works by w.pham

works by william pham, 2005-present

A Girl with Spiders in Her Eyes

There were spiders in her eyes when I saw her the first time. Bright red and thin, arcing outward from the irises. Was her hair brown, or black? Red? Maybe blonde. I don't remember. What color were her eyes? What was she wearing? Was she smiling, or sad? She was drinking coffee, I remember that much, and I remember the spiders. I guess she looked tired, if anything, but I had no real idea, no empirical evidence upon which I could base any sound, logical conclusions.

The next time I saw her, I filled in a few details. I colored inside the lines. She wore very light makeup on her pale face, and her hair was black, but whether or not it was dyed, I wasn't sure. She always held her coffee cup in her left hand, her fingers wrapped around it like how you'd hold a Faberge egg, and she always took careful sips, never long gulps, and she never made a sound while doing it. I think her eyes were a very dark blue.

She sat with one leg over the other, shoe dangling off her foot, and she always wore dresses, and they were always very long, so that only her ankles showed. She reminded me faintly of a heroine from a Brontë novel, though I had never read one. She seemed confident, but not aggressive, as if with every thought there came an accompanying reassurance that what she was thinking was on the right track. Whenever the bill came, dropped off by a young man or woman in uniform, she placed exact change on the table then laid an extra dollar bill on top of it. She counted out the exact change quickly, with that same confidence, from a coin purse next to the coffee cup. Next to the empty sugar packets and half-and-half containers and the spoon with a single drop of coffee still on it from when she used it to stir the sugar and cream in.

She had soft, delicate hands. Every once in a while, she would bring in a notebook and pen, or sketchbook and pencil. She would only look up once, and then she would write or draw without pause, those red spiders dancing along the edges of her eyes. She always seemed very intent on finishing whatever it was she started. She would barely move; only her hands constantly shifted in erratic rhythms, and sometimes there was the soundless movement of lips suffocating thoughts unspoken. And then the exact change, and the dollar bill tip, and I would always leave before I could see where she went, always with her quiet pride and coin purse.

---

A few days later, in the newspaper, buried in the back pages, I saw the headline: "Girl Commits Grisly Suicide." The girl in question had had the CD of some singer-songwriter playing on her stereo when she stood in the center of her living room and stabbed herself in the heart repeatedly; it was set to auto-loop, and so was still playing when her body was discovered hours later. The reporter made sure to note in his article that that was the same method in which the musician had killed himself, and posed the rhetorical question of the effect of music on young people. Satanic death metal and video games were passé as scapegoats now; the eternal drive to find new things to blame for people's own mistakes, mistakes repeated over and over again like a cosmic perpetual machine hanging in the sky, grinding quietly and inexorably toward -- toward what end?

It must've taken a huge force of will, a great conviction, in order to summon forth the effort to stab herself in the heart. She must've felt like she'd known beyond a shadow of a doubt that this was the answer, as she held the knife in both hands. Her eyes, dark blue and narrow, would have disappeared underneath her eyelids as she took deep breaths and maybe she counted to three before she plunged the knife into her chest, directly into where she had drawn a black X with permanent marker.

Her parents, tearful, were too shaken to provide comment for the article. What would they have said? They asked why, first. "Why?" with constant sobbing and then "Why God?" with no answer. And there was a moment when the thing they wanted most was not to have their daughter back but to have an answer, a reason, some kind of explanation for what happened. It was brief, but it was there, and it sickened them.

Was there a connection between one stranger and another? One girl in a café and another girl who stabbed herself in the heart? I felt like I owed it to the girl in the café, to discover whether or not she was the girl who stabbed herself in the heart.

There was only one cemetery in town, so I started going there every day. I put on a black suit, brought a roast beef sandwich, a thermos of coffee, and a book, any book, and sat in my car and ate and read and watched from the street, only some yards away. Some days there were no ceremonies or burials, and I got a lot of reading done. But I also saw my fair share of people laid into the ground; old people, young people, fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters -- who they were, I could only guess, and it became a game I played, trying to deduce what kind of person had died. If there was a young woman crying with an older couple, then it was a husband who had died; if several old men stood around the priest without saying anything, then it was a veteran; if there were a lot of people, disparate in identity, I guessed it was someone who had entered into many people's lives via profession, like a doctor.

I wasn't sure how I was going to know which dead person was the right dead person, just that what I was doing felt like the right thing to do at the moment. The cosmic perpetual machine at work. To what end was I moving toward?

One day, I saw a girl with spiders in her eyes. I did a double-take when I saw her, but it was definitely her. She wore a long black dress, and her black hair and pale face were unmistakable, and when she uncrossed her arms in order to rub her eyes, I saw the familiar forms of hands that seemed somehow naked without pencil or pen or coffee cup. She was standing away from the others attending the burial and so I put my book down and got out of my car and walked to her, hands in my pockets.

"I'm sorry," I said. It seemed like the right thing to say.

"Thanks," she said. Then she looked at me. "Do I know you?"

"No," I said. "I was just in the neighborhood and thought I'd pay my condolences."

"You were just in the neighborhood? You do realize that funerals are not a good place to pick up girls, right?" She laughed, sort of, half bemusement and half scorn.

"That's not what I'm trying to do," I said, a little defensively. It really wasn't.

"So what, then? Why are you here?" she asked. Her voice rose a little. "Is this some sick game? What are you trying to pull? Who are you? Why are you here?" She seemed to be flustered; she was beginning to repeat herself.

"I'm sorry to have disturbed you, I'll be on my way," I said. And so I turned around and walked away.

I once knew a girl with spiders in her eyes.