Calculus, 8:00 A.M.—Concentration is already an issue, even when I’m on my meds, and this asshole named Martin, who knows where I sit and why, was in my spot when I came running into class five minutes late. I took a seat in the back, deciding it was a waste to even try to pay attention. It was spite on his part, no doubt, a power play, him just being his dickhead self, probably because I’d fucked him within the first week of class then ghosted his ass, like, man, I don’t owe you shit, get it? And like most men, he didn’t get it, would refuse to get it, like, I just wanted to have some sex, no strings attached, that’s all, and he’s all wanting to tell me he’s in love and stuff. I tried to explain to him that I’ve already been through middle school. He told me he felt used, and I told him, So what? Did you enjoy yourself? That’s what it’s all about, not some gooey dating bullshit. You should be happy

After class, I told Martin to go fuck himself for taking my seat then went to meet up with Christina at the Student Center. I was starving, but had no money for food, so I drank lukewarm coffee from a Styrofoam cup while she talked on and on about her weekend in Boston, all the food she’d consumed, all the booze she’d drank. I hardly caught any of it, just heard blips of sound and nodded, occasionally said, Damn, you serious?

That was the only class I had on Tuesday, so when Christina finally ran out of breath, I went home and masturbated to an old X-Files episode until I was tired enough to go back to sleep. When I woke up, I had a text from this guy Kevin who I met at Club X one night last semester. Took him long enough—I think he was scared of me. It was either me or my penchant for trying to get some pegging done inside those strange wide folds of a sloppy night. I tried with him, as is my modus operandi, but, trust me, there’s no convincing anybody when you’re dealing with a nerd of that magnitude.

Chelsea called me around noon. “I’m pregnant. Again.”

“Yeah, what’s new?” I said.

“It’s already grown quite a bit. I’m three months into this thing,” she said. “I’ll have to have a real abortion.”

I knew what she meant by real. She ate morning-after pills like they were candy.

“I’m sorry, girl. Whose is it?”

“That guy Kevin. The guy you hooked up with last semester,” she said.

“That’s totally weird—he just texted me out of the blue, wants to take me out for some beers sometime.”

“Really?!”

“Don’t worry, I haven’t responded yet.”

“What’re you going to say?”

“Obviously I’m going to tell him to get lost.”

“No, for real, you should go,” she said. “Seriously. He doesn’t know I’m pregnant. You should go, for real. Get the inside scoop.”

“I have no interest in doing that,” I said. “He got super pissed when I suggested doing butt stuff. He yelled at me. Said, ‘What, you think I’m a faggot?’ and I was like, ‘No, dude, it’s just something people do, okay, chill.’”

“He said faggot?”

“I know, right? Total douchebag,” I said.

“Probably has a tattoo of Elliot Rodger on his foreskin.”

I laughed. “Yeah, we need to get ourselves a couple of Chads, don’t we?”

“Yup, I’m tired of these incel assholes. I don’t even want to ask him for money. He’s probably one of these dudes who will try to tell me I have to keep it, you know.”

“Oh, definitely, he shouldn’t know about it,” I said.

The alarm on my nightstand went off, signifying lunchtime with dad. We had lunch together twice a week, even though I couldn’t stand him. It was just one way around not having to eat Ramen or Mac N Cheese for the umpteenth time in a day.

“Hey, Chels, I have to go. Lunch with dad. Call me later, okay? All right, love you. Talk soon. Bye.”

We always ate at Applebee’s. We always sat in a booth. My dad always ordered the same thing. I always tried something different. This time it was a monstrosity called a brunch burger—a cheeseburger with hash browns and a fried egg, loaded with ketchup. I scarfed it down while my dad told me he was thinking about leaving my mom. He kept talking and talking and I kept chewing and averting my eyes.

“Well,” he said. “What do you think I should do?”

I burped and grabbed my stomach. “Goddamn, that was a lot of food.”

He just looked at me, waiting, sipped a bit of his Coke.

“I’ll tell you one thing—I’m going to have to abort this fat-ass food baby in a minute. Hope you’re cool with that.”

“Jesus Christ,” he said, unamused. “Can’t you take me seriously for even ten goddamn minutes?”

“What do you want me to say?” I said. “You want me to comfort you—tell you it is okay to leave my mother? You’re fucked. Sure, that’s what I say, dump the bitch. Is that what you want from me?”

He looked embarrassed, ashamed, and I was good with that, even though a part of me felt sorry I’d made a scene.

He drove me back to my apartment without uttering a single word. I stood in the parking lot for a minute, wondering what in the hell was wrong with me, I mean why couldn’t I have just kept my mouth shut? But also, my mother didn’t deserve to be deserted like that, did she? No, she didn’t, so…what the fuck ever. Fuck him.

I went into my bedroom and sprawled on my bed, watched General Hospital on mute while texting Kevin. I told him I was not interested in going out for drinks, not in the least, not ever, and he should just up and lose my number, because, frankly, I’m way out of your league, dude.

He never texted back, thank god.

Chelsea called me later that night, as promised, and said she wanted me to go to the clinic with her next Tuesday. I told her, “Of course. I’ll be there. Hang in there. Try not to freak about it or anything.”

“I’m feeling all right,” she said. “Thanks for being so good to me.”

“Of course—I love you, boo. I’ll see you tomorrow”

I called my dad and canceled our lunches for the next couple of weeks. I said, “Sorry, dad, but I can’t handle you anymore. I’m not your fucking marriage counselor. Maybe if you want to get together sometime and ask me how I’m doing, we can do that. But for now, until that can happen, I don’t want to see you for a while.”

I hung up the phone and a sad satisfaction rippled through me. I couldn’t believe that this life we live is real, and all you can do is try to make the most of it, you know, even when everybody and everything is so fucked up, including yourself.

I had to vent, so called Christina, told her all about my shitty day, and that golden bitch, she let me.

“Wait,” she said. “Maybe your mom should peg your dad.”

“No. Gross.”

“Seriously,” she said.

“Fuck off. No.”

“I mean, you never know,” she said. “Maybe then he’d see the light.”

A few days after I heard the news, that he’d tried to carve a hole for himself inside the earth, I wondered if it were possible for a man to rip out his own vocal chords. One night, I actually Googled it, came up with a bunch of misleads. Wouldn’t have mattered anyway—I’d just get a little black board and hang it around my neck and write it all down for him with chalk. The things I saw, the thoughts I had. Voices still exist, even if you can’t hear them. Maybe it all came down to selfishness. For a minute I thought I’d just swallow down some fish hooks and rip them back out of me and hope for the best—what I’d call “trying to be a good friend.”

Often he’d stand at the corner outside Al’s, sipping at his Mocha while holding court with himself, just talking and blabbing away to nobody. If anybody tried to join him, which, as friendly and welcoming as his smile was, was often, he’d clam up and do more drinking than talking, staring right though their caring faces out beyond and over the dirt road to a place where the sun patched the hills with gold.

He hadn’t always been like that, sure, that all started up after Marti took the Mazda and hitched a U-Haul to the back, stuffed all of her belongings into it, and headed off into the great belly of America, telling him she had to go out and find herself, where exactly she fit in in this too-short disaster called life. That’s when he stopped talking, around then, even though he kind of still talked to me. You couldn’t call it conversation, or exposition, or anything, really, other than short observational bursts, guarded clues into the state of his thinking. I even made him go to the doctor one time, and not without a fight, either, because I figured maybe he’d had a miniature stroke or something, but Dr. Bruner said he was healthy. His face didn’t droop any more than usual and he still seemed to walk just fine.

After the attempt, though, he had to spend a few weeks locked away with some head doctors out in Mulridge County. The day he got out, I went over and found him in his rocking chair on the front porch whittling away at some totem he held tightly in his palm. From where I stood, it looked like he’d fashioned himself a tiny baby.

“Hey, Scott,” I said. “Long time no see.”

He looked up and nodded, kept whittling away at the infant, sweat beaded along his brow in thin rows. I detected in the dying light a few streaks of gray in his sideburns. He was only twenty-five and starting to age at a rapid clip, though his face remained boyish, in fact, strangely so, and you couldn’t help but think that there were a million other faces that were just the same, you’d just never seen one.

He finally folded and pocketed the knife, set the baby on a little table to his left, and said, “Finn. Been a minute.”

“What’d you carve there?” I said.

“Marti,” he said.

“Looks like a baby.”

“It’s Marti,” he said.

“All right, then,” I said. “Marti it is. How’re you feeling?”

He didn’t say anything, just nodded.

“Looking good,” I said.

He lit a cigarette, took a long pull and sighed, staring off through the lighted windows of the house across the street.

“Well,” I said. “I’ll go ahead and get out of your hair. Just wanted to stop by and say hi, that’s all. Don’t want to be a bother.”

As I was walking away, I heard him.

“Sure is hot,” he said.

I turned around. “Hit ninety-seven today,” I said.

“Hot,” he said.

I nodded right into an immense moment of silence and just kept nodding.

“Want to come in?”

Still nodding, I followed him in and sat at the dining room table, a darkly varnished thing littered about with unopened mail, while he rummaged through the fridge.

“Want a Coke or something?”

“That’d be great,” I said.

He sat down across from me, offered me a cigarette.

“Thanks,” I said, but he just sat there staring at me, not saying a word.

We smoked in silence for a while, sipping our Cokes.

“I have to clear the air,” he said.

“You don’t have to do that, trust me. It’s okay. Don’t worry about it.”

“It’s not Marti. It’s my job. My job’s got me all fucked-up,” he said.

“You’re an IT guy, right?”

He nodded. “You don’t know the half of it.”

“The half of what?” I said.

“My job.”

“Well?”

“I work in the city.” he said.

“And?”

“I sit at a table with rows of other people. These people, they do the exact same thing as me.”

“Yeah?”

“I worry about them.” he said. “They don’t even know what kind of damage they’re doing to themselves.”

“Okay? What do you mean?”

“What I do. You want to know what I do?” he said.

“Of course.”

“All the evil shit you hear about being on the internet. My job is to view all that stuff and decide whether or not it should be scrubbed from the internet.”

“Seems like the lord’s work to me,” I said. “Why you feel so bad about it? Somebody has to do it. It’s honorable, right?”

“You just don’t get it. Nobody gets it. Marti didn’t get it. You don’t get it. The doctors don’t get.”

“Hey, hey, slow down,” I said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you.”

“I’m not upset. Just get on, you should go. But finish your fucking Coke first. Don’t want it going to waste.”

I chugged the Coke down and said, “You need to chill a bit, okay. Calm down. I love you.”

“There is no such thing,” he said.

“Whatever, man,” I said. “I’m leaving.”

When I got out onto the porch I took his stupid little wooden baby he’d carved and threw it across the street into the neighbor’s yard. My anger got the best of me. I started thinking about how if he tried killing himself again, he’d do well to pick out a surer method. Rather have him dead than crazy.

We didn’t talk much after that. His hair grew long. He stopped going to Al’s, recused himself from the world around him. And in a way, so did I.

Maybe if I could’ve kept my mouth shut long enough, his silences would’ve been voice enough for me to “get it.” Perhaps that’s the real matter, after all—“getting it.”

It’s never so much the swallowing that hurts, it’s the ripping out. If fish hooks could talk, I swear to god they’d tell you to run.

For over an hour she’d been thinking about killing the baby. Was it a baby? A toddler? He sprawled between two exhausted, resigned parents four rows behind her. They had been in the air for six hours, somewhere over the Pacific, and she’d just had it already with the carts of stale food, the fake smiles, the snoring old men, and now, now more than anything, the crying of the kid, especially after having had the worst sex of her life that morning. It went on and on and on. She tried to plug her ears with her fingers, some meditation, headphones—nothing cancelled the sound. She could hear the blood in her head. Then the movement of her thoughts, the stars becoming nothing, dying—she could hear it all. Suddenly broken, she jolted up from her seat, and started over the man next to her. No doubt she was going to shut that stupid loud-mouthed lump of flesh up—break its neck, smother it with a pillow, maybe even flush it down the fucking toilet—glug glug glug. But then something happened. The last passengers, the inconsiderate few who still had their lamps on, cut the lights off almost simultaneously. It was kind of like a magic act. Maybe it was magic, period. And just like that, as the darkness moved in and consumed them, the kid finally shut up, didn’t peep even a wheeze of air, as though the sound of his tears had been vacuumed clean out of him.

She sat back in the seat, slunk down, closed her eyes, and began thinking about how horrible she had been—thinking such thoughts. Then her brain started in on another thing she didn’t want to think about. The lazy, half-assed, unprotected sex she’d had that morning in her hotel room in Mumbai. He was a sexy Welsh man, fifteen years her junior, named Albert. She’d been excited, after meeting him at a bar near her hotel. She was immediately charmed by him—his wit, his accent, his seeming decency. They’d spent the night together, had some fun, but he didn’t know the first thing about pleasing a woman, clearly, could hardly even locate the clitoris, his tongue making motions in all the wrong directions. Something she just choked up to inexperience.

When she finally started to doze the man sitting next to her woke up and decided he wanted to chat. Talked on and on and on about his business opportunities in China, Tech this and that, blah blah blah, on and on about how cool and young and rich he was—a monologue for the ages.

Finally, he said, The name’s Jeff.

She shook his hand, didn’t say anything.

Well, he said. What should I call you?

Jill, she said, unsmiling.

Jill, he said. What a pleasure. You get those eyes from Zales, because they sparkle like diamonds.

She laughed, rolled her eyes. Sure, she said. Something like that. Actually, I think it was Helzberg.

After a few seconds of awkwardness from Jeff, she said, Listen, man. That fucking baby’s done crying and we have four hours left on this flight. I’d like to be asleep for all of them. Sorry. Nice to talk to you and all, but I’m going to sleep, if I can.

Jeff nodded, said, Understood. Get some rest.

She woke up upon landing at LAX. She ignored Jeff’s small talk. When they got off the plane, he followed her—first to baggage claim, then to a vending machine. She hardly noticed him at first, yet there he was, tapping his foot, all smiles and waves outside the bathroom when she emerged, air-drying her hands, flapping them like weird wings.

Hey you, he said. I’ve been thinking. You like cats? I’ve got two at home. I’d love to take you out for a drink and show you my cats.

Ted, she said. I mean Ned. I mean Cody…

It’s Jeff, he said.

Well, Jeff, you see…the thing is…

Come on, he said. One cat, couple drinks…

You’re nice and all, she said. Thing is I’m a dog person. I wouldn’t save a cat to save your life. Sorry bub, just not interested.

But, he said. But he didn’t finish. She’d already turned away, had gained a few yards between them.

He watched as she faded into the crowd, her name in his head like an echo increasing in volume. By the time she hailed a cab, she couldn’t recall his face—and she didn’t like dogs, either. Her name wasn’t even Jill. It was Amy.

The cab driver played reggae the whole ride home. It was the same and yet totally different from New York—more of a sprawl, a different smell. She’d only been in LA for six months, working as a showrunner for a popular Netflix series. She was a natural born writer, her stories occasionally appearing in the esteemed New Yorker. She told the cab driver her real name. He told her his. His name was Raheem. They small-talked over Bob Marley and the Wailers. She was truthful, except for her job. She said she was a veterinarian who specializes in cats.

I hate cats, he said.

She didn’t say anything, just smiled big and wide, nodding.

How do you feel about screaming children on airplanes? she asked.

Can’t stand them, he said. I’d do anything to shut the little shits up.

I wanted to murder the kid on my flight.

Maybe you should have, he said.

When he dropped her off, she threw her bags in the entryway of her apartment, kicked off her shoes and went into the kitchen. Fridge flung open, she chugged down half a Bud Light and let out a burp. She felt a little grimy so decided to shower. As the hot water fell over her body, she recalled the screams of the child on the plane. She slid her fingers up and down, up, down, all over her body, lathering.

When she got out, she saw she had a text from her girlfriend, Myra. It was a meme of the president saying something asinine, sporting an I-think-I-just-shit-my-pants face.

She texted Myra back: One day we’ll drink from his fucking skull.

She entertained the idea of telling Myra about her trip, didn’t feel the energy.

In her robe, she peeped through the blinds out into the courtyard and saw a young couple smoking cigarettes on a bench.

She remembered his name. His name was Raheem. He was the nice one. The screaming child in her head stopped screaming. It had nothing to do with him, though, nothing whatsoever. It was just a memory, a thought. But maybe it was something he said. She wasn’t sure. Probably not. It was a little over the-morning-after, but she knew she’d be going to see her doctor soon. She didn’t want anybody following her.