The Woman Who Fell To Earth

Chapter 32

Jupiter

"Arthur James Dottweiler," Angie scolded. She had burst into his apartment unannounced, which he usually welcomed, but not when she was spitting fire and burning him with her scalding green eyes.

"What?" he asked defensively.

"That poor girl," she said. "How could you? After all she did to help you?"

"What? What are you talking about?" Although he knew exactly what she was talking about.

"You're an asshole," she said.

"What did I do?" Arthur asked, playing dumb.

"I went to see David, I mean Brixton, today."

"You did what?"

"I did. I know I told you to call the detective, and I still agree with that. She's sick, Art. That's obvious. And I know she creeped you out. Hell, she creeped me out, too. But that's no excuse for you to scream at her, berate her."

He tried to interrupt.

"She has a mental illness, Art. You can't cure that by yelling at her." Her eyes were rimmed in pink. Her face flushed.

"Angie, I didn't," he started.

"Yes, you did!" she exclaimed. She huffed, paced back and forth, hands waving at her sides like she couldn't pin them down, shooing away pigeons in the park. She faced him abruptly, stared into him.

Arthur's face fell. "I'm sorry," he said, and he meant it. "But Ange, you've got to see it from my side, she lied to me, all this time, took me for a fool."

"Lied to you about what?"

Although he had told Angie the circumstances with which they met, he had never divulged to anyone that she was, to him, David Bowie for the past two months. He couldn't tell her now. It would only make him look even more the fool. All he could say was, "She lied to me about who she was."

"So what?" cried Angie. "Everyone lies about who they are. It's how most of us survive in society. Have you ever seen a social media profile? Everyone lies, Art. Dating sites? Resumes? That's just what people do. So what? So Brixton wanted to distance herself from her past? Who doesn't? And I don't blame her, not with her childhood."

Arthur thought back to his research, his conversation with Mrs. Jones. Her upbringing sounded fine, charmed even. "What do you mean? Her upbringing?"

Exhausted, Angie slumped onto the sofa. "Oh, Art, she told me everything. She had been put back on medication, and it was like meeting an entirely new person. This wasn't strong, confident, eccentric David. This was Brixton Jones, a frightened, insecure little girl."

Arthur sat next to her and listened intently as Angie spoke.

"She showed me her scars, Art."

"Her scars?"

"Her surgery scars. It was this life being constantly surrounded by supermodels and body critiquing. Even her parents were models, constantly focused on their bodies. Shipping her off to boarding schools, she couldn't get their attention no matter what she did. Always trying to earn their approval. Once she turned eighteen, she started getting cosmetic surgery. Thought if maybe she looked like one of their supermodels, they would treat her like one, finally paying attention to her needs. But it never did any good. In fact, her breast augmentation only lasted months before the silicon leaked all through her body, sending her to the ER, then through months of recovery. The surgeons had to remove so much tissue, she ended up having to get her nipples tattooed on her like a breast cancer survivor. But without the sympathy. Tattooed nipples, Art! Can you imagine?"

Arthur thought of Brixton in the bath, her plastic body under the water like a doll.

"She was obsessed with perfection. She would hear her parents speak of Barbie proportions, the pinnacle of what they wanted their models to achieve. She took it almost literally, and over the course of a year, had all her body hair lasered off so she would be practically synthetic. Her obsessions grew, showed no sign of slowing. She was already slim, but she went under even more radical procedures trying to be rail thin. As they say, if you have the money, you can get someone to do it. Her tummy tuck involved not only fat removal, but five feet of her small intestines were removed to make her even slimmer. I saw her stomach, Art. She showed me. She has no belly button!"

"I know," Arthur said quietly.

Angie gave him a dirty look, incorrectly imagining how he would have seen Brixton's non-existent navel.

"She took countless diet pills, even the dangerous ones. She stopped eating. All the chemicals and lack of nutrition, it made her nails so brittle they'd fall off. She'd replace them with acrylics, but, oh, Art." She shook her head, took a breath and continued, "She's had this pathetic life trying to so hard to please people who had no idea she was trying to please them. They sent her to school, she wanted to be a fashion designer. Or maybe she wanted to be a mechanic or philosopher, and they wanted her to be a fashion designer, then turned around and told her she didn't have the talent for it, though I tend to disagree with that."

Arthur thought back to David's outfits, looked over at the black fisherman's coat by the door. His stomach sank and he felt sick.

"So you see, Art?" Angie pleaded, her eyes dripping, voice hiccoughing. "She was just a desperate, lonely child looking for acceptance in this cruel, cynical world. Boarding school? Nannies? She was abandoned, too."

Arthur's stomach churned, his mouth went dry. His throat tightened. "But," he argued, "what about the bathtub, and that notebook? She's not some innocent child like you're saying. She sounds psycho to me."

Angie's face hardened. "Do not call her psycho, do you hear me? Listen, I know some of the things she did were alarming, but she just went over the edge a little. She's not psycho."

"Did you ask her about the notebook? Was it really shorthand or was she communicating with some imaginary friends?"

"Stop it," Angie said angrily. "I did mention the notebook. She said it was a journal her psychiatrist told her to keep. He had her write down her feelings when she was on the edge. She was too embarrassed for anyone to see it, so she wrote in shorthand so her mom or anyone who found it," she bore her eyes into Arthur's face, "couldn't read it. She was just protecting herself."

Arthur mumbled something incoherent.

"She thought she'd finally found the acceptance she'd been longing for when she found you, then your friends, and even me. And now -"

"No!" Arthur interrupted hastily. "She's wrong. You're wrong. She gave me acceptance. She gave me friendship. It was all her. She saved me!" He broke down into a flood of tears, collapsing next to Angie on the couch, falling to the ground on his knees. He rested his head on Angie's lap and hugged her thighs and cried. She stroked his head, leaned over and kissed it. He felt like the tears would never cease, he was a fountain in the park, never ending flow of water from his eyes. "I didn't know. I'm so ashamed. What do I do? What do I do now?"

Angie continued stroking Arthur's head with her hand. "Give her some time," she said soothingly. "She needs time to get better."

"But will she get better?" Arthur looked up, his face red and swollen.

Angie shrugged. "She's got great doctors. She's at the best facility in the city."

"But can they fix her?"

Angie kissed his head again. "Let's hope so," she whispered.

Sixty-eight days.