Buenos Aires, Argentina, February 2015

Nina Lazris met her husband in the week between arriving in Buenos Aires and discovering the book that punched holes in her personal history. Besides that, she did little of note. She unpacked her bags, set up a writing space in her newly rented apartment, took long walks in the summer heat. She worked, though less than she should have, on the dissertation she had flown halfway across the globe to save. She spent too much money on fancy prepared foods before realizing she’d miscalculated the exchange rate. It didn’t matter—Nina had resources to fall back on—but she tried to live within her grad-student means. It was part of being a serious person, which she worked hard at. Before she stumbled on Guerra Eterna, it was arguably the project of her adult life.

Nina wasn’t positive her presence in Argentina qualified as serious. It was neither fully stipend-funded nor fully planned. In fairness to herself, she could only have planned so much. She’d come to Buenos Aires to study the protest movement arising from the suspicious death of special prosecutor Alberto Nisman, and he’d barely been dead three weeks. Hard to blame herself for not organizing her trip while he was still alive.

If somebody had told Nina a month earlier that she’d be spending her spring semester here, she would have laughed in their face. She had never been to Latin America before. Never traveled alone. Never imagined that, four and a half years into her doctorate, she’d wrench the scope of her dissertation open, shifting from social-media-driven dissent in the United States to social-media-driven dissent in the Americas. Of course, if that same clairvoyant person had added that she’d be making a chaotic last-ditch effort to rescue her dissertation—and with it her poor, shredded belief that she belonged in academia—she would have retracted her laughter. Fine, she would have said. Great. Cross your fingers it works.

She crossed her fingers at her sides now, waiting at the light on Avenida Santa Fe, the main commercial strip in her new neighborhood. Chic girls buzzed past in their giant earrings, hip-length hair flickering in the breeze. Sun bounced off the polished hoods of taxis, glared from bus windows, turned the street itself into a lake of glossy tar. The air smelled like hot asphalt mixed with warm fruit, dog shit, and the pleasant burnt-wood scent that wafted constantly from the pizzeria across Santa Fe. Nina had tried it two nights ago: not awful, but also not good.

She was en route to coffee with Ilán Radzietsky, a graduate of her program who now taught at the Universidad de Buenos Aires. Nina was working on a Ph.D. in communications, but instead of getting funding from her department, she got it from her university’s Center for Media and Social Impact, which adopted a doctoral student every few years. Ilán had been its first. Now he was a rising academic star who researched multilinguistic online identity formation.

Nina wished she knew what type of coffee this would be: semiprofessional? Full professional? Casual but platonic? Or would it be one of those first dates recognizable only in retrospect? She had no reason to even imagine the latter. Her stubborn hope that it would be a pre-date pointed, probably, to her fundamental unseriousness. She’d never met Ilán in person. One of her bosses had introduced them, which led to a flurry of emails, and then Ilán invited her to a welcome-to-the-country coffee. All very ordinary. Nina was thinking in date-or-not-date terms only because (1) she hadn’t had a nontransactional conversation, barring phone calls with her dad, since she landed in Buenos Aires five days ago, (2) she hadn’t had sex since Thanksgiving, and (3) Ilán was hot. In the headshot on his departmental profile page, he glowed like some kind of Modern Orthodox sex prince in his yarmulke and open collar. His mussed curls practically lifted from her laptop screen. His smile was crooked, his skin perfect. Since Google Imaging him, Nina had devoted far too much time to sexual and marital fantasies in which he was the star.

A block from the Facultad de Ciencias Sociales, Nina paused to lift her hair from her sweating neck. She checked her reflection in the plate-glass window of a store that seemed to sell only compressive underwear: girdles, control panties, distressing Velcro-sided bras. She reminded herself that, even if she was not a serious person, she was gifted at small talk, proficient in Spanish, and neither as dumb nor as ill-prepared as she felt. She had read every scrap of Nisman news since he died on January 18. She had educated herself on his eleven-year investigation into the 1994 car bombing of the Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina, or AMIA, Buenos Aires’s biggest Jewish community center; she’d read his allegations that the sitting president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, had concealed Iran’s involvement in the attack. Not even a week after he levied his accusations, he was discovered dead in his bathroom. Online, it had seemed to Nina that all of Argentina was in an uproar. Now that she was here, she couldn’t gauge how many people cared.

She could ask Ilán. In a normal way, not a help-me-my-dissertation-is-dying way. She did not plan to tell him that if her research failed here like it had been failing in D.C., she would quit academia. She would be confident. Not socially starved. Not a freak. She would not ask insensitive or ignorant questions. If she flirted, she would do it subtly. She smoothed her hair, tugged her skirt straight, and texted Ilán that she was close.

In her two weeks of feverish predeparture planning, Nina had imagined herself working in the Facultad library. Looking at the building, she had doubts. It was old and mildly crumbling, with a tiny brown garden, a drooping Argentine flag, and air conditioners dripping from every third window. An engraved stone over the door confirmed that it really was part of the Universidad de Buenos Aires, not a run-down office block. Neon-green flyers wheat-pasted to its walls declared TODOS SOMOS NISMAN; matching hot-pink ones demanded ¡JUSTICIA YA! Beneath them, long black streaks of spray paint declared the pope a fascist and Cristina Kirchner a traitor and suggested that both go suck dicks. Nina was idly considering Cristina’s facial flexibility—she’d plainly had both Botox and a face-lift; could she open her mouth wide enough to admit a penis?—when the Facultad’s iron-barred door swung open and Ilán appeared.

He was, unfortunately, even hotter in person. Significantly hotter. Nina wished she hadn’t just been contemplating oral sex. His shoulders were broad, his prayer-fringed hips narrow. The fringes themselves were somehow seductive—flickering little banners of religiousness, reminding Nina that he was almost certainly off limits. His sleeves were rolled to the elbows, revealing hairy forearms and delicate hands.

“Nina?” he called.

She waved and banished all sexual thoughts, though she did permit herself to appreciate how good he smelled when he kissed her cheek hello. A standard greeting here, but she’d assumed—ignorantly, she guessed—that an Orthodox Jew would skip it. She hadn’t been prepared.

In English, he said, “I have a very serious question to ask.”

“Already?”

He grinned. “You said your apartment is on Azcuénaga, right?”

“Right.”

“Have you been to Rapanui?”

Rapanui was the ice cream place on Nina’s corner. Every time she walked by, cold, sugary air rolled over her, heavy with the smell of caramel or baking sugar cones. She’d vaguely planned to take herself there for academic rewards: first set of research aims written, first interview completed, first real idea.

“Not yet,” she said.

Ilán looked extremely pleased. “Would you like to fix that?”

“Fix?”

“You’ll see.”

He led her down Azcuénaga, past the frightening underwear store, two parking garages, a Subway, a delicious-smelling Lebanese restaurant. Drum-machine cumbia poured from car windows. Persimmons, at the fruit stand, were DE OFERTA; Nina would have to remember to come back. She hadn’t had a persimmon since her best friend, Hazel, moved from California, where they were abundant, to New York.

“Are you liking the neighborhood?” Ilán asked.

“I like it a lot. The buildings are pretty, there’s great people-watching, it’s easy to get groceries, I’m near public transit. What else do I need?”

Ilán shrugged. “There’s not much nightlife. A couple good bars, but no clubs.”

“I can handle that,” Nina said, with a spike of self-consciousness. “Not so much of a club girl.” She’d read online that Buenos Aires was a major clubbing city, but she liked drinking and talking, not drugs and dancing. Besides, who would she go clubbing with? Her seventy-five-year-old landlady? Herself?

“Same,” Ilán said. “I live a couple blocks over there.” He waved his arm loosely toward the Facultad. “Which means I should be ashamed that I had to meet you at work to bully myself into going there.”

Nina laughed. “It’s summer.”

“Exactly. Time to write.”

She wondered if he was performing laziness—a favorite pastime of grad students; presumably young professors did it, too—or if he legitimately had a slacker streak. She hoped it was the second. It seemed consistent with the ice cream excitement, somehow. “Writing is overrated,” she said lightly.

“My daughter tells me that every day.”

Disappointment shot down Nina’s spine. She willed herself to ignore it. Ilán carried himself like a younger man, but, per her Googling, he was thirty-nine to her twenty-eight. She should have predicted that he’d have a kid. “How old is she?”

“She turned five last month. She’s very proud of it.” Ilán had almost no accent in English, but, Nina noticed now, he hissed the f in of, holding the letter a second too long. Nina knew she had equivalent tells in Spanish: letters she stretched, diphthongs she shortened. Her r-rolling was unreliable, though her dad had drilled her throughout her childhood, rewarding her with Klondike bars when she cleared the great hurdle of “ferrocarril.”

She tried to conjure up a good question to ask about five-year-olds. People liked talking about their kids, she knew, but what did they like to say? The only parent in Nina’s life was her dad. She had no siblings, no cousins on either side, so her family was baby-free. Her friends were all childless. None of them even had dogs.

“Did she have a birthday party?” she tried.

“She wanted to have a fancy dinner instead. We called it Restaurant Party.”

Nina smiled. “I like that.”

“She’s a likeable kid. An odd one.” Ilán’s tone told Nina he was prouder of the second trait than the first, which she found charming. Before she could ask, he launched into a description of his daughter’s ideas and habits: she was obsessed with dolphins and all dolphin-related content, which manifested, in part, as avid Miami Dolphins fandom; she’d struck up an imaginary friendship with Lady Gaga; she thought monsters lived in her closet, but she welcomed them and loaned them toys; she had only recently learned to separate English, Spanish, and Hebrew, all of which Ilán spoke to her at home, and was delighted with herself when she successfully communicated in one unmixed tongue.

Nina whistled. “Trilingual parenting. I knew you did research in a lot of languages, but still, that’s hardcore.”

“Or crazy.”

She waved his self-deprecation off. A small corner of her mind suggested she ask why Hebrew: religion or Zionism? But if he was a Zionist, she didn’t want to know. “Impressive,” she said. “My dad raised me bilingual, and that was tricky enough.”

Down the block, two silky women slipped into a building that Nina had realized yesterday was a plastic surgery clinic. A taxi honked at a jaywalking girl in palm-sized shorts. She swanned serenely onward, as if the noise were tribute, not rebuke. Over the horn’s ongoing blare, Ilán asked, “English and what other language?”

“Spanish. I didn’t tell you I speak it?”

“You did.” His mouth spread into a smile. “But when I lived in D.C., I met a lot of Americans who”—he clawed his fingers into scare quotes—“‘spoke Spanish.’”

Nina laughed. “I know the type. Memorized every verb in AP Spanish but can’t carry on a conversation.”

“Exactly.”

“I’m terrified of people thinking that’s me,” she admitted. “Sometimes I pretend not to know Spanish to avoid giving the wrong impression. But I do speak it, I swear. I wouldn’t call myself fluent, but I’m probably as close as a nonnative speaker can get.”

“Is your dad a native speaker?”

Nina hesitated. She half-regretted bringing her dad up. On the one hand, she and her father were extremely close, and she missed him. Talking about him at length would be nice. On the other, parent talk was unsexy. If she wanted to begin flirting with Ilán, she should steer the conversation swiftly elsewhere.

She felt she had grounds for flirting. Ilán’s elbow was extremely close to her bare arm, and his energy was not what she’d call professional. It was too bad he had a child. He was ringless and hadn’t mentioned a wife, but she still had to accept the high odds he was married. Also, he wore fringes and a yarmulke, which indicated a sincere belief that God could see the top of his head. God would not like to glance down and spot a married Orthodox man, or even a single one, flirting with an ultra-Reform agnostic.

Nina looked briefly upward, checking in. A window air conditioner chose that moment to drip directly onto her forehead. She took the oily water as a sign that God was indeed watching, and would like Nina to desexualize herself to Their servant. “He’s not,” she said, wiping her face, “but he lived in Chile till he was sixteen, so he went to school mainly in Spanish. He always spoke English at home, but he claims he couldn’t read or write it well till college.” She shrugged. “Anyway, he believes in bilingualism. He says Americans only speaking English is rude.”

Ilán made no comment on her dad’s language politics. Instead, he asked, “Have you been?”

“To Chile?”

He nodded.

“I haven’t.”

“It’s an easy trip from here. An hour flight, maybe.” He left the suggestion unspoken, but Nina could fill in the blank. She knew she should go. She also knew she wouldn’t. She wanted to—she’d wanted to visit Chile since she was old enough to know it was real—but it would be cruel to her dad. Bad enough, for him, that she’d come to the country next door.

Rapanui gleamed at the corner. Its windows were wide open, and Nina could hear pop reggaeton streaming from inside. She pointed down the block before Ilán could ask follow-up questions. “See the building with the iron balconies?” she said. “That’s mine.”

Ilán squinted at it. “Who are you living with?”

“Myself.”

She’d gotten exceptionally lucky with her rental. For $200 a month less than she was getting from her subletter in D.C., she’d landed a gorgeous, fully furnished apartment whose owner, a sculptor named Paula Valenzuela, had temporarily moved to a suburb called San Isidro to keep her daughter company through her divorce. Nina had Googled Paula’s work: her sculptures looked like Henry Moore’s, but smaller and sexier. She was very, very good. Nina wondered if she were famous enough that mentioning her would qualify as name-dropping. Always hard to tell with art.

Ilán refused to let Nina pay for her ice cream, which was unspeakably delicious. It was artisanal and somehow Patagonian, and stretched like taffy between bowl and spoon. Nina took four Lactaid pills to eat her single scoop of dulce de leche. The caramel was rich and faintly bitter, as if it had been cooked to the edge of burnt. She forced herself to savor each bite, though what she wanted to do was shove her head into her paper dish like a horse eating oats from its trough.

Their table was inside the shop, but adjacent to a wide-open window. Warm air blew in from the street, tempering the air conditioning’s chill. Behind them, a long display counter sold handmade chocolates. Blown-up photos of wild berry bushes hung by the register. Nina considered breaking her lease and moving in here, or quitting her Ph.D. and apprenticing herself to these ice cream makers, who were clearly geniuses.

“This ice cream,” she informed Ilán, “deserves the Nobel Prize.”

“Good, right?” He licked chocolate from his spoon. “When they opened, Rebeca was a baby. My ex and I brought her so often, we thought her first word would be ‘helado.’”

Nina took a too-big bite of dulce de leche, willing it to glue her mouth shut. She could not visibly or audibly react to the news that Ilán had—she presumed—an ex-wife. She wondered if he’d mentioned the ex on purpose, to alert her to his singleness. She hoped so. She hoped, too, that the ex was no longer relevant. With luck, she’d swiftly remarried and exited the scene like Nina’s mom, who’d waited six months post-divorce, then moved to Napa and married a winemaker named Todd. He exploited migrant labor and never wore socks, but, after a full quarter century, she still seemed to love him enough.

Once Nina had swallowed and settled, she asked, “What was her actual first word?”

“‘Gaga.’”

“I think that’s baby talk.”

“So did I. But her second word was ‘lady.’”

Maybe he was gay. A divorced Orthodox Jew whose child had been fixated on Lady Gaga since birth? It would make sense. Nina sat back in her clear plastic chair and considered Ilán’s disheveled curls, his movie-star eyelashes, his kempt stubble. He didn’t seem gay, but the whole idea of seeming gay was bullshit, and why else would a woman divorce a man this hot?

Nina gouged a clot of frozen caramel from her ice cream. She hadn’t mentioned her dissertation. In no way had she demonstrated that she was a serious person. She didn’t especially want to start now. Ilán was easy to talk to, easy to relax around. Nina wasn’t sure she could motivate herself to work at seriousness, or expose her academic insecurities. She wanted to have a nice time.

She and Ilán sat at their little table long after their ice creams, and the espressos that followed, were gone. He was full of ideas for leisure-time activities: museums to visit, neighborhoods to wander, restaurants to eat in, books to read. Nina tried, and failed, to resist being charmed by the associative depth of his suggestions. An indie film set in Montevideo reminded him of a book called Guerra Eterna, written by a Uruguayan Jew who was, basically, Elena Ferrante before Ferrante herself was, that Nina had to read: it was a classic, and, speaking of, if she wanted to read classic Uruguayan writers, she should seek out the Eduardo Galeano books published by Siglo XXI Press, which had a gorgeous office-bookstore in Palermo Soho—not, incidentally, his favorite neighborhood (too trendy), but it did have terrific bookstores, and if she wanted to shop for clothes or find a good yoga studio, it was, without a doubt, the place to go.

After recommendations, they moved on to academic gossip. Ilán was extremely willing to make fun of Thijs Kuiper, Nina’s adviser, whom she’d gotten stuck with after her first adviser went to teach at NYU. Kuiper was not affiliated with the Center for Media and Social Impact, nor was he interested in either of those things. He was Nina’s enemy. He rejected her core belief in connection. Nina, influenced by the French philosopher Simone Weil, felt that the true purpose of studying was to learn to pay real, sustained attention to others. Kuiper felt that it was to win tenure and publish in prestigious journals. He thought scholars should be aloof and dispassionate and not have Twitter accounts. Nina thought he was a Luddite, a misogynist, and a Grinch. One of her major reasons for continuing in her program was that quitting would please him too much. She fully intended to spite-graduate, she said, which was true, and also made Ilán laugh.

To stem aggravating thoughts of Kuiper, she asked how Ilán had liked D.C. He and Nina, it turned out, shared a favorite bar: the Red Derby, which was two doors down from her apartment. While discussing the District’s restaurants, he pried from her the knowledge that she couldn’t cook beyond eggs and pasta, and demanded that she come over for dinner before she got scurvy. She couldn’t quite gauge the nature of the invite, but the mere thought of entering his apartment sent a prickle of heat down her spine.

On her half-block walk home, she told herself to hope Ilán was gay. She felt in her bones that he was not, but also that, if he was straight, she could get herself into big trouble. Heartbreak trouble or, worse, step-maternal trouble. Already, she was imagining ways she might charm Rebeca. Contrary to parental stereotype, Ilán hadn’t shown Nina a single photo. She wondered if they looked alike.

In her building’s echoing staircase, Nina tried to remember herself at five. She remembered loving, in descending order, her dad, Scottie Pippen, and God, who she thought lived in trees. In playgrounds and parks, she’d shove her face into knotholes and root balls, braced to stare the God of her ancestors down. Eventually, she got poison oak on her forehead and renounced her search and, with it, her theological interests. She never lost interest in either her father or Scottie, though.

She wondered if her religious sureness had been a kid thing, or if it was her personality. Until her Ph.D., she had always been highly confident. She still felt that confidence operating below the surface of her mind, but her three failed case studies, combined with Kuiper’s scorn for her project, had done major damage. Once, Nina had been positive that studying social media’s political potential was her calling. Her purpose. She’d had all kinds of lofty ideals about the public benefits of researching internet dissent. Now she worried that her entire academic life was an excuse to dick around on Twitter instead of doing real nine-to-five work.

On the plane here, plunging through the dark sky over Brazil, Nina had promised herself that this was it. She was in the fifth year of her Ph.D., and now she was on her fifth possible dissertation subject. Already she had tried and failed to study Occupy Wall Street, which proved too diffuse; the opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline, which wasn’t sufficiently online; Black Lives Matter, which she’d decided it was not her place to research; and a newly formed Jewish anti-Zionist group headquartered in D.C. and on Twitter, which had been perfect until it abruptly unformed. Not Nina’s fault, but she took it as a bad sign. A cosmic alert that her work was misguided. If the Nisman protests failed to cohere into the movement she predicted and hoped for, she would take the universe’s advice. She’d admit that she was not a serious scholar, that her whole research agenda was baseless bullshit. She’d pack up and go home— and not home to D.C. either, but to Chicago. She’d admit defeat. She’d get a job.

Nina woke, on her first Friday in Buenos Aires, to a text from Ilán. He’d enjoyed spending the afternoon with her, and he’d meant that dinner invitation. Would she like to come over Tuesday? And if so, did she eat meat?

I eat everything, she replied. Briefly, she considered a winking emoji, but thought better. Instead, playing it safe, she asked, What can I bring? Dessert? Wine? Then she screenshotted the exchange, texted it to Hazel—Date or not date??—and pried herself from bed, leaving her phone behind. She would, she decided, do one full hour of work before checking for Ilán’s response.

Ilán proved to be a slow but consistent texter, which meant that Nina, adhering to her one-hour rule all day, was highly productive. She parked herself at her desk and devoted the morning to indexing internet theories surrounding Nisman’s death. In the afternoon, she messaged demonstration organizers to request interviews, then created a list of relevant slogans and hashtags. She tweeted several Nisman-related news stories to prove baseline engagement. She had yet to recapture the whole-body research enthusiasm that had brought her here, but she did feel good.

In the early evening, she quit working and took a beer onto the balcony. The sky was silky and blue, filled with criss-crossing wires and moonlike satellite dishes. Ash trees shook their green branches, stirred by pigeons and passing cars. It occurred to her that, except for her frantic week of work in Chicago, today was the closest she had come in years to the life she’d imagined for herself when she set out to be an academic. Ordinarily, her work-at-home days revolved around guilt, chores, and her vibrator; library days, guilt, Google, and snacks. She had fallen into a bad rut. Maybe coming here had snapped her free.

The next day, she worked till lunchtime, then walked to the used-book market on Avenida Corrientes. The selection was dizzying: art books, plastic-wrapped Penguin paperbacks, spooky biblical tracts, spooky sex manuals, medical sex manuals, woo-woo sex manuals, tarot guides, academic journals, encyclopedias, fancy Nobel-winning fiction, weird small-press fiction, the works. She bought a Henry Moore exhibition catalog as a hostess gift for Paula, who’d invited her to lunch in San Isidro the next day; a first-edition Spanish Valley of the Dolls for Hazel, who worked in the art department at Simon & Schuster and would love the Creamsicle-orange cover; and half the books Ilán had recommended at Rapanui, all of which she’d noted on her phone. She had to take a snack break halfway down the street, which led to a major discovery: in addition to containing the world’s best ice cream, the city of Buenos Aires was home to the perfect grilled ham-and-cheese. Her sandwich was impossibly thin and crispy, with perfectly salty ham and the exact right amount of mozzarella to pull between bread and teeth without making a mess. She wanted to eat seven more. She hoped Argentine pharmacies sold Lactaid. At this rate, she was going to run out by March. 

Nina left Avenida Corrientes content, dehydrated, and weighed down by books. Within days, she would see her walk home as a time of hilarious innocence. She’d had no idea that Guerra Eterna would be any more important to her than the six other books jammed in her New Yorker tote bag. As far as she was concerned, Guerra Eterna was relevant to her life because Ilán had told her it was good; relevant, in other words, because discussing it with him could help demonstrate she was a serious and intellectually engaged person worthy to audition for the role of his temporary girlfriend.

Nina understood that, to a thirty-nine-year-old tenure-track professor with a kindergartner, a six-month relationship might be too trivial to appeal. She understood, too, that it was unfair to hope for. It was not good—was probably objectifying, or tokenizing, or some other bad-ing—to want Ilán to be her tour guide and short-term boyfriend. It was an immature hope, a study-abroad hope. Nina disliked herself for it, and yet.

Months later, she’d admit to Ilán that she had initially wanted to date him for practice. She hadn’t had a real boyfriend since college. She’d thought she could learn adult romance, then take her new expertise back to the U.S., where, presumably, some childless, American, age-appropriate version of Ilán would await. She’d thought her fantasies about marrying him, compelling though they might have been, were just manifestations of a crush.

Walking home, books swinging at her sides, she permitted herself one such fantasy. Beach ceremony, barefoot, very small. Maybe she’d even be pregnant. Nina would love to be pregnant at her wedding. She’d always wanted kids. A whole pack of them, ideally. Her whole life, she’d wished for a bigger family than her little Lazris unit. Growing up, she’d begged for a sister, though she would have gladly accepted a brother had one been offered. Even now, she occasionally imagined her dad falling in love with some younger woman and having a late-in-life baby. Her dad, who hadn’t been on a date since he met her mother in 1983.

Nina wished she could somehow spy on her parents’ courtship. Her mom, Wendy, was perfectly fine—Nina had no bad feelings toward her; she visited her in Napa before the start of every academic year—but strenuously boring. She had the inner and outer smoothness of a morning-show host. It was impossible to picture her attending an anti-Pinochet rally or caring who Pinochet was. Maybe Nina’s dad had found it calming to be with a woman whose concerns didn’t extend past herself. All he ever said about his brief marriage was that it had been ill-advised on both his part and Wendy’s but, because it led to Nina, he was grateful for it every day.

She needed to check on her father. Make sure he wasn’t too lonely. Really, she should email Nico, both to let him know her dad needed some extra support and to invite him to visit Buenos Aires. She’d love to see him. It had been—four years? Five? Too long.

When Nina was a kid, Nico came to Chicago every summer. He brought gifts, planned day trips, hauled them across the city to eat Indian dinners on Devon Avenue, pancake breakfasts at Ann Sather’s, pierogies in the Polish Triangle. He was Nina’s namesake, fake uncle, and role model. He was the only person alive who could reliably make her dad laugh.

Nina often asked Nico for help taking care of her dad. In high school, when she decided she needed to know Andrés’s full story, she bypassed her father completely. She feared asking him to remember. Instead, she called Nico, who explained how Andrés had died, then described him when he was alive. He helped Nina imagine Andrés not as a martyr but as her dad’s wiseass friend. Most importantly, he showed Nina that her dad felt as if he’d been living the wrong life since Andrés had gotten disappeared in 1973, and that she, Nina, did not have to feel the same way. She could love her dad without imitating him. She could know her family’s, and her country’s, past without beating herself up for what she had not personally done.

Only once, in college, had Nina deviated from Nico’s no-self-flagellation doctrine. In her guilt over leaving her dad alone at home, she’d launched herself into researching Cold War–era dictatorships in the Southern Cone, with a special focus on Pinochet. She took every available Latin American history class, did two independent studies, then proposed an honors thesis. Her adviser, a sweet, bearded man named Doug Cope, supported the idea but wanted her to do original research in Chile. He was happy to help set it up, even to wrangle departmental funding. Nina balked. Later, she mocked herself for the whole plan. Studying Chilean history could not possibly have given her more access to her dad’s grief than twenty years as his only child had.

She was approaching the Palacio de Aguas Corrientes, which she’d seen on travel blogs but not yet in real life. It had been, at one time, the world’s most ornate waterworks. Now it was, if she remembered correctly, an archive, and a gorgeous one, all turrets and arabesques, high golden windows and rosy, power-washed bricks. Jacarandas shed purple blossoms on the lawn. A lone balloon bobbed from the fence. The building’s beauty returned Nina to herself. She should have been concentrating on her very lovely and completely unfamiliar surroundings, not rehashing her lifelong worries about her dad. He was, after all, a grown man. Shielding him from his emotions was not Nina’s job.

She admired the water palace a moment longer, reminding herself how lucky she was. Lucky to be here; lucky to love her dad so much, even if it brought complication; lucky to have Nico to help sort that complication out. Luckier than she knew to have met Ilán, and to have Guerra Eterna biding its time at her side. No book would ever be more important to her. In the decades of their marriage, she’d often tell Ilán that no person would ever be more important than him, but she always hoped she was lying. She never gave up believing that her sister could someday matter most.

The post Is This Dissertation Research or a First Date? appeared first on Electric Literature.

When I was seven, my mother asked me to steal a Baby Ruth from CVS. I told her I didn’t want to, but she said I should give it a try just to see how the whole thing felt. 

“But I don’t like chocolate,” I explained. 

“That’s not the point,” she said. The point was that I was young, and when you are young, she said, you can’t get in much trouble if you’re well-dressed and white and female. Besides, I was a good height for the candy counter. And the Nestle corporation was depriving whole nations of children from clean drinking water. Wouldn’t it be nice to stick it to them? It didn’t matter we had more money than we knew how to spend. Man had invented money to perpetuate the primal urge to watch others suffer. She promised: it wasn’t about the money.

In the end, I took the candy but only got as far as the door before giving a loud confession. My mother acted surprised and put on a show of disciplining me. In the car on the way home she said, “You’re a trust-worthy girl, Sarah,” and I got the sense that the whole event was a bigger experiment than she’d let on. It had been a test and one I’d passed, although it would take years to understand how and why.

The autumn I turned thirty-seven, I was walking to work when I saw her: a baby that could have been mine, but wasn’t. She was strapped to the chest of my ex-boyfriend Dave, who held a coffee in one hand, a bottle of milk in the other. 

“Sarah?” he said, disoriented. Even though we both still lived in the same college town where we’d met as undergrads, we hadn’t spoken in years. Keene was like that; you could avoid a person if you gave the effort some attention. While Dave had grown up in New England, I had other motives for sticking around. Moving from a Fifth Ave. penthouse to a dorm room in New Hampshire had provided a false and humble bearing I’d never managed to leave. 

“Mr. David Cooper,” I said, tipping an imaginary hat.

When Dave proposed, I’d meant to say yes but signed up for a half-marathon instead. We’d both agreed that meant something. Truth be told, it wasn’t that I couldn’t imagine a life with Dave—I’d loved Dave—but a deep and inexplicable panic had set in that could not be brushed aside. 

Up close, the baby looked to be around eighteen-months and had blonde hair that stood on end. It was October, still warm enough that her missing sock wasn’t cause for alarm. More problematic was that the bare foot made me want to run a pointer finger across her sole. I’d read somewhere that stimulating an infant’s feet impacts development, and I yearned to prune a few neural connections the way one might impulsively remove lint from a stranger’s fleece. Meaning I wanted to make a difference, even if it was small. Especially if it was small.

Dave had grown a handlebar mustache and looked like a playful villain. I asked about his life in a general way. Was he still working as an electrician? He put on a British accent. “Vera wins the bread these days.” 

Vera. Stylish and empathetic Vera. She was an impossible-to-hate public defender who I hated. He’d only met Vera because she’d once been my friend. Long ago, I’d confided in her that I wasn’t so sure I was the marrying type, and she encouraged my hesitation. Give yourself time, she’d said. No one needs to figure out everything all at once.  

“I’m just a no-pay Mary Poppins,” Dave continued. Still British. Dave had been the kind of boyfriend who could make me laugh by stating uncomfortable truths in odd voices. When he ditched the accent to bring up my mother, to say he’d read about her death in the paper, I grabbed at his daughter’s foot and she startled. As the baby cried, I admitted Mom’s death wasn’t the best thing that ever happened to me, and Dave’s face twisted with familiar pity.

“Hey, you and Vera should come by the house,” I said. It wasn’t the first time I’d acted impulsively in an effort to find stable ground. A month earlier, I’d slept with the vet tech after euthanizing my cat; a month before that, cut my hair after denting the car. But as soon as the words left my mouth, I regretted the invitation. 

Bottle now in his pocket, Dave stood with pinched fingers below his nose. After spreading his thumb and forefinger in opposite directions across the slick black hairs of his mustache, he said, “Do you mean that?” 

I should have taken the opportunity to loop back and admit it wasn’t a good idea—not while I was still grieving my mother, maybe not ever—but instead I invented a small dinner party. I wanted to prove that even though I lived alone, I wasn’t lonely. “It would be great if you guys could make it,” I said and then relayed a few false details.

“We’ll be there,” Dave said. “Vera has been—well, I know for a fact she’d love to see you.”

When we said goodbye, Dave waved with his daughter’s chubby, balled-up fist. She’d settled and was looking at me the way I imagine an animal gazes upon a terminal patient. That was the word that arrived: patient.

Walking into work, I was mentally sorting through my options to retract the invitation when my phone pinged. Vera. 

“You don’t know what this means,” she wrote. “There have been so many times I’ve wanted to reach out.” 

I’d recently taken a temp job writing obits for the local paper. I didn’t need the cash but a way to distract myself from who I might become now that my mother was dead. The office was small. Five desks in eight hundred square feet and a back table for the printer. There were three street-facing windows, a kitchenette, and one peace lily plant someone had named John Lennon.

Ping! “I can make a salad. Or a dessert. Just let me know what’s best.”  

I took off my coat and hung it on the back of my chair. From across the room, my boss Trixie—a broad-shouldered woman in her fifties—pointed at the clock. Before her life as a managing editor, Trixie had been a competitive swimmer. In both roles, she cared only for the minute-hand. Because of my run-in with Dave, I was late, and Trixie did not look kindly on an employee using company time for leisure. An extravagance a small paper like ours can’t afford, she said when people took long lunches or tried to schedule an appointment during work hours. I threw my keys onto the desk’s surface, turned on my computer, and gave Trixie an apologetic smile. 

Ping! “Do you still like Sour Patch Kids smothered in peanut butter?” 

Vera followed this last note with a laugh-cry emoji, as if we texted all the time, as if she hadn’t married and then procreated with my ex. I shoved the phone in my pocket without answering. What was she saying? That she remembered my childish behaviors? That it wouldn’t surprise her if I was still full of bad taste and unconventional tricks? 

I’d show her.

It should be noted that my mother married four times. Her first marriage was to my father, who left before I could speak. Next came Phil. Phil was the one with the money. He was classically old, and Mom, twenty-five, still had her looks. “Sweet as sugar,” she’d say grabbing Phil’s wrinkled face with long red nails. Phil was seventy-five when they married, eighty-five when he died. “The devotion that lasted a decade,” Mom said at the funeral and never changed her tune. Their love was real, she claimed, and she wasn’t going to waste her breath convincing people otherwise. 

“It’s true, the spirit doesn’t care about age,” she once said when I challenged her on the subject. She’d caught me, a young teen, sneaking out the window to meet a twenty-six-year-old pizza delivery boy promising a free pie if I sat shotgun on his route. I didn’t care about the pizza as much as I’d felt charmed by the idea that my presence could warrant gifts. Phil had been dead two years, but Mom still dressed in black. She stood in my doorway, a shadow of a mother. “But the pizza boy? Really?” 

I called Mom a snake, a swindler, and a hypocrite, which she took in stride, but when I used the word I’d heard kids at school toss around—gold digger—she asked if I knew how squirrel tasted. By then, I’d memorized the story: she’d spent a childhood eating squirrel hearts, squirrel livers, and squirrel kidneys. “And I liked it!” she’d finish emphatically, as if this were the real horror. The implication was Mom had done for me what her own mother could not; she’d taken the shame out of living.

Only she hadn’t.    

Over the years, there were plenty of ways in which Mom and I stumbled into the embarrassments of our pleasures. After Phil came Andrew, a loser. Then Drake, another loser. Each took Mom for nearly two mil, which truth be told, hardly made a dent in what Phil left us. 

And me? I acted in ways only the emotionally poor behave, meaning I took attention, any attention, at whatever cost. To which you might say, Hey, Sarah, didn’t you leave a very good and pretty funny man named Dave who gave you plenty of attention? and I still wouldn’t be able to tell you why.

As I settled into my desk, Dave’s baby stayed on my mind. The fact appeared in a wave of morning nausea: Dave’s child only existed because of a choice I’d made. If I hadn’t left the relationship, Dave would be glued to my genetic material, ipso facto, he’d never have matched the other half of his daughter’s DNA with Vera’s. In this way, I felt a motherly tug to that wide-eyed one-socked baby. In my refusal of her father, I’d birthed the possibility of Dave’s baby, no? 

This got me thinking: how many other kids had my poor decisions breathed into this world? 

All morning, I sat with my computer screen angled toward the wall and perused Facebook. The idea was to get a look at the kids of the men I’d left behind. As I scrolled through their photos—this one chubby, this one in soccer gear—I felt a rush of deep love swell beneath my breastbone. Cosmically speaking, I’d played a part in their here-ness. Maybe I wasn’t just a woman nearing forty. Maybe I was a much bigger force than I could ever imagine. The whole event got my bowels moving, and I entered the office’s bathroom. 

It must be said: there are some people who have a clear and easy relationship to their body. If they are thirsty, they take a drink; if they are cold, they tend to their warming; if the urge to take a shit arrives and they are, say, at the grocery store, they pull their cart to some out-of-the-way aisle and locate the restroom. I am not one of those people. In college, I waited days until I could walk the half-mile to the campus library where I relieved myself in the very private, single occupancy, double-lock fourth-floor bathroom. Somewhere along the way, Mom had taught me how to sever what a body wants from what a body does. Even still, I used public bathrooms strictly for urination, but after looking at all those kids, my stomach was in knots. I was sitting in one stall of the two-stall bathroom, thinking vaguely of Dave’s baby but also of Mom and Mom’s money, when the bathroom door opened. 

Hearing the sounds of heels on linoleum, I panicked. At first, I tried all the standard tricks. I gave a distracting and unnecessary flush. I coughed. I made a noisy production of pulling toilet paper from the roll while shuffling my feet. Maybe, if I finished quickly, I could leave before putting a face to those heels. It felt unfathomable that in the near future I’d have to stand around the microwave while a burrito warmed and a co-worker—who had put ears to the sounds of my sphincter, a nose to the aroma of my lower intestines—asked what I was having for lunch. 

Soon enough, I was at the sink going through the quick motions of hand washing when my high-heeled companion let out a thunderous fart followed by an audible sigh. The water of the sink was still running, so my presence did not elude her. She had already trumped my bathroom production, and from the sounds of it, she was just getting started. The bravado and gall of her doings not only impressed but moved me, emotionally speaking. I decided right then and there: I wouldn’t cancel the dinner party with Dave and Vera, I would arrange one. I could be brave. There were fears, very real fears, I could overcome. 

I squatted and craned my neck to look into that small window of open space beneath the stall. I wanted to catch a glimpse of the heels, which turned out to be two-inch faux-leather pumps in bubble-gum pink. 

“Just bring yourselves,” I texted Vera. “This will be fun!”

It was my belief at the time I had ownership of very little in this world. Seeing Dave’s baby had challenged this belief, but when I got back to my desk, the browser still on a photo of Chuck Moorehead’s kids in store-bought Halloween costumes, I felt my motherly heart deflate. These children, with their curly red hair and expertly applied face paint, were so clearly not mine. 

And yet, hearing that gaseous woosh then plunk, plunk, plunk had made one thing obvious: we were singular creatures with closed systems of intake and output and that was OK. It could be normal, natural even, to be alone. What did I have to prove to Dave and Vera other than this? I imagined them leaving my home, bellies full, saying to one another, You know, Sarah’s got a good life. She’s got her independence, her comfort, her freedom. 

It was soon revealed that the heels belonged to Georgia, the newspaper’s one-woman ad sales team. Georgia was in her early thirties and had thick blonde hair which she wore in a high ponytail. The ponytail, alongside a mild case of rosacea, gave her the look of an alpine skier. When co-workers talked about getting together after work, it was never Georgia who spearheaded the effort. She was the sort of woman who knew you had a cat or a sick aunt and asked after them in a quick moment of care. 

I needed to hand in my edits, but I’d become distracted. As Georgia returned to her desk, I watched her the way I’d watched men in bars. I was curious to know more. I admit it crossed my mind that Georgia, a bit of an office bore, might be a phenomenal lover. It wasn’t so much that I wanted to sleep with Georgia, but I wanted to learn her ways. How to get comfortable in a body? How to put one’s needs into the foreground? She was just the kind of person who’d impress dinner guests with her soft demeanor and core of unwavering confidence. To have a friend like this, I thought, would speak well of me. 

Sitting at my desk watching Georgia make a phone call, my thoughts spiraled. Georgia had knocked loose in me a desire to greet vulnerability with abandon. When Trixie passed my desk to give me my next assignment, I stood up and saluted her like a soldier. 

“On it, Ma’am,” I said. I was full of energy and resolve. 

“Settle down,” she huffed. “A woman’s died for Christ’s sake.”  

In an effort to befriend Georgia, I began bringing small treats into the office each day. I discovered that Georgia liked sweets, like salt-water taffy and peppermint candies, and that she’d chat a little longer than usual if I brought my offerings straight to her desk. I made up excuses—an aunt who’d traveled to the Cape, a niece raising funds for a dance team—but soon my co-workers had expectations. 

“You know what I haven’t had in a while?” Trixie said one afternoon.

“What’s that?” I asked. 

“Blondies,” she said, which set me on a course of baking that Georgia especially liked. It seemed that eating was another way in which Georgia was unabashed with her wants and needs. She didn’t hesitate to open her mouth wide or give moans of pleasure as crumbs fell across her keyboard. And yet, the buttery cakes, muffins, and cornbreads upset Georgia, gastricly speaking. Nearly every day she bee-lined it to the restroom shortly after she ate, a small sweat blooming across her forehead.

I’d already set the date with Vera and Dave when I got up the courage to follow Georgia into the bathroom one afternoon. I was planning on saying how much I admired her, how I’d noticed her being absolutely herself and what a gift that was, but Georgia was already in the far stall. What began as a guttural grunting turned into a splashing, a spitting. I could see through the long sliver by the door’s hinges that Georgia was on her knees.

At first I felt terrible. Had my baking skills failed her? Had I purchased old eggs? Rancid oils? Suddenly I understood: Georgia, who hadn’t gained a pound—Georgia, who always ran to the bathroom after an indulgence—had a secret.

I wanted to meet Georgia in her pain, which is to say, I stuck around. I reapplied my lipstick while imagining Georgia’s fingers at the back of her throat, pointer and middle finger fitting naturally, if not a little snuggly, in her soft, wet mouth. How did it all work? Did she wiggle them until she felt the mound of tissue that made up her tonsils? As she heaved, I thought back on Georgia’s first bathroom performance. Maybe I’d gotten it wrong; maybe Georgia wasn’t at ease with herself in the way I’d assumed. Maybe she was loaded with laxatives, and bruised histories, and survival plans.  

When Georgia emerged from the stall we stood next to each other at the sink. As we washed our hands while facing the same wide mirror, Georgia had what looked like tears in her eyes. I felt desperate to know: how did it feel to relieve such an enormous pressure? 

“I’m sorry you had to hear that,” she said. “I think there’s a bug going around.” 

“My friend Paul just had a nasty virus,” I said. “Wonder if it’s the same thing.” There was no Paul, no virus, but it comforted me to comfort Georgia. I wanted to say other things—things that would let her know that if she wanted me as a confidant, she could have me—but instead I followed up with, “I’m having a small dinner party next week. Any chance you’d want to come?”

Georgia did not immediately answer. She dried her hands with a paper towel then tightened her ponytail. “Ok,” she finally declared. “I think I could use something like that.”

With Georgia on the roster, I needed a guest or two more to round out the evening, but who? I wanted the vibe to be casual yet intimate, playful yet mature. Over the course of the next week, I invited my Pilates instructor (busy), the cute barista at the corner cafe (engaged and wary), and my therapist, who I tried to entice with the idea of treating the party as a session of sorts—a live tableau of my confusing and disintegrated life. You could show up for just an hour! I’d said, and when she gave a dour look, I amended the offer. Fifty minutes? She declined, encouraging me to pause for a moment to ask myself what I was trying to accomplish with these shenanigans. 

Back at work, Trixie called me over to her desk, where she waved the pages I’d turned in earlier that morning. 

“Is this really it?” she asked. “This is your best effort?” Trixie had assigned me not an obituary, but a profile. Let’s see what you can do with some more space, she’d said. A plumber had won a thousand dollars in an art competition with a piece titled, “Plunge this,” a self-portrait of his mouth wide open. I’d rushed the interview, and the piece was padded with bland descriptions of shapes and color in place of character and insight. But also, we were a free paper that ended up on the tables of elementary school art rooms. 

I’d used Mom’s death to explain sloppy work and missed deadlines before and tried this tactic again. 

“You know my mother died when I was sixteen,” Trixie said, and then confided that despite what others promised, losing a mother was not a loss time heals. “But it’s a loss you’ll have to manage,” she said, meaning shape up or ship out. Meaning caring for small and banal stuff, like plumbers-turned-artists, could have an effect on the emotional landscape of a life. It was the first real piece of advice that made sense.

In a last-ditch effort, I invited Trixie to the party, and as it turned out, she was going to be in my neighborhood that evening and agreed to stop by. 

“Take another shot,” she said, handing me back the profile. “See what happens when you care.” 

That evening, I wandered the grocery store with questions on my tongue. Had Mom enjoyed offal as a girl because it was genuinely good? Or had she enjoyed it because she was starving? Maybe it was good because she was starving. Another answer: she’d forced herself to eat those tiny organs—spongey, bitter—until she believed they were a delicacy, a privilege. And weren’t they? And weren’t they not? 

I spent the morning tidying, the afternoon cooking, the order of which I only rethought as Dave and Vera arrived, the house now sticky with effort. I still lived in the same modest two-bedroom in the lackluster neighborhood I’d chosen in my twenties, the same house where Dave had asked, Will you ever be ready for something new? 

“It smells amazing in here,” Vera said as she and Dave walked through the door. Vera looked good, much softer since I saw her last. But even with a round face and full backside, Vera hardly looked satisfied. A deeper, more subtle change had taken place, and the shift acted on me with a kind of primal intensity—something felt rather than understood. Were the muscles of her face doing new things? Had the cadence of her voice altered slightly? 

“You’re the one who smells amazing,” I said after giving a quick hug. “What’s that perfume you’re wearing?” 

“It’s called une shower,” she laughed, “which is as much of a beauty routine as I can manage these days.” 

She took off her coat, revealing the yellow cotton dress she’d bought on a road trip we’d taken through Maine one summer. That weekend, I’d marveled how Vera could find something in a grungy thrift store and turn it into the kind of outfit you’d see on the streets of Paris. But now the dress, ill-fitting and wrinkled, looked like a nightgown one wore for comfort alone.    

“No baby?” I said to Dave, putting my hands to hips in a playful posture of severe interrogation. I was feeling hyper, not right, and began baby-talking. “Where’s my little munchkin? Where’s that chunky little darling of a meatball?” 

“She’s with my sister.” Dave took off his jacket, received Vera’s, and put them both in the coat closet that once housed his ski equipment. “If you can believe it, it’s our first night alone since Olive was born.”

“We’re not alone,” Vera said to Dave, and then to me, “Work is insane. Being a mother is insane.” 

A bit too loudly, Dave put on the voice of a sportscaster: “Mom and Dad’s big night out!” At this, he grabbed Vera’s hand to make a quick joke; hands raised, Dave gave a cheer of mock-celebration. Their “big night out” was so lame it was funny. I could tell Vera was worried that Dave’s behavior could be the pinprick to the balloon that was our reunion. With a false laugh, I tried to convince everyone, myself included, that their parental titles and entwined hands could not upset me. 

“The ol’ place looks good,” Dave said, now walking an odd gait around the living room like some white-gloved inspector. He ran a finger over my bookshelf, a finger over the mantle. A shiver, from the base of my neck down the length of my back, betrayed my efforts to act nonchalant. I could tell myself many things—anything really—but my body whispered the truth; I was feeling things, electric things, in Dave’s presence. 

“It’s like nothing’s changed,” Vera said, warming herself by the fire. She wasn’t wrong. I still had the same thrift-store furniture I’d made Dave strap to his car’s roof. The woman at the register had said, Your wife has a good eye, to which Dave framed his face as if he were the steal. Why thank you, he’d said, and she’d laughed. Oh, we’re not married, I stated, and on the ride home Dave wanted to know why I’d felt compelled to correct her, a stranger. And lie? I asked. For what reason?     

“The others should be arriving soon,” I said. “Although it looks like the party will be smaller than planned. Penelope’s dog swallowed some chocolate this afternoon. She and Martha are at the vet.”

“Oh that’s too bad,” Vera said. “I was hoping to see Pen and meet this hot wife of hers.”

Throughout our twenties, the three of us had done everything together, but Penelope had been my friend first. Penelope, whose father had remarried the babysitter, didn’t think twice about her allegiance when Dave and Vera began dating. In fact, sometimes she took her anger at the whole situation too far, and I had to remind Penelope that sure, Vera was dead to us now, but she wasn’t really “a conniving bitch who cared only for herself.” I hadn’t told Penelope about running into Dave or about the dinner party. She didn’t even have a dog. 

“Let’s have a drink,” I said, waving us toward the kitchen where I’d laid out a tray of charcuterie. It made no sense why a whole chicken, sitting in a baking dish on the stovetop, should embarrass me, but I quickly shoved the bird—exposed, raw—into the oven before glancing at a cheat-sheet I’d hidden in a drawer. (High heat for ten minutes, then down a hundred degrees.) Twenty minutes per pound, I chanted to myself while pulling a corkscrew from the drawer. Twenty per pound. Twenty per pound. The fact of the matter was, I’d never been a great cook. Growing up we’d had a personal chef, and after Mom died, I lost my appetite for many things, food included. When I ran into Dave, I’d been eating the same thing for months: oatmeal, PB&J, spaghetti smothered in butter.

“What a thing,” Dave said, “to be back here.”

Vera put her hand to her heart. “Feels like we’re twenty.”  

I opened a bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon, more specifically, a ’75 Lafite Rothschild. I’d also inherited Mom’s wine collection, over five hundred bottles worth around three million, a portion of which I kept boxed in my guest room. In the months since Mom passed, I’d drunk only one bottle by myself, a 2016 Chateau d’Yquem Sauternes blend to wash down a box of Kraft Mac & Cheese, after which I promised myself to find a buyer for the collection. Only I hadn’t yet. 

With familiar ease, Dave went to the cabinet where I kept the wine glasses. Another pinprick, this one felt by me on Vera’s behalf. Dave knew every square inch of this home and hadn’t forgotten. I looked at Vera, and she looked at me. As we tried to find the familiarity in each other’s faces, I imagined a scenario in which I gifted a good portion of Mom’s money to Dave and Vera’s baby. I could be a rich auntie, a third and important piece in the child’s life. But Vera looked back with an expression I’d never seen before. Her big brown eyes—usually receptive and curious—had turned toward some private conversation that wasn’t going well.

“Being young sure is something,” I said. “We were nearly teenagers when we all met.” 

The three of us were clinking our glasses when Trixie arrived, buzzed on the heels of a holiday party just down the street. I’d never seen her in anything but work clothes, a rotating ensemble of slacks and blazers, but tonight she wore a festive silver dress with sequins the size of compact mirrors.  

“Cool outfit,” I lied, but the dress made me dizzy. I could see a hundred versions of myself, each more warped than the next. 

“Is this it?” Trixie asked out the side of her mouth. “Is this the party?” 

Before I could answer, Georgia knocked at the door. She’d come from her father’s house in Jaffrey, and he’d demanded she meet his new horse, stabled twenty minutes further north. 

“I’m sorry I’m late,” she said, handing over a box of chocolates. We hugged—a first—and I could smell the barn in Georgia’s hair, the sweet and warm aroma of hay caught in the fibers of her sweater. But wrapped in my embrace, Georgia grew rigid. 

She hadn’t confided in me, and yet, I knew her secret. A new tension had emerged—between what I’d learned and what I could express—and as I released Georgia from my grip, I found myself overwhelmed by indecision. Should I encourage our blooming friendship by looping my arm through hers while giving a house tour? Or was it wise to hide my enthusiasm until we could fully trust one another? 

“Make yourself at home,” I said, pointing toward the living room where Dave and Vera had settled. “I’ll grab some more wine glasses.” 

I dashed into the kitchen. In my moment alone, I tried to take a slow, deep breath but was finding it difficult to quiet myself. What had I done? What was I doing? I had assembled this random group to prove what? That I was anchored to Keene, to my life, in some significant way? That the past could not continue its haunting? Whatever my intentions, an energy was blooming inside me, not entirely pleasant. 

When I returned to the living room, Trixie and Georgia flanked the fireplace in club chairs. Dave and Vera sat in the loveseat, which left me Mom’s rattan lounger. It was the only thing she’d kept from her own mother, claiming, while it wasn’t pretty, it could cradle a spine just so. She wasn’t wrong. Even Penelope, who suffered a bad back, came over sometimes just to get twenty minutes in the old thing. I eased into Mom’s chair taking in the warmth of the fire. 

“I’m so glad you could all make it,” I announced. Could I lean into the evening? See what small pleasures might be waiting? “Hope everyone came hungry.”

“I have to admit, I didn’t realize this was a dinner party,” Trixie said, her mouth downturned in cartoon-mistake. “I may have already eaten—” 

“I didn’t realize Sarah could cook!” Vera said with too much punch. Dave shot her a warning look, and she raced to explain. “I just mean, I saw this girl microwave more ramen than should be medically allowed.”

Georgia gave a polite laugh—not too hearty as to indicate she’d join Vera in a tear-down, if that’s where this was headed, but just enough to smooth things over for the rest of us. As Trixie sipped her wine, her dress caught and tossed the fire’s amber glow. Parts of my home, isolated and distorted, began shifting in those large sequins. 

“We were in college,” I said. “Vera was the abnormal one, eating broccoli and beans every morning.” My voice came out terser than planned. 

“I was only playing—” Vera said. Her face had reddened. “I didn’t mean to—”

The mood of the evening was proving itself as unreliable as Trixie’s dress. Georgia wasn’t touching the charcuterie, and Dave and Vera, back in my orbit, appeared worried.  

“People change,” I said, restoring good-nature to my voice while throwing my hands in the air.

“The only true thing,” Trixie agreed, and continued to make her way through the Lafite Rothschild. “I’m no wino, but this tastes important,” she said, and then gave an appreciative sigh that emptied and filled her chest. Swimmer’s lungs. As the dress collapsed and heaved, a disco show appeared on the ceiling. Maybe it was the wine, but if I squinted, it could look like we were under water.   

“The bottle was a gift,” I half-lied, and Dave and I caught each other’s eyes to have a private chat. This was something we used to do at other people’s parties when we needed to relay non-verbal messages. In this shared look Dave said, Can’t fool me. With kind eyes, I retorted, It’s nice to be remembered. 

When I first moved to Keene, I’d decided not to tell anyone I came from money. Not even Vera. Only Dave, years into our relationship, knew the financials of my upbringing after celebrating Christmas with my mother in New York. Back in New Hampshire, when he asked why I hid this part of myself, I said it was an uncomfortable fact, that the money wasn’t even really ours, that my mother had changed some very core part of herself to get it. 

At the time, Dave said I was overthinking it, that the people who loved me would embrace my full story. But money changes things, I said, to which he replied, You’re right. Knowing our kids will be rich, I’m never eating cereal again. He’d been joking, but also, it was the first time he’d mentioned our non-existent, future kids. The money, and Dave’s new knowledge of the money, had materialized a life we’d never discussed. 

Vera’s darting glances interrupted the silent conversation I was having with her husband. Could she tell that Dave and I still had access to our shared history, a history which hadn’t included her? As I scanned Vera’s face—older, slightly unfamiliar—I wondered about our fates. Who had put their hands in which pots? And which claims had lost their value? 

We were nearly done with the Lafite Rothschild when Vera turned to Georgia and asked, “So how do you know Sarah?” 

“The simple answer is work,” Georgia started, “but when you’re around someone day after day, you begin to know them the way animals know each other.”

“How do you mean?” asked Dave. 

“Through proximity. Through habitual experience.”

It was great to hear Georgia talk this way. She was making it seem like our friendship had philosophical undertones, which when I thought about it, it probably did. I decided to take the opportunity to announce Georgia’s merits.

“You’ve never met such a hard worker,” I said. “And like such a nice person. So nice. So many people complain about their co-workers, but we’re just a little family, aren’t we gals?” I was exaggerating, sure, but it felt good to parade my new life in front of Dave and Vera. 

When Georgia politely agreed, Yes, we were very lucky to have each other, to have nice jobs, Vera’s face tightened. Vera—who’d always been easy-going—now looked like a kid who’d just been told not every child gets invited to every birthday party. Is this what I’d wanted? To witness Vera feeling the flame of jealousy? I checked my watch. We still had fifteen minutes before I could take the chicken out, then ten more for the meat to rest. To kill time, I brought out another bottle, this time an ’89 Chateau Petrus Pomerol. When Trixie tasted it, her eyes all but bulged out of her head. She grabbed the bottle and ran her hands over the label. Then she took out her phone and Googled the vineyard.

“I knew this was good,” she said, “but this is beyond.”

“Is it?” I asked, my voice light.   

“Is it? This is a five-thousand-dollar bottle of wine!” she said. 

I was about to make up some elaborate excuse when Vera stepped in. “Sarah’s mother married an oil man,” she said. “Grew up as rich as a Kennedy, but you’d never guess, right?” 

The comment came out sounding like a pointed attack. It was a tone that claimed Dave (See, we tell each other everything), while simultaneously scolding me (See, I know you spent our friendship lying). And yet, as soon as she’d finished speaking, her eyes admitted regret. She wasn’t really at the helm. She’d been overtaken by marriage and motherhood and was now lost inside herself and waiting for rescue. Could someone who knew her, could I, help her back into the driver’s seat of her own life? Despite all Dave had done for her, I guess this was a job he hadn’t managed. Even though I felt compelled to support her, I resisted the urge. This—Dave, motherhood, the distance between us—was what she’d wanted. She’d chosen it.   

Dave and I locked eyes again, but this time my message wasn’t warm banter. He’d betrayed me. He’d told Vera the one thing I’d shared with him and him alone, something he promised never to reveal, not to anyone. 

“My father is an oil man too,” Georgia said. “Works at a gas station when he’s not riding horses.” Georgia hadn’t meant to be funny, but Trixie laughed. If Georgia perceived the surmounting tension, she hid it well. To collect myself, I went back into the kitchen, where I found smoke escaping from the oven’s seams. I turned off the heat, turned on the exhaust, and inspected our dinner. I’d forgotten to reduce the temperature and had cooked the bird at high-heat for too long. My mistake had charred the skin beyond repair. 

This is how Dave found me, near tears with my face at the oven’s open mouth. 

“Look,” he said. “Vera’s going through a really hard time. She hasn’t been acting like herself.” 

I looked at him with wide eyes. Like, Really dude? Like, Don’t you see we have a bit of a situation on our hands? But Dave—for all his good humor and funny voices—also possessed the ability to ignore other people’s concerns if they weren’t his own. I remembered this now. 

I raced to get the mitt, pulled the chicken from the oven, then opened all the windows. The room became cold. I felt my muscles, already tight with panic, constrict further, but also, the sounds of a winter night—of cars driving through slushy roads—reminded me that outside these walls, there was a world that had nothing to do with me. 

“Vera hasn’t admitted this to anyone,” Dave said, “But ever since the baby, she’s been struggling. I’ve been so worried, but then this dinner tonight. It’s the first thing in so long. She was excited to see you again. We were both so happy—” 

I grabbed a knife to poke beneath the chicken’s skin; I wanted to know how far the damage reached. What could be saved? What would I toss? I was about to put my hands into the carcass—to start pulling out pieces of dry chicken to rehydrate in a soup or chicken salad—when Dave’s phone rang. It was his sister. Baby Olive had developed a fever so high and so quick that a febrile seizure had occurred. I could hear Amy’s shaky voice on the other end. “I’m at the hospital now. The fever’s under control, but they want to monitor her. It’s not the kind of thing that causes damage. They promised there’s no damage.” 

Now Dave was the one looking wide-eyed. I could tell he’d been holding a lot, too much, and that this new and heavy piece was making his spiritual muscles shake.

“We’ll be right there,” Dave said. He hung up the phone, but stood frozen. He closed his eyes tight, and when he opened them, he looked at me straight-faced. It felt like the most familiar thing to take his hands into mine.  

“I shouldn’t have left,” he said, and for a moment, I thought I was inside a different conversation. “She was sleepier than normal when we dropped her off, but we all thought it was just another growth spurt. I should have stayed home. I shouldn’t have—” 

“No one did anything wrong,” I said. “Just a little scare. No permanent harm, right?” I looked at the scorched chicken. “Not missing much here anyway.”     

When Vera told me that she and Dave had developed feelings for each other, that over the eight months since Dave and I had dated, they’d kept in touch while slowly their friendship morphed, I was standing in my bedroom half-naked. Vera had dropped by to help me get ready for a date, and I was between dresses. When she asked for my blessing, I wanted to call her a bad friend, a desperate woman, a person with no ideas of her own. 

“What if I say no?” I said instead. 

Vera looked at me with a confidence I had rarely seen in her before. “I’m not asking for permission. I’m only hoping, with time, you’ll see a way forward for us.”

I raced to cover myself with an oversized sweatshirt then made my way toward the bed where I shoved my bare legs beneath the duvet. 

“When I look at his face, I see my whole life.” Vera kneeled then at the bed’s edge, her face hopeful like a child saying prayers. “Sarah, talk to me.” 

I then said a lot of things I’ve tried to since forget, accusations and name calling and general hysterics, but here we were again, the two of us still waiting for the consequences of our decisions to reveal themselves. I had a five-pound burnt chicken; she had a fevered baby. Were we really all that different?  

Dave and Vera raced to collect their jackets while apologizing for their sudden departure. Trixie gave a quick and encouraging story about a baby she once knew who’d had a febrile seizure and now attended Tufts. When Vera gave me a hug, she held on for a moment to whisper in my ear. “Being together again was so nice,” she said, and then pulling back, “Maybe you’ll come by the house sometime?” 

Here was the Vera I remembered, the Vera always securing the next plan while the present plan was still underway. Which was something that used to make me feel really great. As if she couldn’t get enough of me. As if she had a real and desperate need for my company. 

“Maybe,” I said.   

It was hard to tell if my face was flush from the wine, the oven’s heat, or the anger that flashed through me when Vera shared my best-kept secret. At any rate, my cheeks were aflame as I watched them leave. Closing the door, I wondered what would become of us.

“Who’s up for take-out?” I asked Georgia and Trixie. The smell of smoke lingered in the air. Georgia was quick to say her stomach was acting up again. In fact, it was getting rather late, she said, and we all agreed, like it or not, we had work in the morning. 

“And I believe you’ve got some writing to do,” Trixie said. 

I smiled, knowing I wouldn’t be coming into work tomorrow, or ever. I wasn’t trying to be a journalist, and if I could have small and banal interests that fed my spirit, they remained unknown to me. As Trixie put on her coat, relief cloaked my own body. The sequins, with their playful, dirty magic, were gone, and all that energy, which had been raging inside me like some trapped animal, quieted. I was worn, and in my weariness, I missed my mother. 

“It was nice to gather,” Trixie said. “Nice to meet your friends.” 

“The country can be a lonely place,” Georgia said. “Thanks for the invite.” And then she put her cheek next to mine and kissed the air the way one kisses a distant relative. If Georgia and I were going to be friends, we weren’t friends yet. Perhaps we’d hang out again and come to rely on one another, but maybe we’d enjoy forgetting the other more than any intimacy. 

 I apologized again for the food mishap, which truth be told, I didn’t even feel bad about. It’s funny the things you can convince yourself are important until they fail miserably.  

The day before Dave met my mother, we went to the zoo. We strolled from cage to cage while Dave gave each animal a voice and a problem. I’d felt too shy to chime in and play along, although in my head I assigned the ring-tailed lemurs dead end jobs for low pay. We ate hot dogs and cotton candy and said some really kind things to each other on a bench in the shade. Even though it was a nice zoo, it was a zoo. By mid-afternoon, the metal fencing and plexiglass wore on me.

“Doesn’t seem natural,” I said to Dave.   

“Captive breeding is an important conservation effort,” Dave said while tapping a sign that argued as much. 

I wondered about this. Did animals birthed inside a zoo have any chance of returning to the wild? Could they survive the life that should have been theirs? It was thoughts like these that could tank my system for days, weeks, months. Dave noticed my deflation, which I dismissed as a brewing fever.

When we saw my mother the next day, Dave told her about a mountain lion we’d seen walking the same worn circle. I could tell Dave was starting to really love me, and the world was doing that thing it sometimes did; it was receding, and I could feel the space between myself and everything. My mother had served a squash soup, which I left untouched.

“It’s your favorite,” she said, but it wasn’t true. I had never liked it, not once, and I sat without appetite as Dave asked my mother a series of questions about what I was like as a child. And then I listened to her describe someone I’d never met.

Soon after Mom died, I thought often of that blond tread of dirt, lonely and worn. I looped back on the image so often in those early days that in an attempt to ease my mind, I actually called the zoo. I wanted to find out if the mountain lion was still walking that same circle, but the person on the other end of the line said they’d never housed a big cat, or if they had, it was gone now. 

“Gone where though?” I asked.

“Like I said,” a listless voice drawled. “Not here.”   

Override takes many forms. I would come to see that long after I’d stopped working at the paper and sat eating salted pistachios at the lake’s edge. Truth, my truth, would come upon me there in a sudden breeze one June. The blossoms of wild blackberries and sweet grass, baked in early summer sun, would release an aroma so pungent and joyful that I’d wish my mother alive again. As the lake’s surface rippled, I’d have the thought: if only I could show her what I’ve learned.

But standing in my doorway, waving goodbye to Trixie and Georgia, I thought only about my inheritance. The word still felt loose and sick, like something that should have been fully-formed was instead puddled by confusion, loneliness, and grief. The secret was out; I had more than I knew what to do with, but what could I claim as my own? What kind of difference could I make? What did I want from this life of mine?  

I could start a fund for underprivileged kids, I thought. I could buy raw land to protect through conservation easements. I could turn the cash into gold, bury it in someone’s lawn, and then draw a treasure map to be placed in a neighboring mailbox. Now that would cause some chaos. But really: no matter what I did, the money would flow through me. It didn’t have to be complicated. In fact, it could be easy. I could give myself the things I desired and allow the rest to run right through. 

The post Money Can’t Take the Shame Out of Living appeared first on Electric Literature.

He took in air. Compared to Manhattan’s concrete sentries, Averman’s island was a state of nature. Or, relatively: They’d landed on a fresh tarmac carved out of the jungle and skirted by a comically long hangar. To the left, rows of idling Jeeps. Above, a sky the size of a sky. And all around, an atmosphere rehabilitated with newborn oxygen.

This felt right. Nobody here would know his circumstances, not fully. He’d sent Averman the barest outline of V’s disappearance. There would be perfunctory inquiries, a show of bereavement—To lose one’s wife! So suddenly! And not just any wife, but Victoria Stevens!—and then Guy would be given room to fully embrace his denial. He’d carouse and collapse; they’d look the other way.

The Quorum: a punctuation to his misspent life. He would enact a prohibition against self-awareness, against awareness of any kind. Guy would exist simply. And then, after public revelations forfeited the simple existence, he would exit simply as well.

He waited on the airstairs as the pilot collected his bags. He inhaled again, as deeply as his phlegmatic respiration allowed, stopping at the wet rattle in the lower throat.

A simple existence required discipline. To live without thought was challenging enough; add rigorous self-sabotage and you court failure. But he’d been firsthand witness to the continual challenging of the limits of human capacity. V said it was a matter of wherewithal. And while he lacked her brains and brio, he could imitate her unyielding will. 

Oh. A glandular swell under the jaw. He turned and voided onto the black airstrip. It was improbably milky and—good news—free of blood.

A rude moue from the pilot. Uncalled for, really. Guy was so obviously a wreck, so obviously freshly upended, one would think a little sympathy was in order. The pilot had that exsanguinated Gaelic look; maybe a proverb from the old country? But no. He just bent forward to check if the vomitus had spotted the plane. Guy returned to the cabin, gargled vodka from the galley, spit, realized he still could still taste yesterday, and took a quick, bracing pull.

The pilot waited near the cabin door. “I’m to return Monday at sixteen hundred hours, sir?”

“Let’s take things one hour at a time.”

The pilot stifled a look and returned to the cockpit. Guy filled his hip flask and tried the stairs again, with good results. Someone had already loaded his luggage in one of the Jeeps. Two sun-kissed youths approached, both clad in teal jumpsuits—Averman Teal, which he’d paid Pantone an undisclosed sum to invent. The boy and girl radiated possibility.

“Mr. Stevens, Arthur Averman welcomes you to the Quorum,” they said in unison.

“Mr. Sarvananthan,” Guy corrected.

“Of course,” the girl said. “Allow us to escort you to your vehicle.”

A quiet frenzy of staff, security, and ground crew conferred in the hangar. There had been a miscommunication, it seemed, or possibly several. The bodyguards kept pointing to rows of cots in the corner. And near the Jeeps, a naked Bennett Benatti, waving hello and performing light stretches. Guy waved back and, for some reason, gave a thumbs-up. A trio of Averman’s staff waited on the luxury automotive heir, holding a white towel, a garment bag, and black espadrilles. Benatti finished his routine and dressed as Guy approached.

“I expected your lovely wife,” Benatti said.

“Indisposed. You’re stuck with me,” Guy replied.

Benatti left his shirt half-buttoned to display his tattoos of Old Masters facsimiles from the family collection. Probably the only heir at the Quorum, Guy thought. Most were incredibly conservative, loathe to donate a penny more than what was expedient taxwise. Whereas one-percenter transgression was Benatti’s raison d’être.

He opened a gold cigarette case. Guy motioned for a smoke.

“Not stuck with you,” Benatti said. “All due respect, your wife is super boring. Work, work, work. You I like. We will cavort? Maybe ‘solve global problems.’”

“I don’t want to think about any problems,” Guy said. He took a slow drag. Like licking the books of God’s library. “My goal is ruinous intake.”

The glowing youths directed them to a pedestal with a tray of amuse-bouche, explaining the clear liquid was Averman’s concoction for “post-flight refreshment with infusions to stimulate focus.” Guy passed; Benatti drank two.

Guy pointed his head toward the huddle of personnel. “More frantic than I expected.”

“Everyone’s arriving now,” Benatti said. “Arthur wanted to stagger us, but we come when we come, no?”

Benatti put on a white linen blazer, then slid a leather driving glove onto his right hand. Guy likened the affectation to men who got a single earring when they hit fifty.

He couldn’t recall the last time he’d driven. His license expired ages ago.

Jeeps arrived as others departed, carrying Quorumites one by one to the main compound. The drivers, much like the rest of the jumpsuited employees, seemed culled from the lacrosse fields of the Ivy League.

The girl gestured toward another pedestal, with markers and sheets of paper. She explained they were to write a one-word reply to the sentence Humanity is ____. Guy’s honest answer wouldn’t do. He went with afflicted; Benatti drew an exclamation point.

“Excellent,” she said. “Now Mr. Averman would like you to peel the sticker and wear your response on your chest. This ritual will—”

“Forgive me,” Benatti interrupted. “But we do not wear stickers.”

The girl retained her smile and directed them to their Jeeps. Benatti tossed his cigarette and Guy did the same.

“Let’s ride together,” Benatti said. “I’ll take front.”

Guy climbed in while the driver radioed to someone at the compound. The legroom was lacking, which would normally annoy him, but the nicotine bloom kept his spirits up.

They careened down a red-dirt path barely wider than the vehicle and flanked by squat palm trees. Robust jungle left only a column of sky; Guy saw the next wave of circling Quorumites, awaiting permission to land. How big was this gathering? A hundred? Two hundred?

Benatti was talking about his new girlfriend and angling his phone toward Guy. Intimate selfies from what’s-her-name, The Voice winner whose repertoire consisted solely of the last couplet of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Lifelong bachelors liked to share these updates with Guy, as if seeking approval.

When did he and V last fuck? A month ago? Now it would be their last fuck, as in never again. She might have warned him. One final romp, with their repertoire of gags and friendly edging. V disarmed utterly during sex (or he believed she did), her grunting chromatic and unselfconscious. He knew the spots: visit the clavicle, avoid the hip bone, hum down the perineum. She would tap his shoulder to advance to the next position and, almost without fail, orgasm with three large shudders. Their circuit lacked variety but never rose to the level of complaint.

Which didn’t mean much now. Their plateau was, in fact, a slow decline—easy to mistake when your schedules so rarely overlapped. With her work, travel, and general single-mindedness, what might be an evening’s conversation for others took them weeks.

“Do you smell that?” Benatti asked. “Lavender. That can’t be natural here.”

“Mosquito repellent,” the driver said. “Mr. Averman dusted half the island.”

Guy noticed stitched letters across the shoulders of Benatti’s jacket, also in white: “Mistakes Will Be Made.” The new slogan for a Rome-based periodical he’d recently purchased. Guy coveted the sartorial subtitle.

He moved to inspect himself in the driver’s rearview. Must be presentable, up to a point. Guy’s hair, teeth, and skin still advertised his access to the best products and methods. Nothing could be done about the eyes. The past twenty-four hours had accelerated the discoloration, as if he’d smeared camouflage around them.

The past twenty-four hours. Christ.

The Cucinelli polo couldn’t do anything about the paunch, but it artfully hid the love handles which continually flummoxed his personal trainer. They were something of a birthright: Sarvananthan men, though blessed with good hair and high metabolism, could neither figuratively or literally outrun the soft middle of middle age.

His body was aging faster now. It knew the money was gone and the jig was up. They said fame arrested one’s maturity at whatever age the person broke through; with sudden fortune it was one age’s that became cast in amber. He had looked fifty since the First Flush. No longer. He rolled his head on the swivel of his neck. Today he would age a lifetime.

“Are you ready to do the most good? Are you ready to finalize your legacy?”

Averman’s voice—from where? The questions repeated with the same inflection.

“Speakers, hidden in the brush,” Benatti said. “He does the same thing at his companies.”

The driver made a joke in Italian to Benatti, possibly about soccer, and they were soon debating something of grave importance in Turin. Guy concentrated on not sweating out the booze.

The Quorum was a fitting last fête—he’d met Averman at his first one. A fundraiser for the Central Park Conservancy. Back then Averman was like an avuncular mentor, despite their proximity in age. V had setup the Foundation and told Guy his job, more or less, was to solo navigate the circuit. Be a face. Charm, smile. Learn the unwritten rules.

Guy had thought the Curtis Institute’s black-ties would be adequate training for the gala crowd, but he was quickly at sea. How did one stand at these things? Was he just supposed to walk up to random people and introduce himself? Then a tanned and toned arm interlocked with his, an arm belonging to a magnificently coiffed Australian beaming with naked gusto. Guy later learned Averman fed this state through adrenaline-spiked family outings with a cadre of X Games athletes; he’d just completed two weeks in a self-made sloop up the Amazon. Averman had a vague and modest idea of himself as a legendary figure—common enough among Guy’s new cohort—reinforced by the man’s inability to simply be. The world was a sleeping bear he couldn’t resist poking.

Averman’s attitude immediately calmed Guy’s nerves. As did the zoological tour Averman launched into, pointing to a redhead in a white caftan gesticulating wildly inside a circle also in white caftans. “That’s Petra Bax, libertarian blowhard extraordinaire. Who knows why God gave her money. Like a baby with a handgun.” Though Averman hadn’t lived in Sydney for decades, his voice retained the wide accent of the antipodes. “And never go to one of her ‘summits.’ People quoting the Federalist Papers and talking about century rides on their trail bikes.” He nodded toward a lounge filled with people in aggressively experimental clothing. “The young heirs. They’re intellectually lazy, humorless, and indiscreet.” He winced; Guy silently hypothesized an extramarital misstep. “High statistical likelihood of squandering the family fortune and whiling away their dotage in the pool houses of distant cousins.”

Averman never picked up on Guy’s intellectual laziness, which surprised him. Guy thought it fairly apparent. He never saw the benefit of growing as a person and long suspected its alleged correlation with success—a skepticism reinforced by V’s rise and the First Flush. The only real shift in his beliefs was the inevitable one, that their largesse was preternatural, which happened to match everyone else’s outlook in their rarefied orbit. He acknowledged that sure, the people who would correct him on this matter were incentivized not to by his ability to disperse capital their way. Stipulated. But his conviction held: he had become the person he was always meant to be.

Until.

“Are you ready … ?” Another Averman recording Dopplered by.

Guy unconsciously checked his phone and startled at the waterfall of Jeremy’s messages. His brain would not allow itself to cohere the letters into words and the words into meaning. He pocketed the phone, then unpocketed it. Thought of V’s cold dispatch.

He should send a final text. Something curt and wounding. She’d expect some transliterated sobbing, a witching-hour accusation or two. His thumb absently tapped the screen while he considered the spectrum of replies. Every one of them expected and ineffectual. He checked the screen; his thumb had typed a string of Fs, Gs, Hs. He cleared them out. There was nothing to write.

He cocked his arm to throw the phone, then stopped and tapped out a message to the Foundation staff. Why not.

You should all find new jobs. By Monday, if possible. No time to explain.
Be good,
G. S.

He hit send and flicked the phone into the deep green. The driver noticed and didn’t react. What a professional. Auspicious for the days ahead. Alive, Guy felt alive.

They passed a faux-weathered sign welcoming them to ARTHUR’S FOLLY. To Guy’s knowledge the name had never stuck, even after Averman commissioned a Netflix travel series on the island. It sounded more befitting a pontoon than a Xanadu—you shouldn’t be cheeky with your private Eden. They slowed behind a line of idling vehicles. After ten seconds Benatti exited the Jeep.

“We must be around the corner,” he said. “Let them sort this out.”

Guy nodded at the driver and followed suit. Benatti’s instincts were shared by the other Quorumites: every Jeep was similarly empty, save for luggage and Styrofoam coolers. They walked the bend and the road widened to a circular drive with a blue-tiled fountain, chatting Quorumites, and their host, perhaps fifteen feet up in a shining scissor lift. Guy recognized about half the crowd. Mostly American, maybe a dozen women.

Averman bullhorned in their direction. “And now we have Mr. Guy Sarvananthan and Mr. Bennet Benatti! Welcome, gentlemen!” He wore the same outfit as his staff, and from this distance his head appeared monochromatic: the deep tan on his wide face matched the sun-bleached gold of his shoulder-length hair.

“Il duce! Come stai?” Benatti exclaimed, saluting.

Averman made a sarcastic gesture somewhere between “hang loose” and “rock ’n’ roll.” He swung the megaphone toward employees creating a shaky tower of Globe-Trotters and Rimowas. “The luggage should already be in their assigned suites. This accumulation is displeasing. How we begin is how we proceed!”

Benatti and Guy walked to the fountain and away from the chaos. The other arrivals milled around a registration setup, backslapping and catching up; Guy spotted Roark. Just beyond, marble stairs led to a whitewashed high-ceilinged structure with teak trim. When the island appeared through the jet window, after Guy had awoken from a nap blissfully free from nightmare or spousal apparition, he catalogued the sandy beaches, dense jungle, tiered steppes, and the craggy black swoop of a dormant peak. It all conformed to the default mental image of a private island, razed and rewilded into a capstone idyll, albeit with fewer buildings than Guy would have thought. He’d also expected the busy design of Averman’s hotels, with their dessert-bar maximalism that, to Guy at least, tended to curdle into architectural temporizing. This was quiet. Austere. Averman wanted them clean and focused.

“Gentlemen, we begin.” Roark joined them at the fountain in a white linen three-piece.

They all nodded. Benatti distributed cigarettes.

Guy gestured at the crowd and found he was listing to the right. “Roark. What’s your over-under on Averman pulling this off?”

“If he does,” Roark said, “it’ll be the first major contribution from the Aussies since Hewitt took Wimbledon.” He turned serious. “I’m sorry about Victoria, Guy.”

Guy held his inhalation, pictured the smoke filling his respiratory tract. How did Roark know? What did he know? Ah—Averman. He must have updated their mutuals sotto voce.

“She … she would have wanted me to be here.”

“Not one to cry over spilled milk?” Roark asked.

“Or flipped kayaks.”

Roark whispered into Benatti’s ear. The Italian stared at Guy, then past him, then at him again. Averman boomed that the swordfish needed icing.

“She is there,” Benatti ventured, “and you are here. Hence the ruinous intake.”

“Hence,” Guy said. He remembered his flask and took a nip.

“Yes, well.” Benatti pursed his lips and exhaled, then motioned them to follow him. They skirted the scissor lift and the luggage tower—the same height, Guy noticed, but Argo-like, refreshed with new pieces—and walked onto the lawn between the main building and the jungle to the left. Low-slung residences in Santorini white extended down the plateau, where sinewy palms emphasized the blank sea beyond. Averman’s staff buzzed around and between the buildings like atoms. Or like electrons inside an atom. Whichever was scientifically accurate. Guy nipped again.

“Do you fellows notice anything about our accommodations?” Benatti asked.

Roark nodded. “Those two are new construction, built for the Quorum. And the suites are ground level so nobody can claim a better view.”

“Ever the egalitarian,” Guy said.

Benatti sniffed, as if Guy had passed gas. He pointed to the farthest residence. “Ah, but they only look the same. I have it on good authority those rooms come with new Totos—the ones with the, what do you call it, stool analysis.”

The staff cast dark glances at Benatti’s smoking; he didn’t notice or didn’t let on that he did. “And some rooms have authenticated Noguchi lamps. The others are repros.”

Roark attempted a hierarchy of the amenities—all agreed on the primacy of the deluxe shitter—and pointed to a staff dormitory camouflaged by thick flora. Guy felt an initial scrim of anxiety fall from his person. This was why he’d come: the lingua franca, the high judgment, and the presumption of never pleasing anyone else.

They returned to the circular drive, where about forty Quorumites were milling about. Averman was now delivering orders at an auctioneer’s pace, his usual bonhomie usurped by impatience. There were schedules to amend. Late arrivals to process. A flat tire “two clicks south.” Guy remembered the New Yorker profile where Averman celebrated his sixty-fifth birthday by paying the Navy SEALs to take him on practice exercises. (“Best broken arm yet.”)

Roark turned to Benatti. “Guy and I are coming from New York. You?”

“Punta del Este,” he replied. “I am celebrating the conclusion of the merger. In fact—”

Benatti darted to a crate of coolers on wheeled metal racks and began flipping open their lids. There had been a long-running family struggle at Editto S.p.A.—something about bringing Benatti’s empire in line with his cousins’ regional telecoms—and an acquisition by Daimler would guarantee sinecures for everyone’s eventual great-grandchildren.

As much as Benatti livened up a room, Guy never envied him. When you’re born with that much you’ve already used all the good luck you’ll ever receive. What’s more, short of curing blindness, you’d never best your ancestors’ achievements; Guy had seen this dawning realization lead to crack-ups in more than a few dynastic layabouts.

Benatti returned with a bottle of champagne and shot the cork toward Averman, whiffing by a yard, then dabbed a bit of foam behind his ears.

“In bocca al lupo,” he said. “May those German pricks fund my Lake Como expansion.” He held up a wet index finger; Roark and Guy declined.

“No! Absolutely not!” Averman barked at an arriving group. “Zone of trust. This was made explicit.” He hit a button and the lift accordioned down.

Three people climbed out of a Jeep while a fourth passenger remained seated. Roark said they were the MIT kids, a trio of postdocs whose breakthroughs were on par with John Bogle’s invention of the index fund. They could be triplets: matching curly black hair, roughly the same height, olive skin, wearing white T-shirts and bands of smart bracelets.

One of them called up to Averman. “He’s integral to our algorithm testing. He’ll stay in our suite the entire time.”

Averman handed his megaphone to an employee and hurdled the crossbar. “Zone of trust,” he repeated. “I must insist.” He opened his arm to signal the other Quorumites and walked over. “Our accord is strong yet fragile, built from years of groundwork and the cooperation of the greatest minds in the world.”

While keeping his eyes on the MIT kids Averman reached into the car and reattached the passenger’s seat belt. “I don’t know your plus-one. Nor do I care to. Get rid of them.”

The passenger radiated discomfort while the MIT kids conferred. They nodded and the Jeep drove off.

Averman clapped his hands. “Okay! Sign in with Jessica and get situated. Drinks on the veranda in seventy-eight minutes.”

Benatti threw his cigarette in the fountain. “If you’ll excuse me, I’m going to talk to Arthur about one of those Totos.”

After he left, Roark lowered his voice. “What have you heard about a secret conclave?” He stared straight ahead, as if they were being watched.

“Secret how?” Guy asked.

“A Quorum within a Quorum. Where the real action is.”

The insecurity of these guys. “Well, Roark,” he said, with sugar in his voice, “I wouldn’t know anything about that. And if I did …”

“Joke all you want. Some of us are here on business.”

“Pitching your Governors Island project during the discussion on female genital mutilation?”

“Don’t be naïve,” he snapped. “Any man who leaves here without new partnerships should kill himself and spare his board the shame.”

“I have other priorities,” Guy said. “And your conclave idea is probably just a rumor.”

The crowd at check-in dissipated, so they walked to the table near the marble stairs. Averman’s executive assistant Jessica mapped directions to their suites (“Ooh, you both got good ones”) and reminded them of the cocktail reception. Roark waddled off to take a phone call.

Guy patted his flask and remembered his plans. “Jessica, I wonder where one may procure cocaine and amphetamines for the weekend.”

She tapped at her tablet, all crisp demeanor and general precision. “All set, Mr. Sarvananthan. It will be delivered to your suite by dinner.”

“Oh, and a quick shave. Send someone down before drinks. And a pack of Camel Reds.”

“I’m afraid the Quorum is smoke-free, Mr. Sarvananthan. But we’ll have a barber sent right away.”

“Thank you.”

He was directed to his residence. The suites ran down one side; on the other, a column of large picture windows. In his room he found a handwritten note next to his bags: Let’s save the fucking world!!!

Heavy fricatives came from the walls: grey noise, V’s favorite. They must have programmed it for her arrival. He found a control panel and muted it.

The suite was a soothing mix of tightly threaded rattan and off-white suede, with an overly curated bar. He’d need to send for more; man couldn’t survive on gin alone. Or die on gin alone. Next to the stoppered Watenshi and an ice bucket sat a green juice in a chilled highball glass. Delivered seconds before his arrival.

He unpacked his polos and linen trousers, keeping two inches of space between the hangers, and lined the horse-bit loafers near the door. He tossed his sleeping mask on the bedside table, next to an issue of Celeste, the glossy magazine Averman published for his wife, about his wife. What started as a one-off anniversary present had grown into a puckish take on AmEx’s Centurion, with stockists in London high streets and collaborations with designers of cruelty-free resort wear.

He unzipped the padded ski bag and pulled out the sword. It was smart to bring it. A comfort blanket and, if things went truly awry, handy for parrying threats. Back in New York he’d thought about brandishing it at the Quorum—an eccentric’s open carry. Now he saw that wouldn’t do. Best to keep it a secret.

He stowed the dulled heirloom and assessed the bar cart, sampled the juice. Nutrients surfed his veins and brightened his being. Clarity encroached from the periphery. Oh, no. He poured a big boy gin, knocked it back, and checked the bathroom. The usual buttons on the toilet—rosewater bidet, heated seat—but no stool analysis. A subpar Toto.

The patio looked out to lawn and sea. Various staff ran by transporting lobster crates, pillows, croquet sets. They were uniformly young and athletic and about as racially diverse as Guy expected. Not a Desi in sight, but otherwise like a Ralph Lauren ad conscripted into hospitality.

It was too quiet. He searched for Brahms on the wall console. Op. 118 felt appropriate. He thought of an anecdote Roark had once told him, how MLK would call Mahalia Jackson at all hours and request his favorite hymns.

Glenn Gould’s version of op. 118. That would do.

Guy was a year out of Curtis when Gould died. Faculty and local alumni held an improvised memorial at someone’s house in Chestnut Hill. He immediately regretted attending. The eulogies were stilted, overreaching. A musical studies professor said if the Russians attacked, he’d take the maestro’s Brahms LP into the bunker. A soused oboist hinted Gould had faked his death. Another argued the pendulum would swing back: restraint would be in vogue again. Professors who’d caught a performance transmuted their past annoyances—Gould’s posture, Gould’s clothing, Gould’s humming—into the fundament of secular sainthood.

Guy hadn’t seen the next generational talent at the conservatory, but there were plenty of virtuosos. He could recognize it instantly, whatever the instrument or style, a recognition below consciousness which consciousness fought to articulate. That level of talent was a true gift, a richness that could be enjoyed dumbly—that is, enjoyed without any knowledge of its innovations or method, and with inexhaustible obsession. One of the other composers possessed this talent. A sickly boy from the Gold Coast whose name Guy could no longer recall; he did remember—could, in fact, not forget—the spinal purr of the boy’s chamber piece. Like discovering a new language one could not yet speak but intuitively felt reached heretofore impossible levels of articulation.

It took time for Guy to discern the limitations of his own talent. Composing short pieces for orchestra masked some of it. Here was the pinnacle of aesthetic experience: twenty-seven world-class musicians articulating a sound comprised of discrete, bounding fluidities. Nothing compared to the simultaneity of its breadth and depth. Whereas the song cycles he composed practically shouted their deficiencies. One could not hide oneself behind piano and voice.

Naturally he was fond of those years; naturally that was inevitable. Though he admitted to a level of naïveté, Guy was clear-eyed enough at the time to avoid self-delusion. By his last year at Curtis he understood that he’d peaked young and at modest elevation. He would never become one of the handful of composers with a career. In the years following graduation he stuck around and found contentment—or something just below it—in his rotation of piano students (respectful, college-bound tyros); an on-and-off affair with Gretchen Baumer, assistant concert master for the Philadelphia Orchestra; and, when he could afford it, pilgrimages to the festivals at Lucerne, Salzburg, and the rest.

A staff member ran by his patio, halted, waved at Guy, and walked toward him. She stopped again, rethought her approach, and dashed around the corner. Thirty seconds later he heard a knock.

“Mr., um, Sar-van-than?” she asked, and flipped through a portfolio stuffed with leather pouches.

“Sarvananthan. I’m him.”

“Here you are, sir.” She handed him a pouch and ran off.

He laid out the vials and glassines on the bed. Best to save the coke for nightfall. He swallowed two blue pills and made another drink. Turned the volume up and browsed the inlaid bookshelves. Patrick O’Brian adventures, photography books, World War II histories, Delvaulx’s Nautical Works, and, prominently faced-out, Averman’s bestsellers. His debut had been adapted into a Korean soap called Big Man Big Heart, according to the cover. Guy inspected the back copy. Apparently the charismatic titan of industry had first dictated the memoir’s outline into a voice recorder atop Everest. Did people really believe that? Guy reshelved it and came to the most recent publication, a glossy hardcover titled No Man Is an Island, But It’s Fun to Own One. V once said it had caused a minor dustup for its erasure of the triangular trade.

Her own business memoir was quickly negotiated and long delayed. They used to laugh about it: the woman who hated looking back, forced to synthesize her past. He once asked if they’d Ubered from their City Hall wedding to the Ace Hotel in NoMad—this was before the First Flush—or if they’d taken the subway. Her reply: “The past consumes too much bandwidth.”

V, invading his thoughts once more. A neuroscientist once told him memory wasn’t interested in its conception. When you recall a moment, you’re not getting the original, some preserved flash with all its particularities. It’s merely the most recent iteration, changing in the present through the act of recollection. Moreover, it’s all incredibly fallible, open to present feeling and influence. Better to think of an individual memory as an ever-evolving concept.

In the coming hours and days his brain would likely disinter long-buried memories, mulishly forcing himself to encounter himself. He was a man in free fall; it made sense. But if the memories were colored by his free fall, perhaps this absolved him from interrogating them for a point—or worse, a lesson. Treat them as random images lobbed by a desperate subconscious into … processing? Was that the goal? That meant change. Improvement. He had no intention of either.

Hell, there may even be some fun in it. If his brain insisted on fighting the disequilibrium to spotlight All That Has Come Before, or All That Might Have Been, perhaps his free fall might reconfigure the memories into new and unrecognizable shapes. Perhaps his disequilibrium might even befriend his brain; alcohol was a social lubricant, after all, as were the pharmacological sweeteners on his bed.

He slapped his face and washed his hands. Curled his toes into the jute rug. Paged through a coffee-table book about the island, where an architect extolled “nature as nature intended.” This apparently required a godlike swipe of the vegetation and the planting of seven cypresses outside Averman’s quarters, symbolizing his chief revenue streams.

A foldout map confirmed Guy’s impression from the jet. The island resembled a puzzle piece, with circular bays and rounded peninsulas. The grassy steppe of his residence also contained the sprawling central hub, athletic facilities, three outdoor pools, and a bocce court. Other delights included gardens and greenhouses; a fruit tree with varieties of pear, apple, orange, peach, banana, and kumquats grafted into an efficient cornucopia; and all that jungle, with paths and cairns for forest bathers. Foxglove too. Even a man-made ecosystem needed its poisons.

The north sported a novel bit of geographical cosmetology. A monolithic and imported sliver of limestone leaned against the grey cliff face, having been sheared off the Olana estate in upstate New York. A sidebar noted its sentimental value: the site of Averman’s proposal to Celeste, back when they were young and, after the implosion of his first hotel development, briefly destitute.

Another knock on the door, and soon Guy was recumbent on the patio under a teal apron while a staff member scrutinized his cheeks and neck.

“Full shave, sir?”

“No, just this hanger on, above the lip.” Guy pointed with his drink and sploshed some gin onto his face.

The unflappable barber toweled him off. “Very good.”

The barber still went through the motions, laying out his razors and creams. He spritzed Guy’s face and produced a hot towel from a small Styrofoam box. Head back, with a partial view of the sky, Guy took in the familiar scent of the barber’s deodorant. What was it? Something with anise—Old Spice. His father’s aspirational purchase from the local Target during the three-day stretch between arrival in the United States and a fatal heart attack, which occurred mid-interview for a position in the catalog department of Sears & Roebuck. It was sudden but not unexpected, a common morbidity among Sarvananthans, and the cruelty of its timing, in Guy’s mind, was eventually laundered through an emergent Midwesterner’s optimism: at least his father didn’t die the week before. No, he’d collapsed on America’s doorstep, a grand achievement after years of maddening bureaucracy, dead-end calls to various embassies, rejected bribes, unexplained deferrals … and then that catalyzing stroke of luck, arriving not by the connections of a sterling military career, but through his wife.

Guy’s mother, who only ever wanted to practice law, was forbidden to do so by her father, who demanded she choose between teaching and nursing. She went for the former, and this skillset finally unlocked America, whose mid-1970s shortage of preschool and kindergarten teachers partially informed a larger immigration quota of subcontinentals. She co-ran a robust Montessori in St. Louis Park, the middle-class Jewish enclave outside Minneapolis, and they lived in nearby Richfield. If the location was undesirable—his father balked at the stories of tundra conditions—she reminded him their other option was Toronto, farther north.

Guy and his mother took to wearing his father’s deodorant in memoriam and out of pragmatism. When it ran out they silently agreed to keep the red tube in its rightful place on the bottom shelf of the medicine cabinet.

His mother mostly referenced the death in monetary terms—the high cost of funerary services in this alleged land of opportunity—and in the redistribution of household duties. Guy later understood she grieved privately, taking long drives while carpeting the driver’s-side floor mat with soaked Kleenexes, or with a tight group of aunties who ran a catering business out of one of their kitchens, cooking banana-leaf-wrapped lamprais for the birthdays and graduations of the Twin Cities’ Sri Lankan population. His mother specialized in love cakes and would refill a water glass with Diet Coke as she worked and complained about the “one step forward two steps back” shuffle of her new life.

When he pressed the issue one night over Hamburger Helper, she replied his father had simply used his lifetime allotment of heartbeats—fifty-eight years’ worth—as she would too someday, and if they were going to thrive in America they shouldn’t waste one minute crying over misfortune. His father was in heaven, boring God with talk of the untapped potential of the national cricket team, and that—she enunciated decisively, with a mouth full of ground beef—was that.

Guy found his school work comically easy compared to the Colombo regimen—they didn’t even enforce corporal punishment! But he had difficulty making friends, and the Minnesota winter conspired against his social life. Take the simple act of entering school. The second he crossed the threshold his glasses fogged up, blinding him no matter whether he wiped them clean, removed them, or waited for the condensation to dissipate. Thus he was cursed to hesitate inside every entrance, making pinched expressions and hoping nobody was nodding hello or—however improbably—motioning for a high-five.

Then there was his general inability to walk on the icy sidewalks, a skill his fellow students seemed to perfect at birth, like Inuit children flensing seal meat. (He believed Eskimos lived in northern Minnesota for an embarrassingly long time.) He was prone to overcorrecting, bending forward at the waist and throwing his center of gravity about, a shameful ballet that both attracted and repelled attention. Finally, there were the painful effects of winter on his cock. This was most acute whenever he came in from the cold and had to urinate. Something about the outdoors stimulated his bladder, and he would fumble with numb fingers through layers of clothing, praying he wouldn’t piss his pants, unbuttoning the fly of his Lee’s and releasing the torrent with a still-frozen, shrunken cock that stung sharply until it accustomed to room temp. The generalized effects of the routine surely contributed to his difficulty losing his virginity to one of the comely Scandinavian or Teutonic girls.

Though if he were honest, the cold cock wasn’t nearly so detrimental as his reputation of an asocial weirdo, established by a rather public dropping of his water glass in the lunch line—he had it in his hand, wondered what it would be like to drop it, and simply dropped it. Everyone disregarded this as accidental, until he repeated the action three more times. A counselor recommended “healthy outlets” for his confusion and anger but wouldn’t give specifics. He heard tales of classmates’ acts of rebellion: stealing street signs, doing whatever the burners did behind the Southtown Mall. Guy never received an invitation.

Which isn’t to say it was a lonely adolescence. The Sarvananthans were welcomed by their neighbors, mostly 3M retirees with extreme fealty to the sportscasters of WCCO— mentions of KFAN were met with silence. He spent many nights at the Knutsons, playing their modest collection of sheet music on a workaday upright. The Germans, of course, but also Copland and Gershwin. He credited Shelly Knutson for alerting him to his talents. Not enough musicianship for conservatory—she was realistic, for which he was grateful—but the improvisations showed promise. Perhaps composition? This comported nicely with young Guy’s self-image as a budding anti-capitalist, born of misplaced rage at Sears & Roebuck. Much later he would learn of the bankruptcy of the original “everything store” and feel intense bodily elation without understanding quite why, time being what it was—what it is—and really, who among us is that in touch with their childhood selves?

Though “self” was imprecise. From what baseline might he measure his changing self against? He perverted himself through memory, and he couldn’t stand outside himself to glean the knowledge of this perversion—or at least, glean perspective on the size of the perversion. There was no record to consult. He’d never been a diarist, and he didn’t have any lifelong friends.

All the better. He was freed from the obligation of consistence, absolved for all near-term hypocrisy and selfishness. To cherry-pick oneself: what bliss!

The barber applied a cold towel to his face and asked about the nose hair. Would he like a touch-up? Guy declined. Let them be wild.

He thanked the barber, sat up, and managed the slight dizziness. A white leviathan appeared in the water. He asked the barber if he was seeing what he was seeing.

The barber rolled up his equipment. “We’re not allowed to comment on it, sir.”

The object resolved into a passing megayacht with ungainly mods pimpling its decks. A glass dome covered the stern, with trees inside and what looked like sand dunes. A small figure arced up one on an ATV, held in midair, and disappeared down the backside.

Petra Bax. Crashing the Quorum.

Guy stood and fell backward, saved from knocking his head on the concrete by the barber’s quick reflexes. Excellent: the pills had kicked in.

The post A Billionaire Bender to Save the Fucking World appeared first on Electric Literature.

After Leo left, I had trouble keeping track of myself.

I had just moved into a new apartment, and I felt like I was existing in an endless twilight. I would drift off for a nap in the living room, only to find myself standing in the kitchen, washing a dish I didn’t remember using. Or I would leave a cut of meat to defrost in my shining, empty refrigerator and forget it was there for days, until the sour smell of old blood dripping into the crisper reached my nose. I lay on my couch and watched car headlights and long shadows chase one another across my ceiling as the hours went by, listening to Billie Holiday and sipping whiskey. Leo had loved Billie Holiday, owned every album she’d ever made on vinyl. I wondered where all those records were now, if they were collecting dust in storage somewhere, or if they were still nestled in the built-in bookshelves in our old apartment.

The money from my divorce settlement would last me for a while, but not forever, and although I knew this, had tallied up the remaining numbers in my accounts to determine how long I’d be able to go without seeking new employment, I couldn’t bring myself to begin the process of starting afresh. Despite the genericness of my name, Amy Hwang, even the most negligent recruiter or hiring manager could find out everything they needed to know about my connections to Gnoss and its founder with even a cursory Google search.

I stared into the abyss of my past accomplishments, listed row by row on a CV that I had once been so pleased about, so proud of compiling, like a house I had laid brick by brick. Now I felt as though I was staring out through the bars of a locked window in that same house, imprisoned by the vestiges of a life that would never be mine again.

I ignored all incoming calls, except for Lila’s. Lila and I were roommates throughout most of college, and though we were never very close, we had remained in each other’s lives long after our relationships with our other friends had faded. We were different enough that we never felt threatened by each other’s news or achievements. We were barely a year out of college when she showed up to one of our infrequent drink dates with a diamond on her finger and photos on her phone of a clean-cut, handsome man with family money and a history of successful investments. Her husband bought her a boutique, where she sold designer clothing for children in soft colors like oatmeal, blush, and buttercup. In other words, Lila had a lot of time on her hands, and she prided herself on knowing just how to use that time. She knew the perfect place for everything, from sunrise yoga to natural wines, and she often posted about all her experiences on the internet. She was a member of Yelp Elite, a superuser whose enthusiastic or negative review of a restaurant, riddled with exclamation points and emojis and cross-posted to her Instagram, could be significant for a new business.

So when Lila told me about a spa she knew of and offered me her upcoming reservation there, I thought, Why not? Leo used to say that I never knew when to take a break, that this was one of the things we had in common, and it’s true—I always felt guilty whenever we took vacations away from the company, and I have never been a person who enjoys relaxation rituals. But I had also thought I was not the kind of woman who would find herself newly divorced at the age of thirty-six, blocking all unknown numbers and deleting all of her social-media profiles to avoid reporters’ insistent and aggressive messages, and ordering everything online so she wouldn’t run into anyone she knew on the street. So many unprecedented things had already happened to me; I figured, what was one more?

“The location alone is so worth it,” Lila said. “It’s far away from everything, and there’s hardly even phone service out there. It’s the perfect place to rest and recharge.”

Lila was the first person I called when the news about Gnoss came out—the accusations of falsified lab results, the lawsuits. She flew out to New York City from LA and rubbed my back while I sat numbly in our living room, the room I had so proudly and lovingly decorated. “It’s not your fault, Amy,” she kept repeating soothingly. “You didn’t know.”

The drive to the spa would take me about four hours, so I left the city hours before sunrise, when the traffic was sparse and the sky was still dark. I stopped for coffee and gas at a station along the thruway. I considered keeping my sunglasses on when I entered the convenience store, but decided that I would probably not be recognized up here. The clerk barely looked up from her phone to give me my change, and I relaxed, the coins warm in the palm of my hand. Leo never carried cash, so I was always the one who had to bring it in case we went to a place that didn’t take cards. He hated bothering with currency, but I liked having money in my hands, the rustle of green bills and the weight of metal coins in my wallet. We used to joke that it was the immigrant in me, even though I was technically the child of immigrants.

When I got back into the car, the presence was there, in the passenger seat. It must have crept in sometime during the drive up, or while I was in the gas station. I could practically taste it behind my teeth. It watched me as I took the first few scalding sips of gas-station coffee, made no better by the addition of slightly sour milk. My head began to ache, the way it usually did around the presence.

There was no use in trying to avoid it. “Hello, old friend,” I said. It did not respond. It never did, no matter how many times I addressed it or implored.

I tried to settle my nerves by fiddling with the radio and landed on a country station. I turned it up, a familiar electricity rushing through me when I realized it was a song I had loved once, long before I’d ever met Leo. I sang along to the radio, and we continued up the thruway without stopping along the way. The radio continued playing ancient hit after ancient hit as I rolled the windows down, letting the wind whip my hair into a greasy frenzy. I caught my reflection in the rearview mirror and noted idly to myself that I was starting to go gray, lines of iron interrupting the long coils of black.

The sun rose yellow outside. I wondered what kinds of treatments the spa would offer. Despite the events of the last few months, I finally began to look forward to my stay. I managed to mostly forget that the presence was there, though I continued to feel its magnetic pull.

The air grew sharper and the trees grew taller and darker as we wended our way farther north, especially once I’d turned off the main thruway. We passed through small, sleepy towns with names like Cheshire and Hancock, towns that seemed like they hadn’t changed at all in the last few decades. American flags and festive scarecrows beckoned from every porch. Soon it would be autumn, time for leaf-peeping and apple-picking. Leo and I had gone apple-picking once, not long after we’d gotten married, on a rare weekend when neither of us had to work. I was twenty-eight then, determined to live up to the role of younger, vivacious wife that I was aware had been assigned to me. We wore coordinating plaid flannel shirts and posed dutifully for photos next to the trees we picked our apples from, though more often than not we decided to go for the fruit that was already on the ground. When we got home, we found that almost all of the apples were filled with worms.

The houses grew taller and narrower when we entered Vermont. Picturesque views of peaked roofs, church steeples, and treetops began to appear outside the car. The sound of the radio grew fuzzy, and the voices faded in and out behind waves of static. I turned it off and listened to the quiet and the hiss of my tires on the tarmac as I navigated the sloped roads. I could feel the presence pulling at the edges of my consciousness again. My headache sharpened.

Leo had been my lab supervisor at Columbia when I was a PhD student. At first, I didn’t notice him much beyond the functional role he played in the lab, fixated as I was then on getting ahead, ignoring the statistics about how hard it was for women to succeed in the sciences. I am going to be the exception to every rule, I told myself. I would graduate well within the expected time frame of seven years. I would author several papers, all of which would be published in reputable journals. I would find a tenured teaching job at a prestigious university.

Leo was much taller than he seemed when he was sitting down, with narrow shoulders and a shock of thick graying hair. He had a loud, braying laugh that was both disconcerting and disarming, the kind of laugh that turned heads and flattered its recipient into thinking they’d said something notably witty. He gave everyone nicknames, including me, calling me “Aimless,” which was his way of making a joke, because I was anything but that. Though I have never been a naturally gifted or brilliant student, I have always prided myself on my diligence and my ability to focus for long periods of time.

I was not popular in our lab, given that I seldom joined the team for after-work drinks or weekend Frisbee games. But the work (we were studying immune-system responses in mice experiencing environmental stressors) was enthralling. Once, on a slower day when I had gotten particularly in the zone, Leo had to shake me to alert me that the fire alarm was going off. We were the only ones in the lab that day. I was preparing to give one of the mice an injection of the serum we were testing them with, when I was startled by the weight of a hand on my shoulder.

“Amy! Didn’t you hear the alarm?” Leo loomed above me, looking concerned and, for some reason, a little angry. I stammered out an apology, put the syringe and the quivering mouse away, and shuffled outside with him. It was just a routine fire inspection, and afterward Leo found me in the lab and apologized for startling me. “I’ve never seen someone with the ability to focus the way you can. It’s a little scary,” he said.

“Thank you?” I said.

“I mean that in a good way, mostly,” he said. It wasn’t until he’d walked back to his station that I realized he’d called me Amy, instead of Aimless.

A few years later, when Leo left the university to start Gnoss and asked me to join him, telling me he’d make me the head of one of its most important projects, Lila urged me to go for it. “But my degree,” I said weakly. She pointed out how miserable academia made me, all my years of toiling away in the lab, applying for grants I didn’t get and struggling to get my name on papers that I had coauthored with the (mostly) white men I worked with. And it was true that my heart was no longer in my work, my project having stalled for years while I remained unable to obtain the results I needed to finish. The confidence and certainty that had once fueled me, given me the kind of laser focus other people had to take drugs to obtain, was in tatters, a ragged white flag where there had once been a victory banner.

She counseled me through signing the onboarding papers and the NDA, and, once I was hired, instructed me on how to respond in a flirtatious but still-professional way to Leo’s increasingly frequent and informal emails asking for status updates about my project. When he finally asked me out, she told me what to wear, how to wear it, and why I should wait to have sex with him until our third date.

It was 11:30 a.m. by the time I reached the hidden lane that supposedly led to the spa. I almost missed the gate and had to reverse the car back to it. Welcome to Dripping Pines Spa and Sanatorium, read a small hand-painted sign. Sanatorium? I blinked, and then the letters rearranged themselves to form Sanctuary. I was tired from the drive, wired from the coffee, I thought. I prepared myself to step outside of the car, to punch in the code that Lila had given me, but the gate slid open without any prompting. I guided the car in through the narrow opening and down the well-paved driveway, which was bordered by trees and white stones. It led to a small lot, where I parked. Mine was the only car there, besides a blue Honda Civic that I assumed must belong to the proprietor. “You’ll love Ruth,” Lila had said of her. “Make sure you request the hot-stone massage. It did wonders for my lower back.”

I walked inside, where a fountain burbled in an atrium. The presence followed me, as unnervingly patient as always. An unseen diffuser emitted puffs of orange fragrance into the air. “Hello?” I called. Low tones and chants played softly in the background.

“You’re early,” said the woman behind the desk. I had expected a willowy white blonde wearing prayer beads and a caftan, but this woman wore a blazer over a turtleneck, and she was tan, with silvery hair cut into a neat bob, and she was Asian. I had not expected to see another Asian person this far up north. She stared at me over her rimless glasses for a beat too long, and I was wondering if she was thinking the same thing. “I can’t let you in with that,” she said, finally.

I felt chills rush up to the surface of my skin. No one else I’d ever met before could see the presence. I felt it pulse silently beside me.

“Please,” I said. To my surprise, my eyes filled with tears. I must have been very tired from the drive. “I came all this way. I’ll pay extra.”

The woman studied me. “Sit down,” she said, gesturing toward a rattan stool. I sat and wiped my eyes. She disappeared down a hallway and reemerged with a cup of hot tea. I let it steam my face.

“It’s been with you for quite some time,” she said. “I can’t remove it for you, but it can be contained.”

I nodded, momentarily blind from the steam. My entire body felt sore. All I wanted was to rest, to lie down, to let the fatigue of the last few months overtake me. I took a sip of the tea. It tasted like ginger and tree bark.

“You’ll have to keep this on during your time here,” she said. She slipped a wooden cuff around my right wrist. It was made of a plain, polished dark wood. “That should help somewhat,” she said. “Rowan is good for protection. I’ll show you to your room now.”

“Thank you,” I said to her back as I followed her down the halls. She did not reply or turn around. Behind me, I felt the presence trailing me, a discreet distance away.

Leo had started Gnoss to address the problem of memories that no longer needed to be retained.“The brain is simply a hard drive,” he was always saying. “We do periodic data dumps on our personal devices to keep them running smoothly, so why not our minds? Why can’t we simply upload the memories we no longer need?” His model was simple—monthly memory data-collection scans, which could be performed at any Gnoss facility. After anywhere from five to ten scan sessions (depending on the number of memories a client had developed over the course of their lifetime), Gnoss would build the client a mind map, called a Chartis, of their own memories that they could then manipulate, categorize, and organize, choosing which memories to retain and which to upload to their own personal, private memory clouds. According to Leo, uploading traumatic, difficult, or simply unnecessary memories would alleviate day-to-day stress levels, improve relationships with others, and combat trauma-induced insomnia and other psychosomatic disorders, thereby allowing clients to take back control of their lives. And though reversing the process was more difficult than undergoing it, it was doable, in case the user wanted to recover any of the memories that they had previously uploaded.

I became part of a new initiative that was testing Gnoss’ latest innovation, Neolaia. Unlike the original Chartis process, which could take up to eight months depending on the number of scans that were deemed necessary, Neolaia was a shortcut—a flat metal disk the size of a dime that, when adhered to the skin, could absorb enough data overnight to create a simple mind map that the user could access via the Gnoss app. With Neolaia, Chartis creation now took only a matter of hours, and even though the resulting mind map wasn’t as complex or sophisticated as the map developed by the usual Gnoss scans, now almost anyone with a Wi-Fi connection could take advantage of the technology to organize and optimize their memories, up to a point. It also meant, thanks to the lower production costs of the device, that we could now offer Gnoss’ services at a significantly lower price point, and eventually phase out the original Chartis process.

Leo’s hope was that Gnoss’ treatments would also, over time, lead to decreases in more inscrutable psychiatric disorders, such as Alzheimer’s and dementia. He had lost his father to Alzheimer’s when the man was only fifty-five, a fact that I knew haunted him, especially as his own age crept upward. My mother had also had the disease, which was part of the reason we had connected in the first place, and why he had hired me. “You have a personal connection to this,” he told me over our first lunch meeting. “I need top-notch people, but also people who get it. People whose actual lives have been destroyed by this.” He spoke of Alzheimer’s sometimes as though it were a human foe, an archenemy in need of vanquishing.

When I was in high school, my mother began roaming around the neighborhood on her own, sometimes without shoes, and often without a clear explanation for what she had been doing or looking for. She was fine in the mornings—calm, sweet-tempered even—but as night fell she would become angry with me, sometimes accusing me of lying to her over trivial things, like where I’d put the salt. Her condition rapidly worsened when I was in college. With my father at work, she was left largely alone during the day. I didn’t tell any of my friends, even Lila, about it, about how my father had to lock my mother in their bedroom at night, or how she would forget his face and scream when he approached her. It was easier to bear that way. I continued to go to class and excel in my studies, but between the hours of midnight and 7:00 a.m., I was completely unable to sleep. If I did fall asleep, which I seldom did, I usually woke up an hour or so later and lay awake, paralyzed by anxiety, until the morning light streamed through my curtains.

My mother finally died when I was in my twenties, and afterward, my father and I, who had never been very close, drifted further apart. He moved back to Korea, and our messages to each other grew increasingly infrequent, until they took on the tone of communications between polite, apologetic acquaintances. He remarried when I was twenty-five. “I’m sorry not to have told you sooner. I know you were probably busy with work,” he said when he wrote with the news. He sent me photos of my half-sisters sometimes, two little girls who looked nothing like me.

Not long after I joined Gnoss, I began the Chartis process myself. I decided to upload those core memories of my mother and her decline to my cloud, so that, while I could remember the basic facts and chronology of what had happened to her, I was no longer troubled by the sense memories that had plagued me before, like the stale smell of her nursing facility; the way her terrified and rageful eyes followed me around the room whenever I came to visit; or the exact tone and timbre of her voice when she confused me with someone else and accused me of stealing from her. I filed each of the memories away, labeled them, and then thought no more of them.

Afterward, I slept soundly for the first time in years. My skin cleared and my digestion improved, as did my overall sense of well-being. I took deeper breaths, became more generous with myself and my colleagues and friends. I no longer felt racked by guilt and grief. Gone were my sleepless nights, the nightmares, the grinding of teeth that made my dentist warn me that I’d be left with nothing but a mouthful of dust by the age of fifty if I didn’t change my lifestyle.

It was then that the presence first arrived. I woke one night to find it sitting on my bed, regarding me quietly. I’ve been working too hard, I told myself, I’m seeing things. But the next morning it was still there. And though it sometimes went away for a while, it always came back, no matter where I went or what was going on in my life. Leo never saw it, and I never pointed it out to him, afraid of what might happen, of whether he would look at me as if I were crazy. Besides, I told myself, if I don’t pay attention to it, it might just leave on its own.

But as time went on, the presence grew stronger and more insistent, especially whenever I asked it to leave. I wondered if it felt it was owed something for its years of loyalty. Sometimes, it tugged at my attention like a recalcitrant dog at its leash, distracted me, made my head throb.

I tried to find out if it was an as yet unknown side effect of the Chartis process. But Gnoss had reached unicorn status three months before I joined, and demand was high across all market sectors, including among seemingly “normal” individuals, many of them high-functioning and quite successful. According to their introductory questionnaires, the typical Gnoss client hadn’t experienced more than the average number of Adverse Life Experiences (or ALEs), but simply wanted to “optimize” their cognitive and memory skills by data dumping the memories they no longer needed.

Our testimonials were overwhelmingly positive. Even users with the most challenging types of ALEs—abuse and assault victims; addicts; war veterans; the recently bereaved—all of them found reprieve from the memories of their traumatic experiences via the Chartis process, and not one of them, even those who had experienced the few negative side effects like occasional nausea or sleepiness, ever reported being followed around by a shadowy presence that no one else could see.

My room at Dripping Pines was small and plainly furnished, with one bed and a desk and chair, but it was well kept and tidy. I hung the few clothes I had brought with me in the closet and sat down on the narrow bed to stare out the window, at the murmuration of green and sunlight outside. It was warm outside, but early September in the mountains of New England meant that the temperature would dip below fifty degrees in the evening. I studied the informational brochure that the woman had left behind. “Spa hours are ten a.m. to five p.m. every day,” she had said. “Lunch and dinner are served at twelve p.m. and six p.m. No bathing after hours, no exceptions.”

The spa setup was simple. There was a sauna, made of teak, into which steam was piped, and two pools in a large, tiled room. The first pool was heated and smelled of eucalyptus and rosemary. The second was kept cold and filled with salt water. Additional services, like massages or private soaking baths, were also available upon request. My room was stocked with fluffy white towels, a plush bathrobe, a pair of slippers, and a pair of rubber flip-flops. I was surprised by the simplicity of it all, as it did not seem like the kind of place Lila would rave about—her tastes were generally more refined—but I could tell that everything, including the bed linens, was of the highest quality.

I kept the bracelet on at all times, even bringing it into the shower with me, and I felt the presence at a remove, as though it were not allowed to come within a certain distance of me when I was wearing it.

Over the next few days, I rarely saw the woman at the front desk, and it wasn’t until my third day there that I realized I didn’t even know her name, if she was the Ruth that Lila had told me about. Nor had she asked for mine, not even to check what name the reservation was under.

The waters softened my skin and hair. I felt relaxed and clearheaded in a way I had not been in quite some time. At lunch, I took my simple meal of porridge, vegetables, and a boiled egg, which was always prepared in advance and left for me on a tray in the large dining area, outside. The spa was indeed a sanctuary, and some areas of the grounds were marked as being off-limits to guests because certain migratory birds liked to nest there. I knew nothing about birds, but I felt my heart lift when I began to recognize their bands and markings, and the sounds they made when they called to one another.

Lila had been right about the lack of phone service. I had just enough in the parking lot to send a text, but not enough to call anyone. At first, I considered asking the woman at the front desk if there was at least a Wi-Fi network I could connect to, but as the days went by, I found the absence of the internet from my life a welcome change. It was a relief not to feel the need to check in with the world, not to tense up every time a name or a call flashed across my screen that could be someone asking me how I was doing, or a reporter seeking a quote.

At night, I slept soundly, so soundly that I was even starting to remember my dreams. I used to have the most vivid dreams when I was younger, so vivid that I would sometimes wake up laughing or crying, or to the sound of my own voice carrying on a conversation or arguing with a dream person. After the Chartis process, my dreams had become harder and harder to remember. I had started trying to track them in a journal, after a brief fit of attempting to learn about dream analysis and interpretation, though I rarely remembered anything significant enough to write down.

But at the spa, I found myself falling asleep earlier and earlier each night, satisfied by the simple but hearty food and worn out from another day of bathing and sweating and walking up and down the gently sloping hills of the spa’s grounds. And I dreamt about fantastical situations, in colors so bright that when I woke up, I found myself wondering if I was still sleeping and had passed into another dream, because the real world seemed almost unrecognizable for the first few seconds.

On my third night at the spa, I dreamt that I lived in a house that stood on two scaly legs, like a dinosaur. Inside, my bed was lofted, an airy nest under which I cooked and washed and ate. There, I found a cat, curled up in a corner. She was a beauty, with dark-gray fur and bright-blue eyes. She purred at me and swished her long tail. When I returned from fetching her a bowl of milk, she was gone. In her place was a small orange kitten, with tiny, tufted ears like a bobcat’s. He let me trail my fingers over his fur and pet him, rubbing him under the chin and behind his ears. He curled himself around my ankles like a sentient ribbon and followed me as I tidied up, underneath the great lofted bed. When I turned around, he had vanished, and there was instead a large white cat with a round, squashed face, whose flat yellow eyes regarded me with dull disdain. Hello there, I said, and I offered him my hand to sniff. Instead, he unhinged his jaw and encaged my hand in his cavernous mouth. I could feel his small but pointed teeth digging into my flesh. I wondered if I would lose a finger. I had to pry his jaws off my wrist, as though he were an alligator and not a cat.

In the morning, my whole body was tense and sore, as though I really had been wrestling with a cat. I decided to book a massage. I needed to feel human fingers prodding and digging into my flesh, to rearrange and pummel my body.

I showed up at the front desk at the appointed time, to find the woman who had greeted me on the first day there. “Our usual masseuse is out of town,” she said. “I’ll be taking care of you.” She began walking down a corridor to the left of the entrance that I hadn’t noticed before. She inquired after my health, asking me how I had been sleeping lately.

“Very well, though I keep having the strangest dreams. And today I woke up feeling as though I’d been walking for miles.”

“Many of our clients report the same thing during their first few nights here. Our spa is quite haunted, you know.” She said this very casually, as though she were telling me about some inclement weather we were due to experience later that week. “You didn’t happen to dream about cats, did you?”

I almost stopped in my tracks. “I did, as a matter of fact.”

“They belonged to the previous owner,” she said. “They show up in my dreams, too. They died in the fire.”

“There was a fire?” I asked. Lila had said nothing about this in her descriptions of the spa. I stared at the woman’s taut back as she continued walking down the hallway. She didn’t respond.

The massage room was dimly lit; the shades were drawn. A diffuser in the corner piped out lavender-scented clouds, which made me feel drowsy. She handed me a plush white towel and a yellow robe. “You’ll need to take off the bracelet, too,” she said.

“I’ll give you a few minutes to get settled.”

The door closed, and I undressed, slipping out of my clothes, and settled myself on the massage table. I hesitated before removing the bracelet, and when I did, I could feel, with a disorienting whoosh, the presence slide into the room with me, its familiar heaviness making it a bit harder than usual to breathe.

“So it’s still with you,” she said when she returned.

I felt cold pinpricks run up and down my exposed spine. “How is it that you can see it?” I asked. “No one else has ever been able to.”

The lights dimmed further, and the scents of ginger and jasmine filled the air. She was dripping oil onto her palms. “Perhaps they weren’t looking closely enough,” she said.

Her hands were strong, her fingers supple. She began with my head, massaging my scalp, before moving down my neck to rub the tendons and cords there. As her hands traveled across my shoulder blades and down my back, a deep well of feeling began to open up inside me. The heat emanating from her hands felt almost unbearable. I felt as though I would start to shake or cry. I took a deep breath and waited for the well to close back up.

Gnoss went public the same year that Neolaia became available in the North American, European, and Asian markets. Leo was ecstatic. For once, he seemed happy with what he had accomplished, instead of brooding on what could have gone better or what was next. And although it wasn’t like I hadn’t been expecting our lives to change, it still took me by surprise, the influx of wealth and exposure Gnoss’ success brought us. We moved into a new apartment, bought vacation homes, pieds-à-terre. Leo, never one for flash, or so I’d thought, got a few luxury cars. We went for joyrides together in them, the wind streaming in through the open roof as we held hands and blasted his favorites—the Talking Heads, the Pixies, the Doors. By then, I knew all the words to the songs he’d grown up listening to and I hadn’t.

He appeared regularly on the covers of magazines and the front pages of national newspapers, and I was interviewed for women’s glossies and talk shows. I was given a stylist, for public appearances. I found the attention uncomfortable at first, but I grew used to it, and to all the attendant perks and benefits.

Privately, I tried not to think about what the larger implications of Gnoss’ developments might be, what could happen to a society in which memories were no longer something you inevitably had to live with until they faded away or were replaced by others. I ignored the usual doomsayers, the op-eds and forecasters who warned of dire times, of loosening moral standards and the potential for dictators, predators, and abusers to take advantage of the tech to further subjugate their victims or inoculate them from the consequences of what had been done to them. We’re helping people, I thought. I told myself that Leo was a visionary, that Gnoss was, in fact, changing the world in a way that so many tech and biotech companies promised to but never could.

“Extraordinary people aren’t bound by ordinary rules,” Leo liked to say. I never asked if he thought I was extraordinary, because I didn’t think I had to. After all, he had asked me, of all of us at Columbia, to go with him. With Leo, I never had to worry that he would think less of me for putting my work and ambitions ahead of other matters. Unlike other men I’d dated in the past, he didn’t balk at my insistence that I didn’t want children and never would, as he felt similarly. Gnoss, what he was building there—that was our baby, our shared vision.

When the news about the Chartis process and its drawbacks started breaking, I tuned out, refusing to look at the reports and even ignoring company emails, worded in polite, smooth tones, about what was going on, and reminding employees that they were bound by company policy to avoid speaking to the media. But it was hard to avoid the stories, the footage, the countless interviews. One woman, a childhood cult victim who had used Neolaia to dispense with her most difficult memories of the abuse she had suffered during her family’s time in the sect, was interviewed in a nightly news segment. She could barely string together her sentences, and had to be reminded several times of who she was. Her face was blurred out, for privacy, and the network referred to her as Cynthia.

“What would you say,” the host said, leaning forward sympathetically in his chair and narrowing his eyes, “is the most debilitating side effect?”

Cynthia began to cry. “I can’t remember anything. Anything at all.” The camera panned away from the blur of her face over to the host, who pursed his lips and reached across the space between them to hold her hand.

“You’re somewhere far away,” the woman said.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“I’m going to ask you to turn over now,” she said. I obeyed. I closed my eyes as her hands traveled down my legs, handling my calf muscles with strength and tenderness. I realized, with a small shudder of sadness, that I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been touched.

“So how long has it been with you?” she asked. It took me a moment to understand what she meant by “it.” I tried to tamp down my awareness of the presence. I could feel it—not in the room with us, but on the outer margins of my consciousness—watching and waiting.

“About five years,” I said.

“And have you ever seen anyone about it?” she asked.

“To be honest, it’s not something I felt I could ever explain to anyone,” I said.

“Maybe you should have tried,” she said. I felt annoyed at the cool remove in her tone, the impression she gave that it was somehow my fault that I had been dogged by the presence for so long.

We didn’t speak for the rest of the session. My breath slowed again as I relaxed back into the massage. I felt like I was floating above my own body, watching it be handled and squeezed and kneaded like dough. The rope of tension that banded my muscles loosened, as though she were undoing its knots.

As a child, I was plagued by indigestion, and my mother would often massage my hands, pinching what she told me were pressure points that would help with the sharp, stabbing pains in my stomach. When I complained that it hurt, she would shush me. “Pain isn’t always bad,” she said. “It’s there because it wants to tell us something.”

What we didn’t think to take into account: Neolaia was perhaps making the Chartis process too easy.

It wasn’t immediately apparent that something was wrong, in our initial trials. Some of our subjects did experience side effects like mild disorientation and vertigo—nothing to be alarmed about. I took notes, ran trial after trial, wrote up reports.

“We have full confidence in Neolaia’s potential to further the overall goals of Gnoss’ mission,” I wrote in my final report. “Chartis production time has been significantly decreased throughout our trials, and while data integrity is always a concern when it comes to scalable tech, our main objectives, to increase accessibility and intelligibility, have been achieved. We have no reason to believe that further beta tests are needed at this time, and are excited to recommend Neolaia production be ramped up to full capacity.”

What I didn’t tell Leo was that the first time I’d received access to my own Chartis, I was immediately hooked by the simplicity and beauty of it. I tried, somewhat successfully, to ignore the urge to continue purging my memories, to discard everything I no longer needed. I also ignored reports from my own team about how some of our subjects experienced a significant downturn in their mental and emotional well-being in the months after undergoing the Chartis process via Neolaia. I told them that their data were insubstantial and that they had better run the numbers again to come up with better ones.

“Are you sure?” Leo asked me later at home.

“Are you doubting my results?” I said. He’d assured me early on in our relationship that I’d have complete freedom in my lab and my clinical trials, that he’d never take advantage of our personal connection to weigh in on my professional findings.

“Never,” he said, leaning in to kiss me. We were grilling vegetables and plant-based burgers. It was late summer. I was slicing lemons and making salad dressing. “I just want to make sure we’re ready. This is a turning point for Gnoss. For us.”

“I know that,” I said. “And I’m telling you that Neolaia is good to go. The sooner we can roll it out the better, right?”

“Look at you,” he said, amused. “Usually, you’re the one telling me to slow things down, to check all the data twice.”

“Maybe you’re rubbing off on me,” I said. I had been heading up our efforts around Neolaia for nearly three years at that point, and I was eager for it to debut on the markets, to make my mark as more than just the wife of Gnoss’ founder. I knew what my peers thought of me, that I had only gotten to my position—my own credentials and years of experience had no bearing, of course—because I had been sleeping with the boss. And there it was again, that surging sense of certainty and drive, as slippery and silver as a fresh fish, almost as though it had never left me. I felt the urge to make something of myself, to prove people wrong, to achieve something again.

They say you’ll never go broke underestimating people’s intelligence. The same goes for their willingness to avoid feeling discomfort. When memories are the medium through which we experience most of our emotions and relive our highest and lowest moments, it makes sense that, after a while, it would become addictive to edit, delete, and manipulate them over and over again, in search of a clean slate. A place beyond pain.

Early user complaints about Neolaia were smoothed over easily enough. Minor kinks, I told myself and my team. But when a news story broke about how a prominent senator in Illinois who had lost her teenage son in a drunk-driving incident years earlier was found wandering the cornfields of her hometown, weeping and clutching his school uniform—that was the beginning of the end. The senator had been a Neolaia user, and had, in her determination to keep her grief from derailing her career, uploaded too many memories in one go. An emergency redownload of her memories was planned, but it was too late—so many of her memories had been threaded through with thoughts of her son that it became impossible to detangle them from the ones she needed in order to function normally. She ended up in a nursing home, unable to articulate her sorrow or remember her own name.

After the hearings and the consumer lawsuits, it was ruled that some users’ adverse reactions to Neolaia were not due to faults with the technology, which worked as promised. Leo was allowed to stay on as CEO. The company pivoted. In the end, it was me and the rest of the high-level Neolaia team leads who took the fall. And, still, I knew I was lucky that the only fallout I really experienced, at the end of it all, was in legal fees and the dissolution of my marriage and my career.

After the massage, I felt wrung out, loose, like a newly washed garment. I thanked the woman and wobbled to my feet, wrapped myself in the complimentary robe. I imagined I would go back to my room, pass out for another night of sleep. Instead, she offered me a joint.

“Smoking after a massage is the best,” she said. “It goes through the body as clean as a knife.”

It turned out she was right. We sat outside, watching the last of the sunlight fade from the purple-edged mountains, and passed the joint between us. The air was thick with the smell of chamomile and weed. My limbs felt pleasantly heavy.

“It’s good to remember how big the world is,” the woman said. She seemed younger like this, with her glasses pushed up onto her hair and her eyes half closed in relaxation.

“How long have you been doing this?” I said.

“This?”

“Massage therapy. Running this place.”

She smiled. “Too long to remember,” she said. “I used to be like you. I had big plans, once. Now my days have a slower rhythm.”

“But you don’t know anything about me,” I said, bristling slightly.

“Don’t have to,” she said. “Everyone who comes here is running away from something. The body reveals everything, if you know how to listen to it.”

Birds called to one another as twilight fell. I wondered what story my body told. What secrets and hidden sorrows it still contained, despite my best attempts to erase them from my mind. How arrogant and foolish I had been, to think that I could outrun myself. As if on cue, my head twanged again as the presence hovered nearby.

“You’ve forgotten who you are,” the woman said. I felt my breath catch. “That’s what it wants. It’s just trying to remind you. That’s all.”

“What about you?” I asked.

“What about me?”

“You said everyone who comes here is running away from something.”

She took one last drag of the joint. The sweet-acrid smell of weed hung in the air. The setting sun illuminated her face, turning her golden.

“It’s better to hold on to some things,” she said enigmatically. “Besides, I’m not running anymore.”

That night, the cats appeared to me again in my dreams. They wound themselves all around me, nuzzling my chest and face. The dark-gray cat sat on my chest, while the orange cat, which was now an adult, butted his head against mine. The white cat watched us impassively, switching his tail from side to side. Tongues of red flame licked the walls, but there was no heat. I passed one hand through the fire and watched as it came out unscathed. “Do you see this?” I asked the cats, marveling. They yawned, bored.

When I woke, the presence was sitting at the foot of my bed, just like it used to. I had forgotten to put the wooden bracelet on after my massage. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry I left you behind.” It watched me, silently insistent. It seemed to need me to bear witness to it, acknowledge its shape and heft. I reached for it, and my hands passed through its dark, transparent membrane. I knew then what I had to do.

“Leaving already?” the woman said when I emerged from my room with my bags the next morning. “Most people tend to want to extend their reservations here.”

“I should be getting back,” I said. “I’ve been away for long enough.”

“I hope you find what you’re looking for,” she said. She touched my arm, lightly. “There’s space for you here, whenever you want to come back.”

“Thank you,” I said. I handed her the wooden bracelet, which she accepted with a slight nod.

She came outside to watch me leave. I waved before I pulled out of the parking lot, and she raised one hand in reply. When she turned to go back inside, I thought I could see three tails—orange, white, and gray—floating behind her in the doorway.

The ride back seemed to pass much faster than the way up had. I didn’t play the radio, just rolled the windows down and let the wind sing in my ears. The narrow, winding roads soon widened into highways, and my car was joined by others, all heading south. Beside me, the presence waited, as silent and faithful as an old dog. Whenever I began to feel afraid of what lay ahead, I allowed its weight on my mind to soothe me, to bring me back to the road and the feeling of my hands around the steering wheel, guiding us home.

After Leo left me, I deleted the bulk of our later memories together. I didn’t want to be reminded of what exactly we’d said to each other, how much we’d hurt each other. I didn’t want to remember the look of anger and recrimination on his face as he accused me of sabotaging his work, of hurting the company. I didn’t want to think about how he’d instructed his lawyers and Gnoss’ PR team to craft a carefully worded statement implying that the user issues lay with Neolaia and, more specifically, with me and my failures, my negligence. I held on to just enough about those days to stay abreast of the details, to protect myself. But his facial expressions, the last things he ever said to me—the shards of memory that had caused me the most pain—I removed those exact particulars from my mind, so that when I considered those last few weeks and months, it felt like I was wandering around a half-built, abandoned house, with gaping holes where there should be scaffolding, or reading a letter sent during wartime, with several words and passages redacted by a censor’s heavy black lines.

I didn’t know if I was ready to bring it all back, to inhabit once more the dark rooms and passageways of my memories and all they held. But it was time to stop stepping around them.

When I arrived at my building, it felt as though I’d been away for months, rather than just under a week. I hesitated before fitting my key into the lock, certain that I had the wrong unit, that I had confused the one above or below mine with my own. I was still unused to this apartment, and had almost, on the way back, turned my car toward the home that Leo and I once shared, out of pure instinct.

But upon entering the apartment, I felt at ease. There were my books, my things, the few items of furniture I’d managed to purchase in recent months, including the bed where I slept alone each night. The presence followed me as I shut the door and locked it. It settled throughout my apartment like a fine layer of dust, and I realized that I hadn’t had a headache at all on the ride down.

My phone buzzed with a message from Lila. “So how was the trip? How are you feeling?” I ignored it.

I sat down at my scarred wooden desk and opened the right drawer, the one that always got stuck. The presence watched me as I felt around inside until I found what I was looking for—a dime-sized metal disk. It warmed at my touch. I placed it on my left wrist, waiting for the familiar pressure on my skin, the low hum that meant it was booting up.

I opened my computer to the Neolaia app and found the folder containing all of my data files. There it all was, in color-coded and alphabetized order—every memory I’d ever flinched away from, that I’d deemed too heavy to carry with me. I highlighted all of them and found the menu options I needed.

ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO REDOWNLOAD? A message asked me in flashing red letters.

I clicked YES and closed my eyes. The disk grew warmer and began whirring softly.

I sat back and waited to feel everything.

The post My Worst Experiences Haunt Me From the Memory Cloud appeared first on Electric Literature.

We’d been driving for two days, unsure where we were in this land of grass and hard dirt, the world made liminal by the blur of the road, by the pleasant haze of our cigarettes. Inside the car, with me and Mark and a dash full of snacks, all was fusty, dusty, happy, and warm. We slept by the roadside, pissed where we pleased, honked the horn into the moonless night. Mark had heard about Guthrie Farm from his forum friends, strangers with names like Doggerel and Scumboy and Less, who were big on enthusiasm but light on geography. We were in what could only be described as a county, somewhere north of where we’d previously been. When other cars passed us, they drew their windows up despite the heat.

It was getting on for evening when we found the place, and the whitewash farmhouse glowed like candlewax. The barn to its side was thin and unpleasant, hardly bigger than a school bus.

“How many hogs could you fit in there?” I said to Mark. He never said pig, talked only in hog, in swine, in cutter and pork. He looked pleased with me, handed me the tobacco pouch like it was a bag of jellybeans.

“Not too many. That’s what makes them so special.”

“Artisanal,” I said.

“Oh yeah.”

“Artisanal hogs.”

The Guthries didn’t have a car in their driveway, only the skeleton of a quadbike, a few cannibalized engine blocks, layers of tarp weighed down by stones. There wasn’t any wind this far north, or possibly west—nothing stirred. No lights on in the house either, but I wasn’t worried—things had a way of working out for Mark, and he and I were fast becoming one and the same. I had even started walking on my tippy toes like he did, prancing like a gazelle around the car when we needed to stretch our legs. It was his idea to come out here, and then it was our idea together, and then we didn’t care whose idea it was, were both just happy to be doing something cool together. We were on the road. We were free and happy. We ate burgers for breakfast and instant noodles for dinner. We had sex in a roadside bathroom and bruised ourselves on the cistern doing something funky with our legs. Outside, someone knocked, occasionally cleared their throat.

Mark honked the horn and flashed the beams.

“Emissaries at the gates!” he said out of the window. I leaned over him and turned the indicators on, then the hazards.

“Yeah!” I said.

“Yeah!” he said.

We got out of the car, leaving the engine running and the lights streaming in through the Guthries’ curtains. Mark knocked twice, perfunctorily, and we made out like teenagers while we waited.

“Do you think they’re home?”

“Oh, they’re home,” said Mark. “Where else could they be?”

A light came on in the hallway. We nudged each other, held our breath, waited for something else to happen.

“Oh, they’re home alright.”

After another five minutes, the door opened, and Tom Guthrie appeared before us, old and smelling of dish soap. The corner of his beard was stained yellow from some mean tobacco.

“A pleasure,” said Mark, doing a little bow.

“You’re with them,” said Tom, looking at his feet. “From those message boards?”

From what little we could see through the hallway, the house wore its age well, the wallpaper peeling in tasteful strips. A lamp to Tom’s left was dented and tarnished in a way that indie coffee chains would die for. Mark stepped forward and shook Tom’s hand, pulling it up from where it hung limply at his waist.

“You’re an absolute celebrity there,” said Mark. “This is wild! Like meeting Sting or Cash!”

“Like meeting Bowie,” I said.

“Yes! Exactly! The Bowie of Swine.”

“David Bowie’s dead,” said Tom Guthrie, as if he still wasn’t quite over it. “This isn’t a good time. We weren’t expecting visitors.”

“It’s a great time,” said Mark.

“It’s our birthday, you see,” said Tom.

“Happy birthday!”

“My wife and I, it’s our birthday. It’s our day, you see.”

“Then you’ll let us cook for you,” said Mark, who still hadn’t let go of Tom’s hand, its veins standing out in milky blues. “You’ll prepare us a range of cuts, and we’ll have a slap-up meal and celebrate together.”

He led Tom into his own home, an arm around his shoulder, pulling his shoes off and leaving them by the sill. I followed at a distance, shutting the door to the loamy dark outside, the tin-can clatter of insects. I placed my shoes next to Mark’s.

The house was one story, every room branching off from the central hallway with the kitchen at its terminus. The light was buttercup warm, the bulbs the kind they don’t let you buy anymore, running so hot they scorched the ceiling. Everything smelled like cooked dust, like a radiator turned on for the first time in years. Little side tables had pictures of a younger Tom and his wife—swimming by a creek, standing in front of the house, holding a freshly dressed deer by its antlers—always posed the same, their hands barely touching. A phone rang from the living room, but nobody went to answer it.

We seated ourselves around the breakfast table. Outside, a security light came on that hadn’t when we arrived.

“Are you going to keep your car running out there?” said Tom, but Mark just waved his hand in a way I knew well, which made me smile into my hands.

“How about a coffee? A cup of joe for the birthday boy! Will Mrs. Guthrie want one too?”

“She’s resting. She doesn’t drink coffee,” said Tom, looking at me for perhaps the first time. His eyes were remarkably clear, those of a man much younger and in control. “Who are you?”

“I’m Mark Swain. It’s such a pleasure.”

“Is that a joke? Like a play on words?”

“No,” said Mark, placing down three black coffees. Tom pushed his away a few inches, pinching his nose. “You have no idea how long I’ve been waiting to meet you. The guys on the board just can’t stop talking about your meat.”

“How much did they tell you?”

“Not much. Just that you’re the man, you know? You’re the guy.”

“And who’s this? Mrs Swain?” said Tom, waving a hand not so much at me as at my aura, the general idea of me.

“I’m with Mark,” I said.

“She’s with me,” said Mark, planting a fat kiss on my forehead, his stubble like the stroke of a doormat. “So, how about some food? Anything in the fridge?”

He opened it up, but there was only a furry slab of butter, a receipt for an air fryer.

“We don’t keep much in,” said Tom. Mark and I looked at him for a long moment as he rapped his knuckles on the table.

“Hm,” said Mark.

“So,” I said.

‘I . . . can get some cuts from the barn?” said Tom.

“That would be best,” said Mark. “That would be just great, Mr. Guthrie.”

“It’s our birthday, is all. My wife and I.”

“And we’re just thrilled to be spending it with you. Babe, aren’t we just so psyched to be here for Mr. and Mrs. Guthrie’s birthday?”

“Thrilled!” I said.

Tom Guthrie closed his eyes, crossed himself, and made for the back door.

“Please don’t touch anything,” he said before leaving.

Mark settled into a chair with a worn pattern of butterflies, rolled us each a cigarette and smiled.

“Is he going to slaughter one? Just for us?” I said.

Mark waved his hand again, blew smoke up into the busted alarm, as if daring it to sound.

“He doesn’t seem happy to see us.”

“Trust me, he’s just fine,” said Mark. “The guys on the forum said it would be like this. This is pretty normal. It’s kosher.”

“Well,” I said.

“Well,” he said, springing up and dragging me along. We walked through the house, following grooves in the carpet from Tom’s slippers. Mark touched a phone book, a porcelain dog with no eyes. I took one of the picture frames and turned it facedown, without having any idea why. The living room looked as you’d expect it to, only with a distinctly modern flatscreen TV in the corner, swept clean of dust. They had a bookshelf, but the titles didn’t stick in the mind, their browning covers forcing the eye away—A Walk in the . . . Songs for Rainy . . . Keeping Up With . . . This and That. A daguerreotype on the wall showed an old man standing in front of the freshly painted barn. He could have been Tom’s father, maybe the wife’s—he was a father to someone, that was for sure. He oozed dad.

“He can’t sell much. With the barn so small.”

“He doesn’t sell the meat,” said Mark. “That’s not how it works here.”

“Did they say on the forum how they found this place?”

Mark took me in his arms and kissed me four times, like a bird pecking seed.

“Good things have a way of being found,” he said.

Outside, something sounded. A long squeal, pitching higher and higher until we couldn’t hear it anymore, somewhere between animal and shearing metal. The buckling of damp wood, faintly spongy. Mark held me tight and looked me in the eyes—he was waiting for me to ask a question, but then it felt like the time for questions had passed without my noticing.

Tom Guthrie entered the living room with a tray wrapped in cling film, the meat glistening beneath like polished marble. He held it at arm’s length, waiting for Mark to take it.

“Oh,” said Mark, stepping closer and sniffing deeply, prodding it through the film. “Still warm.”

“Can you take it? I need to check on my wife. It’s her birthday, after all,” said Tom.

“Babe, take this to the kitchen, would you? There’s something in the car I need to get. You’re going to love it, Mr. Guthrie. You’re going to go just wild for what I have to show you!”

Tom passed me the plate, only letting go when he was sure I had a good grip on it.

I sat with it a while in the kitchen, trying to admire its color, to tell the difference between this and the other cuts of pork Mark had shown me. I lifted the cling film, but all I could smell was the blood, a light tang of manure. There was movement behind the Guthries’ bedroom door, a scratching and a fidgeting. Somebody sighed, cleared their throat, sighed again. My coffee was already cold, though it was fresh only minutes ago. Mark honked the horn outside, revved the engine a few times.

Tom stepped into the hallway, opening the door just wide enough to squeeze through before shutting it again. He saw me in his kitchen and jumped.

“You’re still here,” he said.

“Sure am!”

He took the cups and tipped them into the sink, rinsing the basin with cold water until it ran clear.

“Is your wife okay? Will she be joining us?”

“She needs her rest. Things have been hard. The weather, maybe.”

“It’s been a hot one,” I said, and he looked at me suspiciously, as if I might be pulling his leg.

“It’s crazy that you share the same birthday. What are the odds? The curveballs life throws at us.” I had a feeling that my birthday must be coming up in the next few weeks, but I couldn’t quite recall.

“They’ve been coming here for years, people like Mark,” he said, looking out of the window, at the barn hunched in shadow. “Before the forum was a forum. I want you to know that, so you can measure your options. They’ve been coming for a long time, to the farm.”

“It must get lonely out here, you two on your own. You must enjoy the company when it comes.”

“I just needed you to know.”

He looked as if he might be about to cry, but instead he burped, a hint of acid on his breath. Mark returned to the kitchen holding four party hats.

“I’ve had these in the car for years!” he said, placing one on my head, then Tom’s, then his own. “What are the chances? Like it was fate, Mr. Guthrie! Now it’s a real celebration. I’ve even got one for Mrs. Guthrie here.”

He set the fourth on an empty chair, as if she might spring from it at any moment, like a rabbit from a top hat. In the living room, the phone rang again.

“Are you going to answer that?” I said, but the two of them started unpacking the meat into different groups instead—loin, hock, tongue, and back. Together we set up the grill, an old George Foreman, and heated a pan for the bacon.

“Do you cure it yourself?” said Mark.

“I’m not sure,” said Tom, scratching the elastic band at his chin, an ugly red mark already forming. “I’d need to check that.”

“There’s no oil,” I said, opening cupboards to inspect the dust and crumbs, the occasional yellowed receipt. “No salt and pepper even.”

“Oh, baby,” said Mark, taking me in his arms and kissing me the tender way, the rare and slow way, the little-too-drunk-for-sex way. “We don’t need any of that. We’ve got everything we need right here, with you and me and these folks here on their birthday. My God, isn’t she just great, Mr. Guthrie? Isn’t she the best you’ve ever seen?”

“You seem like a nice girl,” said Tom. “Truly. I wish you would leave.”

“Mr. Guthrie,” said Mark. “We are so blessed to be here. We are so thankful. We wouldn’t dream of leaving, what with dinner half-cooked and with it being such a special day for you both. Please, just enjoy yourself!”

“That’s right,” I said.

“Exactly,” said Mark.

The room filled with the smell of cooking meat—earthy, bloody, lovely, lovely. The loin, hock, and tongue sizzled on the grill, spitting fat onto the splashboard. The bacon gave off just enough moisture to cook itself in the pan, going an even red and brown with no char, no fuss at all. My vegetarian days, when I was with Stig or possibly Andrew, seemed like a thing of the distant past. Even before then, I never much liked pork, could have lived quite happily without it. But being with Mark was like being stripped of all my ragged years, like damn brand-new skin.

Tom pretended to fall asleep in his chair, but his eyes shot open every now and then, checking our progress.

“Okay, time to plate up,” said Mark. “‘Mr. Guthrie, would you go and get your wife for us so we can sing Happy Birthday?”

“She’s resting. The weather.”

Mark smacked the spatula onto the skillet with a big old clang. There was that look in his eyes I didn’t so much like, the one I saw him sometimes give to strangers when he thought my back was turned.

“Mr. Guthrie, I’m tired of all this naysaying. You both need to keep your strength up. My forum friends said that Mrs. Guthrie always joined them for dinner. It’s important for her to be here, with us, and for things to be fair and balanced.”

“They lied to you,” said Tom, energized by Mark’s look rather than cowed into silence. He looked for a moment like the man in the daguerreotype, made of stronger stuff.

“Forum friends don’t lie! We don’t lie, do we, babe?”

“They don’t lie,” I said. “They made a pact. It’s part of the rules.”

“That’s right. Now come on, Mr. Guthrie, we’ve gone through all this effort. We’ve got all this food right here that we made just for you, and frankly I’m yet to hear a word of ‘thank you, Mark,’ ‘you didn’t have to, Mark.’ Go and get her. I insist.”

While we portioned everything up, Tom went into the bedroom. We could see his feet beneath the door, unmoving.

“Can you believe that? The thing he said about lying?” said Mark, playing with his knife and fork. “Can you imagine Doggerel ever telling a lie? Or Blisstime?”

“Let’s not let it ruin our day,” I said, pinching the gristle between his index and thumb.

“You’re right,” he said. “God, you’re always so right. You always know the right thing to say. I’m a lucky guy. I’m such a lucky man.”

“Mark,” I said, and all sorts of words about the way he made me feel tried to force their way up, in all kinds of ways, like a scream. A question came out instead. “Is it my birthday soon?”

“It’s whenever you want it to be,” said Mark, and he stroked my inner thigh.

When Tom returned, he’d sweated whatever strength he’d mustered out into his shirt.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Swain,” he said. “She’s just not well enough. She sends her apologies.”

Mark got up from the table and embraced Tom, breathing deep into his neck and making man-hug noises, the noises men make when they hug.

“Tom, I forgive you unconditionally. My lady here showed me the error of my ways, and I feel just awful for snapping at you like that. On your birthday, no less! I think we’ll all feel so much better after we’ve eaten something.”

“I don’t want any trouble.”

“We’re not in the business of causing trouble, Tom. That’s not what we’re about.”

They talked for a moment about the forum, but it slid away from me like those book covers, left me bored and a little antsy—where we go . . . star-falling . . . no greater . . . passively drowning. I had a prodigious sense that the words were simply not for me. Once, when we started dating, I asked Mark what the forum was about.

“We really like a good ham,” he said, and that was good enough for me, good enough for a long, long time.

Instead of listening, I watched the barn as a band of moonlight stretched over it, revealing its gnarls and twists, its patchwork charm. It looked like it had been there forever, as natural as the shrub grass and dumb gray rocks beside it, shedding its skin every century or so to keep with the fashion, its business its own. There was something marvelous in that, in something so entirely untouched.

They were seated at the table again, party hats on, each with their plate of unseasoned, sizzling meat. Mark took our hands, closing his eyes and breathing long.

“In this, the King bears his bloody snout,” he said. “In this, our covenant is known.”

We paused, unsure when to break the chain of our hands.

“Okay,” said Tom.

“Good job, babe,” I said.

“Dig in!” said Mark.

And Tom did, with little fanfare, cutting his meat into cubes and ingesting them like a machine—five chews on the left, five on the right, swallow, repeat. I waited for Mark, who kept his mouth open, edging the bite closer and then back like foreplay.

“Are you ready?” he said but didn’t wait for an answer. He took a bite of the loin, sinking back in his chair. I opted for the hock, because it is important to keep your own inner life, separate from those you love, no matter how dearly you love them. Stig told me that, or possibly Andrew. It was dry, a little overcooked, I thought. It tasted brown, which wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. It wasn’t necessarily anything.

“Oh wow,” said Mark. “Oh, babe, wow.”

“I know, right?” I said, and I did kind of know, in the sense that it was pork, and I was eating it, and if Mark thought it was good, then it truly had to be. He brought the mouthful out onto his tongue, gray and fibrous from all the chewing, as if to let it breathe with him. I did the same, and it did maybe taste a little better when I sucked it back in.

“This is next level,” said Mark, gripping Mr. Guthrie by the shoulder. “Thank you, brother.”

“Please don’t call me that.”

“Thank you, Tom.”

We moved on to the tongue, which I had never tried before, and which went down with only a touch of gagging. It had the consistency of leather, but hadn’t the pioneers eaten their leather boots when they were starving out on the plains? And didn’t only some of them go insane and kill their brothers and/or wives?

“Holy shit,” said Mark. “Excuse my language, Tom, but holy and holier shit!”

Next, the bacon, its rind of fat as thick as an orange peel. No matter how much I chewed, it found the gaps between my teeth, managed to keep itself whole.

“Oh man, oh man,” said Mark. “Babe, are you feeling this?”

“I’m feeling it!” I said, taking his greasy mitt in mine. I closed my eyes, felt the warmth between our palms like one continuous rope of fat, unbothered by teeth. I could feel in that touch a future unburdened, in which this was the best meal I’d ever had, in which we sat on the hood of Mark’s car, remembering this table, this touch, our hands down each other’s pants as we ate a pack of thin-slice ham we picked up at the service station. When I tried the loin, I could feel what it would one day be to me, and the future was almost the present, was the past.

“From this does convergence bloom,” said Tom.

“What’s that, Mr. Guthrie?”

“I said would anyone like a drink of water?” He threw his empty plate into the sink.

All our plates were empty, actually, though it seemed we’d hardly begun.

“Nothing for us!” said Mark. “I don’t want anything else in my system. I just want to let that settle a while. Honestly, Tom, I could eat that every day and never get bored.”

Tom’s back tensed, bringing his neck low into his shoulders—I got the sense that this was his usual posture, that he had been putting on a good show for us all this time. He smothered what could have been a sob, or another burp.

“Now, Tom,” said Mark, taking our plates and waving his hand at me as if to say, no bother, though I hadn’t moved to stop him. “I think it’s time for us to see where the magic happens.”

“I really don’t think that’s necessary,” said Tom.

“It sure is! It’s very important to see how your food is made. Don’t I always say that, babe?”

“They all do. It’s like their motto,” I said, really wishing I could have that glass of water.

“It’s not pleasant in there, not after . . . you know,” said Tom. “I don’t think Mrs. Swain would appreciate having to see that.”

“She can wait outside. Right, Mrs. Swain?” said Mark, winking at me.

“Whatever works best for you,” I said. It didn’t seem right to disagree, and besides, I quite liked the ring of it. It sounded like something you might find at a county fair—Mrs. Swain’s Homely Marmalade. Mrs. Swain’s Famous Homely Pecan Pies.

Together, half-dragging Tom Guthrie between us, we exited through the back door towards the barn. The security light didn’t come on, leaving us sinking occasionally into puddles of muck or tripping over machinery. The barn stood out by its absence, by the black lack of starlight it cut away. Before we reached its closed double doors, Mark took me to one side.

“Babe, I just want to check you aren’t feeling excluded,” he said. He sniffed my hair, and though I hadn’t washed it in a while, I knew that I liked his funk and he liked mine, that it was more of a collective, convergent funk from all our time on the road.

“No! You’re so sweet for asking, though. I’m fine just hanging out.”

“You don’t mind?”

“I really, truly don’t,” I said, and it was wonderful not to lie, to mean it unconditionally. We kissed in the dark and knew just where to place our lips.

“You know, we should do something like this for our birthday,” he said. “It’ll be in just a couple of weeks, won’t it?”

“Something like that,” I said.

“I know I’ve said it before, but what are the chances? Us being born on the same day? The world sure does throw some curveballs, that’s the truth. Okay, Tom,” said Mark, strolling back over to the barn, “show time!”

They each took a door and heaved. From the side, my view was blocked; I could only see the light glancing off them after Tom flicked a switch. He looked so frail. If his photo was taken at that moment, I’m not sure a camera would even pick him up. He was more like a smudge, one of those tricks of the light that people used to call ghosts, which they now call imperfections, which is somehow so much worse. Mark had never looked more handsome.

“Jesus,” he said, trying to hide his smile and keep an air of measured awe.

“So now you see,” said Tom.

“It’s so much more than I ever imagined.”

“It’s a lot to take in.”

“She’s beautiful, Tom. She’s a marvel.”

“I do the best I can.”

“You could have something so much larger, there could be so much more. I know a guy, lots of guys, actually, who could help. It’d be no bother.”

“I’m not interested,” Tom said.

“And if you let her out, let her go free range?”

“That’s not an option.”

“So it’s just her.”

“She’s all we need.”

“And how long does it take?”

“For what?”

“For it to grow back.”

“Not long. Not long at all.”

Deeper in the barn, something made the same high pitching note as before. In the distance, a dog yelped, though there were no houses for miles.

“Can I approach her?”

“Can I stop you?”

Mark laughed, and Tom showed maybe the barest hint of a smile. They walked together into the barn, and something shifted, weight settling into the walls, the note of that cry a ringing in my ears, just beyond perception. I sat looking at the light streaming out, shadows moving hugely, obscurely.

The phone was ringing again.

I returned through the kitchen, our plates stacked in the sink, the air pleasantly greasy. Past the Guthries’ bedroom, past the turned-down picture frame. In the living room, the daguerreotype glowered, and I reached for the telephone.

“Hello? Grace?” said a voice.

“No. Are you looking for Mrs. Guthrie?”

“What? Jesus, Grace, is that you?”

“I think you might have the wrong number.”

“Hello? Just stay on the line and tell me where you are. We can sort this all out. Is Grace there? Or maybe Helen?”

The line hummed a moment, something rustling on the other end.

“Helen, are you there?”

“Who is this?” I said.

“It’s Carol. Carol . . . Flank.” The voice was a woman’s, faintly southern.

“Carol Flank?”

“Or Garstang. Helen Garstang. Grace, just listen to me. There’s some kind of group. Some grouping.”

“Look, I don’t think I can help you. My name is Mrs. Swain,’ I said, placing a hand over my mouth to stifle a laugh. “I’m here on a visit. My husband and his friend are outside, in the barn.”

“Helen! Helen, who is in the barn?”

“Mark. Mark and Mr. Guthrie.”

“Is Carol in the barn? Oh God, is that what happens when they—”

The line went dead. I looked around the room for pictures of daughters in overalls and white smocks, but couldn’t see a trace, just the old man, just the Guthries with their hands almost touching. I twirled around the room, touching things as I pleased.

Back in the kitchen, Mrs. Guthrie’s plate remained on the counter, the food still hot enough to give off steam. The security light came on, washing away the shadows pouring from the barn door. There could be anyone in there, or no one.

“Did the phone ring?” said Tom from the back door, giving me a start.

“Yes. Wrong number.”

He nodded, unconvinced.

“Do you judge me? For what I’ve done?” he said, reaching down beside me to pick something up.

“What? No! I think you’re just great. And Mark really likes you.”

He looked at me like I was a hand grenade.

“You should consider it,” he said, and made his way back out to the barn, taking the fourth party hat with him.

I took the plate of meat to the bedroom, knocked, and waited the amount of time they wait in movies before opening (which is to say, not as long as I should have). The light was on in the room, the bed empty and unmade. No wind came through the open window, the curtains unmoving. Just broiling heat. Nobody home. I put the plate down on the bedside table and climbed into the bed, pulling a thin sheet around my thighs. With the heat, with the smell of cooked hog, I felt that the future was just around the corner, waiting to shed its skin. I think I dozed a while until I heard the back door open, heard Mark speaking low and excited. I wondered how long it would be before he found me, tucked up in this stranger’s bed, but I wasn’t worried. He was talking about the weather, about how unseasonably cold it had been, and I felt the truth of that in my bones, creeping in through the window.

The post A Culinary Visit to the Belly of the Country appeared first on Electric Literature.

It was ironic that Zhenia and Ben would come home from spending time with people who had kids and be so giddy with relief and self-righteousness over their decision not to have any that it would make them want to fuck.

They had just gotten back from seeing a high school friend of Ben’s who was in town to fundraise for the Obama campaign and had brought along his whole family. It was watching this friend try to hold a conversation while also wrangling his toddler and switching off with his tense wife on something ominously called “The Baby’s Bedtime Routine” that made Zhenia and Ben, now in their empty, quiet apartment, feel engorged with smugness.

“You can’t really go anywhere,” Zhenia said, leaning out of the bathroom midfloss to continue the shit-talking they’d started in the car. “You can’t even have a conversation. Having kids makes people so rude. Can you imagine just letting your kid stand in front of your face, yelling and interrupting like that?”

Ben was naked in bed already, absentmindedly stroking his nipples.

“It’s true. What did we even talk about? He’d ask me about work, and then as soon as I’d start to answer, he would shift his attention to his screaming child, and I didn’t know what I was supposed to do in that situation. Like, am I supposed to wait? Am I supposed to answer over the screaming child?”

Zhenia spat in the sink and dried her mouth with a towel, laughing. “I would have loved to see you yell over that kid like you were in a loud bar or something.”

When she stepped out of the bathroom, Ben was using the sheet to fan at his erection.

“What are you going to do with that mouth?” he said in a funny voice.

“I cleaned it just for you.” She bared her teeth.

Then they had sex freely, with all their fluids sterilized.

A strange image appeared to Zhenia right after she came, of her grandmother boiling the drinking water—vivid and metaphorical. She thought her grandmother could visit her like this only if she were dead, so even though it was late, and even later on the East Coast, she called to make sure that her grandmother was still alive.

Zhenia thought about that visitation again a few weeks later when she noticed that her period was late. Ben had gotten a vasectomy as soon as the union gave him health insurance, and she’d been on the pill for years, so she wasn’t really worried. She took a pregnancy test just to confirm what she knew—that pregnancy was impossible—but the test was positive. She’d gotten the first pregnancy test from the dollar store, so she got three more from CVS, in case the first one was defective.

Why was it so cheap? It must have been wrong, she assured herself, as she peed on the more expensive ones in the pharmacy bathroom. It wasn’t wrong. She was pregnant. The nausea started almost immediately.

That day during her shift at the hospital where she was working as a translator she had frozen several times, mid-sentence, hand up, eyes closed, waiting for the wave of nausea to pass over her.

She knew that she would need to have an abortion. What other option was there? She’d had one before, and unlike in the dramatic way it was portrayed in movies and on TV, it wasn’t a difficult choice, she wasn’t traumatized afterward, and no part of her regretted that decision. Yet now, somehow, it did not feel like a possibility at all. Why was that? Ben had always been clear about not wanting children. Forcing a child on someone who didn’t want one was barbaric. But hadn’t she also been sure that she didn’t want one until, suddenly, she did?

She called her grandmother to tell her the news. Her grandmother had stopped being able to outwardly understand things, but it was still possible, Zhenia thought, that she was at least partially in there. Anyway, she was the only person whom Zhenia wanted to tell.

She called the house and her mother answered.

Zhenia had been hoping that it would be Nathaniel, her stepdad, because he lacked curiosity and never asked questions. He’d married her mom when Zhenia was six years old and was the only father figure Zhenia had ever known, and yet she never thought of him as “dad.” But, he was a reliable presence. He could be counted on to shuffle up the stairs with the cordless phone and hold it to her grandmother’s ear and not think anything of it afterward.

Her mother, though, was a different story.

“Zhenichka.” Her mother, Marina, was already sighing. “What gibberish. Don’t use your grandmother’s dying body as your confessor. You want to help your grandmother, come back here once in a while and help me take care of her. Change her sheets. Brush her hair. Massage her legs with lotion so she doesn’t get sores. Do something practical for once. Don’t whisper bullshit into the phone while I hold it to her unhearing, unseeing, unthinking, but still somehow living, head. It’s grotesque.” Then she hung up.

But what did her mother know about what Baba Vera could or couldn’t hear? And if her grandmother had been able to speak, she would have surely disdained the “practical.” She would’ve wanted exactly what Zhenia was offering, the contents of her heart.

A few days later, Zhenia and Ben went out to dinner at the Thai place in the strip mall across the street. She thought she would tell Ben then, but she didn’t. She felt instinctually protective of what was growing in her. Telling him, she sensed, would let the air out. Or, in. Wasn’t that how Hemingway described an abortion in “Hills Like White Elephants”? “It’s an awfully simple operation. Just let the air in!” The characters never talked about it directly. She’d read that story in a high school English class after having her first abortion and laughed at the melodrama of it, laughed hysterically enough to be sent out into the hallway. Part of why she couldn’t stop laughing was because the boy in her class who’d impregnated her had thought the story was about a lobotomy.

And now, what? She could at least feel the pain of the woman who was being strong-armed into something she didn’t want.

Ben was telling her about the reality show he edited—how one of the women was on a weird citrus diet and was eating oranges with the skin on. He’d edited a reel of her spitting seeds constantly into her hand. That woman’s husband was rumored to be a psycho, maybe even a murderer or serial predator. What if there was footage of him in the background of a scene they’d shot at their house, holding a murder weapon?

“It’s funny,” Zhenia found herself saying, as though it related to what he’d just been talking about, “that something can be nothing or everything depending on what value you assign it.” She was thinking about how the last time she’d been pregnant, she had definitely thought of what was growing inside of her as cells, and this time, already she’d begun thinking of it as a baby.

Ben stared at her, waiting for her to follow up that vague statement with an example or an explanation, but she didn’t. Instead she lurched across the small restaurant to the bathroom and vomited up shrimp.

Zhenia had met Ben at NYU, six years ago, when she was a sophomore and he was a grad student—they’d met in her dormitory cafeteria a year after the Twin Towers had collapsed. Their first date was to Kim’s Video and then to his grad housing, where he kissed her, finally, on the couch in the common room in the blue glow of the DVD menu. A few months later, halfway into the spring semester, they dropped out of school and moved to LA for pilot season together with their friend Naomi, imagining a life in which they would all become successful actors.

Zhenia’s mother had not taken the news well. “You’re not even in the acting program!”

Marina was a biologist who studied how bacteria communicated. As for how humans communicated or searched for what was in their hearts—this did not interest her. Any academic discipline without a clear and direct path after graduation was questionable. That Zhenia was an English major had already seemed stupid but not nearly as illogical and arbitrary as this decision to pursue acting in Los Angeles.

“I don’t need the school’s permission to be an actress,” Zhenia had said, though whether she believed this or not, she wasn’t sure.

“Marina, let her go.” Zhenia’s grandmother had picked up the phone in the other room and interceded on Zhenia’s behalf. She’d blow into Zhenia’s sails herself if she had to. “Let her become an actress, that’s a great idea,” she’d said.

The fact that Zhenia had never acted or expressed a real interest in acting, that she hadn’t even made it past the first rounds of auditions for her high school plays—were these not valid points to make?

“Mama, you know that’s just because I have a quiet voice.”

“In Hollywood they’ll have microphones,” her grandmother agreed, “and in movies the acting is different, it’s not even acting. That is the point, I think. You can talk quietly, but with intensity.”

Who knows what her grandmother had actually believed. Anything would have been a great idea, to just get her away, to protect her from Marina and from herself. She knew that her health was failing, that her mind was failing, and she did not want her little Zhenichka to bear witness to any of that. Whether Zhenia wanted to bear witness to that was beside the point. “Let her get to LA and if not acting, she’ll find something else.”

“Idiocy,” Zhenia’s mother exclaimed, finally angry enough to switch over to Russian. “Total idiocy! What have I been paying for the last two years? You and Babushka plotting and scheming . . . Take her with you. You two headless dodos. Nothing she has done in my entire life has made any sense, and all of it has been with the end goal of irritating and hurting me because she knows that as much as I would like, I can never be rid of her!”

After she moved to Los Angeles, Zhenia would call every week—she’d save up funny stories about Hollywood ladies with dogs in baby strollers and men with misspelled tattoos—but as the months went on, her grandmother grew vaguer and quieter, hiding her confusion as much as she could, missing and postponing their calls more and more frequently until eventually she became indisposed. Zhenia tried to get information from Greg, her little brother, really half brother, if she could catch him between his cello lessons and soccer games. Her mother did not like them to have an unmediated relationship because she worried Zhenia would contaminate him with her impractical and poorly thought-out worldview.

“Wouldn’t it be cool if you went to the Chestnut Hill Cinema and there I’d be on the screen, my face the size of a house?” Zhenia would ask.

“That would be cool,” Greg would say uncertainly. “Did you get a part in a movie?”

“Not yet. How’s Babushka?”

“I’m not allowed in her room. She doesn’t like me in there.”

“Is she in her room right now? Mom said she went out.”

“She’s in the hospital.”

Which is how Zhenia found out that it was serious. The hospital didn’t keep her long. There was not much they could do for her. Instead, she deteriorated slowly at home, and Zhenia stayed away, diligently going to auditions, using her mom’s credit card to take improv classes and get headshots. Zhenia got a job, first at a coffee shop and then, putting her Russian skills to use, as a medical translator. Zhenia’s Russian had been a huge point of pride for her grandmother—it was their private language. Vera would brag to anyone who would listen about how unusual it was for someone who immigrated at the age of five to hold on to their mother tongue so well, especially since Zhenia’s mother spoke English exclusively at home to Nathaniel and Greg.

In her first and second years in LA, Zhenia had flown home to visit a few times, but she could see that it put too much of a strain on her grandmother to make things look normal, to try to hide from her beloved granddaughter the truth of her condition. And when Zhenia had said something about moving back, her grandmother had howled—“I don’t want you taking care of me. No! What gibberish. This is the last thing I want!” Zhenia understood then that she was being banished, and when she didn’t come back for Christmas she could tell that everyone was relieved, maybe herself included.

Everything felt temporary, and since there were no seasons in Los Angeles to track time, you could avoid accounting for its passage. Five years went by in this way. Naomi got a part on a TV show that went to series pretty soon after they’d moved, and Zhenia and Ben auditioned for things endlessly until Zhenia eventually gave up and then they married each other.

The next night, Zhenia was lucky because her mother wasn’t home, and Nathaniel was bland but helpful. She lay in bed next to Ben, talking to her grandmother in Russian, about the thing she wanted to talk about with Ben but was too scared.

“You’re disappearing and this baby is appearing,” she said to her grandmother, “and the two feel connected to me. I can’t afford any of this, that is definitely true, but poorer people have had babies. Mom had me under much worse circumstances. But, she had you to help take care of me. To love me. There’s also the fact that my husband doesn’t want a baby. He has always been completely certain about this.”

Her grandmother’s breathing was an even whistle. Zhenia heard Nathaniel clear his throat. The phone must have been on speaker, and though Nathaniel’s Russian wasn’t great, he’d taken enough evening classes early on in his relationship with Marina that he must have been able to understand the gist of what Zhenia was saying.

He cleared his throat again, this time in order to speak. “We could help you,” Nathaniel said, “if you moved back here. I’m sure your mother would be happy to—”

Zhenia hung up. The broken fourth wall. She could see how in his eavesdropping, it must have felt to him like she was making a confession. Laying herself before him for the saving. And her grandmother was just a pretext. A bearskin rug to lie on top of.

Ben turned the page of the script and looked up at her. He pulled the cap to the highlighter out of his mouth. “What’s up?” he said.

Take a picture in your head, she thought, this is the face of the person you are about to betray. The thin strand of saliva connecting his lip to the neon pink cap.

“Do you believe in reincarnation?”

“What?”

He obviously didn’t, so she didn’t know why she was framing it like this. She was wondering whether the baby growing inside of her could be the reincarnation of her grandmother. This felt both irrefutably true and completely irrational.

“Like, say you did,” she went on. “How would it work, do you think? Does one person need to die and the other need to be born at the same exact moment? What if someone was half-dead, their body still on earth? And what about the whole question of new souls, and the population growing? Do souls split, and in the process do they deteriorate? Or do they split and grow the way cells do, multiplying continuously?”

Ben wiped his chin and put the cap back on the pen. “And by soul you mean . . . ?”

She felt absurd, because she didn’t really believe in souls, or maybe she did, but she still realized that it was absurd.

“You’re so Russian.” Ben laughed, looking down at his script. He flipped a few pages back, then smacked his chest with his fist. “My Russian soul!” he said emphatically, with a thick accent.

She stared at him, until he stopped snickering. He had an audition the next day for a prestige series about Nikola Tesla. He still went on auditions occasionally, even though his career as an editor for reality television was thriving. She picked his hand up, lifted it high, and let it drop limply onto his lap, knocking the script off the bed. He looked at her, still smiling but with a building sense of dread. The dread was catching up.

Maybe she could wait until she began showing to tell him. She should at least wait until after his audition because it could be a big break for him. He didn’t get auditions like this very often, and the role—hairy, large nosed, wiry—it was basically written for him. This news could sabotage him. It might distract him and get his head out of the game.

“We’re pregnant,” she said, which sounded weird as soon as she said it. The “we” a little try-hard.

He nodded like he understood the joke. She was getting back at him for the Russian-soul stuff. They nodded at each other like two bobbleheads until she got up and brought him the four pregnancy tests. They were a week old now and yellowed, but the blue plus signs in the second windows were still visible against the discolored backgrounds. She kneeled before him with the plastic sticks and put her head sideways on the bed, so she wouldn’t have to look at him.

The post Pregnancy Is Turning Her Childfree Marriage Into a Russian Folktale appeared first on Electric Literature.

How had we turned out this way? My friend and I were plumbing disappointments over slices of cake. That was one of the best things about this country—people regularly ate Kuchen. It was normal.

Not so normal, alas, were our relationships.

“Are they that harsh with you?” I asked. Of those men who had recently caused me pain—I paused to take stock on my fingers, one, two, three—at least two were mutual acquaintances.

“No,” my friend said. “On the other hand . . . .”

It is easier, I find, to speak about certain topics in a language not your own. For example, the superhuman ability of some people to take a remark you’ve made, twist it like a steel pipe, and thrust the mangled weight back into your stomach with a thump: here you go.

“I think,” I said, groping for vocabulary, “I think the problem is a kind of masochism. I sought out those people who could never be pleased, whose feelings for me grew around a seed of hate. Then I made it my goal to please them, one after the next.”

Everyone has problems. My friend signaled for the check.

If this were a fairy tale, I might have tracked down those ex-friends and -lovers and asked them what they thought. A quest! In a foreign land! But this was no fairy tale. Or rather it was, but of a different type: I was on my very first sabbatical leave with a giant grant to research sixteenth- and seventeenth-century goldsmiths, in particular Christoph Jamnitzer’s Neuw Grotteßken Buch. The fairy tales were in my work, not my life. They manifested in Jamnitzer’s prints, woven into goblets and coats of arms, anthropomorphized in armored crustaceans carrying cornucopias of fruit. They wound round the gilded face of a clock. For the entire history of art history the elaborate collection had been dismissed as nothing more than accomplished frivolity, utterly devoid of an ethic or politics, not to mention a historical conscience—

No one was more surprised that I’d received the grant than me.

This is to say if I could have quested, I would have. Instead I was on my way to the grocery store with a carton of glass bottles to deposit and a birth control prescription to fill. Never mind that I was celibate. It was gray, gray, gray—no one had warned me how perfectly miserable Berlin can be in January—and I was using the pills mostly for off-label purposes, i.e., to skip my period. Once a month struck me as basically all the time. One has to preserve one’s strength.

I took the route past the park, making up etymologies along the way, as was my habit—Schicht is layer, Geschichte is history, time is a mille-feuille pastry in a window display—when one of the very men I would hypothetically have liked to question came round the corner, looking distressed. The tails of a severed bike lock hung limply from his hands. I glanced back over my shoulder, amazed. How did he get here? I’d left him on the other side of the ocean. In fact I’d moved here in large part to leave him behind. Had he forgotten how awful we’d made each other feel? And now he’d been so careless as to return. I was totally unprepared. He waved the ruined halves of the lock.

“Aren’t you going to help me?” he asked.

My ex had been in Berlin for nearly a year, as he explained over beers in the nearest bar. I was taken aback. He smiled cruelly, which is how I knew he was about to mangle my surprise. “Of course I’m in Berlin,” he said. “Everyone’s in Berlin. If you want to be original, try Riga.” I was stung by the comment, jealous to learn he’d never tried to look me up. Those were the unwritten rules of divorce: if the one moves away, the other is obliged to avoid wherever it is she ends up. Furthermore, to feel abandoned either way. Cliché that I am, I said, “But you knew I was in Berlin.” He shrugged and sipped his beer. I noted, with wounded satisfaction, that my German was far better than his.

So much better, in fact, that I wasted upwards of two hours there in the bar fielding phone calls to help him find his stolen bike. In return, my ex told me that I was wasting my life. He implied that I was a cliché, with my nothing interests and public funding and ignorance of contemporary trends. I swallowed it all as unthinkingly as a teenager might a pearly bolus of cum, and left the bar feeling perfectly sick.

Can you believe the mistakes I was already making? My friend and I were back in the café the following day. I ought to have pointed out to him, I lamented, that I was at least one iteration ahead in mass-cliché production, that it was he who’d moved to my current place of residence, that it was I who had left him. These stabs were the basic maneuvers on which our duels had thrived. Touché! He always aimed to draw blood. It was wrong that I let him, worse that I so quickly forgot why he did it, the answer to which was obviously to protect himself. From me.

My friend pushed her plate away. Outside, the street was cloaked in gray. It was three in the afternoon, and already night was beginning to fall. We listened to the sorry sounds of people schlepping by. Outlined in January’s cautious luminosity, her profile nearly broke my heart. She took a huge bite of apple cake. Her cheeks bulged beneath high bones. She’d found herself in a similar situation once, she said, one where it seemed her opponent would always have the upper hand . . . .

“Well, what did you do?”

It was at the party of a friend, she said. A certain Sylvia. They’d been close once, but a sudden chasm had opened between them. It was unclear why my friend had been invited to the party, given this geological event. But there she was. The apartment was chic but tiny with a long, narrow artery of a hall that branched into the ventricles of three small rooms, which on that evening pulsed with music and people and light. It was like one of those dreams, my friend said, where the hallway you’re traversing keeps growing longer and longer and the door at the end ever farther away the more urgently you try to reach it. She set off through the crush of socialites. Half an hour later she found she hadn’t progressed at all. The rooms she was trying to reach—and really something wonderful was happening within them, she was sure, chances at love and enlightenment and beauty were being snatched from the air—seemed even more distant than before. A moment later the hallway was empty, and she was standing alone with Sylvia the host, who was flanked by her famous, much older boyfriend.

“You,” Sylvia said, like it was the first word of a curse. “I remember the first time I saw you.” She was quite drunk. Her older boyfriend looked on with trepidation as Sylvia described having spotted my friend sitting on the library steps near the office where they worked. “You were wearing strange shoes,” she said. There was something in the memory that gave cause for resentment. Now, at the party, she placed a palm on my friend’s forehead and pushed, pinning her to the wall. The three of them stood there. My friend, the host, the host’s famous boyfriend. They were all waiting for Sylvia to remove her hand, but the moment never came. They might have been three children playing a one-sided game of London Bridge. It was hard to escape. The host stood just out of reach. And few things are more pitiful, my friend was learning, than swatting limply at your captor’s wrists. “Love, that’s not nice,” the boyfriend crooned.

My friend paused her story in the last silvery burst of light. She took a final bite of cake.

“What happened next?”

“Well,” she said, very matter-of-fact, “I grabbed her, too.”

The idea had come to my friend in a flash. Of rage, perhaps. She was angry at being made a fool of by this woman who held some secret grudge against her. She doubted Sylvia herself knew what the problem was. A dull pain gathered behind her third eye, beneath Sylvia’s palm, and so in a quick movement, my friend reached out and seized her breasts.

“That’s not what I was expecting at all,” I said.

My friend sighed. “I didn’t enjoy it nearly as much as I thought I would.” She scraped her fork against the empty plate. “The point is, I don’t recommend revenge.”

I shuffled home through the early whisper of a snowstorm, resolving, for the umpteenth time, to be more like my wonderful friend.

Though my first thought when I woke up the next morning in my ex’s apartment, far too early, was that I never would be like my wonderful friend.

The room was dark and quiet and smelled of sleep. The lofted bed brought the ceiling close, and the empty socket of a chandelier fixed its vacant judgment on my ex-husband and myself. If you could really call him that. A marriage that lasts less than a year might be better described as an annulment.

Outside, the nickel swell of dawn. It was time to go. I carefully descended and shivered across the floorboards, picking out my clothes from precarious stacks of instruments and books. In a previous life, I would have snooped around to see what he was reading, but that morning I had no interest—perhaps people do change after all. I stood in the door for a minute, considering the warmth and the smell of him. Then I was in the stairwell, buttoning my coat, grateful I hadn’t jettisoned the birth control. That’s the problem with living, as I always did, with one foot in the past. I never gave up hope that things would return to the way they’d been.

I didn’t see my friend for two weeks after that. Life intervened. I caught a flu that left me bedridden for a week. Next time we should get sick simultaneously, I suggested over email. Then we could still hang out. We still can, she wrote back. I have an extremely strong immune system. I wasn’t surprised. I was tempted to tell her to come round with juice and lemons and broth, but I still cared what she thought about me too much.

By the time I could sit up, I’d lost three pounds and was due immediately in Zürich for a presentation on my area of research. Or not exactly my area—no one but me was in the area of research that was A New Book of Grotesques—but adjacent enough that I’d been invited to share my thoughts on guilds. The panel was organized around the development (or not) of intellectual property law among artists of the Enlightenment. Can socialist values be adequately expressed through mediums dominated by cults of genius? Toward what does contemporary solidarity flow? The Swiss have funding for everything.

Having walked no farther than the hardwood stretch from bath to bed for over a week, I struggled to make it to the Hauptbahnhof on time. In the station, the salty undertow of currywurst colluded to slow me down. Nauseous and wheezing, I reached the platform just as the night train was beginning to glide.

Thirty minutes outside the city, I caught my breath. I found my cabin and collapsed onto the cot.

“Hallo?” came a voice from the Murphy bed above.

“Entschuldigung,” I choked.

My cabinmate and I went back and forth in German for a time before realizing we were both American. Then a certain cynicism set in. We spoke about our work. He was an architect. “Oh, architects never stop working,” I said—I knew because I’d once roomed with one. “That’s correct,” he replied. In fact he had to work tonight. But where? In the lower bunk immediately across from ours sat the model he was to deliver to the Basel office in the morning. It looked very official, enclosed in a bright white box.

“Try the dining car?”

“That’s a thought.”

He was very stressed about this model and the work that remained to be done. He’d been studying, apprenticing, racking up debts and paying dues for nearly seven years. This was a big opportunity for him. Unlike most architecture apprentices, he did not come from wealth to begin with. His brother was in the Army, his father a vet and trucker who’d died young of a heart attack. They all of them had weak hearts, he said. He knew he shouldn’t be surprised by the sort of person he was now forced to deal with daily, the associates who exploited assistants like him for years, under-paying and overtaxing them. But it was disappointing. I was just beginning to think there was something familiar in the hardships of my cabinmate’s biography when two tube-socked feet appeared on the upper rungs of the ladder, introducing a uniquely shocking stench. I will be the first to admit that I was no paragon of human behavior at the time, but those socks left me newly amazed, putting all stirrings of déjà vu to rest.

We sped through Brandenburg. The architect took a phone call with a colleague back in Berlin. They were redesigning a museum façade, I learned. An exoskeleton for the original building that would lie within. The reading lamp in my berth illuminated my lecture notes, and passing streetlights flickered erratically in the window of the train. I idly reviewed my outline until the tube socks appeared again, this time traipsing down the ladder to the end. It was only then, when the architect was standing right before me on the navy carpet of the night train’s floor—oh, poor carpet, what endless disasters and fluids it had seen, it isn’t right to carpet floors in times like these—that I realized I did in fact recognize the architect. I was ashamed of my delay, also hurt that he still did not recognize me. It’s true I have one of those faces that transforms dramatically, depending on the day, and that it was many years since this man and I had been friends. We’d roomed together, as you’ve probably guessed. It was he who’d taught me how to fry a perfect egg; how to fight without crying; how important it is to keep on top of one’s laundry.

Those years returned to me in a painful rush. Thursday movie nights. Communal dishes. Pasta Fiesta: noodles plus anything that was about to go bad. It was very devastating for our apartment when he was not accepted to architecture school the first time round. I’d tried to remind him that plenty of brilliant people end up applying twice. I found a letter by Henry James: “You will do all sorts of things yet, and I will help you. The only thing is not to melt in the meanwhile.” I knew better than to stick it to the fridge. He slipped away into a bitter depression, eschewing movie nights and communal pastas of any sort, until it seemed we hardly even saw each other in our two-bedroom railroad. We were two more trains passing in the night. I hardly knew if he was alive. One morning, I stormed into his room, not caring if I caught him doing who knows what. “You!” I could have pinned his forehead to the wall. “You,” I said, “have too much talent to waste! Do your laundry and get out of bed!” There was a rule in our apartment, given our platonic situation, that you always knocked. It is a good rule for any living arrangement, but one about which we were especially strict. He was pissed. I’d found him shirtless in bed, the window open to let the stench out and the winter in. A slow, cruel smile spread across his face. “What’s this?” he said. “A pep talk?” A monologue that began this way could not end well for us, I knew. Yet I stood frozen, as if under some spell. He was sick of women like me, he said. Women who skipped through life tilting quotas away from him. He casually stretched his arms overhead, flashing the dark of his pits. The exaggerated gesture revealed just how shocked he himself was by the depths of his resentment. But it was too late to turn back. “After all,” he said. We’d ridden violent waves to the land of Milk and Honey. What right had such mermaids to monopolize the attention of the admissions officers? What right had we to—? I grabbed the nearest book, a coffee-table edition of Bauhaus principles that I’d gotten for his twenty-first birthday, a truly expensive gift, and threw it as hard as I could. It was a fight to end fights. Or at least our friendship. In the resulting scuffle, I punched his exposed pectoral, just above the genetically weakened heart, with a force and conviction that alarmed us both. Ten years later, the slap of my knuckles against his skin returned to me with perfect pitch.

The architect pulled on his shoes without untying them and lifted the model from the cot. He cradled the white case to his chest as tenderly as a wedding cake.

“Dining car for me—want anything?”

I shook my head. He slipped the key from the compartment lock. I cried out, “It’s going to be great!”

He paused in the door, surprised.

“Your presentation, I mean. I have a sense for these things.”

He worked the whole night and didn’t come back.

My talk in Zürich was also a success. I couldn’t have known that beforehand, however, so I arrived at the station a bundle of nerves. And regret. I ordered a coffee at the first kiosk in sight and came away even more thoroughly shaken: six francs fifty. The desk in the hotel room was set with a lamp and a binder titled Useful Information. I sent a picture to my wonderful friend, adding that they ought to include a note on exploitative Swiss pricing. Her response was immediate. That’s just what food is supposed to cost in a protectionist economy with a livable wage and high social trust.

On certain winter days, my hair can take on a reddish tinge. These are lucky days, and this was one. I put on a green, high-collared dress and stood before the mirror to pile my chignon. Outside, the street filled with the contented sounds of people buoyed by social services and trust. I was alone. In quiet moments such as these, preoccupied with tasks like chopping vegetables, editing footnotes, securing a chignon, my mind often wanders toward the people I’ve lost. There is something mollifying about slicing onions or pinning up your hair. It leaves you vulnerable to regret. Perhaps this was why the third man, the one I was afraid of yet longed to see again, who’d broken my heart more thoroughly than all the others combined, had always preferred my hair down. It was he, in fact, who’d first mentioned to me the Neuw Grotteßken Buch. That’s how I’d learned. And here I was, years later, studying it. Out of unrequited love or scholarship, I wasn’t sure. I looked into the mirror. My mother had told me always to pin up my hair in professional settings. You had to think about these things. You had to appear severe and strong. I wondered what percentage of the advice I’d received in life was faulty. There is no advice, really, for getting what you want, except to recognize when it arrives. And then to hold on.

The scholars gathered in the library. No one was in the mood to chat. We crossed and uncrossed our legs, buttoned and unbuttoned our jackets. The moderator tapped a pen against the table’s edge. As we filed into the lecture hall, I recited a few lines from Jamnitzer’s epigraph under my breath: “Useful for everybody, for those who like art / . . . Those who don’t like it can lump it.”

I am not an impressive person day-to-day. But on a stage, with my slides, and my hair pinned just so, I assure you I am in command: “A New Book of Grotesques includes sixty single-page etchings produced as inspiration for gold- and silversmiths in seventeenth-century Nuremberg. The extraordinary alchemy of styles in the Gothic scenes evidence Mannerist, Baroque, and Italian influences. [1] The creatures depicted here have escaped a child’s nightmare. Armored shellfish and spear-wielding sea creatures coil beneath limericks scrawled on floating scrolls. Though best known as a goldsmith at the time of publication, Jamnitzer catapulted himself to the vanguard of the immoderate imagination with these engravings, enjoying wide circulation throughout the land—”

Next slide.

“Up until important work published by certain of my colleagues in the 1960s, [2] Jamnitzer’s engravings were primarily received as whimsical dreams, a cabinet of curiosities amounting to no more than the fantastical sum of its fantastical parts. In The Bug Market, for example, shown here to the right, a robed vendor delivers a snail. Note the inscription: ‘The Bug Market commissioned for this purpose / Take from it what you like!’ Now look at images four and five. In these objects, kilned some fifty years later, one notes the same creatures warping the handles of goblets and the bases of candlesticks. Such figures, wrought from gold, must continually announce their beauty to the world. Their form is a plea not to melt them down. [3,4] They are arguing for their own humanity. And by open-sourcing blueprints for such heirlooms, Jamnitzer went beyond advertising his own talents. [5] Plunder me to make yourself, these etchings say. Please, do not melt me down, say the objects that result. The cast is an existential argument that the objet d’art is worth more than its weight in bullion. And this is the same tension, I argue, of the individual placed in her social context. We make ever more elaborate plans to justify our existence in the face of all that came before.”

I clicked forward to the end of my slides, feeling for all the world like a figurine struggling to justify her existence against the poverty of her form.

The thing to do is not to melt in the meanwhile.

Applause.

My friend and I spent the rest of the winter nibbling cakes and flipping through reproductions from A New Book of Grotesques. We met in the café nearly every day, as if time were running out. I brought copies of rare prints. Whole afternoons slipped away in the gray light and the diseased air—the general malaise of late February. Together, we investigated. We studied the prints for hours, our cheeks nearly touching as we searched for details no one had noticed before. She had a child’s capacity for fascination, my friend, and yet nothing about her was harmless. Her attention was disfiguring. It made me want to start over on myself. Our heads bent low over these ornaments, I was overwhelmed by regret over the person who’d first mentioned to me the Neuw Grotteßken Buch. My friend flipped to a goblet opened wide to the world.

“I’d drink from that.”

I told her about my talk, about what I’d said of the effort to assert the value of one’s form. It was an existential argument. The gray of the street merged with her face. She too had a very mercurial face. It was the source of formal problems of her own. She looked at the goblet. I got up to order more hot water for the tea dregs. We were at our favorite table, sharing our favorite cake at our favorite café, leafing through the pages of our favorite book. I didn’t want the afternoon to end. When I returned, she sat in profile, lost somewhere out the window. I had the terrible feeling that she was disappearing right before me, slowly becoming someone else. Of course she was. We all were. I set the teapot down. The corners of her eyes tightened, as if she’d experienced a sudden pain. The café was very feminine, trading in cakes and candles and vases and décor.

“Let’s get out of here,” she said.

We left just as the snow was beginning to fall. On the boulevard, I turned, surprised to find my friend was already halfway down the block.

“Wait!” I called.

She stopped. A silence passed.

“Tomorrow,” I said, “do you have plans?”

“Of course tomorrow.”

Then she disappeared into the white. I watched her go. Who knew what she meant. I fixed her image in my mind. All that mattered, I thought, was that we’d find each other again.

1. Wick, Peter. “A New Book of Grotesques by Christoph Jamnitzer.” Bulletin of the Museum of Fine Arts, vol. 60. (1962): 83–104.
2. Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Rabelais and His World. (MIT Press, 1968).
3. Brisman, Shira. “Christoph Jamnitzer’s Speechless Defense of the Goldsmith’s Strengths.” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, vol. 83, no. 3 (2020): 385.
4. Brisman, Shira. “Contriving Scarcity: Sixteenth-Century GoldsmithEngravers and the Resources of the Land.” West 86th. vol. 27, no. 2 (2020): 147.
5. Viljoen, Madeleine. “Christoph Jamnitzer’s ‘Neuw Grotteßken Buch,’ Cosmography, and Early Modern Ornament.” The Art Bulletine. vol 98 (2016): 213–236.

The post Compulsively Trying to Please People Who Never Liked Me appeared first on Electric Literature.

All the kids in our year had started selling their souls to each other at the beginning of seventh grade. Terrible arrangements transpired. In September, Matt Cywinski sold his soul to Brian Counter for a pack of cigarettes, because he’d scored a date with eighth grader Laura Blosser and thought smoking would make him look mature. During their thirty-minute date at Klode Park, according to what became public knowledge, Matt smoked eight cigarettes in a row and puked on his bike handlebars as he rode home. Now, Brian could make Matt do his homework, carry his books, or steal Snicker’s bars from the Piggly Wiggly check-out on his behalf.

My friend Kirk owned Emily Gonzalez’s and Phil Baker’s souls. He’d gotten them both in exchange for giving them rides home from track practice on the pegs of his BMX bike. Whenever Kirk wanted something for lunch other than what his mom packed him, he located Emily and Phil in the cafeteria and picked through their lunches like a vulture. And rumor had it that Jason Robinson owned Missy Graeber’s soul and now forced her to go on long dates with him at the Birnamwood Cemetery, where they ambled between headstones and did Who Knows What.

As long as someone had your soul, they owned you and you had to do whatever they said. The arrangement continued until the soul’s new owner decided to return it, which hadn’t yet happened at Birnamwood Middle School.

By Halloween, people were more careful about selling their souls. I still had mine and I didn’t own anybody else’s. Truthfully, I was hoping that someday soon there would be a grand reset in which everyone’s souls would go back to their original keepers, like a debt forgiveness program. Every Sunday I attended services with my parents at Hartbrook, the Evangelical church in Birnamwood, where the pastor sometimes used this language of “debt forgiveness” to talk about what Jesus did when he died for our sins. Jesus paid a blood ransom, the pastor told us, in order to release us all from the cosmic debt that we acquired upon being born. To have one’s existential debt forgiven—to have our innate, sinful nature erased—was the greatest gift anyone could receive.

“Imagine,” the pastor had said, holding his hands to his heart. “Your soul is ensnared in the cage of sin. What would it take to be redeemed?”

That October, my friends and I biked to the Birnamwood Halloween Carnival, which our school district held every year on the high school soccer field. There were four of us boys that night: me, dressed in a cheap werewolf mask and a black sweatshirt, next to broad-shouldered, tight-lipped Kirk Dawson, who dressed as the Hulk every year in green face paint and Styrofoam hands. My best friend Andrew dressed as the WWE celebrity the Undertaker, while Buzz had taped tin-foil daggers to his knuckles to look like Freddie Kreuger. When we left for the night, Buzz had been dressed as the Undertaker and Andrew as Freddie Kreuger, but Buzz decided he wanted to switch costumes with Andrew. And since Andrew had sold Buzz his soul two weeks ago, he had to do it, even though he had spent hours in his mom’s basement making the aluminum foil claws.

The carnival was alive that night with string lights, laughter, crackly music over the loudspeaker. Little kids zig-zagged between people in foldable canvas lawn chairs, wearing crowns and witches’ hats. Banners of sponsoring businesses festooned the perimeter: the Birnamwood hunting club, Mike Parson’s hardware store, the tax man, the HVAC business that Mike Teare ran with his twin sons. In small white tents around the field, there was a horseshoe toss underway, apple bobbing, a loosely supervised jack-o-lantern carving station with flimsy Walmart knives whose blades snapped under pressure.

Across the field, we spotted our seventh-grade math teacher, Mr. Genley, dressed like Frankenstein. Styrofoam screws sprouted from his head, and chalky green paint covered his face and hands. Other than that, Kirk said, he looked about the same: same fucked-up loafers, same baggy pants held up by a cracked leather belt. He was given to rambling about the intuitive poetry and universal language of math, during which his glassy, blue eyes lit up with feeling.

Before biking to the carnival that night, we had decided to play a prank on Mr. Genley, for failing both Buzz and Kirk. Kirk found his little brother, Mikey Dawson, and pointed out our teacher across the field.

“Mikey,” Buzz said slowly, kneeling beside him. “You’re gonna give that guy the scare of his life.” Mikey was like a small, raging fire hose. He had ADHD, Kirk had warned us, and wouldn’t lock into the importance of his mission unless we explained it clearly and repeatedly.

“What do I do!” little Mikey said, his hands vibrating as if bewitched. “Just tell me what to do and I’ll do it!”

Maybe it traced back to this business of selling souls, but our pranking had a blood-driven urgency that year; we wanted to embarrass someone worse than we’d ever done before. On the bike ride to the carnival, Buzz kept swerving fast in front of Andrew and spitting on the ground. Kirk, usually quiet, loosed bone-chilling screams for no reason. Hot, electrical tethers crackled between us.

We positioned ourselves at the perimeter of the carnival, trying to gain a distance from which we could see everything: all the teachers and parents surveilling from their canvas chairs, all the unruly kids darting between tents. We watched Mr. Genley fiddle with his Styrofoam screws. He was gangly, fresh out of teacher’s college, younger than any of our other teachers. He wore a tiny steel cross around his neck that surprised me the first time I saw it.

 “Follow him around,” Kirk said to his brother, pointing at Mr. Genley, who was standing with two English teachers, Ms. Burkemper and Mrs. Knight. As they spoke, Ms. Burkemper, who was in her late-twenties and wore pencil skirts, kept squeezing Mr. Genley’s shoulder in a way that made Buzz pretend to gag.

“When he goes into the school to use the bathroom, follow him,” Andrew said to Mikey.

“Bathroom,” Mikey said. “Sure.”

“But don’t let him notice you,” I said.

Buzz was seething. He scraped his Freddie Kreuger claws against the chain-link fence until one of them tore loose from his knuckle.

“These are pieces of shit,” he said, waving the loose claw in his hand.

“Then don’t wear them,” Andrew said.

Buzz swiped the claws lightly against Andrew’s cheek.

We set Mikey loose and he ran breakneck across the grass like a cooped-up dog. That night, Mikey had come to the carnival dressed in a pale blue button-up, a black shoulder-bag, and a silver wig.

“What’s Mikey supposed to be?” I asked Kirk.

“He’s Brad,” he said. “Our mailman. Mikey wants to be a mailman someday.”

Beside me, I saw Buzz freeze and turn quickly toward us. 

“I see Cameron,” he said. “Let’s go.”

The four of us ducked our heads and took a sharp left, toward the pumpkin carving station. Cameron Quade was one of the only kids in our grade who was as tall as Buzz, but he was more popular. There was nothing strange about Cameron, whereas Buzz used to have a stutter and his brow jutted prominently from his forehead, begetting his childhood nickname, the Caveman. Worse yet, Buzz had sold Cameron his soul that year in exchange for a half-eighth of stemmy weed, back in September, long before anyone knew how serious this business of selling souls was—how some people would never let you forget it, how they could leverage their ownership to exploit and humiliate you. Buzz had been paying for it ever since.

At the pumpkin carving station, we stood in the corner of the tent, angling ourselves to hide from Cameron. There seemed to be no adult supervision in this tent, I noticed, just kids and teenagers at long fold-out tables, wielding knives and scooping cold, seedy pumpkin guts with their bare hands. To my right, a kid half my size scraped his knifepoint against the plastic table, carving the word ASS into the plastic. Straightaway, I saw Buzz slip a carving knife into his pocket.

“What’s that for?” I asked him.

“What’s what for?” he said, and gave me his shoulder.

To my left, Kirk picked up a knife and stabbed a pumpkin several times, as if searching for its organs. I looked across the field toward Mr. Genley, who stood with Ms. Burkemper by the apple bobbing station, fiddling with the screws in his head. A tremor of light caught my eye; it was the momentary gleam of Mikey’s silver wig, flashing in the dark beyond the horseshoe toss.

Andrew came to stand beside me.

“I hate this fucking costume,” he muttered, tugging at the black undershirt he wore beneath a leather, knee-length jacket. “Buzz told me this coat is actually his mom’s.” He rifled through the pockets. “There are used tissues in here.”

“It’s just for tonight,” I said.

“Easy for you to say,” Andrew said.

We went on watching the field. What I didn’t say to Andrew was that he should have been more careful. The situation was his own fault. Next to Buzz and Kirk, Andrew and I looked like scrawny geeks in glasses. For kids like us, it was best to fade into the background, to keep our souls well-kept beneath layers of protection. By the time I was in seventh grade, I had already learned that any difference—like Andrew’s fishbowl glasses, or my crooked front teeth—made us vulnerable.

After a few minutes, Andrew nudged me.

“He’s going,” he said to me. “Look.”

Mr. Genley was walking toward the Birnamwood High School south entrance. A dark feeling boiled in my stomach. We both watched Mikey zigzag in the shadows behind him, crouched low to the ground, his mailman’s wig winking with light. After Mr. Genley disappeared into the school, Mikey paused at the door, then slipped inside behind him.

Toward the beginning of that school year, Mr. Genley had decided to keep a secret for me, but none of my friends knew about it.  

Andrew and I were always doing weird things when Buzz and Kirk weren’t around: we ate slugs, drew hearts on our faces in mud. We got naked and burned each other’s stomachs with lit matches. We pretended to kill ourselves and laid for hours on the floor of Andrew’s basement, waiting for the other one to stand up first. We did things that, for whatever reason, Buzz and Kirk couldn’t know about.

Just a few months ago, Andrew and I had been sneaking around in the woods at the edge of the Dollar Tree parking lot, which sat at the southern border of Birnamwood. We found a pile of molding pallets half sunken in the wet earth, in the middle of which was a smooth-faced mannequin someone had drawn nipples on. It was Andrew’s idea to tie the mannequin to the stack of pallets and burn it in a Viking funeral, which he’d heard about on the History channel. We named the mannequin Erik the Red after the founder of Greenland, who was supposedly a bloodthirsty warrior, and conspired to burn him in the woods with a rusty Swiss army knife and a jar of pennies, to show that he was evil and rich.

It was August. Just a few weeks until school. I went rummaging in my family’s garage to look for lighter fluid.

There was nothing unusual about that day except the heat, which was reaching its thick, humid summer peak. Sweat beaded my temples while I rummaged through boxes of automotive fluid, half-empty bags of soil, and limp soccer balls. I turned to a closed box of dumbbells that my dad kept under his weight bench. In its lid, I found a sleeve with a few simple exercise diagrams and a small collection of four magazines, all filled with the same kinds of photographs.

I opened the first magazine: Leathermen. With each page, more heat rose to my neck and face. I was sweating so much that my fingers dampened the pages. It was a Saturday and Dad was home, and I kept remembering that he could walk through the garage door at any second. But I paged through each magazine slowly and meticulously, lingering on certain images: naked men chained to bedposts, men in leather collars and vests, their penises purplish and spidery with veins.

One image caught my eye and I stopped. It was a photograph of two men, one kneeling before the other. The standing man held a metal chain attached to a collar around the kneeling man’s neck. His leather boot was poised against the other’s chest, like he was about to kick him. The collared man stared at him with a soft, asking expression.

With great care, I tore this page out of the magazine as cleanly as I could. I folded the image up in my pocket, packed up the box, and left the garage.

This was how I came to have a secret entirely my own. Over the next few weeks, I kept returning to the garage, lifting the box of dumbbells, carefully tearing pages from Leathermen. By the time school started, I had a collection of eight or nine magazine pages in a shoebox under my bed, already softening from so much folding and unfolding. I tucked a few of them into the backs of my school folders and kept another folded at the bottom of my locker, so I could sneak glances while getting books in between classes. It wasn’t enough to keep them under my bed; I needed to see the photos in public, surrounded by people who could catch me.

On the subject of my dad, I didn’t linger. I figured he was like me—he was drawn to the pictures, but it didn’t have to mean anything. It was just a secret part of him that even his friends wouldn’t understand.

On a day toward the end of September, when I was the last one out of Mr. Genley’s math class, I accidentally dropped my math folder and spilled the contents, so that the pictures—there were three of them in my folder that day—fanned out across the floor like a centerfold. They couldn’t have been more visible than if I had laid them out on the floor, one by one, for Mr. Genley to see.

Mr. Genley hurried around his desk to help me.

“No,” I said, so loud it was almost a shout. But he was around his desk. He was already crouching down, gathering my pictures in his hands.

“Austin,” he said as he looked down. “Where did you get these?”

“Nowhere,” I said, reaching for them. “I don’t know.”

Mr. Genley looked at the pictures again, then handed them back to me.

“You can’t bring these to school,” he said, his voice high and strained. “You can’t bring these here.”

I took the pictures back, stuffed them into my backpack, and hurried out the door, cheeks burning. For days, I waited for consequence, so certain I was that Mr. Genley would tell someone: the principal, a guidance counselor, or my parents. But days passed. I walked in and out of math class, avoiding eye contact with Mr. Genley. And nothing happened.

After a few weeks of keeping the photos under my bed, the heat wore off from my cheeks. I started bringing the photos to school again. And for Mr. Genley, I reserved a strange, indefinite fondness, as if he had saved my life in a dream.

A minute or so after Mikey disappeared behind Mr. Genley into the high school, the fire alarm went off. The sound was loud enough to halt conversations across the carnival: a screeching, rhythmic noise, like a thousand high-pitched cicadas singing in rhythm.

“He did it,” Kirk said, a stripe of pride in his voice.

“Perfect,” Buzz said, tapping his remaining claws against a metal tent pole. “Genley’s about to get it.”

After a few moments, we saw Mikey sprint out of the school and dart sideways into a dark patch of field. Only a few seconds later, the alarm stopped, and out came Mr. Genley, his clothes soaked from the sprinklers.

To our surprise, he had a sheepish grin on his face. Ms. Burkemper ran up to him and gripped his arm with concern. Mike Teare, a big man around town, strode up to Mr. Genley, removed his own canvas jacket, and wrapped it around Mr. Genley’s shoulders.

“What the hell is this,” Buzz said, tapping his claws faster against the pole. “Mikey was supposed to lock him in the bathroom.” He looked at Kirk. “Did we not explain that to him?”

Kirk shrugged.

“At least he pulled the alarm,” I said.

“That’s not good enough.” Buzz gestured toward Mr. Genley. A woman from the apple bobbing tent was approaching him, reaching out with hot cider in a Styrofoam cup. “Now he’s getting treated like a hero. He was supposed to suffer.”

“Hey, Caveman!” a voice behind us called.

We all turned. There was Cameron Quade, dressed in a Brett Favre jersey with black glare strips on his cheeks. On either side of him were Jason Bartle and Mark Leverenz, both dressed as Men in Black in suits and sunglasses, which made them look like Cameron’s bodyguards.

“Go get me some cider,” Cameron said to Buzz.

Buzz stared at him for a moment.

“Are you deaf?” Cameron said. He pointed toward the bobbing tent. “Go.”

Buzz turned on his heel and headed toward the tent. The three of us watched him march away.

“This is bad,” Andrew said, tugging at the sleeves of his leather jacket. “He’s gonna take it out on me.”

“You shouldn’t have sold him your soul,” Kirk said. “You see him all the time.”

“Yeah,” Andrew said, his voice cracking. He looked at Kirk. “But what am I supposed to do about it now?”

Just then, I saw Mikey darting toward us from the corner of my eye, still crouching low to the dark ground. He ran up to us, panting.

“I did it,” he said.

“Idiot,” Kirk said. “You were supposed to lock him in there.”

“In where?”

“The bathroom.”

“I was?”

I looked back at Mr. Genley. He was huddled in Mike Teare’s coat, surrounded by other teachers, eating a caramel apple and laughing. To my right, I saw Buzz head back across the field with a cup of cider and deliver it to Cameron Quade, just a few meters away from us. Buzz stood there before Cameron while he tasted it, as if waiting to see if he might need another. Then Cameron waved his hand, letting Buzz know he was satisfied.

I took off my werewolf mask and stuffed it into the front of my sweatshirt. I felt cold and jittery, like something awful was about to happen. From the north end of the field, near where Mr. Genley was, we watched Ms. Burkemper climb onto a metal folding chair, wobbling a little in her heeled boots, holding a handheld loudspeaker. She turned it on, eliciting a little static.

“Attention,” she said, broadcasting across the field. “Attention! We’re going to announce the winners of the costume contest.”

Buzz came and stood beside me. I could feel his energy, his unsettled rage, beaming from his chest and worming into mine.

“In third place, we have Susie Weatherby, dressed as Dolly Parton! All right, Susie!” Ten-year-old Susie emerged from the crowd in a jean jacket, straining beneath a mountainous blonde wig that was almost as tall as she was. Ms. Burkemper crouched to pin a small green ribbon on her jacket.

“And in second place,” Ms. Burkemper said, standing back up on the chair. “We have Ed Genley, dressed as wet Frankenstein!”

A warm, collective laugh rippled across the field. Ms. Burkemper turned to Mr. Genley at her left and handed him a yellow ribbon. Beside me, Buzz shuddered and looked to us.

“This is bullshit,” he said. “Let’s go.”

He turned away from the festivities and walked southward, toward the dark end of the field where we’d chained our bikes to a fence. Kirk turned around and followed him. I met Andrew’s eyes in the dark, as if we were sounding each other for alarm. But we both turned around at the same time and hurried to catch up to Buzz and Kirk, so tethered were we to each other. 

“And in first place,” we heard Ms. Burkemper say as we walked away. “We have Jason Robinson! Who is dressed quite elaborately as a headless man . . . .”

For stretches, Buzz biked so fast that the rest of struggled to keep up with him. He stopped pedaling every so often and coasted, looking around wildly as if for something to burn. He led us off Birnamwood’s small Main Street and down Orchard Street, a sparse residential road that unraveled into dirt after a hundred yards. There was an abandoned dairy farm on the lefthand side, with a moldering tie stall barn and an orchard where Andrew and I sometimes picked apples in the fall.

 Buzz rode fast into the grass. He jumped off his bike and let it fall to the ground. Kirk, Andrew, and I followed him, set our bikes down, and stood aside while Buzz paced and kicked dirt with the toe of his shoe. All his Freddie Kreuger claws were bent, hanging sideways off his knuckles.

“Cameron’s the worst,” I said.

Buzz looked at me. “I don’t care about him,” he said. “That contest was fucking rigged.”

“Yeah,” Kirk said. “Genley’s costume was busted.”

Andrew was standing a pace behind us, arms folded tight across his chest. “I’m cold,” he said. “What are we doing out here?”

“We’re plotting our next move against Genley,” Buzz said.

I looked at him, surprised.

“You want to do something else?” I said.

“Yeah,” he said, snapping his eyes toward me. “We have to get him.” He kicked the ground again. “I heard he’s a perv. Jason said he fucks little boys.”

There was a long silence. Buzz kicked the dirt again, his face worked into a scowl, like he was thinking so hard it was hurting him.

“Can’t it wait?” Andrew said. “It’s cold out here.”

Buzz stopped pacing and looked square at Andrew. “It’s like you can’t handle anything.” He started to pace again, then stopped and looked back at Andrew. “Get on the ground and roll around,” he said.

Andrew got down and rolled around on the orchard grass. When he stood back up, mud caked the back of his leather jacket and Buzz was laughing.

“No,” he said. “Stay down. Get on all fours and bark like a dog.”

Andrew got down on all fours and barked like a dog.

“Wait, Austin,” Buzz said, looking at me. “Give him your wolf mask. That’ll make it more real.”

“No,” I said. “I didn’t sell my soul to you.”

“Who has your soul?” he said.

“No one.”

“Fuck you. What can I buy it for?”

“Nothing,” I said, holding my hands against my heart like my soul was floating in there, fragile as an underwater flower. “It’s important to me.”

“Fuck you,” he said again.

Then his head snapped toward Andrew, as if he had an idea.

“Andrew,” he said. “Didn’t you say you saw Mr. Genley going into his house?”

“Can I stand up now?” he said.

“Yeah,” Buzz said. “Didn’t you say that?”

Andrew stood up and folded his arms tight across his chest again. In the dim moonlight, I thought I saw his eyes glassed over with tears. “Yeah,” he said.

“Where was it?”

Andrew brushed dirt from his hair. “End of Mineral Point Road.”

“Let’s go,” Buzz said.

He ran back to his bike, picked it up, and kicked off hard into the grass. I tried to meet Andrew’s eyes in the dark, but he wouldn’t look at me. He mounted his bike and started after Buzz, Kirk and I a few paces behind.

“Hey,” I called ahead. “Why do you want to go to his house?”

Buzz didn’t answer. He biked fast into the darkness, lit by the reflecting discs he’d clamped in his wheel spokes. The rest of us biked after him, struggling to keep up. I wondered what Kirk and Andrew were thinking, but I couldn’t see their faces in the dark.

Mineral Point Road was fifteen minutes away, south of the dairy farm. We had to climb a hill to get there, which worked us all into a chilling sweat. Andrew’s teeth chattered; the leather jacket had a steep V-neck, so that even when Andrew buttoned it, cold wind must have poured down the front of his shirt.

At the end of Mineral Point, we slowed and dismounted. Two houses sat at the end of the road, facing one another. Buzz looked back at Andrew, waiting.

Andrew gestured to the house on our right. It was a little blue-gray cabin with a screened-in porch and a shed off to the left. We’d heard rumors that Genley lived in a trash heap, but the house was neat, painted a crisp light blue. Gardens wreathed the front porch and crept around both sides of the house. They looked meticulously kept, full of late-blooming purple and yellow flowers. In the moonlight, I glimpsed the yellowish, glowing skin of squash. Genley knew how to feed himself, I thought. He’d staked a wooden birdfeeder, shaped like a miniature version of his own house, into the grass.

“This place is small,” Buzz said, assessing the place. “I knew he would live in some stupid, small house.”

We followed Buzz’s lead, leaning our bikes in a pile beyond the rounded end of the road, buried in shadow. We walked up to the house, Buzz and Kirk boldly stepping close to the windows, while Andrew and I hung back. 

“What do you think he wants to do?” I whispered to Andrew.

“I don’t know.” He pulled his coat tight around him. “I want to go home.”

Buzz and Kirk headed toward the cabin and peered in the window, shading their eyes with their hands. They looked at each other, circled the house once, and headed back to us.

“Did you see anything?” I said.

“Curtains are closed,” Buzz said.

Then Buzz started toward the small shed, the rest of us following closely behind. Buzz shone his bike light on the shed door, which was held shut by a small combination padlock that had been left open.

“Easy,” Buzz said, and slipped the padlock from its hinge. He dropped it in the grass.

“You’re going in?” I said.

“No,” he said. “Andrew is.”

I looked at Andrew’s face in the dark and found it pale, tortured. His teeth were still chattering, his hands deep in the pockets of the leather jacket that wasn’t even his. It occurred to me then that while Andrew, having given up his soul, was forced to stay, I could leave if I wanted to. Nobody could blame me. I could bike the long road home by myself, I could escape any further violation. I didn’t even have to watch.

Buzz opened the shed door and gestured toward Andrew, as if to say, After you. Andrew took Buzz’s bike light and raked it across the room, illuminating boxes of tools and cans of house paint with drippings on their edges, wrenches hanging by nails from a corkboard on the wall. When his light reached the right corner, Andrew lingered on a stack of canvases facing away from us.

“What are those?” Buzz said.

We watched Andrew step inside the shed, approach the canvases, and pull one away from the wall and shine his light down on its face.

“No way,” Andrew said.

The three of us stepped forward, suddenly curious. We angled beside Andrew to see the canvases. The first was a painting of Genley himself: a patchy depiction of his naked torso and head, bearing his distinctive glasses and patchy beard. Andrew flipped to the next, which showed a yellow prairie, then another of a tiny dog. He tore past these until we found a painting of two naked men locked in a tight embrace, tense and intimate, cheeks pressed together.

“I fucking knew it,” Kirk muttered in my ear.

Andrew paused on another, which showed a naked man—presumably Jacob—wrestling an angel, befit with white wings and an orb of pink radiance wreathing his head. In Genley’s painting, Jacob and the angel stared at each other with intensity and attention, their faces just inches apart.

“Here,” Buzz said. He reached into his pocket and produced the carving knife I’d seen him steal from the carnival tent. He handed it to Andrew. “Tear them up.”

Andrew took the knife and looked at it.

“It won’t take long,” Kirk said. “He deserves it.”

“Get ‘em, Andrew,” Buzz said.

I didn’t say anything.

Under the glare of Buzz’s bike light, we watched Andrew take the paintings from the wall and lay them out on the shed floor. Andrew raised the blade to the face of Genley’s self-portrait and dragged it across the canvas, riving it in half. He went on to a painting of a wheatfield under boiling clouds. And then another. My stomach turned.

Andrew turned and handed me the knife.

“You do it,” he said. His pace looked pale as a moon in the darkness of the shed.

I took the flimsy knife in my hand. Andrew stepped back. All three of them were now watching me. The sweat I’d worked up from our bike ride seemed to chill me from the inside, but my face burned and my stomach hurt. I circled the paintings on the floor, half of them already destroyed, trying to buy time.

“What are you doing?” Buzz said. “Quit stalling.”

I knelt beside the paintings. The concrete floor of Genley’s shed felt cold through my jeans. I could feel Buzz’s eyes on me, watching the movements of my wrist, the curve of my spine, how my eyes tracked across Genley’s paintings. Everything I did, he would notice and remember. The longer I knelt there, the more he would see of me, and the more likely he was to see something I didn’t mean to give away.

I sank the knifepoint into a painting of two figures, an angel and a man, grappling with each other. I carved the painting into pieces: wings into tattered rags, interlocked hands into severed fingers.

Afterward, we biked home almost in silence. Buzz was giddy for a little while, ecstatic over what he hailed as our greatest prank. It was the most extreme feat we’d ever orchestrated. He predicted that we would talk about it for years to come. And most importantly, Buzz said, it had happened to Genley, a creep who really deserved it. Genley, who didn’t belong in our town. Genley, who wore a cross around his neck but harbored a perverted private life in which he painted naked men.

After a few minutes, we all quieted down and rode home in silence. I put my werewolf mask back on and panted as I biked, my breath thick and hot against my own face.

Before the end of the year, my wish came true: we all received debt forgiveness.

Without discussion, everyone in our grade spontaneously moved on from this business of selling souls. There was no announcement, no grand gesture, no town hall meeting where everyone collectively decided to return each other’s souls for the betterment of civilization; everyone just forgot. Or the arrangements had grown so complicated that kids started to feel that it wasn’t worthwhile to keep track. And in that way, even though the problem was fixed, something unresolved lingered in the air. A weird tension endured in our grade that even our teachers noticed, transpiring in vicious fights among the boys and cattiness among the girls. Buzz got suspended for fighting Cameron Quade. Andrew slowly separated from our group and started eating lunch with the band kids.

I’d torn up my magazine pictures the morning after we rode home from Genley’s house, stricken with new certainty that no place was entirely safe, that every zone could be infiltrated, and that the consequences of someone finding the pictures were as dire as death.

On the last day of school before summer, Mr. Genley had us share our summer plans with the class. I laid my head on my desk while kids talked about vacations in the Wisconsin Dells, Christian summer camps in Eagle River. When everyone had finished, Mr. Genley gave a short speech about what a pleasure it had been to teach us, what promise we had, and how he would be cheering us on as we entered the eighth grade. After the bell rang, I lingered as I put my books away and zipped up my backpack.

“Good luck, Austin,” Genley said as I walked past his desk. He smiled at me with the same warm, crinkled expression he sometimes adopted while teaching, as if he’d worked all his life toward the goal of teaching math class at Birnamwood Middle School, and had finally arrived at his lucky star.

I looked back at Genley and scowled. Suddenly, my insides were twisted up with something that resembled anger. My face burned. I wanted to tell him that I’d been dreaming of his angels, the images of them intertwined in each other’s arms. Those pictures haunted me in a way that felt like a curse. I couldn’t stop thinking of their faces. Fingers gripping fistfuls of hair. Eyes rapt with attention. How they stared into each other’s eyes as if searching for something that would save their souls: freedom, instruction, mercy.

The post Fitting In Will Cost You Your Soul appeared first on Electric Literature.

While Carmel was falling in love with Derek O’Toole, Richie was twenty-one and ready to begin his life. Somehow three years had passed since he had left school and to his surprise nobody had made him do anything since the day he walked out of his final exam. He hadn’t made a plan because he wanted to take the summer off to have a good time. When the summer ended he felt no more inclination to do anything than he had before it, so he allowed himself another year to decide on the next move. 

In the interim he signed on to the dole and worked cash-in-hand in a few pubs around town when they needed someone for busy periods, and rented a box room in Ballybeg on an informal basis from the older brother of a girl he was seeing. After the girl broke up with him the brother threw him out, sick of his prodigious vomiting and foul-smelling 3 a.m. meals left hardening on the counter, leaving the single box of possessions on the front door step. Following this inconvenience he took the same approach to accommodation as he took to working, taking it up whenever it surfaced but not seeking it with any urgency. In between situations there was always Mayor’s Walk, which was tolerable so long as he used it only for sleep and stayed out of his father’s way as much as possible. 

He didn’t know why he had expected an intervention, except that it seemed most everyone else he went to school with had one. Either they had made up their minds to study or train or become an apprentice or their parents had proposed a certain kind of job, in some cases even arranged the interview for them. A few moved far away which was a definitive enough action on its own without also needing a career. The ones who couldn’t find anything and went on the dole like him were making plans to try Dublin and London. 

It was so tense in Mayor’s Walk in the final few years of school that all his focus was on the day he could leave and not be under anyone’s control any more, he had never seen beyond that. Nor had anyone broached the subject with him. After a substantial amount of time had passed, Rose would occasionally ask if he had any plans when he called in to the house. She always asked while making the tea or cooking, said it casually as though it was nothing to her either way. 

The casualness was not unpleasant, or intended to convey indifference, but because of a natural gulf—an awkward absence of natural authority—that existed between she and Richie because they were not related by blood. This gulf varied in its depth over the years, sometimes feeling hardly present at all, but as he had reached his late teenage years it had shifted into a permanent state of significance, separating the two of them. This estrangement was prodded at and worsened by his father, who would call attention to it at any opportunity. If Rose gave some passing bit of advice, John would reflexively say, What would you know, you’re not his mother, and both Rose and Richie would be embarrassed into silence.

So Rose had not guided him as she surely would Carmel when she graduated. And his father had never brought the subject up except to remind him that when school ended he would be expected to pay rent if he stayed in the house. 

His father had, to be fair, assumed a general, blanket stance of apathy toward employment as a concept, ever since he had been forcibly removed from the workforce by a catastrophic injury suffered in the factory before Richie was born. One arm had been crushed to near uselessness, and a network of damaged nerves caused him tolerable but constant discomfort. Perhaps it was because of this he could not bring himself to feign enthusiasm for Richie beginning his years as an employable man. Perhaps he liked to know that his son was of as little material value as he felt himself to be. 

The year elapsed and still nothing happened to suggest a course of action. He was surprised that no event had had occurred to shape the future, but not unduly alarmed. 

He had always drank with the resourceful enthusiasm of someone afraid it would be taken away at any moment, and he began to realize that was exactly what he had expected to happen—that a plan or circumstance would announce itself in his life to make the way he drank impossible. 

He felt a sense of indignance when he began to notice slight physical signs of his abuse—around his nostrils threaded veins were becoming apparent, and the skin around his eyelids was often swollen and a livid corpse-like purple. 

How was this possible, when he was only twenty? 

His stomach, too, was suffering inordinately for what seemed to him only usual behavior. He shifted restlessly in his bed, the feeling of trapped air migrating around his guts and sometimes suddenly changing tack so that it felt as though it had settled dangerously in his chest. 

He wondered could you have a heart attack from constipation and diarrhea, the tension creeping over his heart and around the back of his shoulders, a jagged and precarious net of pain which worsened with every breath he took, so that he could only take small shallow ones which did not move his body at all and he felt that he might lose consciousness. 

It did sound worrying, he knew that, but he struggled to feel worried. He was with people every night of the week who drank the same way he did, what made him so different that he was going to die of it? When there was nobody obvious to hand, he walked down to the new clubhouse the bikers had started in a shed off Paddy Brown’s Road, calling themselves the Freewheelers. Of course he did not think yet about the fact that the rotation of people alternated through his own evenings which remained the same, their once-a-week sprees fitting in seamlessly to his full-time pursuit.

But still. Not to worry. Something would make itself known, he assumed, and he would make the most of the leisure now, seeing his friends as much as he liked, long hilarious nights around kitchen tables, the burst of euphoria that came with true, painful laughter was so extreme and powerful that it felt obviously to be the real point of life.

One afternoon in town when he was walking around with a bottle of Lucozade waiting for one of the lads to finish work and meet him, he passed a little store front being renovated in the Apple Market and asked the fellow painting the sign what was coming in.

An Italian restaurant, he said looking pleased. The man who bought it is moving down from Dublin, but he’s from Rome originally he told me.

Richie felt a rare stir of decisiveness and desire and asked if he knew were they looking for staff.

I’d say they must be, come back on Saturday when I’m finishing up and I’ll write down his phone number for you.

He thanked the fellow and walked on feeling warm, wonderful, the glow of volition inside him and rendering the evening ahead rich and meaningful. 

Richie had his first shift at Mario’s three weeks later, the day before the grand opening.

Who’s Mario? he asked Bella, the daughter of the owner who was explaining the menu and feeding the new staff little samples in dinky paper cups then demanding they give her three adjectives to describe what they tasted. 

Mario is nobody, she sighed, My father thought people would like that name better than any of ours. He’s been called Phil his whole life, which doesn’t exactly sing with Italian glamour. 

Why not Bella’s? Richie asked her, this harried, pretty woman in her thirties not wearing a ring.

She laughed. Let’s just say I wasn’t the favored child until very recently, when I was the only one who would move down here to do this, she gestured around at the dangling fairy lights and fake plants they had just festooned the low ceiling with.  

Do your brothers and sisters not have any interest in restaurants?

No. My sister is married and has young children to look after and my brothers are interested in having a lot of money and people knowing who they are. Maybe they would have wanted it if it was in Dublin or London or Rome but not down here, she said, and he felt mildly cut. 

He didn’t like when people spoke about Waterford as though it wasn’t a real place. It made his lack of momentum feel darker than it usually did. She noticed him turn away and end his curiosity and touched him lightly on his shoulder.

I don’t mean to offend you. I like it just fine here. I think it suits me, and he smiled back at her, wanting to make her like it even more than she did, wanting for things to be a success and her to become the golden child of the family. 

The waiters were all given white shirts and waistcoats and green aprons to wear because that was the usual get-up in Italy and he felt pleasure trying it on that evening. He had a room let for eight weeks in Merchant’s Quay and he thought after that he would have enough wages saved to find somewhere more settled, longer-term. 

The menu was deliberately crowd-pleasing, almost everyone ordered pizzas and spaghetti bolognese and lasagne, but there was a slightly more challenging special every day which Richie enjoyed hearing about from Bella and tasting. He repeated with fondness her enthusiastic advocation for each one even to families who expressed their forceful disinterest toward him as he spoke, the ravioli filled with squash puree and walnut sauce, the squid and roasted red peppers, the gnocchi made with spinach and goat’s cheese. 

Bella had a friend of hers come and help her paint a big mural on one wall of a bountiful table full of food and wine, surrounded by laughing friends touching glasses. Bella wasn’t as good a painter as her friend but Richie could see it was meaningful to her to be a part of it, and he enjoyed seeing the small sliver of tongue poking out of her mouth while she concentrated. 

After the first week, having survived his first minor disasters, he began to feel that he was good at what he was doing and that it made sense of him as a person somehow. Bella appreciated him. One evening she came into the kitchen white-faced and said she had accidentally served meat to a man who claimed he was a lifelong vegetarian who had never endured the passing of flesh over his lips before.

Which one? asked Richie, immediately suspicious. She described him, Kevin, a pretentious and pretty boy Richie had gone to school with whose current passion was cultivating an air of long-haired mysticism. He scoffed. Tell him I saw him with his face in a bag of sausage and chips every Saturday night for five years, he told her. 

She didn’t, but the knowledge made her laugh, and calmed her down. 

He was at ease moving around, fluid and intuitive. It was because it felt like a performance, he thought. Every night was like the beginning of a new play in which he held a peripheral but crucial role. There was something extremely soothing in the way he was simultaneously on show and necessarily discreet. It was a situation which addressed the discomfort of his life to this point, the dread of ever being a burden on others and the dread of nobody ever paying attention to him. His fear of other people receded in this specificity, where he had a role to fulfill and information to impart and receive and because he was playing a role he was able to respect himself more than he did at other times, straightening his back and making eye contact and smiling boldly.

Six weeks in, on a Friday evening after service ended he drank three large glasses of leftover wine with Bella and Luke, the nicest chef. He was a gregarious Frenchman who made up for being from the wrong romantic European country with the extravagant smacking sounds of enjoyment he made as he cooked, and a general enthusiasm for bringing new food to this place he had moved to for love and where he had been routinely appalled ever since by the sullenly ugly, limp meals on offer. The three of them gossiped about the other two waiting staff, Deirdre and Thomas, teenagers whom they suspected of recently beginning an affair. 

Deirdre is always smiling now, have you noticed that? asked Bella, and it’s ever since we had the night out and the two of them went off together at the end of it.

Maybe she’s just smiling because she loves pasta so much, said Richie, and they laughed and he was pleased. 

You love pasta so much, said Luke fondly, reaching over and pinching his cheek, you’re getting nice and fat now.

Hey! said Richie, but he had always enjoyed being teased with obvious affection and he didn’t mind it at all.

No, man, it’s a good thing, said Luke. You looked bad when you first started. Not joking, I asked her if she was sure you were going to keep turning up. But you’re doing so great. My best waiter, no mistakes.

Bella smiled at the two of them dopily, her low tolerance for alcohol sated by her share of the now-empty bottle.

I’m tired. Can you open up in the morning, Rich? Remember we have a birthday lunch booking at midday so get here by half-nine to set up, please. I’ll be here at eleven, and she slid the second set of keys over to him. 

When Richie left it was only a little after midnight, and he was exultant in the fine weather and the warmth of his new friendships. He walked down onto the quay and felt his body to be stronger and more useful than before, and a dreamy liquidity beginning in his limbs from what he had drank. It was so lovely to be able to drink only a little bit, he thought. Working at the restaurant had been good for him in that way. He was busy trying to get it right and be present for Bella and the rest of them and hadn’t seen much of his usual crowd, hadn’t drank in that way for a few weeks now. This didn’t feel like a sacrifice because he had a drink with the restaurant staff most nights. 

These evenings tended to end with one or more of them yawning compellingly, reminding the rest that they were gathered together because they had worked hard for a long time and that they would do so again tomorrow. There was drunkenness, but not the sort which caused physical intrusions the like of which had troubled him before he started to work there. All of this he reflected upon on his languid stroll, glad and surprised that something so significant could change without any enormous will or effort on his part. He had been right, perhaps, that it hadn’t been himself but only his circumstances which needed shifting. He was so pleased, in fact, so proud of the departure from his old way of being, that it occurred to him he could go and see the usual crowd right that moment, and have some more to drink with them. 

He was, as it happened, passing the building where his friend Gary Clancy lived and had hosted drinking sessions every Friday night for the past year, and he stopped and stood outside of the door. He thought for a moment, doing a quick calculation and figured if he got to sleep by three he would be absolutely fine to get to the restaurant for half-nine. Young man, full of health, life, light. He could do anything, do it all.

He was buzzed upstairs and received with a rousing round of whooping and shouts of Here he is, the man himself!, a welcome phrase which had always struck Richie as almost unbearably cheering, that feeling of everyone being happy to see you, telling you the night had been lacking something before your arrival. Sitting around the kitchen table were Clancy and four other fellows he knew to varying degrees, boys he had been to school with, and one older man whom he knew only to see. The man was exotically named Lucien though he was a lifelong local and suspected of giving himself the title. He was also, Richie recalled vaguely, suspected of being gay because he lived alone with two cats and put care into his appearance. This suspicion was overlooked or forgiven though because the appearance he took care with was one of great ferocity, safety pins stuck into all manner of surfaces, and hair spiked into enormous threatening towers. In Camden maybe Lucien would have been nothing remarkable but here the dedication to an image as singular and unusual as this was regarded with a twisted respect. To stand out was so abhorrent and insane that someone who did it fully on purpose was accepted as a mad genius. Richie, who had always despaired of his every variance, could see that it almost didn’t matter what you were—so long as you swore yourself to it with total arrogant pride there was little anyone could do to use it against you. 

Two yellow-blonde girls he didn’t know sat on an armchair, spilling limbs over each other and whispering privately, almost primly despite the bottles of sticky cider they were huddled round and the fags with dangling long ash in their hands, occasionally hooting with laughter. One of them looked up at him when he scraped out a chair to join the table, he nodded hello and in response she crossed her eyes very quickly and fully before returning to her conversation, which made him smile. He apologized for not having brought anything to drink.

Not at all, Richie boy, admonished Clancy, and drew out a new bottle of vodka and a two-liter of red lemonade, You probably left this here another time, anyway. Drink up. Where have you been the last while, we missed you. 

He enjoyed hearing this, of course he did. He told them about the new job and that he’d been busy settling in, but he’d missed them too. He said this bashfully, but he liked that they were saying these things to each other, it made his being there alright. These were his friends. He tipped his cup toward the other lads and said, Nice to meet you, to Lucien, who winked his approval back as Richie downed his drink in one. They all cheered and a spark of celebration entered the room. Mark—a nice introspective guy who had been derisively nicknamed Dark Mark in school because of his thoughtfulness which sometimes appeared to be moodiness but really wasn’t, not in any bad way—Mark was having a baby with the girl he’d been with since third year in school. He had just found out a week before. They cheers-ed to that again, and Clancy asked him, How does that feel, are you shitting it?

Gary, said one of the girls sharply, so that Richie assumed she was Gary’s girlfriend and did not appreciate the implication that lifelong commitments were something to be avoided. 

No, it’s grand, said Mark. It is scary, like, yeah, but I think it will be good craic. I’m one of four and I always thought I’d want the same as that, none of us were ever alone for five minutes but in a nice way, you know, feeling part of the gang.

And Richie thought no, he did not know, couldn’t imagine a feeling like that. He drank again, draining the second cup, feeling it burn into his chest cavity and the bubble of levity and pleasure travel further into his brain.

I’m proud of you Mark, I think you’ll be a smashing dad, said Lucien quietly. He stood up and put on a record, something loud and indecipherable and modern-sounding, exciting.

I don’t know, said Paul, one of the other lads from their year. Wasn’t it Mark who rang Mr Hutchinson that time and told him his son was dead? 

There was a moment of quiet while they sorted through the past to clarify the memory and once they had they began to laugh, really, really laugh, until it felt like coming up on drugs and there was no way to escape it. Oh, oh, they cried, wiping tears from their eyes and throwing their heads back, shaking themselves to try and recover.

They had been eleven and it was April Fool’s Day. Their teacher Mr Hutchinson was a friend of one of their fathers, and it was decided for the prank that year they would get his phone number from the father’s address book and call him. Mark was the calmest of them and one of the funniest, so he was chosen, and they pooled their coins at the phone box and dialed the number. It was only as Mr Hutchinson answered that Mark realized they hadn’t actually planned for what to say if he answered, there was no script to follow. Desperately grasping in his mind for anything to fix on, he recalled that Mr Hutchinson had an adult son in Dublin.

Hello? Hello? said Mr Hutchinson.

Hello, sir, said Mark in a gruff disguise voice, and all the rest of them listening instantly dissolved into silent giggles, Mr Hutchinson?

Yes that’s me.

Mr Hutchinson . . . . Panic setting in now, needing to do something, make a big splash, impress everyone, Mr Hutchinson, I’m very sorry to tell you this but your son is dead. Up in Dublin. Your son died.

There was silence on the other end of the phone and surrounding him amongst the gawping faces of his friends. Then he heard a gasp down the line, and weak murmuring sound.

Oh, no, oh, Danny, no, no, please, no.

Mark’s eyes widened and he said in his ordinary voice, No, no, don’t worry Mr Hutchinson, it’s only an April Fool, don’t worry at all, please don’t worry, and slammed the phone down.

He spun round to look at the others, begging them with his eyes to tell him it was going to be okay and he was alright. Richie had his hand over his mouth and was shaking his head side to side involuntarily, trying to go back in time. There was a general sense of appalled shock. Then Paul and another boy had let out a few shrill sniggers, and then the whole lot of them had collapsed with hysterical disbelieving laughter, even Richie. He remembered how it had come flying out of him, out of the depths of his chest like a cough would, hacking and unstoppable. They laughed and laughed at the disgraceful absurdity of it, at how amazingly far Mark had overshot. They knew that it was a dreadful thing, and that they would soon pay for how bad it was, but for the moment they banged and thumped the phone box in their perverse glee, and it was a beautiful thing as well as an ugly one.

They laughed the same way now, ten years later and most of the same lads sitting around that kitchen table. When Richie met the eyes of another of them he started all over again. They reached out blindly for one another’s arms to squeeze for emphasis, and the physical sensation of happiness was so immense that Richie could hardly believe he had almost not come here tonight.

Near 4 a.m. there was an awareness that the drink would be gone before long, Clancy shaking the near-empty bottle as he poured from it.

We’re almost out, boys and girls, he said with a sigh. The room was dense with smoke and good feeling. Richie, could you get a bottle of something from the restaurant do you think?

Richie, vibrantly red in the face already, flushed further and exhaled in a conciliatory way. Ahh, he said, Ahh, I don’t think so. They take the stock all the time.

Clancy put his hand on his heart in a swooning gesture of offence. Of course they do, I’m not suggesting we rob the place, who do you take me for? We’ll get it back to them later today, I’m good for it. It might not be too often we’re all together like this, Mark about to reproduce and all.

It’s only because of this uncivilized country, said Lucien languidly, reclining on the armchair with one of the sleeping girls curled around his shoulders like an enormous drunk cat. When I was in Paris we went out to get bread when the bakeries opened at dawn and bought wine to drink while we queued for it. Only in Ireland do the government treat its people as too incompetent to decide what to do with their bodies.

Richie nodded forcefully despite thinking to himself that this was surely not a quite accurate summary of world politics. 

All the same he had to admit that eating a lot of bread and drinking wine sounded an extremely appealing concept in this moment. Maybe there would be bread handy to take at Mario’s as well as wine. The inside of his chest felt hollow and acrid and he wanted to push something soft down his esophagus. He thought also of how good it would feel to have a whole bottle of cool white wine before him. Like vodka, white wine had a quality of bottomless enjoyment. Not only did he have infinite tolerance for consuming them, they also had the capacity to endlessly promise good cheer. So long as there was more of them there was more pleasure to be had. This promise was not exactly a false one. It was true that whatever way they interacted with his brain he could feel no worry or sadness so long as they kept him company. Enough beer made him full and grumpy and red wine made him fall asleep, but there had never so far in his life been a time when he had tired willingly of drinking vodka or white wine, stopping only because he couldn’t get any more.

Before long they had persuaded him that it wasn’t such a big production as he was making it, and they would have the bottles replaced by the end of the day. He did notice that they were bottles plural now rather than singular but this was to be expected. One bottle between them would be gone in a few minutes, if he was going to go all the way there he may as well pick up a few. They were good for it, they weren’t mean lads. For the most part they weren’t short of a few quid. He was only doing this because they couldn’t get it anywhere else. 

I’ll come with you, said Lucien, standing and stretching. I need the walk.

A brief absurd flare of alarm as Richie thought of the rumors of him being gay or otherwise odd, then he scolded himself for being judgmental. The streets were empty but strewn with recently abandoned junk food which made him feel a moment of worry as he understood that the things they were doing had ended for the rest of the city.

The night is young, said Lucien, catching his eye and wriggling his brows enigmatically. He was quite handsome beneath the ghostly make-up, a strong big nose and a mouth which stretched so wide it made Richie think of the tragedy and comedy theatre masks. 

Is it still night? Richie asked, and began doing the latest and what would turn out to be final set of calculations: If we get back by five I’ll stop drinking at seven and have a shower and then I’ll be fine to get back in to open up. He had stopped kidding himself about sleep now. 

Who cares? said Lucien, You decide. All of the things you believe are fixed are just a matter of words. Call them something different and they change. It’s night if we want it to be, because whatever it is, it’s our own to spend. My old man used to obsess over the hours between 8 and 10 p.m., none of us or even my mam were allowed to talk to him then because he said it was the only part of his life that belonged to him. For years I had that too, I believed there was something special and sacred about night-time. And then I grew up a bit, got to see a few things, and I realized it was all a con and a trick to keep people like him in their place. In reality it can be night-time whenever you like—those things we like about night-time, we can have them whenever we like if we just decide to have them. There’s no special rule that says it has to be dark when you have a drink, or light when you start work. Good morning, goodnight, happy Christmas—who cares? Live how you want to, when you want to. That’s the trick.

He had linked Richie’s arm loosely as he spoke which made him feel nervous and luxurious with novelty. They arrived to the restaurant, Lucien singing Christmas songs beneath his breath, light irresistible mania. Richie opened the door and led them toward the storeroom where he picked up two bottles of white wine, feeling relieved by their slender familiar weight. Lucien was picking up more, turning something out of a bag and filling it with red wine.

I don’t think we should take that much, Richie said, mildly.

Relax, kid. It’s only because I don’t drink white wine, said Lucien and shrugged at the perfect and irrefutable logic he had employed. 

Richie would not in the future remember a full narrative trajectory from this time onward, only moments and images and the feeling of time dipping in and out haphazardly. When he tried to recall the anxiety he must surely have felt, there was nothing, only smooth absence. For a while, later, this was the focus of his agony: that he couldn’t recall feeling even slightly bothered about what would in a matter of hours fill him with a degree and quantity of shame which he had never withstood before. The mystery of his missing anxiety plagued him in the aftermath, as though there was some moment of transition he could identify if he looked long enough, between the unfeeling person and the feeling one which followed. How could it be, he thought frantically, how could it be that the same situation hours apart could affect him with such wild difference?

But it was true, and there was no mystery to solve. There was no key moment, no switch flipped. He was not repressing a memory of secret panic which he had hidden from Lucien. Lucien had not threatened him with violence, or even with dislike. It was only that the time had come where feelings had ceased and mere sensation remained, and even sensation only at a remove, tickling some phantom limb. He had stood there while Lucien loaded up, and then wandered into the fridge and then the freezer for some reason, wanting something to eat, putting things on the ground, forgetting about them, rifling. One image he retained was of Lucien absurdly leaving the walk-in fridge with a large salami under each arm. 

Then it was Lucien with two laden clanking bags of wine on the ground before him, but going back for one more he had seen in the fridge because, he said, it was already open so it would go to waste anyway if they didn’t have it. Out in the dining room as Richie groped for, dropped, and tried to find the keys, Lucien had stood before the mural which Bella and her friends had painted and laughed at it. He said something mildly disparaging, Richie remembered, though he did not remember exactly what—was it that it was bourgeois? Or boring? Or simply bad, badly rendered? The words were lost but he did remember Lucien uncorking the open bottle of red and pouring it into his hands and flicking it and throwing it at the mural, making some joke, Richie laughing at it, there being a feeling of harmless hyperactive fun. He could just about see the image of the mural with splatters of red wine splayed across it. 

There was then an image of being back at Clancy’s kitchen table and drawing deeply on the bottle of white wine, which was not even cool as it had been in his thirsty imagination, ash everywhere, the burn in his lungs combined with the acid of the wine deeply satisfying. The girls had gone, he thought. Lucien was putting on more exciting music and was dancing, strutting around the room. Still a feeling of fun, of fuck-what-may-come. There was little concrete after that. Hanging over a toilet, almost-clear vomit. Reaching over and running the shower at full blast to mask the noise. Once he had got it all out, having a ridiculous thought that if they heard the shower run, they would wonder why he hadn’t had a shower. Putting his head under the shower to wet it and make sense of the fact the shower was running. Once he had done that, taking a tube of toothpaste and squirting it into his mouth, putting his mouth to the tap and mixing the two. Collapsing down beside the bath, brain blood pulsing. That for a few minutes and then running the cold tap and shoving his face beneath it. Roaring into the drain to clear his throat. Slapping his face with more water. Going back to the table feeling he had got one over on everyone there, as though they’d never have known what he was doing. Sensation of being annoying, sensation of being pushed into a corner, people laughing. And then nothing until the next day.

In the moment before waking his body was already laden with expansive dread, knowing more than he did. The top part of his chest was so heavy and dense with fright and sorrow that he felt sure he would scream. His pulse thumped disturbingly, erratically, and he put his hand to his throat to touch it, push it back inside of himself. There were too many bad things to think of and he told himself to be calm and slow but it was no use and he sat up on the couch where he lay and put his head in his hands and cried for a few moments. There were two bodies on the other side of the room but they were still and he didn’t wake them with his noises.

He needed to know what time it was but he also badly did not want to know. He would have chosen to remain in his brief suspension if it held any comfort at all or the possibility of returning to oblivious sleep but there was no way to move but forward now, the ignorance as excruciating as the truth would be. He turned on the radio to a low volume and waited until he heard what time it was, just after midday. Some of the worst of the alarm had left his body as soon as he knew how bad it was and that nothing could now be salvaged. The lunch party would be arriving, he thought. He hoped that when Bella had come in it had not been so bad that she would have to close for the whole day. He thought of her having to clean up after him. He thought about how much money it might be that he now owed to her. At least the others would help with that. They weren’t the worst, it wasn’t their fault. It was him. He was the one with the key, the one with that responsibility. She hadn’t given a key to Lucien, had she, only to him. He cringed to think of Lucien and their conversation, their chummy familiarity in the dead night. He wondered about the parts he didn’t remember. 

He rubbed his thumb under his eyes and over his cheeks which he felt to be hot and with the small raised bumps beneath the surface which sometimes came. He knew there was no choice but to go there to the restaurant before he sobered up completely and lost his nerve and would hide from it forever. There were the keys to return and he would have to do that or else she would be frightened he would come back again that night and would need to get the locks changed. The idea of himself as a person to be frightened of was so wrong and obscene, and yet he had to credit it. He could imagine how she would feel after this, because it was how he felt too. He had never felt scared of himself before, that he was a suspect person who couldn’t be predicted. He had been sick in the gardens of his friends’ parents’ houses, and kissed girls he had wished he hadn’t, he had been embarrassed plenty, but he had never experienced this depth of shame and total bewilderment at his own actions. He couldn’t think about that now. 

Around the corner from Mario’s he hesitated, and took the keys out of his pocket to hold them in his hand like a white flag, so that when she saw him she would know he wasn’t there to make any further trouble. Outside he winced at the window and shaded his eyes, lingering back in the gutter so as not to cause a scene. Elaine and Thomas were near the front by the pizza oven, the two teenage romantics he had been laughing about with Bella not that long ago. They stared at him, not with disgust exactly but with frank and indiscreet interest. Is that what sort of person you are?, their expressions seemed to say. Is that what people can be like?

Luke the chef crossed past them and came out of the door, shutting it firmly behind him.

You get out of here now, man, he told Richie.

No I know, I came because I still had the keys. Is Bella here, can you send her out so I can tell her how sorry I am? And that I’ll pay her for everything? He looked into the window again and saw that there were customers sitting down which gave him a small sense of relief, and he thought he saw Bella’s figure moving in the back. 

She won’t want to see you. I’ll take the keys and I’ll make up the bill and make sure you get it. You spoiled a lot of produce too, so it will be a big bill.

Yes, said Richie, almost enjoying the feeling of endless self-loathing reverberating in his chest, glad to have some concrete unpayable debt to focus it on. 

Why did you do that? Was it worth it for some party? We had something good between us here and you totally fucked it. There’s no point in begging her for your job by the way, I’ll quit before I let you work here again.

No, no, of course not. No, it wasn’t worth it, and, no, I wouldn’t ask for it back. I understand what I’ve done.

Do you? You really hurt her. This isn’t like some corporation where it doesn’t matter and what you do doesn’t affect anyone. It’s her family, and she decided to trust you. To them, it will be like she did this, like she lost the money.

I’ll pay the money back, said Richie.

Yeah, yeah, a quid a week for a hundred years? With what will you pay it back? How? He sneered, I’ll tell you something now, and it will be the last thing I ever say to you. You want to knock this on the head right now. Today. You don’t want to get into habits. You don’t want to be the old guys you see with piss dried into their pants sitting at the bar every day of their lives who people don’t want to sit near. You’re not cut out for it. Some people are, they can handle it and they can stop when they like to. I can tell by the look of you, you don’t have the energy to live and to keep behaving like this. It will be one or the other, and you don’t have too long to decide which it will be. You’re weak. Weak, weak, weak.

As he repeated this he touched Richie’s shoulder in a way that indicated solace, but then he turned back around and left him alone and that was as far as the comfort would extend, an appeal for Richie to see how weak he really was.

The post His Drunk Excuses Only Last the Night appeared first on Electric Literature.

Mirna caught Piss Pants hanging around her car when she returned from the superstore. His pants were soaked as usual, but it was hard to tell if the stains were old or from a more recent incident. For as long as Mirna had been living out of her car in the parking lot of the abandoned Spring River Shopping Center, Piss Pants had been sneaking over to wave at Mirna’s baby. The baby wailed at the strange man. Mirna marched towards him, gripping the plastic bags filled with diapers, potato chips, and buy-two-get-one-free sodas. The purchase had eaten up most of whatever money she had left. Piss Pants made kissy faces through the window and put his lips against the glass. She hollered, and he ignored her. He mumbled some nonsense to the baby, who cried louder. Mirna shouted and ran at him, dropping some of her bags. Piss Pants scurried off to the abandoned shoe store he called home, and the baby continued to cry for hours after.

Several others had set up camp in the shopping center, living either out of their cars or one of the empty shops. They wandered the parking lot looking for change, food, and cigarette butts. Mirna had given them all nicknames based on their worst features. Piss Pants, Shit Pants, Toothless, Lazy Eye. She watched them amble between the stores as she ate chips and drank soda from the removable cup holder she used as a mug. The baby looked up at her from the old diaper box that Mirna had repurposed as a bassinet. He began to cry again. She jingled her keys for him and said “It’s okay” over and over in a baby voice until he piped down.

That night, Mirna woke to Shit Pants and Toothless knocking on the car roof. They pulled on the door handles and spit on the windows. Thick ropes of mucus ran down the glass. Mirna hit the lock button over and over, hoping the sound would scare them. “Let us in, baby,” they begged. Mirna told them to get fucked. “We’re cold and it’s raining,” Shit Pants said. It was neither cold nor raining. They banged their fists on the hood. Mirna continued to curse at them. The baby began to cry. “Wah, wah, wah,” the men said. Mirna waved her tire iron at them. Shit Pants exposed himself and, when he got tired of tugging on his limp penis, peed on her front bumper. Toothless pushed on the car, rocking it back and forth. She turned on the engine, and Shit Pants kicked her passenger-side headlight out. She put the car in drive and peeled out of the parking lot, leaving both men on the ground.

She pulled over after a few miles and fed the baby while she ate potato chips. Crumbs rained down on the baby’s head. When he finished, he nestled against her chest. She did not want to name him yet because she felt that she didn’t really know him, and how could she give a little stranger a name he’d carry forever? He was much smaller than any baby she’d held before. His eyes drooped so low they were nearly parallel with his nostrils, and the space between his nose and mouth was completely smooth. When he cried, he felt like a vibrating cell phone. He’d gained some weight in the two weeks they’d lived at the shopping center but not much.

The baby lay in his box in the backseat as Mirna drove down the coast. She could not return home with the baby. They’d know just from his face that she had tried more than once to drink him away. All she could do was drive. She took caffeine pills instead of pulling over to sleep because there would be a new Shit Pants and Toothless waiting for her in every parking lot.

Mirna followed the parkway south and passed through several shore towns in the throes of late summer. In the distance was the purple and green glow cast by Ferris wheel lights. Every few miles, she turned on the light and cooed at the baby to make sure he was still alive. She had a quarter tank left, and twenty dollars on the pre-paid debit card in her purse. She had another ten in cash from pan handling the day before. She didn’t want to think about gas and money, so she didn’t. When tolls came up, she just drove through the express lanes, and the digital sign screamed TOLL UNPAID in red letters. The exit signs counted down. Exit 10, Exit 9. What happened after Exit 0? Would the car fall into the ocean? Would they have to doggy paddle all the way to Delaware?

The car ran out of gas somewhere near Atlantic City. She put a rag in the window and walked south, carrying the baby in his box and a duffel bag of their things. Cars rushed past them. The draft they threw off nearly knocked Mirna over. She made it two miles before a tractor trailer pulled over in front of her. The truck driver jogged towards her. He shouted something, but she couldn’t hear him.

“Jesus Christ, girl, you’re lucky I was paying attention,” he said. “You’re going to end up in someone’s windshield.” The baby, who’d slept through the entire walk, began to cry once the man came near. The driver peeked into the box. Mirna pulled the blanket over the baby’s face. “Is that a—just get in the truck.” Mirna’s shoes were starting to come apart and her ankles were on fire. The baby’s box grew heavier in her arms. She followed the driver.

She and the baby rode in the sleeper cab. He had so much hair already and still smelled a bit like blood. She needed to do a better job for him. She wanted him to remember the warmth of her body, her smile, the scent of her hair. Mirna remembered her own mother as screaming, crying, or breaking dishes, then apologizing the whole next day for her behavior. She hadn’t been feeling herself, she’d say. She’d had, had a long week.

The truck driver kept asking her questions. What was her name? Where was she from? Where was she going? She told him to keep heading where he was heading.

“I just dropped off a shipment of shellfish to one of the casinos,” he said. “You should’ve seen all the oysters. I had a damn ocean-load.”

The truck driver was a long man. The headrest of the driver’s seat came up to the base of his neck. It was hard to tell if he was trying to grow a beard or had just forgotten to shave. He must’ve been in his thirties. When he wasn’t talking, he squirmed in his seat or ground his teeth. The baby cried, and Mirna rocked him. She didn’t need to hide his face anymore. The truck driver wasn’t smart enough to figure out what it meant.

He talked on. “You know, you wouldn’t believe how far some food travels. When I long-haul, I take stuff that already rode a boat over from China and drive it from California to New York City. I’ve met heads of lettuce that’ve seen more of the world than me. I’m Mike, by the way.”

“Mirna.”

“And what about the little ‘un?”

“He doesn’t have a name yet.”

“No name,” Mike said. “Can’t go through life with no name. Why not just name him after his dad?”

Mirna cut him off before he could continue. “I don’t know the father.” Mirna did know the baby’s father. Explaining the whole thing felt like too much. No, he wasn’t actually her cousin. He was the son of a family friend, so she called him her cousin. Everyone at the bonfire was drunk, and she’d snuck off to the woods with him. Every girl back home had gone into the woods with a boy at some point, and that hadn’t been her first time either. She had read online that an abortion was seven hundred dollars, and there was no way in hell she or anyone she knew had that kind of money lying around. That’s why she’d tried to drink him away. That’s all there was to it.

“Hm, well he wouldn’t be the first kid to not know his dad,” Mike said. “My dad—”

“Can you take me up to Hamilton?” Mirna asked. “I got an aunt there. Might take the train to New York.”

Mike agreed to take her but continued his story about his father marrying Mike’s first-grade teacher. Mirna looked into the baby’s face and tried to think of a name. His face revealed nothing but her past misdoings. The baby could be left at an orphanage, and Mirna could just go home, but there were no orphanages anymore, no nuns bringing foundlings in off the front step. And if there were, when the baby grew up, he would only have to look in the mirror to know that even before he was born, he hadn’t been loved. If she held onto him, she could at least tell him that once she’d had him, she never gave him up.

Mike spoke of his father, how he only used to see him twice a year and would be made to sleep on the couch, where in the early morning he would awake to the sound of his father and stepmother having sex. After they hit 42 North, he burned himself out on memories of his father and stayed quiet. Mike changed lanes often, and when he shifted gears, the truck let out a deep sigh like an old man being turned over in bed.

“There’s no aunt, is there?” he asked finally.

“How’d you figure?” Mirna said.

“Just a hunch. If you need somewhere to stay, I have a finished basement with a pull-out couch. I can’t let a young mother wander the streets. Just ‘til you figure out what you’re doing.” He described the layout of the basement to her in excruciating detail. How they could move furniture around to make things more comfortable. How the basement was always cold no matter what, and his theories as to why. “I’ve got space heaters though. No crib, obviously. That box will have to do.”

The truck came to a stop, and Mirna woke up with her head against the window. The baby squirmed in his box. Across the street was a brick apartment complex. Two dozen doors decorated its face.

“I’ve gotta see a friend real quick,” Mike said.

“You’re just gonna leave me in here?” Mirna said.

“Well, I’d invite you in for a drink, but Dave’s place isn’t the best for babies.”

Mirna rocked the baby just so she’d have something to do while she waited. She’d had a friend, Ann, who got pregnant their sophomore year, and Mirna had helped plan the shower and buy the baby toys. But once the kid was born, Mirna stopped seeing Ann because it was always such a hassle. She would either bring the little noise machine along or complain about how he’d kept her up all night. Then she’d be stuck staring at tired, rundown Ann and thinking about how her whole life was over at sixteen.

Mirna made sure the baby was lying on his back in the box. He wriggled and flexed his hands. He still didn’t have the strength to grip her finger. She hopped out of the truck and went after Mike. In the apartment, the only light sources were a cloudy fish tank and TV with a laptop plugged into it. Next to the kitchen was a pool table and cues where a dining room table belonged. Mike sat on a couch with two other guys who looked much younger than him. They watched a pirated movie that played on both the TV and the laptop. The two men, one of whom must’ve been Dave, stared at her through glassy eyes.

“What about—” Mike said.

“I just fed him,” she said, “and he can’t go anywhere.”

Dave led Mirna to the fridge. They had to squeeze between the pool table and the wall to get there. She took two wine coolers from the fridge’s deli meat drawer. “One for the road,” she said, but Dave gave no response.

She sat next to Mike on the couch, and he started up again. His tongue flicked every idea in his head out into the world. “I’m still thinking about how that kid has no name,” he said. “I mean it ain’t right.”

“I’m going to name him Baby,” she said.

Mike laughed. “What about when he’s forty-five?”

“Well, when he’s like four, I’ll change his name to Boy. At eighteen, he can be Man.”

“My grandfather had a dog he just called Dog,” Mike said. “What if you named him Dog?” Only he thought this was funny.

They talked a little longer and drank a little more. Mike didn’t take over the conversation this time. Mirna felt like she’d been granted a great permission. She told him about her parents and how they drank all day, and how even when they split up, they still argued on the phone weekly.

“Hey, hey, don’t cry,” Mike said. “Drinks getting you down. You need a little pick-me-up.”

They did a couple of bumps off a bread knife, and Mirna felt like she was strapped to a towline being pulled by a pack of wild dogs. Dave had fallen asleep on the couch. The third man threw chips at Dave’s open mouth. Mike got Mirna another wine cooler and kept ranting about how he didn’t know what his next move was and that he couldn’t spend his whole life driving; at one point he referred to the highway as his mistress. When he grew upset talking about having to give away his dog because he was barely home, Mirna decided she’d play some music on the small wireless speaker she found atop the fridge, but Mike just shouted over it. Mirna grabbed a pool cue and demanded Mike teach her to play, and he said he didn’t feel like it, so she mocked him until he taught her how to shoot. He guided her from behind because he was incapable of being subtle. They played one game, and he let her win, but she didn’t care because she still won, which meant she must have learned something, right?

Baby was fussing in his box when they got back to the truck. They picked up formula from an all-night pharmacy and drove to Mike’s place. “I’m sorry I was gone,” Mirna said to her son, “but I have a name for you now, Baby.”

Mike lived in a row home a few blocks from the Delaware River. Down the river, on the opposite bank, there was evidence of the Philadelphia skyline. Mike’s town was made up of row homes and corner storefronts with current lottery jackpots hanging in the windows. In the kitchen, Mike fed Baby from one of the bottles in Mirna’s bag. He rocked the child as he ate. Baby fell asleep nestled against Mike’s chest. Mirna watched them from the living room.

“All my half-siblings are a lot younger than me,” he said. “I learned how to do this stuff pretty early on.”

He found a bigger box for Baby and more blankets. He went into his coat closet and retrieved a small teddy bear, which he placed in the box. Mirna snatched it from him. Her cousin had a baby that had rolled over in the night and suffocated on a plush frog. Once she got Baby to stop squirming, she joined Mike in the living room. They drank a six pack together and watched some late-night movie. Mike kept turning away from the TV to look her up and down.

“You should sleep in my room tonight,” he said. “I’ll take the couch. Wouldn’t be much of a gentleman if I didn’t offer. Go ahead. Upstairs on the left.”

Mirna changed her clothes and threw out her blood-specked underwear. She wiped Baby clean with a damp piece of toilet paper. Little bits of it stuck to his face. Touching him was nerve-racking. He was like a fragile lamp that had already been broken once before. He sneezed and Mirna wiped the snot off him with a hand towel and then hung it back up.

Mike’s room was a hodge-podge of furniture he must’ve been given or had found in the trash. The dresser and one nightstand matched, but the other nightstand was a TV tray table covered in soda cans and cell phone chargers. Mirna slept on her side with Baby’s box on the floor next to her. She let her arm dangle from the mattress and stroked Baby’s chest. Beneath his sternum it felt as if something was dying to break out of him.

Mike woke her up when he climbed into bed next to her. “Can’t sleep on that couch after driving all day,” he said. “Don’t worry. You won’t even know I’m here.”

Mirna wiggled to the edge of the mattress. Throughout the night, Mike got up several times to spit in the bathroom sink and pee. Baby cried, and Mike mumbled for her to shut the kid up. Other than that, he and Baby slept through the whole night while Mirna lay awake listening to the dissonant music of their breathing.

Mike’s Wi-Fi password was a dozen numbers and letters stickered to the back of his router in the living room. It took Mirna several tries to type it into her phone. She searched her name and the word “missing.” A Mirna Rockford had been missing in Richmond, Virginia twelve years ago, but that was it. None of Mirna’s family or friends had posted anywhere that she hadn’t come home for over two weeks. Once you were eighteen, no one cared where you went. In her town, disappearing meant you had run off with a boy and would come back home in a year with a baby in your arms and your belongings in trash bags.

Mirna looked over at Baby, still lying in his box, and her duffel bag filled with the few things she owned. Mike snored away upstairs. In the daylight, it was hard to ignore the mess. Plastic bags and padded envelopes were thrown in the corners of every room. Dust and hair collected against the baseboards. There seemed to be crumbs everywhere, as if a farmer had come through and sown them all throughout the house.

There were two smaller bedrooms. One was filled with boxes of clothes and papers. The other just had a folding table against one wall and an old laptop charging on the floor. Mirna changed Baby’s diaper on the folding table. She did her best not to look at his face, and even considered getting a paper towel to cover it. Mike had yet to say anything about how Baby looked, but he’d only handled him in the dark.

Baby’s breathing was strange. It was shallow at times, and then he would fight to gulp down big breaths. Maybe he just hadn’t figured out how to do it yet. It was only his sixteenth day on Earth after all. Or maybe his inside was just as twisted up as his outside.

Mirna watched TV with Baby’s box next to her. She was uneasy about taking him out of it, as if all he needed to be safe from the world was a little cardboard. He cried; she held him, fed him, changed him again. She changed but didn’t use the shower. There was no telling when Mike would pop up.

He woke in the afternoon, left without saying a word, and returned with a half dozen grocery bags. He put the food away and sat next to her and Baby on the couch. Mirna hugged him. It had seemed like something she should do until she did it. He studied Baby. 

“Is that normal?” Mike asked. “His face, should it be like that? It looks like he’s having a rough time breathing.”

“It’ll straighten out,” Mirna said. “Newborns have squishy faces. Sometimes they need to settle.”

“Like dough.”

“Like what?”

“Oh, never mind.”

In the nights that followed, Mirna and Baby moved to the couch. No matter what Mike had promised beforehand, he would appear at the foot of the bed every night, complaining of his back and slide in next to her. In the mornings Mike played some kind of football game on an ancient video game console that was caked in dust. It buzzed, whirred, and would eject the disc at random. Mirna fed and changed Baby while she watched Mike curse at the game. When Baby didn’t need to be fed or changed, she felt like she was just waiting for him to need her again.

At night, they ate frozen entrees that Mike put in the oven and often forgot about until he smelled them burning. No one called Mirna looking for her. Someone she used to work with at the dollar store texted her what’s Jameel’s brother’s name? followed by sorry, wrong number. Mirna let her phone die.

After almost a week, Mirna returned to Mike’s bed where Mike tried to spoon her. She told him to get the fuck off, and he rolled over, pretending he had been asleep when he’d grabbed her. The next morning, he took up a weeklong haul. He left her with a pack of diapers and several cans of formula. “You should start figuring out what your next move is,” Mike said before leaving. “When I get back, you’re gonna need money if you want to stay longer.”

Mirna gave him her ten dollars in cash, and he left with it in his pocket.

The first few days alone with Baby were fine. It was just like when Mike was there, minus the distorted, crackling soundtrack of his old video games. She couldn’t figure out how to use the oven, so she only ate pretzels and crackers. Baby’s breathing grew worse. A little wheeze would come from his box, followed by coughing, and then he’d start to cry. “Shhh, little boy,” Mirna would say. “You’re too handsome to cry.” If he died, she didn’t know what she would do with him, but she guessed it didn’t really matter. She and Mike were the only ones who knew Baby existed.            

She used Mike’s laptop to check her card balance. She had sixteen dollars and forty-eight cents left. A bus ticket home was twenty-two. She looked around Mike’s house for spare change. She found a handful of ones and walked to a station two miles away, carrying Baby’s box in front of her. The prices on the website were outdated, and twenty dollars would only get her halfway home.

Instead, Mirna took a local line to a nearby fertility clinic she’d found online. They had to transfer twice and walk the last thirty minutes. It was Tuesday, and it was raining. Mike would be back on Monday. If she could get rid of Baby, maybe he’d let her stay for free a bit longer. She could get a job and save up money to move to New York City. She could live in Queens. She could get stuck in traffic in the tunnel, or Mike could take her with him to far-off places like Arizona. They could drop off okra, whatever that was, to restaurants all over America.

Mirna waited in the clinic parking lot for a couple to show. Every now and then a nurse came out to smoke or have an argument on the phone, and Mirna would duck behind a dumpster.

A couple didn’t arrive until noon. Mirna approached them, holding Baby. “Excuse me,” she said. The couple kept their heads down and went inside. So did the couple after them. An hour passed until another came.

“Excuse me,” she said. The husband was much older than his wife, who seemed to be pulling him through the parking lot like a child out on errands with his mother. The husband made eye contact with her.

“Gerald,” said his wife, pulling him along by the sleeve.

“Are you guys trying to have a kid?” she asked Gerald and not his wife.

“Well, we came to—”

“I have a boy here,” Mirna said holding out the box. “He’s got a breathing problem. I can’t afford to take care of him. I’m sure they’re charging you a lot in there. Just give me like two hundred dollars, and you can have him. You won’t ever see me again.”

“Do you need help?” the wife asked while Gerald pulled a crumpled five-dollar bill from his pocket.

“You seem like nice people,” Mirna said. “I think you’d all be very happy together. You don’t even have to pay me.”

“My friend volunteers at a shelter in Lawnside,” the wife said. “I can call someone. They can help you and your little boy.”

Mirna was paralyzed by the wife’s offer. To Mirna, a shelter meant an auditorium filled with beds of snoring, handsy men. It meant a social worker carrying Baby off to a foster home. It meant her and Baby being passed around from one underfunded program to another until there was nothing left of them but bones and hair.

The wife got in the car and made a phone call. She spoke, waited, then spoke some more while looking at Mirna.

“I’m sorry,” Mirna said. “It’s been a hard few days. I’m going to miss my bus.”

She ran. Baby cried as he bounced in his box. They hid in an empty retention pond and rested in the mud. Baby’s crying attacked Mirna’s ears. She covered his mouth with her hand and let him suckle her finger. “Hush-a-bye, don’t you cry,” she sang until he fell back asleep. When she grew tired of hiding, she closed the flaps of Baby’s box to protect him from the rain and walked back to the bus stop. After all the bus fare, she had nine dollars and some change left.

Mike’s basement was just as cluttered as the upstairs. Power tools with frayed electric cords decorated the floor. In a corner sat a pile of potting soil and concrete mix bags. There was an attempt at a home gym shoved off to one corner. Mirna beat the dust and dead bugs from the cot’s mattress. She changed Baby on the tool bench before lying down with him. Mirna didn’t leave the basement for the next two days except to fetch crackers and soda. She doted over Baby, hoping to make up for nearly giving him away to strangers. She did not raise her voice when he kept her up all night. She let him lay on her chest and not a single minute went by without her kissing the top of his head. Against her lips, his faint hairs felt like dandelion puffs.

Producing mucus seemed to be Baby’s only activity. He didn’t react to Mirna’s singing or baby talk anymore. In one of the many boxes in the basement, she found a bulb syringe and used it to drain his nose. The next two days were spent keeping Baby’s sinuses clear and watching the ankles of passersby through the basement windows. She plugged her phone in, turned it on, and waited for texts, missed calls, or voicemails to come in. The only messages were coupon code texts from stores and robocall voicemails warning her that her car’s extended warranty had expired. Her thumb hovered over the contact for “Home.” If her mother answered, she would have to shout, “This is Mirna, your daughter” because otherwise her mother would say, “Mirna who?” She’d probably huff and ask, “Do I have to come get you?” Mirna’s older sisters had run away from home all the time as teenagers. She and her mother would go to the bus station to pick up either Sara or Masha; they would always be wearing some guy’s sweatshirt. If her mother did come get her, she would do nothing but scream at the child the second he became even a mild inconvenience. She’d spit vodka-soaked threats until Mirna and Baby would be forced to run off again. 

Baby started to wheeze. Mirna burped him and rocked him. He spat up a glob of mucus on her shoulder, but the wheezing persisted. He could only breathe easily if he was held upright and bounced on Mirna’s knee. 

The day before Mike returned, Mirna wandered the neighborhood in search of somewhere to work. She filled out an application for a pizza place that also sold loose cigarettes and phone cards. Afterwards, she filled out another application at an all-night pharmacy. By the register was a rack of small stuffed animals. Baby had nothing of his own. Even Mirna and her sisters had had toys. Somewhere in her mother’s rowhome, Mirna’s childhood companion, Poofy Pig, was still stashed away. She bought a stuffed cardinal for Baby for five dollars and tried not to think of the single digit balance on her card.

In Mike’s basement, Mirna dangled the stuffed cardinal over Baby’s box. “Say hi to Mr. Cuddly Bird,” she said over and over, shaking the toy. Baby mostly looked through the bird. Mirna made chirping noises and danced the toy along the rim of the box until Baby gave her a reaction. Eventually he stretched his mouth into a shape that she told herself was a smile.

Mike returned on Friday, and the floorboards groaned beneath his weight. Mirna listened to him move from room to room in search of her. To look busy, she started changing Baby’s diaper, even though it was empty.

“What are you, a vampire?” Mike said, flicking on the basement light.

Mirna focused on Baby’s empty diaper. She hoped he would not ask her if she had a job or a plan.

Mike stood close. “I thought about you a lot while I was driving,” he said. His breath smelled of chewing gum and cheeseburgers. He wrapped his arms around her from behind and pawed at her hips and thighs. Baby winced, and Mirna hoped he would cry. He couldn’t seem to muster up the energy. Mike put his hand in Mirna’s pants pocket. She pried herself free.

“I have to put him down for a nap,” she said, and Mike retreated upstairs.

Even when he was gone, Mirna could feel Mike against her back. He had imprinted himself on the threads of her shirt. His scent was stuck in her nose. She changed and used the bulb syringe on herself. There was no getting rid of him. The entire house was covered in years of Mike particles. Every board and brick belonged to him, and she had spent enough time there that now she belonged to him too.

Mirna rocked Baby inside his box. She kept a dishrag on her shoulder for when he began to wheeze. It seemed like he’d never run out of mucus, like there was some oil drill in him, digging up endless yellow snot. At night, slants of moon light fell through the basement windows. Two men argued about money outside. Mirna dreamed of using Mike’s tools to tunnel into the neighbor’s basement; if she didn’t like that one, she’d dig to the next one, and the next one after that, until she dug into the side of the Delaware River and all of its murk cascaded over her and flooded every house in town. 

Baby continued to wheeze and howl. Mike came back downstairs. She braced herself for his cheeseburger breath and wandering hands, but he just stood at the bottom of the stairs. “What the hell’s that sound?” He looked into Baby’s box. “There’s something wrong with him. You should take him to the ER. I think his face might be stuck like that.”

“He’s fine,” Mirna said. 

“Listen, Tuesday I’m leaving on another long haul, then I’m picking up another shipment there and bringing that up to Canada, then I got another job lined up in Texas. Might pick up another shipment there. I don’t know yet.”

“Okay,” Mirna said.

“I don’t think you understand. I can’t be gone for almost two months and have a runaway and her baby in my house. You guys gotta get outta here, preferably tomorrow.”

“I just applied for a job at the pizza place.”

“Just go home. I’ll give you bus money. Shit, I’ll even drive you back myself. I was trying to do something nice, but this is too much.”

“I could work at the pizza place during the day and get a job somewhere else at night.”

“How old are you even?”

“I’ll be nineteen in two months.”

“Jesus Christ. You know if home’s bad, they got shelters and group homes and stuff like that. Look at this place. It ain’t in any shape for you two.”

“The road is my mistress,” Mirna said under her breath.

“His name is Baby. He lives in a box, for Christ sake,” Mike said. “Tomorrow, I’m taking you home.” He stomped upstairs.

Mirna rolled around on the bed for a bit. Baby began to wheeze and hack again. “Just shut up,” Mirna said. She found a spot on the basement floor to sit and cry, but she couldn’t throw a proper fit with Baby there. She remembered the month after the HVAC repairman had dumped Mirna’s mother, how she’d spent several nights crawling on the floor and wailing after drinking a bottle of peach schnapps. Sara and Masha would try to get her to go to bed or drink some coffee, while a ten-year-old Mirna called her mother a gross slut.

Mirna had spent so much of her life hanging out, drinking and watching her mother drink. She did not know where cities and states were, how money was made, why babies cried, or how you made them stop. Baby cooed, and Mirna played with his toes. “Is this a little piggy?” She wished she was smart. She wished she knew how to do things.

When Mirna came out of the basement, Mike was sprawled out on the couch playing a shooter game. Everything on the screen consisted of sharp polygons. The console struggled to keep the disc spinning, and the game froze for a moment. Mike ignored her. 

“I want to give him away,” she said.

“You can’t stay,” he said without looking away from the TV. “Motherfucker!” he yelled at the game.

“I don’t know what I’m doing. I named him Baby, and he lives in a box.”

Mike still refused to turn towards her. She thought about throwing her shoe at the TV. “I wanna leave him in a nice neighborhood. Something is really wrong with him. Something I don’t know how to fix. He’ll die in foster care.”

“Don’t do that for me,” Mike said.

“It ain’t for you, and it ain’t for me either.”

“We can go tomorrow night,” Mike said. “I’m too tired to do anything else today. You know, this is the first thing you’ve done since you got here that’s made any sense.” He patted the seat next to him, and she sat there, watching him play his game.

On their last day together, Mirna tried to find something to leave Baby in. If it was cold or raining, the box wouldn’t be enough. She thought about putting tin foil over the top, but there wasn’t much she could do about keeping the sides from turning soggy. Mike had refused to give her money for a car seat with a cover. 

She found an old pet carrier in the basement. She soaked one of her shirts with soap and hot water and scrubbed out the carrier before lining the inside with bath towels. To test it, she put Baby inside with a blanket and checked on him every minute. With her face in the door of the carrier, she tried to tell him a story, but she couldn’t come up with names for the characters or made-up places, so she settled for humming “Mary Had a Little Lamb.”

That night Mike took her to a neighborhood about an hour north. He said a lot of New York City commuters lived there: editors-at-large, Wall Street guys, startup bros. It was the first time she’d seen Mike’s actual car, a beat-up sedan with a trash bag and plastic wrap where the rear passenger window should’ve been. Mike wouldn’t let her sit in the passenger seat and made her sit in the back with Baby. “He’s gonna be alone all night,” Mike said. The floor of the car was filled with old fast food bags that had grown stiff with grease. Mirna stepped on a paper cup and felt soda seep into her shoes. The whole ride, Mike’s makeshift window billowed.

They pulled into a subdivision of large brick-front homes with long driveways. One had a fountain in the front yard lit up by landscaping lights. Mike stopped in front of one of the first houses they passed.

“Not here,” Mirna said. The house was nice, and the family probably was too, but she knew to always turn down the first boy to ask you to dance. She had Mike drive all through the development. Streets with French-sounding names branched off the main road every hundred feet or so. An assortment of luxury SUVs were parked in every driveway. Over the fences, Mirna could see inground pools and gazebos. She never thought this many people with that much money could exist in one place.

“Here,” she finally said.

The house wasn’t the biggest or the nicest on the block. The grass was higher than the other lawns, and the white siding was turning green. The owners seemed to have a little less—or maybe just cared a little less—than everyone else in the neighborhood. They didn’t need everything to be perfect. Mirna thought maybe they would be okay with Baby’s face. She put Baby in the pet carrier with his blankets.

“Be quick,” Mike said. “These neighborhoods, everyone is suspicious of a car like this.”

Mirna followed the sidewalk to the front door. She opened the ceiling hatch of the carrier to make sure Baby was okay, then set him down on the welcome mat. She stroked his face and chest as she cleaned his nose one last time with the bulb syringe. He grabbed onto her finger and gummed it. Soon he would have teeth. In some years’ time, those teeth would fall out and be replaced. The front bottom teeth would most likely come in crooked, just as Mirna’s and her sisters’ had. She left the stuffed cardinal in a freezer bag atop the pet carrier.

She took her time walking back to Mike’s car, despite his waving at her to hurry up. She waited to hear a cry from Baby, one last request to have his nose cleaned or see her face hovering above him. She waited and waited, but he didn’t make a sound.

Mike opened the passenger door for her. He looked her up and down before she got in. “You get a call from that pizza place you can pay half the electric bill,” he said. “There’s some furniture in the attic. We can dust it off and get the basement a bit spruced up.”

Mirna stopped listening to him and his plans. They passed the exit for Mirna’s hometown. Mike clicked his jaw and ground his teeth. “You know,” he kept saying but would lose his train of thought.

When they got home, Mike called Dave, who came over with a case of beer. Mirna started to head towards the basement, but Mike begged her to have just one beer with them. Take her mind off things. She sipped on a lukewarm can while Mike and Dave played the football video game. They hooted at one another and spilled beer all over the coffee table. Dave pulled out a wireless speaker and started playing music. The speaker was blown, and the song playing sounded less like music and more like mechanical malfunction. Mike took Mirna by her hands and pulled her from her seat.

“Dance,” Dave hollered, so she danced with Mike for just a moment.

Then Mike sat down and said, “Come on, show us your moves.”

Mirna wiggled a little for them.

“Turn around show us what you got,” Dave said.

She spun around for them once, hoping they would now leave her alone, but Mike put a ten-dollar bill in her pocket and smacked her butt. The two men laughed and pretended to throw invisible money at her. Mike pulled her onto his lap and kept trying to kiss her.

Mirna fought him off and retreated to the basement. Baby’s box was still in her bed. It was damp with pee and speckled with diaper powder. She slept next to it and traced her fingers from corner to corner. Out of habit, she woke up every now and then to clean Baby’s nose but went back to sleep when she remembered the box was empty.

In the morning, Mike broke down Baby’s box and tossed it in the recycling while Mirna was in the shower. On Friday he left as planned, and on Saturday the pizza place left her a message to schedule an interview.

She didn’t hear from Mike until he got to Michigan. He called to give her a list of chores. “I’ll talk to you when I get to Kansas City,” he said. “Bye, babe.”

That week, she took Mike’s recycling out four days early.

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