The Stranger You Seek - By Amanda Kyle Williams Page 0,6

through our skin, my heart and hopes clamoring at the thought of what was coming next. I felt a deep and urgent ache between my legs. All I could see was this small woman. All I could smell. All I wanted. She was everything.

I stretched on tight surgical gloves so sheer I could almost feel the air against my warm fingertips, and took my favorite toy from the briefcase—satin-finished with a white-gold throat, a crook-back with four and a half inches of high-carbon steel blade. I looked at her narrow back as she stood there stirring her cabbage and wondered if she felt it yet, our connection. I wanted her to feel it, to know it, just an instant before my hand reached her.

I think she did. I think she wanted it.

The neighborhood is trendy, between the Virginia-Highlands section of Atlanta and funky Little Five Points. My tiny investigating agency is in what was once a row of forgotten warehouses on Highland. A couple of years ago the owner decided to renovate the exteriors, adding aluminum and brushed-nickel peaks and overhangs, a breezeway in bright Miami deco and some metal sculptures. It looks like a demented welder got hold of a crack pipe. They are now named The Studios and marketed as commercial lofts. Our landlord raised the rent on his current tenants—me, the gay theater company next door, the tattoo artist and body piercer next to them with the S/M stickers on his Jeep, and the Hindu hairdresser on the end. The renovation would bring us more business, we were told. More walk-ins now that we appeal to the nearby coffee-and-biscotti crowd. I hate biscotti. I mean really. Has anyone ever once had a craving for biscotti? And walk-ins. Hate ’em. They’re usually total freaks. People with any sense do not window-shop for a detective. It’s just not that kind of business.

I love the neighborhood, though. I catch myself humming show tunes all day when the theater company is rehearsing, and when I work late, I sometimes pass costumed people on my way in and out, loitering, talking, smoking. Last night a woman in a mermaid costume watched me walk in. She had a cigar in her mouth and she squinted through smoke at me, but didn’t speak. Neither did I. What do you say to a gay mermaid? A dry-erase board propped up on an easel announced dress rehearsals for Swishbucklers.

Two doors down, the hair salon operates quietly and during normal business hours. The owner deeply resents terms like “hairdresser,” “haircutter,” or, God forbid, “beautician,” and makes it well known she prefers “hair artist.” In addition, she was recently assigned a new spiritual name by her guru and would very much appreciate her neighbors honoring that. We do try, though having gone from plain Mary to Lakshmi, we mangle it a bit from time to time. The name means something like Goddess of Prosperity and all the neighbors are hoping to hell it’s real and good fortune has smiled upon us at last.

I am in Studio A and a small sign on my door reads CORPORATE INTELLIGENCE & INVESTIGATIONS. Inside, computers, printers, a couple of overused fax machines, track and fluorescent lighting, and a huge air-conditioning condensing unit give the place a kind of electronic purr. I sometimes hear the humming in my head when I close my eyes at night.

I began CI&I a couple of years ago after emerging squinty-eyed from rehab as if I’d been living in a cave for three months. I was looking for something, anything, any work, any distraction. I never wanted to go back there. Someone asked if it was my first rehab and I remember looking at him, slack-jawed, and thinking, Jesus, it takes more than one? But I get that now. The outside, it’s a whole different deal. It doesn’t prop you up and keep you safe. It’s no net. It’s too many hours in the day. It’s being confronted hour after hour by your own glaring weaknesses.

In those first days on the outside, I went to meetings all over town; sometimes all day long, just leave one and head to another. And I hated them. All the God stuff in AA really got to me. I know, I know. They say it’s whatever you choose as your own God, but let me tell you that when you’re there and everyone wants to hold hands and pray, it sure doesn’t feel like a choice. And all of them talking constantly