TITLE: Navel Gazing AUTHOR: Vehemently (vehemently@yahoo.com) SPOILERS: The Red & The Black DISCLAIMER: Characters and situations metioned herein belong to Chris Carter / 1013 and no copyright infringement is intended. SUMMARY: Everybody's born with scar tissue. NOTES: Un-beta'd, unplanned. It just sort of happened. This is as close as I get to a Christmas story. With apologies to the bearers of warm fuzzies. * * * * * * * Navel Gazing by Vehemently * * * * * * * There is a man, of the years which might be called his prime, sitting in his underwear in a hotel room in Montgomery County with his index finger in his belly button. This is not a luxury establishment, so there is no mini-fridge for him to raid, and it is not safe for him to be seen outside, so he is curtained in this room, hungry and bored, waiting for his next scheduled move. He is not aware of how ridiculous he looks because he is busy convincing himself that watching hockey on television really is fun. It isn't of course, or not to a man who makes his living spill- ing blood. In the past he has wondered whether doctors refuse to watch medical shows or lawyers avoid the law-dramas, but he has not had the uninterrupted time to watch television with any regularity so he could not even name any of the current shows that professionals might avoid. That bothers him vaguely, as if he knows something might be gleaned from the blow-dried heads in each separate time slot, but there are so many other pressing issues which take up his time that cultural catch-up usually goes unfinished. * Somewhere else, a woman is replacing a particularly beloved silk blouse which has been destroyed. She is fighting her way through the chatty Christmas bustle at a distinct disad- vantage in height. This is not her season and her mood is not improved by the boots she is wearing against the slushy snow for which Washington is famous. She stumbles her way past the perfume desks, the lush red of the decorations clashing violently with her own ginger hair, and climbs onto the escalator. There is little hope, she realizes, of escaping the department store with any sanity at all. * He balances on his chair by flexing his bare toes against the dresser table and tries to enjoy the flickering television. But on a Saturday afternoon, in the first week of December, not a great deal of enjoyment is to be found, or at least not for this man. Presently he removes his finger from his belly button and reaches for the remote, flicking once again through the nine channels available to him. Nothing. * Women's apparel is a dazzling array of dramatic colors in velvet and cashmere. As she hunts for the petite section, the woman in question tries apologize to the people she nudges with some sort of grace. Those who eye her askance are overburdened with coats and bags and purses, like the overstuffed packages that adorn empty display areas. The woman wonders, with a help- less fatalism, that nobody seems bothered by this weight. She knows her size and she knows a white blouse can be found in any season. Frilly details she will leave to chance. * For some people solitude is unbearable. He has known those who become so desperate for human company that they befriend pass- ers by in a park, or strike up conversations in department stores. Our man prides himself on not being one of these. He works hard at it, talking to himself, reading books, engrossing himself in his work. But right now he has no work except to wait and he is in great fear of going crazy. * She does not want to chat with the girl at the register; she does not return the rubber smiles of the people standing in line behind her, who have inexplicably begun to sing along with the instrumental versions of carols which exude from the sound system. She makes her boots work for her as she clomps towards the exit and into the sleet. In the rain any time of day becomes the gloaming and she fights the dimness as she pulls her car into the street. Brown slush accumulates at the curbs but so far the weather is not accident -worthy. The array of streetlights and neon signs is dizzying as she navigates the warren of upper Washington towards George- town; the old narrow streets, hedged with expensive cars and darting pedestrians, make her eyes ache and her fingers grow white on the wheel. She knows to expect such traffic; she knows her route; she knows that it could be worse. Her knowledge is little comfort. * He leaves the Red Wings brawling in the background as he stands up, pacing into the tiny bathroom for a look at himself. he likes what he sees; it is not an inconsequential body that displays itself to him in the mirror. When he stands in semi- profile, right shoulder forward, he likes to think he looks like the Greek statues he has seen in museums. He feels almost whole. Then he stands four square and scrutinizes the left shoulder against the right, trying to see whether the muscle has withered so far as to make his outline any more uneven. He seems even enough, if one accounts for the minimizing effect of his wizened stump on his left. He slaps his own hard stomach in approval and goes to look over his clothes, sitting in a haphazard pile on the end of the bed- spread, which itself is folded within an inch of its life. He has no real reason to go out, and several reasons not to; fed- eral agents and wanted posters and his own needling sense of caution curse at his wanderlust. But in the end he just can't stay here. It has been spitting sleet all day, a God-given excuse for him to stay inside, but contrariness runs hot through him like water for a bath. In that way December has it will soon be dark, and darkness in Bethesda is itself a justification for a certain abbreviated nightlife. He is almost enthusiastic as he steps out of his room, possessed of mechanical arm and arms, flicking up the collar of his leather jacket in a move even he recognizes as cribbed from a movie. * Her street is more than ten blocks from M Street, and yet it too is colonized by cars with Virginia plates. The woman has to circle the block to find a parking space and wheedle her way into it with endless small reversals. She fumbles her way to her apartment, and fumbles the keys till she can let herself in, and promptly drops everything on the floor the moment she is inside. It is a fair-sized apartment, as her neighborhood goes, and appointed in warm neutral colors which under other circum- stances might have been actively comforting. Instead they prove merely symbolic of her escape from the outside. The door securely locked, she lights several lamps about the house in hopes it will make her feel more at home. Her purchase is decanted to the kitchen counter, where it slithers on itself in sinuous shine. She is almost afraid to touch it, as if to claim it as her own would be to doom it to the same fate as its predecessor, torn and muddy in a Midwestern state. She does not doubt she will damage it somehow; her fate seems at times to be to document disaster without redress. With a shake of her head she retrieves the blouse and carries it to the bedroom, notic- ing as she goes that her message machine is flashing. She does not rewind the tape to find out who it is from. * Downtown Bethesda always bustles, even more so on a Saturday. If the city were more northerly the icy rain would be snow and the picture of urban shopping idyll would be complete. Our man indulges his sarcasm even as he looks on, his face pinched and bitter, at a parcel-laden mother and her chattering child, a girl, possibly twelve, long and thin and lovely in that heed- less way of girls. They duck into another department store, the girl still chattering, and he decides to follow them. His hand is on the cold, slick door handle before he realizes that he is acting like a professional. He wanders through the cosmetics and the heavy aura of waves of perfume and discovers: he is stalking these people, these people he saw only for a few moments under a streetlight. Purposely he detours into the belts and handbags to lose them in the store. * She holds the blouse in front of herself in the mirror and quickly regrets not doing so in the store. Her taste does not generally run to ruffles along the neckline. She discards it on the bed and slumps next to it with the theatrics she denies herself at work. After a pause she bends to shuck off her boots. She peels off her socks, and surprises herself by reaching next for the button of her jeans. Her sweater makes crackling static as she pulls it roughly over her head. She looks at herself in the mirror, wearing only a bra and her unbuttoned jeans, sitting on a well-made bed, and decides to go all the way. She stands and wriggles out of her jeans, scrutin- izing the practical white cotton underwear she reveals. Soon they too join to haphazard pile on the bed and she stands in a black bra before the mirror, examining her shape. There are marks on her hips from the jeans, and the seam of her under- pants, red lines criss-crossing her abdomen. With a snap she removes the bra, pushing out her lip in an impudence she knows is unbecoming her age and station. She stands, with a critical eye, watching as gravity reacquaints itself with her breasts and pulls them down to rest against her ribs. More red marks, on her ribcage, on her shoulders. The only color on her body is the vague pale orange color of her pubic hair and the dim rose of distended nipples and those red marks, measured across washed-out pale skin. A frown crosses her features as she twists in front of the mirror, tracking the play of light and shadow across her torso. * He fingers the couture leather belts regretfully, since he no longer can wear belts except those which can be cinched one- handed. Two years he has been this way and the little things still capture him like miniature terrorists, demanding full attention on the fact of his arm's absence. Shoes were an eternity for him back in the weeks after it first happened, until he managed to steal a pair of motorcycle boots. Button-down shirts, and zip-jackets, and weapons which require two hands - everything re-learned, as the little stump withered inside its plastic re- placement. He lets out a heavy sigh as he gauges the warm soft- ness of the leather under his thumb. The buckle - right here - and his thumb hooks under the button on his jeans as if it *were* a buckle, as if he were a cowboy tipping his hat to the ladies who shop purposefully around him. He liked his belt, he remembers in an amused flash the time he tied a man up with it, pulling the leather tight through the loop around a neck. He liked his belt the way he liked that job, and when he shot that man he managed to control the splatter such that his belt was unstained. He doesn't know what happened to it after he was found bleeding in the woods. Probably stolen by someone else as enterprising as he has been. * Naked, standing unadorned in her bedroom, the woman in question purses her lips. Then she lifts her hands to purse the flesh of her lower abdomen. A touch of pressure - right here - is where she used to feel Mittelschmerz, before strange experiments and cancer deprived her body of pattern. She cannot say for sure, but a sneaking suspicion overtakes her that she has gained unflattering weight since before, a time of vague befores when little details had not the overwhelming significance they have gained. Her hands rest on the skin just inside of the crown of her pelvis - what her yoga teacher called the womb. She has stopped going to yoga altogether. In profile she can see the outcropp- ing of her lower belly, a small, high-set pudge which she knows must have a scientific name. Her mother calls it a woodge; she remembers the self-reproaching, scandalized feminist tones in which her high school friends called it a peter belly. Silly name for a pound of flesh, she thinks, but she cannot conjure the medical name either. She tries objectively to assess her attractiveness; when she catches herself standing hipshot in a model pose she stops herself, embarrassed. * His jeans sit low on his hips, but not loose in the current fashion. His thumb slips, as if it were an independent creature, up his belly, tickling the hairs there. He can't quite help thinking about the last time he had sex, about that chilly blonde and her wild cries that prefigured her betrayal. His head shakes itself, as if to knock out the memory, as if his helpless want and his inability to hide it could be denied. He reminds himself that he is not one of those desperate people and when he catches himself at it he blushes in shame. * A slouch, and she assesses herself again. She scrubs her fingers on her skin and the red marks begin to disappear in what she hopes is a healthy glow. She fingers her navel, noting the softness of her abdominal muscles, touching her fingernail to the warm soft curl of her belly button. She has seen the scar tissue from the inside, avoided slashing it through on a hundred autopsies with a little off-center cut. She knows that the ducts which attach to the placenta wither and die after birth; she has mapped the puckers of the keloids as the skin grows together, forms itself into solid tissue without nerve endings. She knows that when she pokes the shiny scar she is pressing on her small intestines. A conduit into the warm guts which constitute all she can call her center. * There are lots of things he wants which are forbidden. He has learned to live with the strictures, or so he thinks. A shake, like a mongoose swishing dust out of its pelt, and our man notices that his thumb has come to rest in his belly button, feeling out the contours of that never-callused skin. He knows that silken feel of scars; he has touched it a hundred times, tentatively at first, later brusquely, in the keloids which stripe his shoulder. Scar tissue, softer skin than the real thing. He pulls his thumb loose and goes so far as to wipe in on his thigh, irritated at himself. * It is a long moment in which she realizes she is standing in her half-dark bedroom, without clothes, plugging her navel with her finger. Wincing at herself, she strides purposefully toward her bathroom and turns on the shower. She pushes her hands through her hair, frowning in the mirror as it steams up, and remembers that a message is waiting for her. Later, she tells herself, a time when she will be no more prepared but more willing to face the driving energy of her partner. She reaches in to test the hot water, and straightens with a jerk, wondering why she is taking a shower in the afternoon. She rubs her arms as if cold and turns away from the mirror. * Our man reorients himself, as is his wont in strange environ- ments from time to time. He is standing helpless is a busy department store, too hot and claustrophobic in the cluttered aisles. With a directional instinct he relies on he heads for an exit, breathing great lungsful of the cold damp air of the darkness outside. He knows it was unsafe to go out, and unwise. He chastens himself steadily as he heads back towards his hotel, unsuccessful in keeping the falling sleet out of his collar. He turns his mind back to the waiting he must do and tells himself to enjoy watching hockey on television. END