn’t turned the page in a while.

‘You should stay away from the eighth floor,’ I say. Still not looking at her. I pick up a cocktail straw and draw in the drips and drops of water on the bar. Connecting them. The chemical symbol for oxygen. Hydrogen. Mercury. Lead.

Moxie closes her book without checking the page. Turns to me, crossing those devastating legs of hers. She looks at me and smiles. Real and honest like she’s pleased to see me.

‘I haven’t been on the eighth floor yet,’ she says. Takes a drink of her martini, studying me. I hate her eyes on me and I bask in them. I want to hide away in the boiler room. I want her to keep her eyes on me for the rest of my life. I want her to keep me from disappearing.

‘It’s not safe,’ I say. She raises a slender eyebrow. ‘Not like that,’ I add. ‘There’s absinthe in the air and cocaine in the walls and if you touch the ground your hand rots away. Sometimes.’

Now she’s fully smiling and it’s the sun it’s what I imagine a hot day on the beach feels like, warming and blinding and burning so fucking good.

I’ve never seen the ocean, but if I did it would remind me of Moxie.

‘Why have you been following me?’ she asks. Still smiling, still relaxed. Her foot swings and taps my ankle. I take a gulp of beer. What the fuck is wrong with me.

I don’t know how to answer her. Because I can see sparks and lights around you when you walk. Because she is strange and powerful and frightening and I want to take everything she’ll give me. Because I like her smile.

‘Is that your real hair?’ I blurt out and jesus fucking christ I’m over and done lights out. I’ll go back to my room and live with the rats and ghosts. Join the nervous businessman in the dumbwaiter. Drown myself in the strange vats in the boiler room.

Then she laughs. A low, warm chuckle, like she’s surprised by me. Moxie takes my hand in hers. I wonder what she thinks of the cuts and stains and calluses and scars. My hands are rough and worn compared to hers.

Still smiling, she puts my hand to her hair.

‘Check,’ she says. This could be a trap. This could be a trick. Maybe Moxie is bait. Maybe she’s a delusion a hallucination. Maybe she’s a ghost. No. Ghosts aren’t like Moxie.

I rub the dull brown strands between my fingers. It’s real hair, that’s for sure. But I can tell from the mischief in her eyes that it’s not hers.

‘I won’t tell,’ I say. Like she gives a shit. Like anyone would care either way. My hand is still in her hair. It feels like a secret. My fingers almost brush her cheek. Her expression softens.

‘Althea, right?’ I nod. I like my name in her mouth. She makes me sound like a person. I would be a person for Moxie. I take my hand away. Someone else’s hand. I clench it into a fist.

She props her chin in her hand. The bar is a muted cacophony in the distance and Bishop is yelling at some asshole to stop throwing knives at the wall. My beer glass is dirty with fingerprints and the drugs are soothing my bloodstream and if I could live and die in this moment I would.

‘What am I going to do with you?’ Moxie asks. Still smiling.

‘If you go up onto the roof, you can see the edge of the world where time dies and the monsters live,’ I say. ‘You can see people burning and cities flooding and how things fall apart. Sometimes there are birds.’

Moxie laughs. Open and bright and pure and completely inappropriate for a place like the Nine. This is a woman with murder in her bones and theft in her veins. She takes what she wants.

What do you want Moxie.

‘On the roof?’ she asks. I nod, flummoxed stunned into silence, muted by adoration. Bishop snickers.

In my head I am alone in a room with him and a nail bat.

Even a fucking staple gun. I’m creative.

Moxie extends her hand. Waits for me. I place my hand in hers. She’s warm and soft and could slip a knife in my belly now and it would be worth it, all of it.

Instead she drains her drink and stands, book in her free hand. Tugs at my hand until I stand up.

‘Show me?’ she asks. Like I would refuse her anything. The book she’s holding is ‘Don Quixote.’

‘The Nine can be dangerous,’ I say. Stupid stupid stupid. Moxie knows this place is dangerous she knows I’m dangerous. She’s dangerous.

Moxie twines our fingers together and for a second everything is soft and sweet. She’s got a carcinogen grin and her eyes are on me and things make sense in a way that’s unfamiliar and bright and blazing.

‘Dangerous, huh?’ she asks. Gives me a big wink as she leads me to the elevator. I follow like a sleepwalker like a zombie like a plague victim stumbling to their final resting place.

‘Good thing I have you to watch out for me,’ she says with a knowing smile.