Liv’s mother called, but Liv’s mother always called. I imagined her eggshell sheets on what would soon be her deathbed, the waxy fake ferns in the corner of the nursing home room. I imagined her bloated face on her dead body, as waxy as the fake plants. Disgusting.
The aides were the ones who actually called. They would hold the phone up to her mother’s cheek, and she’d huff into the receiver about how she missed her daughter and how she should come visit. She was always out of breath. Liv would listen to the messages, then delete them without calling back. She’d go back to clacking away at her laptop keyboard, pronounced taps when she hit the spacebar, as if nothing had happened, as if her mother wasn’t on hospice.
Months ago, Liv’s mother was biding her time in the nursing home simply because she was overweight. Immobility due to obesity, the doctors told her. It pissed her off. I could understand some of her anger. Her father, a spindly man, spent his last days caring for her, wiping her ass, all of that. He had a heart attack and dropped dead at her bedside and she only bothered to call 911 after he was still for half an hour. She admitted to this, for some reason.
She had a custom-built wheelchair to accommodate her size, but I don’t think it got much use. Probably only to transfer to the toilet and shower. It wasn’t cheap, since it was outside of what insurance would cover, and Liv always regretted getting it. She should just squeeze into a normal one, she would say under her breath. She cursed her mother’s otherwise good health as those who she deemed more worthy of living passed away one by one. It just isn’t fair, she said, she doesn’t even try. I wondered if all those curses were what made the cancer suddenly sprout in her mother’s uterus. Liv nearly sounded happy when she received the news, and I swear I saw a devil’s smile pulling at her lips as she held the phone to her ear. She figuratively swatted Satan’s hands away from her mouth and forced a frown.
We drove to the nursing home. Things weren’t looking so good, according to the doctor. It was the beginning of March, but it was 76 degrees out with a slight breeze. Birds were tweeting, little frogs were peeping. But there were no bright flowers or green leaves, just empty branches and tan, dead grass. None of it added up.
My mother had a story for days like this, when people enthusiastically rolled down their windows and hung their arms out of their cars.
“When I was in high school, I was on the bus,” she would start, “and it was a totally normal day. There was this guy in front of us in a Cadillac with his arm out the window. He swerved too close to the other lane, and the car coming the opposite way took his arm clean off. I remember all the blood and his arm laying on the pavement.”
I never believed the story, and I had heard it since I was in middle school.
“Never put your arm out the window,” she always ended the story with, wagging her finger. Once I got my own car, I did it just to spite her.
I would have been more comfortable if Liv were preemptively mourning her mother. She had a quiet excitement around her. This was her first time visiting since her mother’s diagnosis; they only ever talked on the phone because of Liv’s compromised immune system. She was risking getting sick just so she could see her mother with tubes hooked up to her, her eyes barely opened.
I dropped Liv off and drove to a nearby Starbucks to wait. Indie pop was flowing from the hidden speakers. The inside smelled astringent, like it had just been cleaned top to bottom with assorted chemicals after a murder. I ordered a caramel macchiato and sat. The woman to my left was wearing a taffy pink sweater, the same color as my compact of birth control from high school. The vent behind her legs rattled. Caramel sauce snuck onto my upper lip when I tipped the cup to take a sip.
I scrolled through my phone, smiling at something on my feed then actively stopping myself. I was trying to blend in. I thought about Liv’s dying mother, and the smile easily went away, hiding, like thinking of unsightly things to kill an erection.
“If it goes any further, I would call the police,” the taffy woman said to one of her friends. Their conversation then shifted to whispers so I wouldn’t hear, but I strained my ears anyway. Something about an elementary school child divulging a story of abuse to a guidance counselor, but that could have been an unrelated story. Despite the temperature, the heat was still on, and the small of my back was starting to sweat. I was thankful when my phone rang.
“Come get me,” Liv said, sniffling. She was crying. I had no idea why she was crying. Was it because her mother hadn’t died yet?
I walked out of the Starbucks and paused when I got to the parking lot. The frogs had gotten louder as the sun began to set. There was a chill in the air now, and I briefly remembered scrolling past the weather report saying that temperatures were going to be dropping. I suddenly felt aware of my place in the world, an arresting feeling. My place was equally as important as Liv’s mother and the people who passed who she viewed as more important. I wanted to tell her about my epiphany, but as I plopped myself into the driver’s seat, I realized she wouldn’t want to hear it. Hearing that her mother had an important place in the world would infuriate her. I muted the radio and drove.
When I can’t think of what to do, I have no choice but to go fast. I grab my car keys from under a pile of crumpled receipts by the door. I’d throw them out, but what if I need them someday? I could be audited. I could need an alibi. I focus back on the keys. It’s important to avoid rabbit holes. I can feel my tongue in my mouth. It’s time to go.
I get in my car and fly out of my condo development’s parking lot in reverse and swing forward towards the ramp to I-295. It’s a little after midnight, 25 degrees out, and I love New Jersey. I should open the windows. The cold air might straighten me out a bit. My instincts are taking me to the Turnpike. Okay, I tell my instincts, that is where we will go.
I’m cruising up 295, but not too fast, not yet. The cops have nothing to do and they like to sit on the median. I think I see a cop car up ahead and glide over into the right lane, slowing down, signal on like I’m preparing to exit. Good evening, officer. I’m on my way home from work. Late shift, you know how it is. Newborn at home. Me and the little lady haven’t been sleeping much, as you can imagine. You got kids? I’m still working out the script when I roll by the shadow that I thought was a cruiser. I say goodbye to my new wife and child.
Fate is funny. I mean like a joke. The shadow cop sends me towards the offramp where my headlights catch a stoned looking teenager on the side of the road with a thumb sticking out half-assed. He isn’t even looking in the direction of traffic. For a second, I think this is part two of my imagining things, but he is quite real as he jumps out of the way after I almost bump him with my fender. I roll to a stop alongside him.
He vaguely looks pissed, more confused. I lean over towards the passenger side window to talk to him.
Man, what are you doing out here? Who even hitchhikes anymore? It’s the middle of the night.
He tries to focus on my face and process my words. He says he got into a fight with his girlfriend and she kicked him out. He’s seriously fucked up and can’t get himself home. His phone is dead, and he’s broke. I tell him to get in before he freezes to death or someone decides to chop him up.
We’re riding up 295 in awkward silence for a bit. I realize I forgot to ask him where he’s headed, and it doesn’t seem to dawn on him he should be asking where I’m going.
Uh, where should I be taking you? Your parents live nearby or something?
“No, I don’t live with my parents. I’ve got a friend a few miles up the road I can crash with, if he’s home. Got to get off at 36.”
Providing that information seems to have used up his brain reserves and he slips back into half-consciousness. We’ve got a little time together and sitting in silence with another person in close quarters makes me nervous. I turn on a playlist of classic hardcore to keep my energy up. GBH kicks on and my mood stabilizes while the opening chords of Sick Boy scream out of dying speakers. I feel electric again, licking my lips.
My passenger rouses out of his stupor, agitated by the metallic noise. He’s looking closer to being part of this universe.
“Come on, dude. Can’t you put on something chill? I’m dying here.”
Hey, I’m the one giving you a ride out of the goodness of my own heart. You’d still be standing out there in the cold or a cop would have picked you up by now. Then where would you be?
“I’ve been arrested before. Who cares? They throw you in rehab. Juvenile records are sealed. At least I could sleep there.”
I lower the music as a compromise because now I feel bad, but I need to keep it on to maintain. My cortisol is on a steady drip. The road is empty ahead, so I take the kid in all sullen, skinny, and hooded. Painfully typical and therefore someone I want to protect. I ask him what his name is, and he says Tommy.
Tommy, Tommy, I say.
“Yeah, man. What’s yours?”
So, I tell him.
Then we sit quietly again until he blurts out that he wants to die. I turn the music off completely and ask him what he said. He repeats his wish. My brain is white lightning.
I say Tommy. Tommy, you can’t think like that. You’re just a kid. Shit isn’t even bad, yet.
“You don’t know anything about me. My parents are fucked up. I don’t talk to them. School sucks. I’m failing. I just ruined things with my girlfriend, who is basically the only thing in my life that isn’t trash. I make things worse for everybody. Seriously. Who would want to deal with me? I don’t blame her.”
“Okay, that sounds bad. But that doesn’t mean things will stay bad. You can turn it around. You seem like a smart guy.”
“Dude, I’m stupid. Smart guy. I wish I was dead. I’m so sick of this.”
You don’t.
“I do.”
Are you absolutely sure of this, says the heat rising in my chest.
He nods at me.
If you say so, man. And then I floor it.
We’re hurtling down a dark 295. There are a few cars on the road, but they stay away from the left lane when they see me coming. I look briefly over at the kid and notice traces of concern. I decide to commit. The engine is trying to kick back but forget it. The machine will hold up because I need it to. I’ve never needed anything so badly. Tommy squeaks.
“36 is coming up!”
I peel over across 2 lanes and brake tightly to make the offramp. The kid’s holding onto the dashboard.
“What are you doing!”
I know this whole area. I know every backroad. This entire state is mine. Everything you see is mine. We’re flying through the streets. I’m getting lucky with the lights. No one is out around here at this hour and I know where the cops usually wait. The elementary school isn’t too far now.
“Please, stop! We’re going to crash. Jesus Christ. Oh, Jesus fucking Christ. Please, dude.”
I ignore him. It’s hard, I won’t lie. I must stay the course now. We reach the school. It’s one of those long straightaways into a parking lot deep in the property. The lot is empty. Perfect. The car hits the entrance and we’re flying straight towards the school building.
“No! You’re going to kill us! Stop the car!”
Yes. That’s the idea.
“No stop stop please don’t kill me please don’t. I don’t want to die.”
I slam on the brakes and spin the wheel. The tires scream loud enough to shatter glass, I would think, but nothing seems to explode. We’re spinning. I’ve done all I can. It’s luck now, so I close my eyes.
The car stops maybe three feet from the building, facing away from it. I’m so wired I can’t feel my arms. I turn to Tommy and give him a triumphant grin. He starts screaming what aren’t even words. Well, they might be words, but they aren’t forming meaning for me right now. I speak calmly, but loudly, to try to get through to him.
Tommy, you have to understand what I did was for your own good. I believe fate brought us together on this night. You reached a crisis point and I was guided to you by forces that I, frankly, can’t explain. I was brought into your life the moment you needed me most. What are the chances? What are the odds? I did what I had to do. I had to show you that you didn’t really want to die. If I could, I’d show you how your death would affect the world. Unfortunately, my powers are limited. I hope you understand. You have to keep living, Tommy. There is so much more to do. I hope you wake up tomorrow with a new lease on life and cherish this second chance that you have been given.
He’s already left the car by this point, disappearing into the night, a speck that I can still make out at the edges of my headlights. When I crash later, for real, I don’t know if I’ll remember every detail of this. My only hope is that Tommy knows, deep down, I am his friend and I honestly meant everything I said.
We hold hands and listen to him read our vows, grey mustache puffing above his breath. I picture him sucking a cigarette outside, a Bible tucked to his body, white robe blowing in the wind. Behind us, my mother's arms hang from the hospital gown, her limp limbs our altar. Her eyes closed, two still coins. Our daughter keeps grabbing the wires. We unclasp our hands again and again. Stop it, we angry whisper. Come back. The beeps are steady, at least. Her moans have subsided, at least. Yes, I will take him, at least in sickness, at most in health. Her body, my life’s centerpiece. Deflated arms dangling, that I watched from the kitchen table kneading dishes in the sink, biceps flexed with the pop of a Budweiser tab, elbows bent so fiercely while sliding open the TV table. And her fingernails that feathered my forehead those nights when the blinds shut out the moon. Now, she is all skin cascading from bone, she is almost remains. I do, I say. I will. His slanted gaze reaching for comfort to hand to me, all sterile pads and latex gloves and Toxic Waste Only bins behind us. She isn’t dressed, I think again. My eyes stay open, wet, but the images still come. Magenta gowns we would have tried on in front of a three-way mirror, I’d sit and argue hot from cheap champagne, no, that’s better for your figure, no, that won’t be easy with a bra. Fat seeping from her sides that we never loved enough.
I like this one, she would’ve said. It’s kind of nice.
It’s my day, Mom, I’d remind her. My day.
But now, here, as I promise myself to him, my daughter pulling rolling curtains open and closed and open and closed, our rental priest with his to-do list in his back pocket, I can see it was never mine, everything that’s mine belonged to her, because I was her, and without her, I’ll be someone else. This world will be someplace new, the kind of place where you say I do as your mother dies in a metal bed behind you, and there will be no magenta, no music, only fluorescent lights beaming on a beige, cushion-less chair. We stand boxed in by corners and cracks, dust-covered and uncared for, three generations becoming two. My little girl squeals and jumps on the linoleum, yellow pigtails flying up and down, up and down, and all the days to come unfold before me, they are all my days, they are decks and decks of cards that have fallen everywhere, cutting my palms, slicing me to pieces.
“If anyone sees that he can live better on the gallows than at his own table, he would be very foolish not to go and hang himself.”
—Baruch Spinoza
for Kit Schluter
Another party, and the people who go to them.
My former boss, whom I distrust on a fundamental level, invited me to his retirement party held at his vacation home on the coast. He hadn’t used it since the summer. At first, when invited, I said no. I had to wash my hair that night. But later, as so often is the case, I said yes.
I was surprised, initially, by how many people attended the gathering. My distaste for him was not unique—most people in our office held our boss in contempt, and generally thought it unlikely that he would have people in his life outside of work. We were wrong. Our boss was a generous donor to his former university’s football program, and it seemed as if several generations of players and coaches were present, all thinking and talking about football, a sport for which I don’t care. Men would say, “Football?” to each other, and in response hear: “The football.”
We had reached a lull in the party. Perhaps only an hour had passed, and there was markedly less chatter than when I had first arrived. I spent most of my time eating tiny hotdogs and telling people I didn’t know anything about sports. They would smile sadly, as if I had told them I recently lost my calling in life, or that my dog had died.
A man named Joseph with broken teeth approached me. He said, “I want to show you a party trick that will make you never want to leave this place.” I told him I had very little to lose, and that a gain would be both unexpected and desirable at present. Joseph unzipped his skin, starting from a large copper zipper on his forehead, which I hadn’t noticed initially because of his wretched teeth. Underneath his skin was my dead mother. “See?” he said. I told him it was a tad too autobiographical, and somewhat puerile in nature.
“Oh?” he responded, “You think you’re capable of better tricks? Tricks that would lead the guests of this party to never depart—ever—from the place which they’re enjoying themselves so fully? So harmoniously? So effortlessly? Though, of course, there is quite a bit of effort. The cost of travel is getting pricier by the day. It’s hard to leave one’s room.”
“That’s true, but no,” I said, “It’s not that. I am capable of no tricks. I can barely tie my shoes in the morning. But a stunt as cheap and suburban as yours requires no respect on my behalf. You can take that up with the internet.”
Joseph’s first skin, dangling limply from his calves, was creating a puddle of brownish mucus on the floor. I could see it dripping towards the legs of the grand piano in the living room, which a football player had tinkered with earlier in the evening, admitting that he hadn’t played in quite a bit. He got through the first few chords of the Charlie Brown Christmas song (it was the season, after all), and meekly stopped on a bum note. One of his former coaches slapped him on the forehead and screamed at his wife to get them more treats.
The mucus had, at this stage, enveloped the entirety of the piano in its substance. Now the piano had transformed into my first boyhood crush, albeit in the shape of a piano. I believe her name was Yasmin, though I could be mistaken.
“This is really too much,” I said. “And I should get going.” It was true: I would be flying to Patagonia early the next day. I had been having dreams that I would soon die. The dreams were all different: sometimes an anvil would fall on my head from a high distance. Other times, I was inveigled into a terrorist plot which resulted in the destruction of the United States White House, and my body along with it. Either way—I feared death’s approach was coming, and coming soon. I drafted a list of things I wished to complete before my demise, and a trip to Patagonia was chief among them. The reason was simple: it was far away. I seldom want to leave my room. And so, a trip to Patagonia could only speak beneficently to my character, my belief in historical dialectics, and my hope that the human soul was, underneath it all, good.
My boss approached Joseph and me with a dumb smile. “A trip to Patagonia would prove nothing of the sort,” he said, and laughed haughtily. “My boy, it is true that you will die soon. At least that’s what my own dreams have told me. But to carry forth with this trip is simply ludicrous. You should spend your remaining days in the company of handsome women, like the one my piano has recently transformed into, and in excessive consumption of hard drugs, specifically cocaine. It shatters your heart, I hear, but that won’t matter much to you, will it.”
It was things like this that made me dislike him. What right had he to peer into my mind—sarcastic and witless as it was—and tell me what I should do? What I should think?
“Well, what do you want out of life, Sebastian?” Yasmin asked. The mucus dripped over the floor and approached me. “Really? You have such little time left.” Her kindness, even in that moment, was boundless. I had once purchased a pearl necklace—which I bought from a vendor on the beaches of Margarita—and given it to her, though we barely spoke. She accepted it without reproach, and continued our lifelong silence.
I breathed in deeply, tongued the remains of a hotdog stuck to my teeth. “It’s true that I am not doing well. I don’t know if I’ll ever be doing better,” I said. “And for that, I blame my mind jail. However, there are small changes I’d like to enact in my life. I should eat less hot dogs. I should drink alcohol only when an occasion calls for it, like today. I should get back on my medication, which I stopped taking because I disliked the idea that I had to take it to function in a standard fashion. Besides that, I look forward to the end of winter. When it is warmer out, things will be clearer to me. I will wake up and behave in such a way that I am crossing off the tasks on my list. I will walk to the park because it is a pleasant thing to do, and I won’t have planned it in advance. I’ll go to the park because I can, and want to. When I arrive, I won’t do anything but sit on a bench. Maybe I’ll smoke a cigarette, which I should stop doing, but I’ll allow it in this particular future, because it means that I am taking ownership of my pleasure. I will not feel suspicious toward the things which give me pleasure. I will drink a glass of water that I have placed on the kitchen table because I’d like that, not because it’s good for me. Afterward, I’ll move to a new city and go to the events held there. I’ll talk about things which are amiable, unpredictable, and filled with flowers that others will want to smell. I will want to smell them too, even though they are in my hand, not very far away from my nose.”
The room had stopped. Conversations of football were snuffed out like oxygen leaking from a candle’s flame.
“Puerile,” Joseph said, speaking with my mother’s mouth, though he was gathering up his first skin from the waist up, ready to re-zip, hopefully for good.
“Not likely to happen,” said my former boss. He was already on his cellphone.
“I’d have to agree with the boss man,” said Yasmin. “Too self-pitying. And I never did like you. Your mawkish gifts and ceaseless projections, etcetera.” She played a waltz with her teeth (those were the piano keys) and all in the room danced with vim: the people of football, my co-workers, my former boss, Joseph, even Yasmin herself.
Before I knew it, I was back home. It felt as if I had fallen asleep as soon as I opened my bedroom door. I had no dreams that night—which was a relief—and my bags were already packed. The rest of this story happened in three parts:
There’s a yellowy light. It’s not fluorescent. This is not the IHOP. It’s the other one. The local diner. Yellowed sign, yellowed menus, yellow, yellowy light.
_________
Nothing that happens here is important. Important is elsewhere is the point of a place like this. This place is meant for in-between.
_________
She is at the hostess station looking lost. Looking like a customer who doesn’t know if she should seat herself. The post-bar rush is over. A last-call-at-2am town in a last-call-at-2am state. But: it’s later than all that. There seems to be no one in the restaurant at all. Bacon grease on everything. Pancakes in the very air.
_________
There are some things a body can do, and some things a body cannot do. Some things stand inside the scope, and then some things stand outside the scope, with their mocking smile and wave, with their cannot. The sum of these two types of things together is called a person.
_________
She has always been an IHOP person, if that’s a type of person to be.
_________
A man stands up from the one working video poker machine in the corner. This man has a great quality to his hands, prominent knuckles, a meaty rectangular strength to them. There is a tattoo in the webbing between thumb and forefinger—a small cross, hastily done. He wears a maroon polo shirt with a black collar. His hands look capable of doing things to other things, of being here and then here and then here and it helps or it hurts. He waves her along, leading her to a booth by the window. She will not look at his face. She looks at his transitive hands.
_________
Notably, the drunks have all gone home for the night.
_________
To look at a face is to have a face looked at is to invite comment. She is still beautiful, despite it. She still radiates youth, she still accidentally looks at people in a way that captures their complete attention, despite it. Some things do not change as easily as all that. To say that one thing is the essence of a person is to be naïve. She is in many ways naïve.
_________
She sits at a table. She says “Coffee,” she says, “Water with no ice.” In the blackness of the window she can see herself say these things. The yellow light overhead casts her reflection in dingy ghost shapes. The table lacquer is coming up at one corner, the booth she is sitting in has a slight tear in the seat back. There is damp and ache coming from her breasts. The man leaves her with a menu, which she ignores.
_________
A prison doesn’t require a key, after all. What it requires is belief in a key.
_________
The waiter brings water and disappears again around the corner. Behind her, somewhere, coffee futzes and sputters. He doesn’t bother telling her it’s brewing. She imagines him on the other side of the wall, playing video poker. On slow nights, a waiter might spend more at the video poker machine than he earns. She thinks he cannot help it. His nametag is peeling, his name rolling back into itself. That it were so easy to disappear, just a furl, a rolling in and away, gone.
_________
She finds him, suddenly, boring, wants to stop imagining him. He rubs a dollar against the corner of the video poker, making the money presentable, making it good enough to be accepted by the waiting mouth of the machine. She cannot see it, but this is what he does.
_________
Sitting there, she becomes aware of her breathing. She breathes manually, and then she panics that she won’t be able to stop breathing manually, that her body will never take over again. How long could she last? How long would it be before that responsibility too became crushing and she let herself collapse gasping to the floor? Could she make it through a cup of coffee, through a meal? Could she make it to daybreak?
_________
Never went in for the girl stuff, aside from being deliberate in her beauty. A breath. She thinks of herself as an angular person. A breath. She is all hard edges when she can help it. A breath. Doesn’t brook bullshit from anyone. Sees it as strength. A breath. Was not this for a time. A breath. And now. A breath.
_________
There’s an old joke, and it’s this: What’s the worst thing that can happen in a falling elevator? It stops. And what’s the best thing? It stops. Which isn’t funny, so maybe it’s not a joke. But it’s true.
_________
She tries to calm herself the way she was taught by her college roommate years ago: breathe out twice as long as you breathe in, count it out, name three things you love about being alive, realize that you are only your body, or realize that you are not just your body—she couldn’t remember which it was or if it was both—just ride the wave, live through this and then this and then this and guess what: now you’re living, present tense and actual. Now you’re now.
_________
It could be said fairly that every moment is life-changing, each insuck of air irrevocable. Thoughts like these are banal at every moment they aren’t.
_________
Three things she loves about being alive:
_________
The waiter reappears, passes her, returns with coffee. The presence of him forces her to be calm. She sits. She sips her coffee. It is surprisingly good. She expected something over-roasted, bile-sour, stale. Something that cried out for the little tub of cream in its basket on the table, sitting by the plastic tower of assorted jellies. There is a kind of betrayal in the robust flavor, in how good it feels to put the warmth into her body.
_________
From the video poker machine, bleeps and bloops move softly through the dining area.
_________
There is an absence of need in her that’s new, or worse, long-forgotten, the mark of an earlier version of herself pupating within her, ready to reemerge. She opens a tub of cream and dumps it in, then another. The coffee grays and whorls. It blooms. The way the black outside snugs up on the windows makes her feel as though she is attenuated to bigger truths lurking in the mundane. She wants things to be this still for her from now on.
_________
She might be connected to something new. A great heritage of loneliness. Nighthawk. That one Hemingway story she hated so much. Aaron made her read it in college, Aaron who got so upset when she didn’t care about all the nada, when she found it too cliché to be interesting. At the time she felt so sorry to hate the story. How often had she been sorry for her own opinion?
_________
She is not quite sure what it will be like, what she will do with so many empty hours, if it will ever feel as though this is what life is instead of feeling like, well, like what, exactly? Like she’s her own ghost, staying behind, carrying on.
_________
A body is still a vessel when it holds only itself. She learned this when the baby was born, and then somewhere she unlearned it, as the baby began to grow and occupy more space, kept finding more space to occupy than she knew was even there in her to occupy. It’s a thing she’d like to know again: how much space can fit in the vessel.
_________
She trembled and slipped back into breathless panic. She thought I fucking told you. She thought Do not think about the Pollywog. She thought She didn’t cry when you set her car seat down on pavement, when you hurried away. She thought She stayed right asleep that scary way the Pollywog would sleep, scary baby too-deep sleep.
_________
The waiter comes back around to see if she’s ready. She apologizes. She forgot about the menu in front of her. He looks over his shoulder to the kitchen and says it’s fine. She is overly apologetic. He says it’s okay, but she persists in performing the act of apology, fingers squirming at the menu.
_________
In some ways she will always be in that two-bedroom apartment, man and baby and her as ghost. She does not want to know this, but she does.
_________
The waiter lingers. The waiter notices the quaver of her and wants to help. He asks her where she’s from and she says, “Here.” He puts two fingers on the table. He says, “No, I mean your peoples.” And she is looking at him, fierce, reddened eyes. He’s from somewhere too, by the look of him. “Guatemala,” she says, “Libya.” He whistles and says, “That’s some mix.” Her shoulders tighten. She does not want to talk to a waiter about anything, least of all this. That a person can reach adulthood without knowing this kind of small talk is terrible, sticking your finger in another person’s nose.
_________
She does not want to be hard angles right now, but she is with the waiter. She wants to be a not. She thinks she might unwrap her fork from its napkin and jab his fingers off the table. He stands there, not letting her be a not, forcing her to be a person in a context that came from somewhere. It’s horrible. He’s horrible.
_________
An in-between is a place like any other. Everybody lives in the present, all the time. Horrible.
_________
She was not always this woman. She learned to be another woman with Aaron. Aaron saw different because Aaron wanted her to love him, wanted that plain, and that came with a desire to bend the will of her to his, get her, the organism, a little closer to her, the idea in his mind. She’s not that idea, though. Not that she blames him. She did it, too, though not so much with Aaron. Aaron was Aaron, without consequence. She did it with the Pollywog. She did it until she realized she couldn’t.
_________
With Aaron she saw she could be not unhappy. Which is nothing at all like happy.
_________
Three things she loves about being alive:
_________
The waiter stands there expectant and she asks him for a cigarette. He says no. They’re there in his pocket. She could reach for them. She could take what she wanted. She looks up at him. He says city ordnance. He says. She holds out her open palm.
_________
It’s possible to feel weightless, freed, awful. It’s possible to feel everything you know, all at once.
_________
Cigarette in hand, to lips. The waiter nervous. Something electric in the scratch of the lighter, in him bringing the flame to her. The waiter’s hands. Used to trouble, probably. In trouble. She can make him feel a way about her, about himself. She need only reach across with her free hand. She need only grab the nametag and peel it free, and what comes after comes after.
_________
Her biggest regret is that she knows she could become anything at all and didn’t, still might.
_________
She tells him she wants to drink coffee for a while. She tells him he can say he didn’t notice the cigarette, if anyone asks. He nods and leaves her alone, disappears into the kitchen.
_________
Three things she loves about being alive:
_________
For the pieces of this to fit together, there must reasonably be some measure by which she would consider herself whole. She was capable of things, once. She could read a baby like a tarot card, every burp a star aligned. She could bear the wailing. She could give herself away, all the way. She could be unmade and still be made. Simple enough things.
_________
She takes a deep drag on the cigarette and her lungs fuzz out. Somewhere a baby wakes in the cold. Somewhere a baby. Somewhere a loss without language. Somewhere a light going on at the precinct, a savior arriving, not the wanted one. Somewhere a vessel being made unwhole.
_________
But who has ever been whole. It’s there in the word itself. Whole, hole. Cruelty, homonym.
_________
Three things she loves about being alive:
_________
That coffee goes cold. That dawn comes on. That a different now is on the way.
Instagram: @michaelseymourblake His Fabulous (It’s True!) Website: MichaelSeymourBlake.com
He was at the counter flirting with a pixie cut. My eyes followed him the whole evening and I didn’t know what to do with myself. So I ordered my fifth gin and tonic, and when Sofie asked, “Why don’t you go talk to him?” I sniggered.
It started raining outside – the worst kind. He was now purring to the little black dress at the corner table. She was small, with a little hunch on her back. I went out for a cig and argued with the voice in my head.
“Perhaps it’s life coming to a full circle.”
“Or this is how I will again make a fool of myself if I stay any longer.”
“Perhaps he has changed.”
“He was sniffing the humpy’s hair like a wild bunny prepping up for a restroom quickie. So most likely, no.”
I took a deep drag on cigarette under the parking shade when the Apocalypse came.
He said, “So we meet again”. I said, “Shut up” and we kissed - through the cataclysm and until the end of the cervix of etcetera.
Later when we called an Uber and drove past the old town, the wisps of the night harked back to the old days when our world was lit with a thousand glowing worms. Back in the apartment we fucked, like old times - on the couch, against the door, in the tub, on the desk chair. When we craved food, I popped some corns.
It was the next best thing to cigarette after sex.
The sweat still turned the top of his ear bright pink. He still swirled his tongue clockwise inside the mouth like a broken down washing machine. I still felt clouds forming in my belly when he watched me getting off.
I knew him, he knew me, and at that point it was all that mattered.
When the rain softened outside he pulled up the blinds a little and carried me in front of the mirror. In the sodium lights from down the street he glistened like a gorgeous tornado and I melted in his clasp. He lifted my hair and whispered softly, “Are you real?” I think he asked that to the girl in the mirror, hence I said nothing. I wasn’t sure if I knew her.
For the brief moments we slept – on and off – I saw fragments of a dream that never reached its finish line. But he was there, making the same old grunting noises while asleep, and at that point it was all that mattered.
In the morning he left without kissing goodbye, just like old times. Later I found his note on my desk.
When Sofie asked, “Are you going to see him again?” I simply shrugged.
The following year I heard he had joined a cult. One day he just left home and hitchhiked down South to find faith, or drugs, or a secret subway to the heaven.
Sofie smirked. “Who knew he could find a different obsession?” I took a long chug of my beer and pushed down the lump in my throat.
I wondered how he is managing in the cold. He had always been a beach guy after all. I wondered if he has shaved his head now. I wondered if we could find each other across the room ever again.
When I wake up in the middle of the day, feeling like a spurned ashtray, I go back to his note over and over again.
“Until next time”, it said.
But how long is one exasecond anyway?
It was a mistake trusting your parents will come back to get you. It was a mistake turning your back to them, clapping idiot-like at the spinning top that lit up red in the dark. They left for Bombay, leaving you behind in Delhi with your grandma, your paati.
Its summer—the city is a furnace, everything is melting. Your paati slips in the bathroom and fractures both her legs. With weights, pulleys, her legs hang in the air, like the hands of a clock: 2.10 p.m. Her loose, burnt-brown flesh hangs loose from her thighs.
In brown shorts and a white t-shirt with stripes, you have your music notebook in your clammy hand, revealing wet phantom finger-prints around its spine when you change hands. A Donald Duck label in the front has your details:
Name: Sethumohan;
Class: III;
Age: 8 yrs old.
She wants to pee. You slide the aluminium dish between her legs, her thigh-flesh jiggles. You wait for her bladder to empty. When she grunts, you carefully pull it out with both your hands, carry it to the door. You hold your breath and drain the dish, watching the piss form black globules on the dry earth.
She hands you her metal ruler, which you bury deep between her cast and her skin and scratch her calf, her ankle, and with your nails between her toes that wiggle. You follow her instructions: left, no, no, right, up, up, down...ah!
“Okay, leave. You’re late,” she says. “Leave the door open.”
You hesitate.
“Run,” she barks and you’re out the door.
*
“Look everyone, Sethu finally decided to show up to class.” Arun, your vocal teacher, tells the rest of the students, stretching the vowels in your name like a chewing gum. He moves his limp wrists and motions for you to sit next to him. You sing for a bit. Then he asks, as always, for the other students to leave. The house is empty. You know what this means. But still, you try. You get up to follow them. You can’t go yet he tells you. He smiles, his hand is on your thigh. You walk to his bedroom.
Arun turns off the lights and pulls close the curtains, bolts the door. The sudden withdrawal of light, gives the room the cold, dark look of night.
“Let’s begin,” he says. He means the game. He calls it, ‘Adventures of the Night Explorer’: the goal is to identify different parts of each other’s bodies by touching. You know the drill, you know where everything is on his body; however, pretense is a big part of the game.
It’s your turn first so you feel your way in the darkness. Your tiny hands land on his mouth.
“Your lips.”
“Correct. My turn,” says Arun.
You lay still on the bed, trying your best to not make a sound. Arun places his sticky, fleshy palm on your stomach.
“Your bum.”
“No, my tummy,” you say, in a condescending tone. He likes it.
“Your stomach?” Arun says and lifts your shirt. He tickles you until you beg him to stop. You have to laugh, you have to enjoy it. Else, he gets mad.
“My turn.” Your eyes have adjusted to the light and you’re able to see clearly, but you continue to pretend like you have a secret. You also reach for his stomach but to make it more believable, you pretend to think.
“You give up?” he says.
“It’s your— .”
Before you can answer, Arun pulls your hand and slips it into his pyjamas, whose strings are already loose.
It swells in your hand until it’s a Popsicle. You know what it is, not by its official name yet, by what your grandma calls it: Choochoo. You have held yours many times, moving it like a hose to see how far up the wall your pee can go. You know it’s wrong, it’s something you aren’t supposed to be doing. If you tell your grandma, she won’t believe you. You could tell your parents, though your letter will end up like the rest, somewhere under a pile of old newspapers? You know they don’t read them. You know this because once they were visiting and you sat next to your dad, smiling shyly, giddy with excitement, and then blinked at your mum. Surely, they must have got you the latest Superman comic book. But the morning bled into noon and noon melted into night and a whole week went by. They hadn’t, and you never asked.
Arun wants you to move your hand up and down. How many times does he need to teach you? He makes these little sounds, takes these short breaths, before finally your fingers are wet like you’d just dipped them in a bottle of glue.
“You still haven’t guessed. You lose”
“Choochoo,” you say. It’s a game and you still want to win.
“Is that what you call yours?” Arun chuckles. “Let’s see if you have one.”
When you’re leaving he says, “See you tomorrow.” He expects you to bob your head, so you bob your head.
Grandma wants to know about your class, what you learned.
“Sing me something,” she says. You say you have to wash your hands first.
“Good boy,” she calls you. She says you should always wash your hands when you come home from outside. “Wash your feet, too.”
“I found him.”
“Him who?”
“Gnostic Baptiste!”
“The spam tag?”
“It’s not just a tag! I wasn’t even running a simple traceroute function before I get a local postal address. So I go there…”
“Wait a second. I need a beer for this.” Alex and I had worked together for 3 years out of the Attorney General’s Office, doing tech consulting for an anti-spam task force. Alex was one of the best systems designers I knew, parlaying hacker-honed skills into the legit and the lucrative. But the thankless and poorly- paid search for spammers had become his holy grail. I thought I’d seen him at his most weirdly obsessive, but this was different. I popped two beers and handed him one, but he just put it on the table and kept pacing.
“You’re saying there’s a person named Gnostic Baptiste?”
He stopped and his eyes got too bright. “A…’person’?”
He finally fell onto the couch and rubbed his hands through his hair.
“…I find the place. An abandoned warehouse by the yards. Not a computer in sight. No phones. No jacks. No Wi-Fi. Nothing. Zip. Except this fat kid in a swivel chair. When I get close he stands up and says, ‘I am Gnostic Baptiste. Spread the word.”
I reached out to pat him on the arm. He shrank back. “Don’t touch me! I’m infected!”
“Infected?”
He sprang off the couch and bent over, clutching his crotch. “Here. Look.” He booted his computer and tapped the keys. “You see?” The screen showed a word document. Alex was typing out a solid block of spam:
BIGGER AND THICKER WITH GNOSTIC BAPTISTE!
GIGANTIC ORGAN COCK FROM GNOSTIC BAPTISTE!
BOOST HER WET HAPPY WITH VIAGRA PENIS PATCH
FOR ULTRA HARD PENILE SEXUAL WITH 100 MG
X 10 PILLS PRICE CHEAPER MASSIVE COCK WITH
75% OFF ROLEX, MORADO GUCCI VACHERON
WATCHES WITH EXTRA LONG COCK FOR HER
PLEASURE FROM MR. GNOSTIC BAPTISTE!
“I don’t get it.”
“Shit, Rob! Look at the keys I’m hitting!” He slowed down so I could see:
t-h-e q-u-i-c-k b-r-o-w-n f-o-x j-u-m-p-e-d o-v-e-r t-h-e
“Wow. Something with the keyboard?”
“It’s not the keys!” He went to my desktop. The same thing happened. We tried the four other computers in my apartment.
They only showed spam.
“Effing weird. We’ll run diagnostics. Entangled zombie shit. “
He grabbed between his legs and crawled into a corner, rocking and whispering to himself. I went to him but he waved me away and staggered back to his feet, bent over and clutching his crotch again. “Gotta’ show you.” He undid his belt and pulled down his jeans and tattered underwear. A hot, yeasty smell filled the room. His penis heaved out of his pants, drooping low from his pubic hair to coil around his leg all the way to his ankle. Even limp it was thick and solid enough to hold a dozen or more silver wristwatches along its impossible length. We both stared, breathless, as it unwound and thudded to the floor. Despite the weight of the watches, it reared up five feet into the air and stayed there, swaying. The glans was round and fat as a grapefruit, like an orchid starved for heat. Alex finally looked at me and I could see the same thought behind his eyes: and he’s not even hard. He went rigid reciting a spam rant in whispers.
“’…massive cock growth for ultra-hard and thick penile enlargement with 75% off all Rolex, Gucci, Vacheron Viagra watches from Mr. Gnostic Baptiste…”
“Alex…!”
“You understand now, Rob? I’m the tangled zombie. I’m fucking spam.” He hefted his cock in both hands and swung it against his leg. After cursing through several floppy misses the weighted organ wrapped itself tightly back around his thigh and down to his shoe. He tugged his jeans up over the pulsing coil and limped to the door.
“Where are you going?”
“I gotta’ find him.”
“Wait.”
“Don’t touch me, Rob! You’ll spend every cent you’ve got on shit watches or Viagra or West African gold ingots or horny Russian mail-order brides or pictures of teen girls having sex with horses or…”
I blocked the door. “You bought the Ultra Viagra, or some shit, and took it?”
As if in answer his penis pressed, then strained against the side of his jeans. “So, what if I did? It was that or be sucked in. I told you—I’m fucking spam! You have no conception of what it feels like! To actually fuck spam! “
His erection was so stiff now that Alex could no longer bend his leg. The denim swelled. The seams popped in low, hectoring snicks. The glans wiggled and squeezed out the bottom of his jeans, white and loamy as dough. The material gave way with a shrieking rent, and his penis sprang across the room. I felt like I’d been hit by a bus. When I came to the door was on one hinge and Alex was gone.
Who, or what, was Gnostic Baptiste? I never saw any trace of him, or of Alex, either. But I know that the moment I get back online again they’ll both be there, selling watches, Nigerian gold ingots, low cost Viagra or Russian teen brides. And waiting for me. And whatever it was that Alex was powerless to resist – the promise of sex beyond any sex he’d ever known, the fucking of spam incarnate with a penis of freaks – will be popping up or dancing across or seeping into every move I make online. The only sanctuary is in silence, and cunning; an electronic chastity that will leave me alone under GPS dumb stars. Now when I walk through L.A.N. parties and Wi-Fi fields I can almost feel a tingling along the back of my hands and up and down my spine. And sometimes it even makes me hard.