She had on long gloves. I wish that hadn't been the first thing I noticed about her, but it was. Her gloves.

They were long and black and the part of me that wasn't busy itching and waiting for someone, anyone, to start a fight or create a distraction -- something to get me moving again -- noticed them, and I remembered someone else who owned gloves. I could feel my fingers tighten around the glass I was holding and I thought about what a relief it would be if the glass could break and drive into my hand, if the marks that would be left on my skin would be lasting.

I want a record of scars, I want to show where I've been, but all I've got is a mostly empty spot where my memories should be and razors of metal embedded inside me. Metal is cold and has no memory; I've spilled blood up and down the claws under the skin of my hand and I don't remember much about the people that blood belonged to.

She sat down next to me and folded her hands under her arms, as if she were cold. Even in the dim light of the bar I could see that the right side of her face had a dark hue that centered under her eye and bloomed out to her ear. It was about the size of a fist, a man's fist, broken into little sections, as if someone had repeatedly tapped out a message onto her flesh.

She turned and looked at me and her eyes were clear and sharp and I had no desire to look at them. But I did want to look at those gloves. So I did.

She ordered a drink and didn't say anything to me. I didn't say anything to her.

She finished her drink and turned to me. The light caught the other side of her face, and the contrast -- the lit side, smooth and unshadowed, and the other side hidden in the shadows, the bruise carefully faded by the dark -- was staggering. I liked that she was vain enough to think that I'd care about her face. I liked the gloves she was wearing.

She asked me for a ride and I said "Sure."

On our way outside, a man yelled her name. I don't remember what it was but I remember watching her turn; watching the dark side of her face, with its pattern of mottled color, slide into the light. The bruises actually extended down into her neck, trailing under the collar of her shirt. The man said something -- a curt dismissal, a warning...I don't know. I wasn't really listening. She just shrugged and turned back towards the door.

In the truck, she told me she wanted to go to the nearest town, which was a good hour away. I'd managed to find another truck and another camper. It was amazing really, how easy it was to slide right back into what I'd had before. Whatever it was that took my life and twisted it around and offered possibilities dazzled me for a few days, I admit it, but then I was reminded that none of it was going to come through. I'd pawed through the wreckage of the army base for a week or so when I got back north, still intrigued by the idea of finding answers. But that's before the nightmares wore me down and made me realize that maybe my past is better left gray and faded. After that I just went back to being, to living. It was easier not to care. It was a lot easier.

I almost told her to get the hell out of the truck. I wanted to get laid, I wanted those gloves on my skin so badly that my whole body felt like it does right before a fight -- charged up, stretched out and eager. I didn't want to drive for an hour. But she saw where I was looking and her face twisted. She'd caught me, and we both knew it.

"Take me to Miquelon," she said, "and I'll leave the gloves on."

So we went to Miquelon.

---

The town was as small and as gray and as dark as every other town in Northern Canada. There's not much up here but clean air and open spaces and people who don't ask many questions. When I was down there -- in that god-awful brick mausoleum that Xavier calls a school -- I felt as if I was pushed down under the earth. Everything was closer, smaller, darker, dirtier. Wherever I went there was the stink of fear and sweat and death and sex and food and every people smell there is.

There was a hotel in the town, although it wasn't much of one. It was rickety and dingy and the clerk was young and bitter and mean. I could tell from the yellow-tinged smell of him. He was a beater too -- I saw how he eyed the woman's face with a greedy intensity, as if he wanted to memorize the bruises on her face and remember how to make their patterns himself.

I paid for two hours. She raised her eyebrows at me and under the fluorescent lights of the hotel "lobby" it made her face look even more sectionalized. One part, colored the shade of a faded and bleak sky. One part, gritty white and chalky. Above her eyebrows, her skin puckered and I could tell that age would not be kind to her. And the skin around and under her mouth was red and her lips were a bloodless spot in the middle of a crimson sea. I could hardly look at her.

But I took her to the room anyway, hearing the rasp of her gloves as she rubbed her hands together.

Inside, the room smelled like piss and shit and vomit and orange bedspreads (which have a peculiar scent of their own, unique to crappy motels -- bleach and sex and weariness) and I turned on the one light. She asked me my name, which I supplied. I did not ask for hers and the eyebrows arched again. I turned away and looked at the wall so I would not have to think about that divided face.

When I looked back she'd taken off her clothes. Her ribs shone out from under the paper-thin whiteness of her skin and the bones of her legs were long and strong and punctuated by the sharp bump of her knees.

For a moment she looked vulnerable and delicate, the curve of her stomach reminding me of someone or something I might have dreamed or saw once, and I almost left the room. There was something of the martyr in her and I didn't want a saint.

But then I noticed that she'd left the gloves on.

---

Some people will tell you that the best thing about sex is the sex -- the actual act itself, with all its sweat and fluids and contortions. And usually it is the best part -- the relief at being purely physical, at just being released, literally -- the truest part, even.

But it wasn't that way with her. The first part -- sliding onto cold sheets hidden under the orange spread, the dingy color of them and the industrial smell of them, the first touch of those knees against my legs and those gloves on my arm -- that was the best part.

Afterwards, when she was in the bathroom and I was getting dressed I felt a twinge of regret. Not sorrow, because that's a different emotion and it carries a sharper edge, but regret. A regret over the loss of that first moment, of that second when I'd been able to imagine something different, someone different, a world of possibility that could be if only things had been a shade different, a little more -- or maybe a little less.

But up close, after that first moment, those gloves were just gloves over a hand. Slightly frayed gloves, stained with whatever debris of life the woman touching me had picked up, and the skin under them was as human as I'm never going to be.

And so afterwards I threw the condom away and watched as it hit the wall and sagged into the wastebasket that sat on the floor. The wastebasket was lined with paper and around its edges were tiny purple flowers, almost the exact shade of the bruises that marred her wrists when she'd taken the gloves off afterwards. We were done and she didn't need to wear the gloves anymore.

Those bruises -- that purple color, darker and stronger than the color that mottled her face, reminded me of someone else's bruises, of hands that had been stripped of their gloves and very carefully folded so they wouldn't touch anyone on the way back to Xavier's refuge.

I finished getting dressed and put on my coat. The woman came out of the bathroom and looked at me for a moment. The light from the room reflected off the bare skin of her shoulder and for a second I caught the wisp of another memory and then it faded away before I could grab it. In the end, there was nothing to say and I was grateful for that.

I walked outside and got in the truck. As I drove away, I watched the lights of the town fade behind me. I rolled down the window and let the cold air wash away every scent I carried and after a while, all I could smell was the earth, a crisp, clear wildness that didn't carry any weight at all.

END