It's not fair that I get to be sick while my boyfriend gets to be healthy. Gets to live life horizontally—flat, always lying, perpetually still—bent in an angle like that of a slant. Like the longest side of a pudgy triangle, the hypotenuse, sinking slowly. Centimeters of neck crouching inwards—up and down—as he swipes his fickle dickle sucky whucky thumb—up and down—as he fries his brain—up and down.Tweet and twit and twat. Stick and root and rat. The kinds of sounds he watches, the kinds of sounds he makes from the other room. Our only room in our only bed that only stores his body. A body that is writhing without putting up fights. My boyfriend will die soon. I know it.“Lucien,” I say. “Lucien.” Always in that tone that swings between concern and entire holes of it.Sometimes, when I stare into his eyes, the nothingness is so nothing it becomes something. Something like ignition or excitement or shock from an unwarranted stab. It’s usually just a reflection of me in those black nothing pupils, and suddenly I remember how thin and sick and close to dying I am—dying in a different way than his eventual death. My death will be quick and pleasant because I would have lived a life full of suffering while he would have lived one of instant pleasure.My boyfriend’s name is Lucien. Or Luth-ien, because he has a lisp. My boyfriend says dating me is like having a full-time job. If he had a full-time job, he would know how inaccurate that is. His days involve watching acres and acres of green turf across screens. He watches games all day. Games that require consistency and power and stamina. Also ambition because how can my boyfriend forget ambition. Wowee wow wow. Wishy wish woosh. Sounds his willy whoopy body makes while mimicking a golfer’s swing, panting, getting tired, lying down again. I have a full-time job, so I can’t lie down. I can’t stretch time or take multiple showers or learn how to whistle. My days are dictated for me, albeit short days, days closed multiple times because no gallery is open all week. “Why are the walls so white?” he asks when he visits, scratching his face. It’s not fair that Lucien’s skin mimics porcelain while mine mimics concrete. Cracking in the middle of day, in broad daylight, for everyone to see. When I rush to the bathroom, I don’t wonder if any art will get touched or stolen or lit on fire at the cost of my absence. Every day is a secret wish to get fired, to kick-start my life in a new way. When I’m at the gallery, I can’t wait to go home to Lucien. And when I get home, I can’t wait to die.At home, I look at his face—his porcelain face—and find new ways to improve it. Lucien’s nose bends like a Bastard sword recently retired from battle, swooshing away at anything nearby. Sometimes, I panic in the middle of the night, because I think he’s stopped breathing, stopped swooshing. When I look at his face in the darkness, I don’t think it can improve any more, because his is the kind that will leather beautifully as he grows older. The kind that will get glances from twenty-five-year-olds ten years from now, and ten years after that, and ten years after that. Now, if he could only grow up. When my boyfriend hears these complaints, he says I should write about things I love instead. But I love to complain—it might be the only thing I love—so I, technically, am doing what he says. I make him so happy.“How can I make you happy,” he asks me again and again. Something my last boyfriend would say. So would the one before. I don’t know how I keep finding the same person again and again. They are all chunks of flesh from one body, regurgitated at different points in my life. Each one hoping to endure a little longer than the last. It’s a race to nowhere, especially if none of them qualify.Qualifying only for dates to dinners where everyone stares. Probably because Lucien is over six feet tall, and I hide perfectly in his shadows. In the cusps of his shoulders where no one can touch me. I grab his deltoids as if they’re soft grenades and wait until he asks to be seated. I feel the closest to God, like God, against his cashmere back.Cherry cheesecake, napoleon shake, small sirloin steak. A floating coke, a perfect sundae, a sticky toffee pudding. Cutie patootie, loopy canoopy, woffee toffee coffee, cherry berry cheesecake. My boyfriend and I don’t have these kinds of nicknames. He has a name. I say it the way you’re supposed to. “Stop.”“Stop what?” “Stop fidgeting. You’re making the table shake,” I say and point to his leg. “I have ADHD, iths not my fault that—”“It’s.”“What?” “It’s pronounced it’s. Is being dyslexic also a symptom of ADHD?” Sometimes I wonder if I create these fights so we can drone on in silence. Cruise through whole dinners, whole days, whole lives together like this. I used to think eternity was short until I met Lucien who makes everything feellong and useless and almost even redundant. Whenever I get overwhelmed with the feeling of spending forever with him, I imagine what would happen if he got in a car crash. Immediate relief gets immediately replaced with fear and regret and eventually remorse. The amount of remorse depends on when the crash happens. Tomorrow, I will still be young and gorgeous and can start over. Twenty years from now, I can’t say the same. Maybe Lucien is my lesson, my meditation in life. His mouth is often half-open, equally ready and not ready to stutter something life-changing, something that will completely slice my heart in half. “I just…I…” “Your words, Lucien,” I say. “Use your words.” A waiter watches us complete each other’s sentences. Lucien likes to collect commas, showing them off whenever he talks. “I, I find you, like, impossible,” he manages. True! I think, but I am trying to focus on things that won’t shatter my heart. A futile attempt when I can still feel the waiter’s presence hovering nearby, secretly taking Lucien’s side of the matter. “You don’t even know him,” I want to spit out to her. You don’t even know how I color-coordinate his life, how I spend hours rearranging shades of taupe and gray to match his complexion. How he’s everything because of me and nothing without.Outside, autumn is crinkling into layers of ice. I think of how it will take Lucien every inch of his brain to not want to slip. There is never a moment I don’t think about him. Phee hooo weee. Whooo whooo. Phee hooo weee. Whooo whooo. Practice makes perfect, and my boyfriend loves practicing his whistle. All of Tribeca and all of Manhattan and all of New York can hear him. The children on Crosby poke their heads out, trying to smell out the tune. My boyfriend waves at them like Elvis or Kennedy, and the children cheer back. Their toothed smiles will be engrained inside our memories forever, remembered as the time we saved lives. We pretend to be united, hand in hand, and continue to walk in leisure until my boyfriend grabs at the chance to sit down. If there is something he’s good at, it’s whistling for a cab.One or two or three hours later, my boyfriend is ready to go into bed. He can synchronize with nature like this in ways he can’t with himself. But reaching unconsciousness can sometimes be an entirely separate effort, so yes, sometimes even he needs help falling asleep. Won’t do so unless I sing him a lullaby. One abundant with rhymes and sounds that can be diced into cubes. And because this is my boyfriend, because I love him, I wedge between him and his pillows and begin singing, watching him drift, as he digs deeper and deeper into a dreamscape, as he finally rests in peace.
Lucien, Lucien, a love I invent,
Lucien, Lucien, wrapped in linen and light, tucked deep in cement,
Lucien who loves little white cries and custard-filled pies and whom I despise,
The woman in the window doesn’t know I’m watching her. Or, if she does, she’s fine with it, having assessed me as nonthreatening. I’m just the skinny white girl raking leaves outside her first-floor apartment patio. Hired-by-the-landlord equals vetted-as-safe. And she’s right, I don’t mean any harm—but it’s probably still weird how many times I’ve raked these particular leaves, which are now effectively mulch. She’s doing yoga in the middle of her living room. Not especially good at it, but she’s giving it her all, and when I rake really softly, I can hear her faint, vocal sighs of satisfaction as she sinks into each pose. The skin on her thighs ripples like waves. I imagine running my tongue over it. She rises into warrior. Her stomach is a smooth, lovely hill flowing into the elastic of her tight pink shorts—the same pair she wore when I first saw her weeks ago. She tucks long, dark braids behind her ears and extends her arms upward. A car alarm sounds, and I duck outside her potential line of sight. I do other chores. Scoop abandoned dog shit. Tag vehicles parked in the lot without permits. Wipe down the sweaty equipment in the shared gym. This is how I’ve been making ends meet since P left: My regular job at the stationery store doesn’t pay much, but caretaking—for another apartment complex my landlord owns—knocks a couple hundred off rent in exchange for about an hour of grounds cleaning twice a week. The complex is called SCENE, always in all caps, no “the.” SCENE is outside the city, in a first-ring suburb, surrounded by grassy boulevards and well-maintained public parks. After I first saw the yoga woman, I looked up prices at SCENE and immediately set aside any dreams of lifestyle equivalence. My apartment is about fifty minutes away by bus, just outside downtown, above a laundromat. This new life of mine smells pleasantly of detergent and dryer sheets. I practice slow-motion falling into my sheets like I’m in a TV commercial about soft fabric and soothing scents. When I don’t get it quite right, I try another take.
***
The stationery store is an image of satisfied vacancy. Blank pages of specialty paper pads, notebooks, envelopes, and planners stare down from the shelves. Down the middle of the room, a long table of pens organized into little glass cups. Full ink chambers and empty pages are a promise—someday, they will carry meaning. Behind the counter, font displays for monogramming and a locked glass case of fountain pens, a couple of which cost more than my rent. I hunch over the cash register, waiting to be asked about prices or cardstock weight or ink flow or line width. The owner of the store is named Connie. She is a tiny woman with hair so long it brushes the backs of her knees. On my first day of work, she told me she had hired me because I looked scholarly. Like a poet, she said, but the kind who still wrote on paper instead of on a computer screen. Microsoft Word isn’t poetic, she said, and my glasses-plus-turtleneck-plus-haughtiness look would be good for business. I asked her if she really thought I looked haughty. She said it was a compliment. Connie is obsessed with love letters. She carefully copies loving lines of famous authors onto expensive floral paper. When she finishes, she frames the pages and pins them to the walls. Right now, she’s working on transcribing a collection of letters between two Victorian poets who have very complicated ways of saying they’d like to touch each other. Behind my head at the register: “What I do and what I dream include thee, as the wine must taste of its own grapes.”I fill orders of monogrammed stationery for all kinds of people. Businessmen prefer plain colors and typesets and pay with company cards. English lit majors prefer gilded edges and offer torn coupons from advertisements Connie places in the college newspaper. Connie looks at the empty store and says, Get ready, a group of customers just got off the train. Connie is also a psychic. Once, she suggested that she could offer me a reading in exchange for two hours’ pay and looked genuinely sad when I declined. I nod and straighten piles of journals. The rest of the shift is quiet.
***
After P left me, I found a therapist named Belle. She has uncomfortably large eyes. Uncomfortable for me, I mean, as the object of her gaze. In my first session, she asked me why I wanted to try therapy and I told her that my boyfriend of many years had broken up with me. She asked why we broke up. I told her that we didn’t have sex anymore. She asked, was that really the reason, and I said, yes, we hadn’t had sex for months before he left. Her: How many months? Me: At least twelve. So, a year. Yes. What changed? I don’t know. Except. When we had fucked, he would get all misty-eyed and wholly consumed, and I would be thinking hard about anything else. I wanted to be into it like he was, but mostly I was impatient, as if I were waiting for a bus. For him, it came easily—he came easily. But my orgasm still feels unsolved and private. Also. Sometimes I get stressed when I have to eat a large sandwich. That’s not a euphemism for anything, exactly. An enormous, unwieldy sandwich with no obvious entry point for biting. I’m relieved when it’s over, without once accomplishing enjoyment during the eating process. Chewing as a structured, mechanical action—just: I have to clean up this mess. The only satisfaction comes from the task being complete. So, that’s how sex was, and why I stopped having it. I thought we had reached the perfect equilibrium. P did not. Belle didn’t have much to say about the sandwich. She said instead, Let’s talk about desire. I said okay, so we did. My task, she said, was to recognize desire when I saw it in others.
***
A text arrives from my friend Amanda, who lives far away and is very into fitness. If I let her talk about herself, she will tell me about things like personal records and her favorite athleisure brands. Once every few months Amanda texts me to check in about my life and hers. We were friends in college, and every interaction since then has been perfunctory. I can see my last response in our text thread from a few months ago when P and I were still together. There, I’ve gushed about a new sofa we had recently purchased. I told her I had found a nice seafood restaurant that I went to alone because P was allergic to fish. In response, she said that she had recently run a charity 10K for drug addicts. I hadn’t replied. I draft a reply to her most recent text. I say as little as I can while still being honest: I work two jobs and live alone. My apartment is covered entirely in linoleum and it usually smells like dryer sheets. Recently, I have developed a fondness for canned fish. It is most of what I eat.
***
I’m picking up a particularly large dog shit at SCENE when I see the yoga woman walking toward me. She’s wearing a velvety beige tracksuit that looks a size too small and a golden necklace that says Bianca. I look at the place where the brown skin of her midriff sticks out, then at her eyes, which are crinkly with a smile. She says that she’s glad she doesn’t have a dog. I nod and say, Me too. She frowns for a moment then recovers and says, See ya. I wave to her with the hand holding the poop bag. Damn it.
***
Connie likes to interpret dreams. Specifically, my dreams. Specifically, as soon as I arrive at the store in the morning. Instead of “Good morning” or “Hello, employee,” she says, What did you dream about last night? Admittedly, I am the sort of person to consider all of those things fake. But with Connie, that certainty lets me revel, safely, in the idea that they might be real. I tell her that I dreamed about a hotel. Hotels, she exclaims, clasping her hands together as though she has been gifted something marvelous. Hotels are spaces of transition. You don’t arrive in them to stay forever—you stay briefly, then leave. Probably you never return. You stay in other hotels, but you never come back to this one, or that one. You’re in a room mimicking a home, but you are not home. There’s no food in the fridge except leftovers that you will inevitably throw out. There’s cable TV, which you don’t have at home. You’re a different person in this different place. Impermanent. But if I say anymore, I’ll have to charge you for a reading, ha ha. Just promise you’ll still be available on Saturdays after your grand change!
***
In the dream, I’m in a room with two crisp, white beds. P is in the bathtub. He asks me to get him a disposable razor from the front desk, even though in reality he’s a near-entirely hairless man—one of the reasons I was attracted to him. When I go into the hallway to look for the lobby, I can’t find anything. The carpet goes on endless, impossible. The doors I pass open at random and I see people inside. They’re watching TV with gaping mouths. They’re crying and pulling their hair. They’re fucking in weird positions I suspect P had wanted to try. I eventually reach the end of the hallway, where ornate, imposing doors open at my touch. Inside, Bianca is executing a perfect king pigeon pose. She is naked, breasts facing the ceiling. I try to go inside the room. Then I wake up feeling unoriginal.
***
I tell Belle about the desire I’ve seen in others. I see the glimmering eyes of customers who wish they were a different kind of person—maybe someone who writes letters by hand to send to estranged friends, or maybe just someone who spends hundreds of dollars on stationery. I see Connie’s desire to tell the future and maybe her desire to find her own love hidden in the letters of others. I see the stern desire of tenants at SCENE to not be like me, the girl working off rent money by collecting others’ various wastes. It’s interesting to me, Belle says, that most of the desires you observe are nonsexual in nature. Sometimes, I say, I see men’s desire for me or for other women. They make it very obvious. Does that ever frighten you? Only the normal amount, I think. Do you want to talk about fear? No, not really. I think I’m really getting somewhere with desire. And where do you see desire in yourself?
***
Bianca isn’t doing yoga when I arrive at the regular time. The drapes to her apartment are partially closed, but I can see her absence in the living room. No yoga video, no downward-facing dog, no pink shorts. For the first time, I examine the room itself, nose pressed to the glass: expensive-looking furniture, a large, wall-mounted television, a stack of books on the end table that all have to do with personal improvement: diet, exercise, self-esteem, finances. Beyond the living room, a well-stocked kitchen with open cabinets that reveal a series of identical, clear plastic containers with various granolas and crackers. Even the hand soap has been decanted into a clear plastic dispenser. The apartment is organized, intentional. I think of my own linoleum box. My fresh-linen air and cans of fish. No books to be seen, because P took them all, but slanting piles of celebrity magazines encircle my unmade bed. I sweep leaves from around the mailboxes. SCENE trusts enough in its own gates and safety that they are just boxes, no locks—so I look. Of course I look! Bianca Williams, apartment 124. She has a subscription to a magazine full of high-end business attire. The models look nothing like her—in that they are all white and draped in stringy muscle—but also nothing like me. They have bulges and caverns in all the right places. They shoot lusty looks at the camera that has plastered them onto glossy pages. I ask myself about my own desire.I waste time checking parking permits, and soon Bianca comes home—drives up in a small, blue BMW and emerges with a friend in tow. They have an aura about them like they’re drunk. They smell like brunch. I hover nearby with my clipboard of license plate numbers and she doesn’t see me or doesn’t care. When they are inside, I hear overlapping voices and rising laughter. I chance a look through the window and see them sipping wine at her kitchen table. I leave them like that, vague, giggling outlines in the background of the room where Bianca does her yoga.
***
Canned fish can range in price from ninety-nine-cent tuna—the kind from companies that have been accused of using dolphin meat—to pricey tins of swordfish or anchovy that can only be purchased at specialty stores. These expensive versions usually have an old-world, art nouveau design to them, muted colors and complex line art that evokes church architecture. It’s like I’m meant to think I’m royalty from a country that doesn’t exist anymore—an Eastern European countess feasting on caviar at teatime, instead of a thirty-something sitting on a rug she bought to hide some of the linoleum, eating canned fish she can’t quite afford with the tiny fork that she used to use to crush up pâté for her cat. The cat is dead now. “Tin fish” is a luxury good. I sink the fork into the pale fish flesh and try to connect to decadence.
***
I tell Belle that I think I have found my desire and she nods in encouragement. I tell her about Bianca and she asks how we met. I tell her, she talked to me about dog poop. And? No, that’s all, except I see her doing yoga through her window. Belle is quiet for a long time. Her face goes taut around the mouth. She explains to me why it is inappropriate to watch someone through their window. No, no, I know. I know that. So why did you do it? My turn for silence. If you are going to put desire into practice, it must be able to be reciprocated. You can’t just watch someone through a window.No, no, I know. Belle, frowning now: This is a good moment to practice empathy. How do you think she would feel if she knew you were watching her? I try to consider this, but as I’m forming an answer Belle continues speaking, so I guess the question is rhetorical. Is this the first time you’ve had feelings for a woman? Yes. Or, no. I had friendships when I was younger where I thought I felt differently than the friends. But it wasn’t a distinct, oh-please-let’s-touch thing. Just an ache in the back of my throat that only appeared on occasion. And anyway, how do you tell the difference between loving how someone exists and loving them? Are you trying to find the difference between love and envy? I would say, picture yourself with them, then picture yourself as them, and see which is better. We talk a little more about Bianca, but nothing very helpful. I stop seeing Belle after this session.
***
When I finally let Connie do a reading in exchange for half of my Friday wages, she has this to say: I’m getting the sense that you place a great deal of value on being liked. Which is good, as a sales associate! But maybe bad for a regular person. You will have people who like you in the longer term, but you’ve entered a dry spell of camaraderie right now. You are on your way to other things—interesting how this lines up with your hotel dreams! Think of this time as your space of transition—not this job of course, which you’ve told me you’ll be at for a long time. While you wait for a change, find a practice ground for feeling the connection you seek. Yes, we all need practice, not in feeling our feelings, but in making them known and meaningful for others. It is good that your biggest hurdle is figuring out what you want—what an interesting phrase, to “figure out.” I’ve done other readings where the biggest hurdle is avoiding a looming and painful death. So, you probably won’t die! But if you start to feel sick, tell me and we can try again. Listen, have you ever tried yoga? It may help with any number of your problems and paths and potentials. You will soon come into a small amount of wealth—not money, necessarily. You will have a slight headache for the next three Thursdays. Oh, and you’ll make a big sale this afternoon! Custom “from the desk of” stationery order.
***
For a while I stop showing up to my job at SCENE and no one notices. Eventually my landlord calls, I assume to fire me, but actually he just tells me there’s a dead raccoon near the SCENE dumpster that he’d like me to deal with. I mostly go because I’ve run out of things to do at home besides paging through the magazine I took from Bianca’s mailbox. I tried television and scrolling the internet and I even found a yoga video online. I made it about five minutes before the instructor said to lay down on the floor, then I watched the rest of the class from that position. I tried a yoga class once, years ago. I went with Amanda, my fitness friend, when she still lived in town. The class was more advanced than I was ready for. I tried for an hour to keep up with a room full of sweaty investment bankers and political advisors in colorful polyester. The instructor, in an apparent effort of pity, lurked near me to push in my spine or straighten my knees as necessary. When we left the class, Amanda said, Wasn’t that fun? My problem is that I’ve only ever known for certain what I don’t want. I don’t want to do yoga or have my fortune told. I don’t care about stationery or athletic clothing. I don’t need a therapist to tell me what I should be doing. I don’t want to have sex. But I do want.
***
The next time I see Bianca, she is naked with the curtain pulled nearly shut. She pulls her heel up against her thigh into tree pose and sighs. Her breasts and stomach hang heavy toward the floor. No line on her body runs straight, all flowing, like waves or poetic shifts in a love letter. Oh, how I love thee, let me count the ways—let me count your limbs, each mark and crevice, every hair on your head and body. She radiates light. She outshines the blinding midday sun. I’m aware of the rake in my hand and the mulched leaves at my feet. Looking at her, I see myself.When she has finished being a tree, she hangs loose in a forward fold. When she rises, our eyes meet and hers go wide.
So a vasectomy isn't actually reversible. I like to start off with that. Because for some guys that's all they need to hear before they decide they need some more time to think about it. I know people say that a vasectomy is reversible, but it's not. You really need to be done having kids if you're going to do this, because it's permanent. But I see you already have some kids so I'm less worried about that in this case. You have three, is that right? That's great. Makes sense you'd want a vasectomy. I have three kids, so I get it. I had three and thought woah there, that's enough of that! Time for a vasectomy! And did it myself. I mean, I didn't do it to myself, but you know what I mean. I got the procedure done myself. By my colleague Dr. Askildsen, actually. Although, to be fair, I could've probably done it to myself. I've done, well, yeah, let's see, I've done probably five hundred vasectomies now with no complications. Maybe one or two complications. Or at least no complications from anything I did, uh, well, not wrong, but, you know, most complications are due to the patient not resting properly or tending to the incision site correctly. Which is partly why we like to have consultations like this first and then schedule the vasectomy procedure itself for a later date – and we'll get into this more later – because there are some things that we like to go over before the actual procedure. But like I said I've had a pretty excellent record. I'm pretty good at vasectomies, basically. I feel confident that I could have done my own procedure, actually, if you want the truth. It's all I do at the clinic, really. And a successfully completed vasectomy has a ninety-nine point nine five percent chance efficacy rate at preventing pregnancy. That's effectively one hundred percent. I could probably do the vasectomy procedure blindfolded at this point, too, to be honest. And we'll get into this more later, but it only takes about an hour, usually less, from start to finish. So some days I do five or six vasectomies in a row, like that's just my whole day, maybe one consult, like this, in the morning, you know, and then I pick up the bulk of the procedures for Dr. Askildsen, usually. Some days it's just back to back procedures and I clock out. There isn't really a clock to punch, but you know what I mean, you know, but it is nice, like, if my schedule's empty after that I can just go home. But most days, yeah, it's like, one or two consultations, a couple vasectomies, lunch, then maybe three or four more vasectomies, then some paperwork. And it's all very smooth and predictable because I am very experienced. You've picked a good clinic to come to, basically, if you'd let me brag a bit, because I am proud of the work we do here. So I appreciate you coming in. Like I said, I could have done my own procedure, blindfolded, I imagine, too, with no complications. But the main goal of this consultation is to get you up to speed on what to expect. So, in a bit, with your permission – and we'll get into this more later – I'd like to take a look and have a feel to make sure everything's alright down there, and that you're aware of, sort of, like, what to expect, in terms of how the procedure goes and, like I said, like which parts of your body I may need to manually manipulate, what to expect in terms of pressure or discomfort, that kind of thing. It's all very straightforward, but I do find that it helps to walk through how it all works prior to the actual procedure. And I should say here that I wouldn't actually do it blindfolded, to you, or to anyone, or even myself, although I definitely could, I'm pretty sure. But legally speaking I probably shouldn't. Definitely couldn't do that. But I could easily do it. Blindfolded, I mean. Or to myself. Both, really. I basically do it blind now, in a way. I mean, we'll get into this more later, but the whole procedure pretty much goes by feel. I'll take a look I guess to make sure there's nothing strange going on down there, you know, that might lead to a complication, like I said, and then I need to deliver the local anaesthetic, but then from there it's pretty much by feel. And I guess the first part is more like a formality, really, to make sure there isn't anything that could lead to an infection of the incision site, like I mentioned. That's generally what we mean by a complication: it's generally something that would pose a risk of infection or impede recovery which would make me not want to proceed. But you don't see that much out here in Weston. You get that more over in Wellsborough, in my experience. I imagine you're familiar with Wellsborough, with it being so close to Weston. Cute little town. But you get some people who really don't know how to take care of themselves. Which, and we'll get into this more later, is what a visual and physical inspection during a consultation helps identify. And usually I don't have to deal with this type of patient much here in Weston, but there's still a lot of ignorance, or discomfort, maybe, when it comes to the body, especially this region of the body, in general, like, for anyone, you know, anywhere in the country. You don't go out to a restaurant and ask people how their genitals are, you know? Which, again, can complicate the procedure. But I remember being surprised about what kind of problems people are just dealing with without realizing it, especially in Wellsborough. At my first clinic we saw some really interesting guys come in, is all I'll say, some guys who seemed to suffer this kind of terror of their own body, I guess is a good way to put it. Well, maybe that's not how others would put it, but it makes sense to me to put it that way. I don't want to go into this too much, but sometimes you can really get a sense of it when they come in. You start talking about things – and we'll get into this more later– you know, like scrotum and perineum, and they sort of recoil. I'd talk about semen, you know, and, really, yeah, the best I can describe it, really, is just terror. A deep fear. Very deep. So I call it terror. You would think it'd be more of like a disgust, or revulsion, maybe, or some kind of general discomfort, you know, because of the association with urine or excrement, but no, it's really just a sort of, well, shocked, fearful. I call it terror, really, that's the best way I can describe it. You start a consultation and then you really see it: terror. The physical nature of fear, really, of terror. You know, you can see it. They get a little pale, maybe they sweat a bit. It's very physical, really a drastic change, and very immediate. Some guys might shiver, even, I remember. But it's really in the eyes. Some guys, you know, most of these guys, their eyes start to get wide, and their pupils dilate. And they sort of, well, cower, I guess, too, in the chair, and I'm not doing anything else than what we're doing here, you and me, you know, just calmly talking about the procedure, talking about what I'll need to manipulate, how a vasectomy actually works, physically, you know, biologically. At the time, when it was happening, I would think they were just afraid of the procedure because they didn't understand it, you know, and this was back when we didn't have these consultations as much. They'd come for the procedure and immediately they start cowering on the table, and I assumed they were thinking it was more like castration, or something, you know, which I get, because there's a lot of ignorance out there, and I get how that would maybe scare you a bit. I mean, it doesn't make sense at all, really, if you think about it, but I don't know, I was trying to figure it out. And I wanted to see how to make things easier for these guys. So then I started, you know, first thing in the consultation, which has a few parts to it – and we'll get into this more later – I would start with just very simply saying Hello, a vasectomy is very simple, and I'm not gonna remove a single part of your body, I'm just making a small snip in a little tube and you won't even notice a difference in three days' time. But I was foolish, in retrospect, thinking that way. It didn't make a difference. They still just cowered in the chair, eyes wide, pupils dilated, little blobs of sweat peeking out from under their hair. Terror. But I was stubborn, you know, and I wanted to be the best, one of the best, if possible, is what I wanted at the time, which I kind of am now, to be honest – so know you're in good hands here, expert hands – and so I kept trying to improve, I wanted to figure out how to help them, and I thought, okay, let's have consultations, and during the consultation, right at the start of it, even, I can reassure them. I thought I just had to be more clear. Concise. I figured I could work out a perfect introduction that would just prevent it right off the bat, you know: the terror. So,like, I tried saying, very first thing: Your penis won't be touched. Your testicles won't be touched. I mean, okay, maybe I wouldn't say it exactly that way, because I do have to manually manipulate the testicles, and sometimes the penis, if it's large enough to get in the way, which can make the procedure much more difficult, as you can imagine – and we'll get into this more later – but I intended that line to just mean I'm not going to injure you, you know, I'm not going to cut off your penis. That's very straightforward but I tried out all kinds of phrasing. I even tried just saying that: I'm not going to cut off your penis. And I even pulled out a diagram, or I'd have it propped right up here when they came in, before they even came in, actually, and I'd point, you know, first thing: None of this stuff is going anywhere. I promise. And I'd point to the penis and the testicles. But no, that wasn't it, that wasn't the problem at all, of course. I know that now. I was wrong. I thought maybe it was just, I don't know how to say it, the association of the whole thing. These guys had a deep fear of the urology clinic, or what the word implied, I guess, I thought: urine, penis, testicles, semen. They had a fear of those things. Or more like a fear of the parts of the body, of what the body does or can do. They had a fear of these things, but, well, I realized it was even simpler than that: the body. These guys were coming in terrified of their own bodies. That's what it was. The body. The self, the physical self. They were being confronted with their own bodies, the reality of their beings, I guess, all the wires and bolts and tubes and screws. Not literally, I mean, not literal wires and screws – and we'll get into this more later – but the whole physicality of it made them uneasy. Now, again, uneasy isn't the right word, it's beyond that, deeper than that. Like I said, it's terror. I was telling them that they had a thing called a penis, a thing called a scrotum, but then that was it, that was all it took, because that opens it all up. Sitting here and saying the word penis was like leading them to Medusa and telling them to look right in her eyes. Everything else was just the predictable aftermath of that little glance, that little glance at the truth, I thought, you know, after really thinking about it. After really trying to understand and work through it, these consultations I'd have and what happened in them, what went wrong, working through when they really began to cower, all that, and asking myself What set them off? Man, I'd ask myself this and think on it for a long time after, I'd think about it at home, you know, or in the car, and I'd come back the next day with a new theory, some new idea of what was doing it, what was igniting it, this real terror. I mean, I should clarify, they weren't running out of the office screaming. Nothing like that. But I know that look. I could see it. The terror. I could see it in their eyes, in their whole being, really, this deep dread opening up in them and draining them, right in front of me, sitting where you're sitting now, basically, and they would sort of gasp for air a little bit, gasping like a fish or something, you know? Have you ever been fishing? Then, right, you know what I'm talking about, how a fish will sort of gasp, sort of open and close its mouth, almost like a reflex. Well I guess it is a reflex, I don't know. You assume they're gasping for air, but fish have gills, right? That doesn't make sense, really, no, so it's something else. I never thought of it that way before, but that's what it is: terror. These men were terrified, just like the fish is terrified. The fish isn't trying to breathe the air, it's simply reacting, it's just a reflex, an autonomous movement. It's feeling out of control, and it doesn't know what to do, so it does that, for some reason. That's how these guys would look at me as soon as I said the word scrotum or the word ejaculate or something like that, as soon as I pointed at the diagram, as soon as I even gesticulated toward their lap, sometimes, even. Little fish mouths opening and closing. Gasping. And I realized that ultimately it was just whatever finally caused them to really understand that: Yes, yes, I have a body, and my body has genitals, and my genitals do things, they make things, they shoot things out, sometimes, even, and I have to sit with that understanding, I have to really confront it, really accept it, and I'm not prepared, I can't do it. Or maybe it's just the body, that simple reminder: I have a body, that's it, isn't it, I'm not just a floating, like, ghost, I guess, but I'm real, I'm a body, or I'm in a body, and my body functions, or, well, it functions for now, and maybe it won't always do that, maybe it's already falling apart, and, you know, someday that will end, and so will I. And that's terrifying. I can understand that, now. I didn't understand that early on, doing these consultations. But I understand it now. And not everyone reacts that way, obviously. Maybe it's just something about Wellsborough, even. I don't know. I thought I could just walk in and be frank, talk to an adult like another adult. And it didn't work. I didn't understand it then. Sometimes I'd get so frustrated, you know, and I'd daydream, even, about, like, walking in and saying Hi there, I'm Dr. Razzle, and hey, listen, one: you have a penis, and two: you're gonna die. And I have a penis and I'm going to die. And there's nothing either of us can do about that. And everyone with a penis is gonna die, and everyone without a penis is gonna die, because we're all just bodies, we're just blood and guts and we have like a hundred years max and then it's over forever and we need to be adults about this because I'm here to help you get a vasectomy. So I'm gonna step out and do some paperwork, and you can think about that for a minute, and when you're ready, I'll come back in and we'll talk about the procedure and what to expect. Isn't that ridiculous? I never did that, obviously. And maybe it wouldn't have helped anyone. Or maybe it would have. I don't know. But I was feeling so desperate, I remember, that it felt good to imagine it, to just think of these extremes, to work through some really out there idea and picture it, you know, close my eyes and feel it, live in that moment, and I think it helped me, too. It really helped me think it through and really understand it. I stopped myself once and thought, Alright, why am I imagining this? What am I trying to solve, really? It was the terror. It was always the terror, in the end, and that wasn't about me. It wasn't about the procedure. It wasn't even about the guy's perineum or prostate or vas deferens. It wasn't about pee or poop or jizz or blood or anything else so common and trivial as that. But it was about something even more simple, even more central to everything, the most common thing, the most simple thing, I guess, really. It was about death. They were afraid of death. That's what terror is. It's not just any fear, no, it's the fear of death. And I thought about that and thought about that, you know, sometimes angrily, sometimes frustrated, I guess, and sometimes desperate, just so over it, just so willing to do anything to help these guys move past it, and sometimes it made me sad, too, of course, thinking about all these guys coming in and of all things I have to be the guy who reminds them of their own death. All these guys, you know, who never had to confront it, never gave a thought to their own end, it seemed like, until of all things they step into my urology clinic office and sit on my chair and of all the things in the world it was me saying the word scrotum and bam! There it is: You're gonna die! And It wrecked me, in a way, for a long time. I felt stuck. It felt impossible to move beyond that. But eventually, you know, thankfully, I realized there was nothing I could do. Nothing! It's nothing anyone can do, really. It's something that not even religion can do, if you think about it, and, hey, that's religion's whole thing, isn't it? To prepare you for death? To explain death? To help you come to terms with death? I don't actually know, but that's how I think of it, anyway. And yet, I thought, you know, everyone is still afraid of dying, even religious people. Despite having religion, they're still afraid. The most ardent believer, convinced, fully sold on life after death in Heaven, even, still at the end: afraid. And if it really is everyone, then maybe the Pope is afraid of death, even. Maybe all the Popes were afraid of death, still, right at the end. And it's so obvious, right? Of course they would be afraid of dying. How could they not be afraid? But of all people, you would think, you know, maybe the Pope could accept his own demise, I mean. But I believe it, I truly believe it, that even the Pope fears death. He has to. And I bet if the Pope were from Wellsborough, and he came into my old clinic, he'd be the same as anyone else. He'd be terrified. He'd feel it. He'd feel the terror. That's death. That's what death does. Even Jesus was afraid. I remember that, from church, I don't know if you're religious, but I remember that. Jesus on the cross: Why have you forsaken me? He felt it. Jesus felt the terror. The son of God, or God himself, right? God incarnate, God walking on the Earth, and it's still the same. The terror was the same. It's all the same. And I thought about that and I realized I had no other option. I had to give it up. I had to accept it. I mean, it was death. Everyone has to accept it. Not just their own death, I realized, but everything else that death does. Death was doing this to my clinic. I couldn't help these guys. I mean, I could help them stop having kids, but that was about it. If even Jesus Christ himself, God on Earth, were afraid of dying on the fucking cross then I certainly have no business making anyone feel better about dying. So I gave up. But, like I said, it's not really an issue around here in Weston. And now I can just focus on just using the consultation to say okay, we can do the procedure, and we'll get into this more later, but here's what it's gonna involve: there's a visual inspection, some manual manipulation, some lidocaine to numb the area, a small incision, a snip, and some minimal stitches. But again, if I were doing it blindfolded, I could pretty confidently skip the visual inspection, especially if I were doing it to myself, obviously. So that would just leave the anaesthetic, which, again, is local, it's like, you know, procaine, like at the dentist, and you just need to inject it into the scrotum without penetrating the testicle. Which, I mean, that's pretty straightforward. So the blindfold wouldn't really impact anything. And, thinking about it now, I've found better results standing next to the patient, you know, facing the same direction, like this, which for some people makes things easier, or at least feel less invasive, less clinical, so, yeah, no, I could do it. I could do it easily. Send me back five years and hand me a blindfold and I'd do it, probably in under twenty minutes. Bam! Anyway, why don't you hop off the table here and, if you feel comfortable, pull down your bottoms. I'll close the blinds. Thank you. Ah, okay. This one'll be easy.
Everyone was lined up to watch. We’d waited months. Cassie sat beside me on the curb as her dad revved the engine of his bike. Ready. All eight cars from the night’s derby were bumper-to-tail in front of him like a canyon. He had cleared seven in Wichita once, but never eight. Cassie’s step-mother Luann had refused to show. Cassie and I both wore shirts with a graphic of him soaring through the air. He signed them earlier that day, laughed and apologized that he was out of the smaller sizes. “Christ sake, those look like dresses on you two...” Walking away we’d sniffed the signatures as they dried. We sat beneath a streetlight waiting for the jump. Our white shirts glowed. Her knees were tucked into hers like huge tits, she looked down at them and smiled at me. “Hope mine never get this big.” She made jokes when she was nervous. Her dad turned the throttle again, ZRRAANG....ZRRAANG. Carnival lights turned woozy in storefront windows as they shook. He took a last look at the ramp and then retreated to the end of the block for his approach. He was the coolest guy I had ever seen. My dad was on stage with the rest of the band and they all started banging away on their instruments. He was on drums. It was their first original tune all night, a rabid, crescendoed free-for-all. The engine screamed through its gears down the street toward us. The band stopped on my dad’s cue as the front tire reached the foot of the ramp. Our hearts beat into our ears. Eight cars. Cassie knew before anyone else. She realized Luann was right. That eight was too many. She pulled her knees from her shirt and sprinted toward where he would crash land, feet from where his helmet split against the street.
***
After that he was different of course. The bones eventually healed but his head never did. No more state fairs, no more jumps. And Cassie was different too. She threw away all those shirts because no one wanted them anymore, especially her. They sold his motorcycles to pay the hospital bills. He would shuffle through neighborhoods, never lifting his feet. Sometimes barely dressed. People whispered in their yards about him until it wasn’t interesting anymore. Finally he took a shotgun into the basement and finished what the crash had begun. The police took most of the mess away, but the blood was still there. Shards of bone were left behind too, some stuck in the ceiling tiles even. I heard my dad screaming into the phone the next day, furious. “Because I would’ve done it myself, Frank, for fuck’s sake!!!” He came out of the kitchen, eyes wet, shaking his head. “That poor girl...’’ They’d let Cassie clean it all up herself because she and Luann couldn’t afford someone else.
***
I followed Cassie down to the creek behind the funeral home. She lifted her dress over the tall grass along the bank. The first time I’d seen her in a dress, or a necklace. She took off her shoes and put them on a large rock, then stepped in. She bent down and caught a few tadpoles in her cupped hands. That time of year there were thousands of them. We’d collected them together as little kids. “Lonesome in numbers...” I didn’t know if she was talking to me or the things squiggling around in her hands. She looked up. “It’s something my dad used to say. That there are so many people it can make you lonely sometimes. Like these things...just too many of them to mean anything. C’mere...” She let the tadpoles go and took off her necklace. It was a delicate gold chain with a dull, white pendant shaped like an arrowhead. “Gimme your hand.” She pressed the sharp edge of it against her palm and drew blood. I asked her what it was. “A shark’s tooth. My dad gave it to me.” It didn’t look like any shark’s tooth I’d seen. I gave her my hand. She squeezed hers hard against it and I felt our blood mix. We watched it drip from our hands and disappear into the water. She asked me if it hurt and I shook my head no. I looked at her and saw she was crying. That’s when I knew it wasn’t a shark tooth between our palms; it was bone.
I found the file by accident.It was tucked between Q3BudgetProjections.pptx and TeamSalesSeminar_2021(final_FINAL2).pptx on the shared drive.Jesus.pptxJust like that.I clicked it out of curiosity. Or maybe boredom. It's hard to tell the difference between the two when you spend the day in an office staring at spreadsheets that mean nothing to you. The file was empty. One blank white slide. No title. No bullet points. No formatting. Just a white void.A warmth emanated from the screen. I stared at it for a while. I bathed in its glow. My body slackened. My thoughts dulled to a low hum. Like I was recharging. Like I had taken something I wasn’t prescribed. Somewhere below the static, I thought I could hear a choir humming. Maybe it was the computer’s fan speeding up. The electric sermon lulled me into a trance. I don’t know how long I sat there.A wave of anxiety snapped me out of it. Any of my coworkers could have walked by, caught me slacking off. I told myself to close the file, to get back to work. But I couldn’t. My hands moved without me. My fingers hovered over the keyboard. I started typing.I wrote:I was the one that stole Rachel's underwear at the 6th grade sleepover.I had never admitted that to anyone, though the memory haunted me awake with guilt many times in the 20 years since. It felt good.I typed another confession. Then another. And another. I kept going until—"Mary," the voice said. I looked up, heart racing. My coworker stood across from me, arms crossed. "You're in this meeting right?" he said. "You coming?"I clicked save and exited out of the file.It wasn't until later that night, stoned and half asleep in bed, that it occured to me. Other people had access to the shared drive. My stomach twisted. I sprung upright, grabbed my laptop, and logged in. Jesus.pptx was in my recent folder.I opened it up. Checked the file history:File owner: Mary SLast edit: Mary SI didn't remember creating it, but then again, I hardly remember anything I did at work. Assured that no one else had read through my confessional, I shut my laptop and drifted off.Weeks passed before I opened it again. Work got busy. Days blurred. But one slow morning, restless, I clicked the file. Just to vent. Just to kill time. I typed secret after secret. My muscles unclenched with every confession. I wrote down my hopes. My childhood fears. I described my first kiss. It was at that moment I decided I would speak to Jesus.pptx every morning when I got to work.The next morning, however, I discovered something strange.I opened the file, expecting relief before the first slide even loaded. But a new slide had been added:I miss the way my mother stroked my hair.I was hit with nausea. My vision tunneled. I hadn’t typed that.I deleted the text and replaced it with a secret of my own choosing:I google myself everyday. I saved the file. I closed it.I began checking the powerpoint every morning.Like clockwork, new slides appeared. And they knew things that I barely admitted to myself. Things I had buried. I wasn’t sure if the feeling it incited stemmed from feeling seen or feeling surveilled. Slide 16:It felt cold and sterile and free of guilt. No one noticed.Slide 21:I haven’t been touched in 46 days.Coworkers glanced at me differently. "You look great," one said in a tone that meant nothing. "You seem tired," another offered, like a question. I started bringing lunch from home, eating alone. I stopped taking breaks. I withdrew, unsure if I was becoming more real or if I was being erased.Eventually, the file ran out of confessions. It had mapped every failing, every fleeting shame. It started predicting my future.Slide 56:I won't be needed after Q1. I stopped checking the file after that. Not because I didn't believe it. Because I did.On March 31st HR called me into their office. I knew what was coming. Before packing up my few belongings and returning my laptop to IT, I deleted the file. Cleared the trash.On the way out, I passed the printer. A stack of fresh printouts sat waiting for someone. In big bold letters the title page read:JESUS (FINAL).I didn't stop to read it.
Ever since her husband was hit by a municipal bus, Mrs. Atwal would spend her afternoons watching the hippos at the aquarium. Their fleetness of hoof belying their primordial size.At two o’clock, on the nose, the hippos were isolated in a separate part of the tank and the mermaid show would begin. Children crowded the double-paned glass. A drowsy piano tune was piped through the speakers. The mermaids emerged from some unknowable recess in the tank. Each time one of the mermaids waved at Mrs. Atwal, or otherwise made eye contact with her, she imagined a hippo breaking loose of its enclosure and flattening the mermaid against the glass.“Afternoon pick me up?” The question threw her, as the man was small—very small—and she couldn’t be sure whether he was asking to be physically picked up.“It’s the good stuff,” he added, and held out a large soda container with a crooked straw poking out from the lid. Then shook the drink so the ice rattled against the sides. “Seems like you could use an eye-opener.”She declined as politely as possible. They watched one of the mermaids purse her lips and blow a kiss to the children.“I hate these floating turds. I wish one of them would get crushed by the hippos already.”She decided she liked this man, and when he asked her if she wanted to visit the food cart—the one by the penguin exhibit—she accepted his invitation.Outside, an axolotl-shaped balloon escaped a child’s hand and floated skywards. The man pointed at the boy and bent over in laughter.“Idiot,” he said. “How hard is it to hold on to a balloon?”The man ordered a single tray of fries, which he proceeded to slather in ketchup from the condiment pump. Mrs. Atwal ordered a small pouch of chips, which she slipped into her bag for later. They sat down at a picnic bench overlooking the Gentoo penguins.“You know how much they pay you if you fall into one of the exhibits?”She shook her head.“I mean, with a good lawyer, we’re talking millions. Even with a bad lawyer, you’ll be set for life. Just for slugging it out for a few rounds with some puffin.”He continued: “A couple of months ago some kid got bit by an otter. Guess what? A quarter million dollars. Can you imagine? He was ugly as sin before the otter got him. A quarter million! What would you do with all that money?”She tried to think of an answer. It shouldn’t have been hard to imagine as her husband had taken out multiple life insurance policies before he died and she had that much—more—in the bank.A seagull flew over to pick at the greasy jetsam under their table.“Fuck off, you ocean rat,” he said, trying to kick at the gull, but his feet couldn’t reach the bird from his seated position.Mrs. Atwal rose to go to the bathroom.“Where are you going, lady? It’s just an ocean rat.”The bathroom was precisely empty. She sat down on a toilet seat in the stall and thought about whether seagulls could digest fries or if it caused them to get sick and throw up later.Under the stall, she saw a coral blue tail fin trawl across the floor tiling. She opened the stall to find a mermaid in a silver wig crying over the sink. She edged beside her.“Why doesn’t Jason look at me the way he used to?” the mermaid said.She wondered if Jason was the other mermaid in the show. Or a land dweller with the biologically appointed number of toes.“He’s always talking with Miranda. And she can barely go thirty seconds without reaching for the air hose.”Mrs. Atwal nodded conspiratorially.“Miranda doesn’t have the lung capacity for this work.”“Right?”“And Jason, I saw him laughing earlier when a child lost his balloon.”“How cruel.”“Cruel indeed.”The mermaid threw her mammalian arms around Mrs. Atwal.“Thank you.”The mermaid hopped and shimmied out of the bathroom. Mrs. Atwal returned to the picnic bench, where only the man’s partially eaten tray of fries remained. She took out her bag of chips and ate them leaning over the railing encircling the penguin colony.“Ma’am,” said the moon-faced attendant. “You have to stand behind the red line.”She looked at the red line, which was several inches behind the railing.Would standing behind this line shelter her from life’s assorted dangers? A tall order for a band of paint, she thought.But like the well-mannered woman she was, had been raised to be, she stepped behind the red line, and for a moment even she believed that nothing bad could befall her.
The first day at Triassic Land, my Spinosaurus tail got torn off in the door of my dead grandad’s old Camry. I left home because I was sick of Mom babying me. I was single. Grown up. I was like a twenty-four-year-old boo-boo she wouldn’t let heal. I’d typed up a fake acceptance letter and showed it to her a month ago. Told her I was starting at Central Michigan University’s summer business program early and that a buddy I used to play video games with had a room. She gave me a hundred dollars, a kiss on the cheek, and said she was proud.I could see all the coasters I’d grown up riding over the barbed-wire security fence. Mad Meteor, Cretaceous Coroner, Chicxulub Impactor—Quivering Timbers had always been my favorite though. No loops, but the wood shook your head like a speed bag. It held all that thrill without any worry of slipping through the harness and falling into the inevitable. I was considering how long it would take to hit the ground when a giant red Silverado pulled up next to me.“Well guy,” the old driver said, hobbling out of his 4x4 chariot, “that tail’s dangling like a dingleberry.” He looked like Clint Eastwood in Gran Torino if Clint Eastwood had been addicted to Diet Coke. When he squinted, he looked older instead of meaner. “I—”“I’ll fix y’up don’t worry. I should’ave some duct tape…somewhere ‘n here.” He heaved his duffel bag out and dropped it on the cracked pavement like a treasure.“It’s really okay, I’ll fix it later,” I said.He pulled out some duct tape and shoved it in my face like a trophy.“Only’ll be a minute and you’ll thank me,” he said.It was easier to let him do it in the end. Last thing I wanted was a fight with a geriatric Dirty Harry on my first day. When he was finished, he slapped my pleather ass and fondled the Camry to stand back up.“Name’s Pat. You Gordy’s replacement?” I’d seen it on the news with Mom one morning. Mom’d said, How is anyone supposed to feel safe anymore? and I’d said, you can do that for a living? The posting online had read: Dinosaurs wanted! 12/hr + meals!“Yeah. I’m Mortimer.” “Jordan?”“Mor-tih-mur!” He reached out and squeezed my hand, like he was trying to juice me.“Or Mort. Either’s fine.” I’ve never had a good talking voice either. I mumble or I feel like I’m yelling.“Suit yerself,” Pat nodded towards the park, “Welp, we don’t want to keep the ‘missus’ waitin’ do we?” His back bent under the weight of his tool bag. I thought to offer help, but I could tell Pat had that old man syndrome where he didn’t let anyone help him, even if it meant he was going to hurt himself.
***
I remember taking photos with Sal the Spinosaurus as a kid. There was a photograph I’d left at home of me crossing my legs thinking it made me look cool only to realize I looked like I had to piss, Mom oblivious, grandad tight-lipped because of his broken teeth, my older brother and his perfect smile. Besides those memories, I knew next to nothing about being a dinosaur. They’d given me no training, just the rule that I couldn’t let people see me with the suit off, which was fine. I was a solid 5, on a good day. On a bad day? Captain Neckbeard. Sal the Spinosaurus suited me.There was a yellowed, stained fridge in the break room with a picture of someone’s family and shitty motivational posters. Plastic employee of the week plaques littered one wall, each staff member holding up some gift card to Chili’s or Olive Garden. I saw a man with my outfit, the Spinosaurus head roaring under his arm. He didn’t smile. When I saw Pat on my route, I asked him if that was Gordy.“Scalies used to be able to get away with stuff. Pouncing on people. Gnawing on their bags. People came here to feel something. To get an experience. Now you so much as tap someone with yer tail and you’ll get a bunch of lawyers bearing down on us, again.” A hammer jangled at Pat’s side like a big iron, sweat collecting in the wrinkles of his gray uniform and forehead.“Guy, the world’s gone soft.”Someone next us on the Pterodactyl Terror Shot screamed—a bungee type thing over the pond filled with swan boats in the middle of the park. You sign a contract for “liability” sake and pay extra for it. I’d never done it, but I’d watched my brother launch over the pond. Saw the worry on mom’s face as he soared.“So you fix things?” I asked Pat, really quiet and real close, my plastic teeth scraping his waxy ear. I waved at kids like I’d seen people do on the floats for the 4th of July parade back home. “Fix things? Guy!” He swatted at my maw. “If you’re being simple about it, sure, but I notice things. Things no one else notices.” In front of us, a little girl tugged her dad’s arm. Mad Meteor careened in a corkscrew above.“Some stupid soccer mom bust the turnstile? My job. Plank hanging low on a coaster? My job. The freezer in the Dippin’ Dots cart overheats? My job. If there’s too much shit for me to do? I tell the ne'er do wells mannin’ the rides what needs fixin’. And customer-staff relations? Oh, I track that too Martin.”“Um, what’s—it’s Mortimer—”“Yup, I’ve been around long enough to know how people are. See her?” he pointed at the little girl and the two men holding her hands. “She’s only been listening to her uncle and her dad hates that.”“How do you know they’re brothers?”“What else would they be?”I didn’t respond.“Them three come here a lot, yeah. The girl loves it when yuh scalies fall over. Saw Gordy faceplant last year and that little girl laughed so hard she almost gave me an ulcer.” I could fall. Did it all the time. Tripping over nothing. Hesitating whenever I rounded a corner or stopped at a 4-way. I was an expert at making mistakes for no good reason, and now I had one.I ran out in front of the family and stumbled into a trash can. Melted ice cream and soiled paper bowls full of crusty chili like dry blood spilled all over the baked concrete. The men glared. The little girl shrieked. For some reason the Peanuts theme song was playing over the speakers. “Stupid stupid! Isn’t he stupid?”“Come on Olivia,” one man said.“We don’t call people stupid,” said the other. He whispered, “...in front of them.” I remembered how I felt when I was a kid. How I knew there was someone in the suit but how it was more fun to imagine something else was making them stomp and roar and make their way through the world.“Stupid, stuuuupid!” The girl pointed.I wriggled on the ground until the girl’s giggles were out of earshot, then stood up, cotton candy stuck to my mesh eye holes so it was hard to see. Pat came over and wiped it off. “You’re a natch-u-ral Mikey!” Everything is a bit when you’re wearing a dinosaur suit. No matter what stupid shit I did, someone would want me.
***
Home feels different when you get back after a new job, and my studio apartment in Mt. Pleasant didn’t feel like much of a home to begin with. I had a lawn chair in front of the TV, a mattress I’d spent an hour contorting to fit in the Camry for the drive from the west side, a bunch of Faygo varieties in the vegetable tray of the fridge, and a series of Stouffer's frozen casseroles.It didn't make any sense why the city I was in was called Mt. Pleasant either. There aren’t any real mountains in Michigan, and all the best parts, all the big lakes were about as far away as they could be. The only water in walking distance was a tiny stream behind my apartment complex flanked by two golf courses and a strip mall containing a Subway, a Family Fare, and a pole-dancing studio. The walls of the apartment were thin, but sometimes that made life more exciting. Guessing that banging sound next door gave me something else to do besides playing Halo and watching Jurassic Park—you gotta enmesh yourself in your life in the character, or at least, that’s what people like Daniel Day Lewis do, right? He’s a good actor, I’d heard. It was a small space, but that was okay. Too much space and you start to feel like you should have more stuff, or even moreso, someone to share that space with.After I’d get back every day, I’d shed my suit and drape it on the lawn chair in the living room. I’d crack open a cold Red Pop Faygo and sit down. Boot up my Xbox. My brother always gave me shit for the living room lawn chair at Mom’s house. I say having cupholders is important, and I couldn’t afford a full-ass recliner on a dino salary.During the first few weeks Mom texted me a lot. Eventually, because she kept asking the same questions, I started calling her instead of texting back.“Hey.”“So, how'd today go?”“It went fine.”“...and?”“That’s it. Nothing to report.”“The apartment okay?”“It’s alright. Kinda small, but you know, I like that.”“How’re classes?”“Couldn’t tell you Mom. Still feeling them out.”“Are you looking for a job? You know your brother says he has a job in a warehouse over there he could get you, right?”“I know Mom.”“I’m just saying, it pays good.”“I’ll figure it out.”“I know. I know. I just hate, y’know, seeing you…y’know.”That’s how most of our conversations went. Tip-toeing around each other until either of us had the stomach to bear our grievances, then backing down anyway. Our family was easy that way. Life was easier that way.
***
By the end of the first month, I was the Mickey Fucking Mouse of dinosaurs, stalking people on all fours, bobbing my floppy muzzle like a bird. I became a skilled practitioner of Cretaceous Cardio, started looking at myself naked in the busted bathroom mirror, watching those little love handles I’d earned doing nothing with my life and dating no one melt away. Even better, they announced a year-round initiative. They’d have a winter carnival in the off months and build an event space to make up lost revenue from the Gordy incident. I’d have a stable gig where I didn’t have to man a register and put on a face. No one would have to see my crooked smile. My yellow teeth.Once my routes became ritual, I realized everything at Triassic from when I was a kid was still there. The horses-dressed-as-ankylosaurs. The viking-boat-turned-megalodon. A random Harley Davidson they still had on display, because why not. The park proved that time doesn’t actually change everything like Mom was telling me more and more every year. I kept pictures saved of every ride for when I was ready to tell her what I was really doing in Mt. Pleasant. Once I’d proven I could make it here on my own. Maybe, once I’d found someone to share the apartment with.Besides Pat, none of the other staff talked to me, so I didn’t talk to them. From the conversations I overheard in the break room or behind the rides, they treated the place like it was just a stepping stone on the way to their next big thing. As if everyone can have the next big thing. You know what was a big thing? Dinosaurs. To be a dinosaur is to embrace nostalgia for a time we can’t be sure even existed the way we imagine. What’s wrong with that? With Pat’s tips about regulars, and late nights watching every dinosaur movie I could get my hands on, I started pulling five-star reviews. I broke in the hard plastic of the claws. Figured out how to piss without taking it off. By June, the break room was littered with pictures of Sal the Spinosaurus holding Chili’s and Olive Garden gift cards. People asked why I kept the suit on. “You don’t get anywhere without some extra commitment,” I said. Pat had told me that one day.There was this one girl though. She started the month after me. A new “scalie” called Rachel Raptor. I told Mom about her over the phone. Told her Rachel was in a class on entrepreneurship, or whatever business classes were called.Rachel and I weren’t supposed to be in the same place at the same time, but sometimes we’d cross paths in front of Coroner, right under the loop. I studied her. Waited for her to say something. She didn’t walk with the weight of her life in each step like I did. She didn’t hesitate before she did anything. She was gentle to the concrete and knelt down to let kids pet her. I wondered what she looked like underneath. I hoped she hadn’t noticed me watching. Whenever people notice me looking at them, I feel like I’ve been shot. Like one of those dreams where you’re naked and you don’t know how you ended up where or why you even are.
***
Mom called to offer a trip to Florida my brother and his fiancé were going on. I held the phone to my ear while I was playing Halo, some kid shouting about how gay I was in the background. Telling me to touch grass. That I probably had no bitches.“I don’t like the beach, Mom.”“What are you doing instead?”“I told you, I’m in the campus cafeteria.” I wondered what the most convincing job was. Burrito wrapper? Sandwich crafter? Everything seemed perfectly menial.“The warehouse job pays pretty good Mort. I could talk to your broth—”“I’m good at this and I’m paid enough Mom.”“I know…what about that girl?”“I’ll keep you updated. I’m going to ask her to get coffee soon.”
***
By the middle of sweat-bucket-summer, the park had spent a lot of money prepping for the new winter initiative, but numbers were down. They made some cuts to the maintenance team. Pat was busy trying to figure out what was wrong with the bolts in Quivering Timbers, whining about how he used to have a whole army of guys with tools at his disposal. I looked up at him from the ground, waiting for some other guests to walk by me. I liked watching him when I could. There’s something about a guy fixing a massive roller coaster that seems divine. The knowledge of what bolt to use, the deftness with a wrench or a drill. I dreamed of the day someone would witness me like that.Pat was asking me for a socket wrench when I heard a group of high-school kids staring at me and whispering evil teenager type shit to each other. I didn’t know what the fuck a socket wrench looked like. Just another thing I felt like I should have learned before Grandad died. I looked through the duffel bag, hoping some manly instinct would kick in. I heard the teenagers hee-haw from behind. “Losersaurus Rex,” one shouted standing in line for the Mammoth Ears.“Pervert.” another said. Despite being far shorter, squatter, and, from what I understood, better at the job than Gordy, people occasionally thought I was the same guy. Some creep. A prehistoric peeper.Pat ignored me asking him what the wrench looked like, climbed down the coaster stairs, and stuck his hand in the duffel bag.“Don’t worry Mort, most of em’ probably won’t stop sucking their mom’s teet till they’re thirty. I tell you, when I was a teenager I wasn’t hanging out at a theme park. I was in a war.” Pat shook his head, patted his hammer on his hip, “I could make an accident happen to em y’know. Rig a ride to go a little too fast when they get on.” He winked.That’s when I felt something hit my back. I’d stopped wearing anything but underwear underneath to cool off; I could feel things better that way anyway. Whatever hit me was damp. Cold. Smelled like the color blue. They’d thrown a fucking slushie at me.I stood still, boiling in my suit. Literally and metaphorically. The ice packs under my armpits had gone lukewarm. I turned to face the teens, careful to maintain my signature Spinosaurus poise; me, Poiseasaurus Rex. I saw a bush the same green-brown as my suit between the teenagers and the corner of the Mammoth Ear stand as an opportunity. All my time spent watching dinosaur movies, being patient playing Halo, listening to Pat and practicing—I had a skill. I could get payback.While the teenagers were ogling some girls coming from the waterpark, I huddled behind the bush. Waited for about three minutes. I was Saunasaurus Rex stalking his prey. When they came up to order, I sprang out and swatted at them with my rubber arms. One fell over so hard it looked like he might have shattered his elbow. He started crying. I squeezed the sound box from Ebay I’d programmed with roar sounds—a fucking steal for $10 plus shipping—over and over, standing above him making eye contact through the mesh in my mouth.The teenager reeled back to punch me, but instead he started crying. I looked back at Pat heh-heh-heh-ing and wheezing, one crooked, hairy thumb up. They ran away. I thought I would feel better.What I hadn’t noticed was the American dream-type family behind the teenagers. One with a girl and a boy and two parents that looked like they ran together at 5 in the morning before work and posted pictures of the sunrise.One of the kids, the little boy, was crying. Scared. Blonde bowl cut like I’d had. Chunky fingers despite the rest of him being a fucking twig. Looks like he’d get bullied. Like he’d play trumpet in middle school and get so angry he can’t hit high notes like the rest of the boys that he’d smash the instrument into his bed post and make his mom pay $200 to fix the rental.I tried to play stupid and ran into a wall. Being stupid’s only funny because I shouldn’t be stupid. A dinosaur should have some instinct that defends against stupidity. Some feeling of where to go and what not to do. An instinct for a successful life. No one wants someone who can’t decide what to do. The kid kept sobbing and the parents pulled him away, looking at everything but me. When I looked back, Pat shrugged. It was as good a time as any to cool down, so I went to the break room to swap out the ice packs. On the way back, I watched the ticketers at the turnstile. Saw the look of death on their faces. One swiped on their phone. I’d thought about getting on a dating app, but that meant I needed pictures. Maybe the suit would be a funny gag.When I pried the screen door open, Rachel Raptor—the girl who played her—was at the lunch table. I still had a little bit of adrenaline left from my ambush, so I sat next to her. She had this short purple hair and freckles I’d never seen on anyone before. She shifted a seat away and put the bottom half of her costume between her and me.She was drawing a cow skull adorned with snapdragons, like the one’s mom kept in her garden. Little flowers I’d spent time sticking my pudgy fingers in, imagining them coming to life. I’d make fire-breathing noises and tell mom each dragon bulb’s name, which ones was mom, dad, and the kids. I’d fabricated a whole family. A comfortable family. “Snapdragons! Right?” I blurted out, forgetting to breathe.She jumped.“Um, yeah. That’s right?”“I’m Mortimer.” I stuck out my hand.“Nice to meet you?” she didn’t grab it.Questions, right, I thought. Grandad always told me to ask questions. People are supposed to enjoy talking about themselves.“So are you doing skulls to say you’re not afraid of death or something?” I tried to mask how I’d forgotten to breathe. I did my best to stay still. To be still was to be stoic. Prehistoically-inclined.“Uh, no. I just think cow skulls are cool.”“They are pretty cool.” I caught my reflection in a mirror, stared at the inhuman eyes. My floppy mouth. Rachel stopped drawing.“So you’re…” she asked, pointing at the employee of the week pictures adorning the walls.“That’s me, yeah.” For the first time since I’d arrived, I wasn’t proud of the pictures.“You really never take off the suit, do you?”“I heard about this thing called method acting. Daniel-Day Lewis did it for—”“Yeah, I know about that. Everyone on set called him an asshole.” She looked at the door across from us for a few seconds. I felt like I was talking to an alien and no one had given me the briefing on first-contact engagement.“Do you uh, what do you do?” I asked.“I’m in art school.”“That’s cool.”“What do you do? Outside of here?”“Uhhh…well I….” I couldn’t tell her I played video games. That was too unimpressive. I thought about telling her I played music, but then she might ask to hear something. Maybe writing?“Sooo, I actually have a specific question for you. Maybe it’s a little personal.”I leaned in, terrified and excited to answer a question. Smelled her coconut shampoo. Felt too close to her. Leaned back.“I’ve got an assignment. Like an art project. I’ve gotta ask people what they’re in awe of and draw something inspired by it.”“Oh. That’s cool.”“Honestly, since you’re a total stranger,” I ground my teeth at the word stranger, “I think this is more interesting. Everyone else here is giving me normal answers.”“Well. I dunno. The ankylosaurus-horses. Pretty cool right?”“No no no, anywhere else but here. Like, you’ve never seen something or thought of someone and you just go, wow?” I thought about the last time I was home, driving on the S-shaped highway that cuts through the city, coming back from the mall movie theater to see Zombieland 2. I’d been swimming through that post-movie existentialism, blasting the jazzy theme song to Halo: ODST, pretending I was in a destroyed civilization, the one living person left behind, a hoard of invading aliens oblivious to me in the camry, swerving left and right with one hand on the wheel like I actually knew what I was doing. I got chills thinking about it. Or maybe that was just my sweat getting cold. I wondered if I smelled.“I really don’t know. Guess I never thought about it.” I said.“That’s kind of sad. I mean—sorry,’ her mouth hung open, “Uh, you should do something! Go somewhere. Everyone should have something.”I thought I was doing something. I had gone somewhere. Bumfuck nowhere.“I’ll let you know when I think of something,” I said. “Cool.” She shrugged.I’d never been so disappointed in myself that I wanted to cry before. I stood up, swapped my ice packs out for the new ones, stashed the sweaty ones next to Pat's brown bag in the fridge, and walked towards the door before Rachel had a chance to leave first. Moments like this were why I kept the suit on.
***
Approaching fall, the park was getting slower. This was normal, Pat told me, like how the dips and peaks of climate change are normal. I spent my free time thinking of something to tell Rachel. Something that would show her I wasn’t just a loser in a suit. I wasn’t artsy. I considered the few times I’d gone camping with my family, watching a storm roll over Lake Michigan from the height of a dune, the view looking down from my first skyscraper in Chicago, the first time I’d nailed a trumpet solo. They all felt too normal or too lame for me to be in awe of. I avoided the break room so that I wouldn’t bump into her before I had the answer. But, when I stopped running into her under Coroner’s loop, I asked Pat if he’d seen her lately.“The weird one with the purple hair? Guy she no-call no-showed twice. No surprise there. No one wants to work any more.”
***
Pat was wrong about the normal dip in park numbers. We were tanking. Management sent an email with the subject line: “WHAT CAN YOU DO TO SAVE THE DINOSAURS?”. It seemed that no amount of good reviews could make up for the worry that staff, that people like me, might be a total creep like Gordy. Not in the age of internet memes and Twitter.Pat and I spent more time by the central pond. He said he’d planted fish in it fifteen years ago to give himself something to do on lunch break.“Ain’t got no mercury poisonin’ in them like the big lakes neither.” All I knew about mercury was that it’s the stuff that they put in thermometers. Did someone dump a bunch of thermometers in the great lakes? People call things like that accidents all the time. Like they’re pretending it isn’t anyone’s fault. But you have to try hard to fuck something up that bad. I suspected a conspiracy somewhere, like how people said Obama turned the frogs gay.“So why are you actually here, Mort?” “I don’t know. I like it. I’m good at it.”“That’s right.” I watched him catch a couple bluegills, or at least, that’s what he called them. I didn’t think their gills looked blue. I never understood catch-and-release. It seemed cruel, especially in a place like this. As if the fish stuck in the theme park pond hadn’t had enough. As if they weren’t doing the best they could with the pond they were stuck in.
***
I stuck with Pat by the pond instead of my routes after the third round of layoffs. A bunch of empty swan boats where normal people who loved each other used to fill up bobbled. Pat had a bouquet of pink work orders tucked in his belt. “Guy, hasn’t been this bad since a guy’s safety belt came loose on Chix—, Chic… Chaclub, oh fuck whatever it’s called.”“Chicxulub?”“Yeah, that one.”He spat on the ground.“You know what Mort? You could be Donald Duck. Go on down to Florida and make them Disney bucks, but you’re here. Doing work that matters in a place that people forgot was good to them.”“I’m too old for Disney Pat.”“Guy, too old like the ocean’s too blue.”“What?”“I was younger ‘n you in ‘n Vietnam.”“I know.”Next to us, one of the few mothers left and her two sons were petting an Ankylosaurus-horse while the handler explained how their tails were clubs. One kid reached for the horse’s exposed leg and his mom yanked him so hard the kid dropped his Dippin’ Dots. He watched them melt. The mom said, “I told you to be careful!” and they walked away, her son reaching back towards his coveted, disposable plastic bowl. The kid started crying. His brother looked up at the sun stupidly. It was Sal’s time to shine.I ran to the ice cream stand and got some more. I stomped over and handed him the cup, holding on with both of my stubby plastic claws. His mom went, “Oh that’s not necessary. Oh, thank you so much.” I pretended to gobble the ice cream the boy had dropped like a predator gnashing at its prey, shoving my face into the concrete and smashing my roar button over and over, like pressing harder would make it sound any different.The kid stopped crying. He pointed and looked at his mom while his older brother fried his eyeballs in the sun. The younger one looked like he had something important to say, like he’d just had an epiphany.Maybe that was it—that look on that kid’s face. The way you can fabricate a good memory out of nothing for someone. That was the closest I’d ever come to being in awe of anything.
***
In early fall—that fake fall where you know it’s going to get muggy and shitty again but you try to enjoy the little time you have left anyway, hoping this time it will be different—Pat was fixing the Chicxulub Impactor, arguing with himself about how to pronounce it. The asteroid that was supposed to smash into the plastic-mold crater was broken. It was going too fast. Crashing into the crater with a real force over and over again. No safety breaks.“What happened to the guy who’s harness came off on the coaster?”“Splat,” Pat said, not taking his eyes off the electric panel.“I mean what happened to the park? When did things get better?”“I ever tell you the story about the kid in the rice patty, Mort?”“What?” “We were up in Da Nang.” Pat leaned against a fake stone wall with plastic vines hanging down, wiping the sweat from his stubble with an already-dirty rag. I knew how these war stories went. Those memories had swelled up inside Grandad until he was bloated with them. Told me all about it on his deathbed. Dead friends. Dead kids. Dead dreams. He sent my grandmother a letter and told her to start finding someone else because he didn’t think he’d survive.“Little kid missing half his hair comes up to us asking for candy every single day while we’re working on a bridge over a patty. Even has this little pet monkey who follows him around. Asks if he can sit with us in the jeep.” Pat turned and smacked the meteor so hard it fell off the metal spring. I reached down and picked the plastic rock up as he talked. It was heavier than I expected.“One day, kid walks up and says his monkey has a present for us. Has this thing wrapped in flimsy paper. I thought it was a gift.” Pat took the asteroid out of my hand, held it up to the sun like an offering. “Turns out, it’s one of our grenades. I threw it back in the kid’s direction. Didn’t mean to. Just instinct.” He twisted the asteroid back on the pole. Every problem I had seemed infinitely small. I imagined a young version of Pat. Him and a wife swigging Diet Coke in their kitchen dancing to oldies. Them in a swan boat.“That’s fucked up.”“Guy, that ain’t the worst that happened. Wanna know what’s really funny?”I knew that wasn’t really a question.“The monkey got away. Not a scratch on ‘em.” Pat laughed, and whacked the asteroid again for good measure. That fixed it. We sat there and watched it, the fate of the dinosaurs playing over and over again the way it always had, like a cautionary tale told too many times to mean anything anymore.
***
When I was a kid, my birthday being in early September was good because it’s pretty far from Christmas and I’d get gifts in the middle of the year-ish. Now I was just excited for Labor Day. Despite me not responding to her for a few weeks, Mom had sent me a Visa gift card. We called. She asked about Rachel and I told her she was gone and she’d said something in that Mom voice that made me feel like a boy in the worst way possible. I put on the button-up Mom had gotten me. Took out all the pins and needles knowing I’d never be able to fold it back the way it came. I’d lost weight so the clothes didn’t fit me right. I tried to tuck the shirt in, but it made me look like an old man or one of those churchy kids you knew would turn out to be a sicko one day. I went to the coffee shop I’d planned on going to with Rachel, hoping that I might see her. Argue for why our shared vocation was something deserving of awe.When I got there, the coffee shop was busy. There was a line with people who had the money for good-fitted clothes and who knew how to wear them, but no Rachel. I thought about leaving, but I pictured someone noticing me leaving after walking in—like someone would see a squirrely guy who can’t decide what to do and go what’s his problem?I ordered a mocha latte because I knew mocha means chocolate. I sat down in a cubby. When a woman walked into the cubby, I felt like I was intruding on her space, so I moved to the bar against the wall where people usually set up their laptops, next to a little library. I grabbed a book about dinosaurs—Triassic infected the whole town. There was a chapter listing alternative theories to the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs: an ice age, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, all perfectly reasonable things to stop something from living to its full potential. I wondered, who would I hold onto if the world ended like that tomorrow? What would I do? I looked at everyone in the coffee shop. The smiles. The focus. The contentment and normality they exuded. How comfortable they were in their own skin.Rachel hadn’t even been her real name.
***
The nail in the coffin for Triassic was the kid that died on Timbers, just an hour before closing on one of the last days we were going to keep the coasters open. Right when it was getting cool enough for me to stop wearing ice packs. After one of the guys running the coaster saw the bloody body in the cab, he called the ambulance. From what I could overhear, it was a plank that had been dangling too low. Our boss sent a group text saying we can’t talk to anyone, not that I wanted to, reminding us of the NDA we signed. They also mentioned the winter festival was on hold indefinitely. I went back to the swan pond and found Pat fishing like I thought I would. Nothing we could do but wait for the paramedics to get here and pronounce the kid dead. To pronounce the park dead.“I’m a damn good repairman, but I’m not God,” he said. The few guests on the other side were being shooed away, confused and complaining that they’d paid for their tickets, that they’d planned these couple days months in advance, just to bring their families here. “Management cutting my team killed that kid. Not me.”By the time the paramedics had left and the few remaining customers had been ushered out, it was getting dark. The inside of the park looked like a level in a video game without any NPCs walking around. Triassic was going to be one of those abandoned places you see on TruTV with a poorly reenacted story about that kid who died haunting it, or something like that. “You afraid Pat?”“Afraid of living long enough I want to die, maybe.”We could see the reflection of Coroner and Timbers in the pond. It was beautiful. Like two contorted snake-fish water dinosaur things in a mating ritual. I think Rachel would have dug that. I wished she were here so I could tell her about it. She’d probably noticed already, but it’d be something to say.“You ever thought about building one of your own?” I asked. It was a stupid question but anything not about the dead kid was better than nothing.“My own what, Mort?”“Roller coaster.”“Haven’t,” he said. Then he gulped. The coasters wriggled in the pond water. “Fixing things is a helluva lot different than building them.”“It’s getting cold,” I said.“Starting to think I should have worn a suit like you right now,” Pat said, laughed, then coughed.“I don’t know what I’m going to do with myself, Pat.”“Well, guy, I don’t know either. Guess I could do something with the old swingset in my backyard now.”“You have grandkids?”“No.”I stared.“Guy! Something wrong with a grown man having a swingset?”“No. I guess not.”“You could help me fix it up if yuh want.”“Not good with my hands,” I said, flopping my pleather arms.“Just need someone to hammer nails.”“I’d probably break it.”“I’ll pay you a fair wage.”How? I thought, but I didn’t say it.“I’m going to the top of Timbers,” he said. You wanna come?”“Not really.”“Gonna pussy out the last time you could ever do this? Regret’s a bitch Mortimer, trust me.”“Fine.”I followed Pat to the Timbers entrance, to the open air and narrow stairs bolted along the coaster’s track. There was a sign that said “AUTHORIZED PERSONS ONLY”. For the first time in my life, I felt like I was trespassing.“You gunna keep gawking at me or are you gunna grow some dino-gonads to match yer skin?”I followed him to the stairs.“Told you you wasn’t a loser.” He grinned.Our weight bent the steps. I kept my muzzle pointed up. The costume broke the wind for me mostly, but I could see Pat’s arms shaking as he grasped the splintered handrail. He looked brittle for the first time since I’d met him in the parking lot.When we reached the top Pat was squinting so hard it seemed like the creases would stick together. We sat in the two-by-four box at the top of the first peak, the highest peak, the Triassic Park flag waving wicked beside them. A cartoon version of Sal—of me—flailing next to us. Pat sat down so his legs hung over the side, the swan boats swirling below. It almost looked like they were alive, celebrating their freedom. I pointed my snout at Pat and waited for him to say something, but nothing came out besides guttural sighs and the occasional “yup” or “guy”. I mulled over options for conversation until a question busted out of me like an alien.“You ever been in awe of anything Pat?” I said it so stupidly. Pat didn’t answer. I wasn’t sure if he heard me or not. “I mean, have you ever seen something and just gone, like, wow, this is impossible and I can’t explain wh—”“I heard yuh.” Pat looked up, almost shocked, smiling. “Whaddabout this view, eh?” Before us was a sea of trees that surrounded the park grounds. Blinking lights above Chicxulub and Coroner. Headlamps from the final cars blinking through the slants of the trees all around the park. In the corner of my eye, I caught a stray dog pissing on a tree.“Gotta be honest with you Mort.”“What?”“The kid and the monkey,” Pat’s face was a rock, “there was no damn monkey.” He took the hammer off his belt and started tapping it on a loose nail sticking out of the wood posts, then hammering it. He kept hammering after the nail had all but disappeared into the dry, rotted wood. “I just shot that kid cuz he scared me.”We just heard the wind for a while.“It’s a nice view, yeah,” I said. In twilight, the cracks in the parking lot looked like a face. Like it was watching and waiting for us to realize something together. I stood up and crossed my arms. Uncrossed them. Crossed them again. Stared at the plunge down.“Welp.” Pat slapped his knees and groaned as he stood back up. “S’pose it’s time to retire.” He looked at the water below too. The sun dipping behind a cloud was making it harder to see the reflections.“So you’ll come around to help with the swingset?” he asked.“Sure,” I said.I turned and walked down the stairs expecting him to follow me. I heard his tools jangling, then nothing. I didn’t look back. I was too worried he wouldn’t be there. On the way down the steps, I imagined holding Rachel’s hand. When I reached the turnstiles, I stopped. Looked around. Took off the suit and draped it over a ticketing station. I walked back to the camry in nothing but my underwear, keys jangling in my hand. I texted mom that I was coming home. I got in the car, and pretended Rachel was in the passenger seat. Told her everything I was in awe of.
I thought I knew what hot was. Humidity I could swallow. The wings of dead fish flies going translucent in the sun. Sprinkles melting off my ice cream cone the second I walk out of the shop. There is no ice cream here. There are plenty of dead things, but they are not stiff and quiet. They buzz. Shake. Scream. If I think about them for too long they’re all I can see. All I can hear. I like to imagine it’s a particularly exotic vacation. A desired hot — one I spent money on and rolled up all my clothes into small balls for.Before, vacations felt like something being done to me. It didn’t matter if I filled every hour with an activity, pinballing from tasting room to walking tour to theater, or if I sprawled on a towel and tried to doze. The time away had the texture, rough and abrasive, of an exfoliating mitt. I never knew what it would reveal in me. My last vacation ruined me.
***
D runs the paddle brush down one side of her hair and then the other. She presses argan oil into each side until it’s a glossy, nutty brown that reminds me of the wood inlays of my dad’s old car. The heat protectant goes on as a spray. The straightener sizzles as D runs it down her hair.D is soft textures and shiny surfaces — thigh-high suede boots, slinky paisley skirt — except for her earrings, two waning moons whose points cut into her rosy cheeks when she turns her head. Her rings glint in the low light and she shrugs on a canvas blazer. "I've never done this," she says, her dark eyes glancing down as she drags her finger over the thread that keeps the blazer’s pockets shut. "I've been saving it for now."I want her to break it. I want her to mar her smooth lines of her own volition. “Do it,” I whisper. She doesn’t hear me.She rips the pocket open and smiles. “That’s it for now!” she says. “I’ll be going live again from the top of the Duomo later today, so make sure your notifications are on!”I put my phone away. I open up the album I’ve made of screenshots from her Lives, in which I can see different corners of her apartment. I soothe myself with what now looks familiar: the skylight, stamped into the sloping roof above her bed; the once-white enamel hotplate that is her only kitchen appliance; the wardrobe cabinet distinguishable from the storage cabinet by the candy-colored Anthropologie table runner that hangs down it. These wisps of knowledge give structure to the scenes I invent for when I confront her. I will be adult about it, thoughtful. I’ll bring over food that doesn’t have to be heated up. An abundance of cold dips. Baba ganoush, maybe. She served it once when her friends from America came to visit. I scroll to the screenshots from that dinner, see heaps of pallid mush on daisy plates she brought over in one of her five giant duffels when she moved from London to Milan. She’d wrapped them on a Live, swaddling them in wide-legged twill trousers that looked too thin to be effective cushioning. I watched her stack them, one on top of the other, oblivious to how easily they break.
***
I’ve come to Italy to see D. I’ve followed her since last year, when Paul stopped fucking me in order to fuck her. She moved here six months ago. I held out till now to come, though I put a flight tracker on as soon as she announced the move. Two hours to get to Gatwick, a two-hour flight to Malpensa, a 40-minute bus drive down flat, gray roads papered with flat, gray billboards in front of flat, gray buildings. Five hours of travel and an hour of milling around in the airport, avoiding the food court and swiping £180 eye serums across the patch of skin above my mask and underneath my glasses. Six hours, maybe, in total. Six hours is nothing. I’m used to American distances. I’ve driven that long to saw through thick steak and push it around a plate in a chain restaurant — a neutral place my parents’ and grandparents’ propriety wouldn’t let them scream in — before turning around and driving home.
***
Paul didn’t tell me her name but I found her easily enough. I told myself I wouldn’t look him up after he told me he didn’t want to be with me anymore, but I got around that by looking up his friends, and I saw her tagged in a poorly-framed shot someone on his rugby team had posted of the team and their various hangers-on at a pub in Camden. She was standing in front of big foggy windows and was the best dressed of anyone present, wearing an embroidered denim Free People suit. She had mussed lips and a red chin I recognized as courtesy of Paul’s beard burn. It looked different on her complexion than it did on mine, but I could tell, and two weeks later, it was confirmed by a video his school friend posted of a gallery opening in Shoreditch, where Paul’s hand, pale and finely scarred like old vellum, rested on the back of her delicate neck. The two of them stood in front of an oil painting of drying laundry strung across a dusty balcony in Andalucia. Their bodies stayed touching from shoulders to hip until the camera panned away.
***
I started watching D’s get-ready-with-me Lives. I followed her antique shopping. Her trips to poetry readings in members’ clubs where her friends read unstructured pieces about fertility treatments. Sometimes I saw Paul, glowing like he’d been professionally lit, smiling the half-smile he prefers because it hides his small teeth. Then D went dark for an entire month. Nothing new came up, no matter how often I refreshed, and I worried she’d blocked me. I started checking on her from the account I manage for the gallery I work for. She reappeared there a few weeks later, announcing her move to Italy. She’d stream to us as she walked to Pilates, to therapy, to the Italian lessons she was taking to “reconnect with her heritage.” She walked everywhere. I told the gallery I needed to work remotely for health reasons. I watched her in bed, blinds drawn, my phone growing hot in my hand.
***
I get dressed for the Duomo from the top down. Tortoiseshell sunglasses. My thick blue sweater and loose brown corduroys, though little of my outfit will be visible under my coat. When I get the notification that D’s gone live again, this time from the Cathedral’s entrance, I slip on brown Chelsea boots and walk to the elevator, where I tap through Stories as I get sucked down to the lobby.
***
I want thousands of people to witness every moment of my life and I want those moments to be perfect tableaux of wealth and good taste, each carousel soaked in contentment: hand-thrown pottery in cornflower blues transitioning to a rainy city street strewn with streetlamp light transitioning to me in a billowy blouse, open-mouthed and laughing. I want the people who witness me living well to be famous in their own chosen careers, blue-ticked and beautiful. I want to see and be seen at London Fashion Week and go straight to Milan Fashion Week after having RSVP’d no to New York Fashion Week because I needed some time to rest, some time to nest, some time to walk barefoot over the underfloor heating of my three-story townhouse where I host parties and serve artisanal bread and eight kinds of cheese to people who don’t eat.I want to be the one they all watch.
***
I thought the shift in the tone of D’s Lives meant Paul had dumped her when she moved. I would still see her one day, I knew, but my daydreams of our time together changed. I’d be magnanimous, the hatchet fully buried, and invite her to aperitivos. We’d sit across a small metal table and our voices would rise with every round, until we’d be walking down a cobblestone road with our arms around each other, laughing at stories about the man who didn’t love us, wrapping ourselves in solidarity.Then Paul posted from Milan. (I’d seen this upon checking his profile a few weeks into sleeping with a man who was in the ensemble of the Oklahoma! revival, when I thought I was over Paul and wanted to confirm that hypothesis. I should have known better. You can only ever get over a man with a better one, and this one shouted “Yee-haw!” in an American accent when he came.) Paul had said he was too busy to go to Paris with me when the gallery sent me to cover the first international show of an Irish artist they’d signed. The artist cross-stitched portraits of male politicians in drag, and I stood in front of them, alone, pouring drinks for the balding would-be buyers and the waifs that accompanied them. While D wasn’t in his pictures from his trip to Milan, he posted a story at the natural wine bar I knew was D’s favorite. In it, a dismembered female hand poured opaque pink wine from a labelless bottle.
***
I’m climbing to the top of the Duomo. I saw in D’s Live that she and the German girl she’s been hanging out with since she moved are sitting on the roof, answering questions from her followers and showing them the view.The roof isn’t as corded-off as I thought it would be. Nothing could be that high and that gothically depressive in America without chin-high fences to discourage jumpers. The Madonnina, gold-leafed and gleaming, is looking up into her crown of stairs, as if she’s already interceding on behalf of the faithful swarming her.On my phone, D is talking into the camera about how this is her first time at the top of the Cathedral even though she’s lived here for months. “We didn’t go to bed until four but we weren’t going to miss this,” she says. “We pre-bought the tickets!”In front of me, D and her friend are sitting atop a marble ledge in the wan winter sun, D’s face tilted down into her front camera. They’re framed between columns capped with gargoyles. It looks like they’re floating between graves. I make my way over to them.Two little kids in puffy jackets dart in front of me and line up behind one of the slats that make up the roof. They climb up it, then scoot down gingerly, half a foot at a time, before scampering back into line to do it again. I close out of D’s Live and watch as a little girl in a toggle-front coat and a fan of dark hair lands at the bottom of the slide. Her shoes thwack against the marble and she waves in my direction. I turn and see, between D and me, a woman sitting against a column. She has a scarf tucked around her face and over the shape of a bun. She’s not encouraging the girl’s fun but she’s not discouraging it, either. On another day, D and I could have laughed at how cute these little European kids and their little European grandmother are, how much joy there is to go around; we could have taken turns on the makeshift slide, inching towards the saw-toothed city below. Today, here, now, on the roof, I open my camera and start filming as I walk closer to D. “Remember to put the 1st of March in your diary,” I hear D say. “I’m going to the season premiere of The Mandalorian and I’m bringing you all with me!”“Did I ever tell you how I gave my first handjob to Star Wars?” the German girl says.“You’re so lucky I just turned off Live,” says D. “Otherwise your DMs would be absolutely flooded with filth.”The girls start laughing and I’m there, I’m right next to them, the sun is shining and we’re all laughing at the joke, and I go up to D and her friend and stick out my hand to introduce myself.“Hello!” I say, already laughing.D squints at me. “Do I know you?” she asks politely. I take off my sunglasses and D’s face goes slack. “Hi, D.”“Shit!” she says. I wait for her to calm down.“This is Paul’s crazy ex,” she says to her friend. She turns back to me. “Why are you here?” she asks, shirking away from where I’m standing.I didn’t think D would recognize me. I follow her, but she doesn’t follow me. She has hundreds of thousands of followers and Paul deleted the two pictures he’d had up of us after he left me. I thought I’d have to explain to her who I was, tell her details about Paul — the acne scars scattered across his shoulders in pencil-eraser pink — for her to believe me.This isn’t how I wanted it to begin. I can hear the kids screaming and I want to start over. “I just—” I start, stammering a bit.“Have you not bothered me enough?” D says. She turns to the German girl. Her cheeks go pallid under her bronzer and her eyes rake across the people behind us, all of whom are consumed in their own moments of communion with the church or with their cameras. “She’s the one who messaged me saying that Paul was cheating on me, who called me 15 times a day until I changed my number.”My stomach starts to roil. I was meant to have the upper hand here. I breathe deep, counting one, two, three. I pitch my voice low: “I only want to talk. I thought you should know—”“Wait, this is the freak who sent copies of your nudes to your house?” asks the German, stepping closer to me.Ever since Paul had left his Google profile logged into my work laptop, I reviewed his emails with my morning coffee. In August, D sent him a series of shots from her vacation in Biarritz. I’d simply printed them out and sent them to the address I found on his Amazon receipt for a women's rash guard. I did write “slut” across them before sending, but considering the content, that seemed irrefutable.“Yes! I literally moved to get away from her!” D’s arm flails between us. “You emailed my mum and told her I was sleeping with my primary school teacher!” “Okay, but—” I say, reaching out to D.D scrambles farther back on the marble ledge. There’s not much space left, and she loses her balance. As she falls backwards, her legs fly up in a tangle of knees. She looks graceful even now, windmilling into nothing. “Jesus fucking Christ!” shouts the German, running to D. “Get the fuck away from us!” she screams at me, her loose blonde hair sparkling in the light. “Aiuto! Aiuto!”It’s all gone wrong. I don’t want D to die, not really; it would get her out of Paul’s life but it wouldn’t get me back in. I run to the ledge, German girl’s imperatives ignored. I see her there, balanced on a thin ledge, centimeters away from a catastrophic fall. The city below her looks tiny, the people too petite to be real.I reach my hand down to where the German girl has already been reaching. My arms are longer, and I’m stronger, and together, we haul D up one fistful of fabric at a time, fishermen bringing in the catch. D’s feet touch the ground and I try to pull her towards me. “I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean—”“Go to hell,” she spits.And so I do. The hallowed ground yawns open and swallows me down, depositing me in a slump at the gates of hell. When I can bear looking upwards, I find the gates’ inscription: Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here. It would make for a good caption, I think. Back on earth, on the roof of the Duomo under a blue-flame sky, my phone clatters onto the slanted marble where I just stood, still recording.
