Trap Doors

By Randee Dawn

"This city," said Freda, "is full of trap doors."
We all paused in our eating, appetizers poised en route to our mouths. In the silence, a space of time that took up perhaps half of a minute, I remember the chill that came over me as she said it. Freda is mistress of the non-sequitur, and she had succeeded once again in taking us off guard. But the comment was strange even for her as we toasted Valerie, our mutual friend who was moving from New York in a few weeks. How strange to be in the middle of a dim French restaurant in the Village, talking of trap doors. I ate the appetizer, which no longer tasted of anything.
"I mean," she followed up, "like in elevators and things. I've started noticing them. Ways out."
It made sense, of a kind. For a moment, though, I had a fleeting image of doorways opening in the middle of the street, trap doors in the sidewalk that sprung open when you stepped on them, of subway grates giving way underfoot, pulling the unsuspecting pedestrian down the gullet of the city. I swallowed my food.
And it made sense coming from Freda, who was really more Valerie's friend than mine. I'd known Valerie since junior high school, when we had the same crush on the same band; now, as so-called adults we had found ourselves gratefully sharing the same city again, if only for a few months. Valerie knew Freda from fashion school, and over the course of Valerie's tenure in Manhattan I had gotten to know Freda in an offhand way. Petite, red-headed Freda reminded me of a rubber band, snapping to and fro, pulled not always of her own volition, jerked into unnatural shapes. She was the wildest person I knew, my only connection for drugs if I wanted them, someone who could live simultaneously with a heroin addict and a mannequin and know the difference between the two. I had been to her apartment twice, in two different locations, an explosion of interior decoration, as if Todd Oldham had self-destructed in her living room and his bloody remains had mutated into campy chic. I liked her as far as I knew her, which wasn't far. I mainly knew that she was loyal to Valerie in a way I couldn't be, loyal in the way a drowning man is to his life preserver. Without Valerie around, I couldn't be sure where Freda would end up.
It wasn't something I thought about much, until she mentioned trap doors. But I grew fixated on the notion of walking down the street and having the space just before your reach literally contracting into a three-sided square, then peeling open like a flap, revealing something just on the other side, something dark and unknown, and possibly...moist.
It was a thought that could make you want to scream.

My friend Rebecca has a hole in her.
In a week they will put her back in the hospital and rearrange her insides and sew it up, but for three months she has had an open wound, a hole, in the center of her stomach, like an eye or a mouth. I never dared to look straight at it, afraid that somehow I might be unable to think of Rebecca without the hole later on, but a friend of mine who met me at the hospital right after the initial operation did. Lynda crouched over Rebecca's stomach as she pulled back the blankets and nightgown and gauze, and stared down into a hole, an action that felt unnervingly intimate. I half expected Lynda to try and poke it, but instead she straightened and said, with some glee, "It looks like a pair of lips."
So it was a mouth, a round "o" of surprise formed by her belly when they pulled out her large intestine, snaking it out like a hose or a tube. One of the first things I asked Rebecca was if she weighed less, for with the loss of an entire organ it would seem one's weight would have to be lessened. It was a fat person's question, something only the desperate might envision. Perhaps without this apparently unnecessary organ I, too, could lose some weight...but Rebecca couldn't be sure. Without being able to really digest, over the past few months Rebecca had diminished in size to, if not exactly stick proportions, certainly sharply angular ones. Her long white fingers, tipped with manicured nails reminded me of the thinnest branches on a tree, waving and unable to grasp, and her voice seemed to have lost weight as well, toning to a low whisper, never too enthusiastic, never too melancholic, just even and quiet.
The next question I had asked her was whether or not she had been allowed to see, or keep, the organ. I imagined it as a display item, either pickled in a jar designed a la Martha Stewart or mounted, like a swordfish, to hang over the fireplace. It certainly didn't seem any more absurd than the idea of pickling vegetables for decoration, or hanging a dried carcass. But Rebecca hadn't kept it; she wasn't sure what they were going to do with it. She supposed they threw it away somewhere.
And I began to think of Freda. It had been three weeks since Valerie had moved away, so I hadn't heard from her in any shape or form. Not that I had expected to, but I began to wonder about those trap doors. I wondered if this city, where Rebecca lived, also had trap doors. I began to wonder what sort of things fell in trap doors: the discarded, the unneeded, the unaware, the lost.
A human organ.
Perhaps.

After e-mailing her for three days straight once I returned to New York I finally reached Freda, and we met for coffee. She was still the same rubber band I recalled, but there was a tautness to her I didn't recognize, and she seemed opaque, almost ethereal. I asked her if everything was all right.
She shrugged. "It's been better before, though," she told me, and went on to explain how hard it was to live with a heroin addict and a mannequin and get more satisfaction out of the dummy, and how eventually, even the dummy was no fun any more. She was back on smack, in order to at least relate to her boyfriend. I didn't protest; Valerie had told me about how far that got you with Freda. Freda already knew better; what could I say to make her more aware?
"I found one," she suddenly whispered to me, again out of nowhere, but this time I knew exactly what she meant.
"What was it like?"
She grinned conspiratorially, and her eyes rolled slightly at the memory. "Warm," she said, and paused a long time. "It was a warm place. I could reach out and there were these soft things and these cool things and these long snakey things and I could pull them all around me. I think it was kind of like being inside someone."
"Like a baby?" I asked.
She shrugged. "Maybe. I think so. Safe. Very warm, very warm."
"Where was it?"
Her shoulders drooped. "Dunno. I was too whacked out at the time. But I knew it when I saw it. It was perfect. I'll see it again."
"When?" Suddenly, I wanted to be there. I wasn't sure why. But I wanted to know. I wanted to know what was in there, if what I thought was moist was instead really warm, and soft.
"Few more days. We're getting some more stuff this weekend, so we can party," she said, and finished her coffee, shouldering her bag and had a coughing fit for a solid minute. "Fucking asthma's back," she said, and spat into a napkin. "I'll call you when we get it."
"Yeah," I said. "That'd work for me."
"I'll hold the door open for ya," she winked, and took off down Avenue A.

She called, but I couldn't make it. That night Rebecca had her second operation and they sewed up her hole and took away her shit bags and covered the thing with mounds of gauze and tape. Rebecca's boyfriend brought over a tiny kitten as a get-well present, and we played with it on the floor of her living room. It fell asleep in my arms, all soft and warm.
Freda's invitation message was on my machine when I got home a day or so later, but when I called her back nobody answered. I waited a few more days, then got worried, so rather than trying the phone again I trudged to her place and scaled five flights to her apartment. Her addict boyfriend opened the door and stared at me, glossy-eyed. "She's gone," he said, and started to close the door on me.
"Where?" I asked, suddenly sick to my stomach.
He opened it a crack more. "Dunno," he said. "We got pretty wasted last Saturday night and I passed out, when I woke up she wasn't here. It was freaky, though."
"What was freaky?'
"Like, she wasn't here but like, all the chains were on the door. I can't even remember letting her out, that's how shitfaced I was." He stared at the floor. "If you see her, lemme know. Rent's due." And he closed the door for good this time, sliding the locks in place, lost in his haze.
Drugs are pretty mystical things. I took some ecstasy last year for the first time and discovered just how interesting the world actually was. Except for a ravenous thirst I couldn't shake for about ten hours, I loved every minute of it, and for a long time if I could have I'd have gone and done it all over again. My eyes were as wide as saucers, staring at everything, blissed and hungry for more. I haven't taken any, though, and since Freda disappeared I don't think I will. Sometimes when you stare at the world differently, you see things that weren't there before. Sometimes there are trap doors. Sometimes they're not supposed to be seen. Or opened. And most of the time, I don't think you should just climb on in there and wriggle around like it's home.
Freda never came back. No one's even sighted her. If you walk around the Lower East Side, you might see her reward sign up on the poles and abandoned buildings. Valerie's taking it really hard. Sometimes, I think I might have been able to help Freda if I'd been there to hold the door open, you know, keep it ajar just a crack so she could get out. But I wasn't. That's the thing about trap doors; they're meant to catch things and hold them, after all. And whatever trap door Freda found, I think, just closed up again and took her with it.
I hope it really is soft, and warm, and safe in there. I really do.
I really hope it isn't human.
And I hope someday she'll learn how to open the door from the inside.

Copyright 1994