Julia starts noticing David when he kills the fish in their bio classroom. The class finds it on the floor when they come in, stranded in a too-shallow puddle of water, tiny mouth open in a last desperate gasp. Like everyone else, David wears an expression of puzzled sorrow, his pale eyes wide with sympathy, but nobody besides Julia notices the spots of water on his sleeves. The thin trapdoor of his smile, flickering in and out of existence.So Julia starts noticing other things, too. She registers the curve of his lips, the cupid’s bow as pronounced as those of the girls in Renaissance paintings. She wonders what it might taste like. Rust or moss, maybe, blooming in dark secret places where no one looks.One evening she sees him walking into the field behind their houses. The slim rifle, straight path into the woods, and then a shot. Venison on the neighbors’ table for dinner. He sees her seeing him. On the path between their properties, into the narrow space between their bodies, he says, “I can teach you, if you want.”It’s that sliver of a pause, that hesitation before if you want, that decides her. Because for a second, before he thought to add those words, he didn’t even consider that she might not want it. And in that second she was ready for anything. She wants to live in that second. She wants to pull that second over her like a cloak and walk so far in it that she can’t find her way back home.___The next day, in the forest, David stands very close to her. He has to, in order to show her how to hold and load the rifle. There’s a metallic odor seeping from his skin, as though he’s chewed up a bunch of rounds, gritted them to dust between his teeth, digested them and turned them into sweat.“Man, you’ve never even held a gun before,” he says in wonder. “What planet did you come from?”“Some sheltered girl planet, I guess,” Julia replies, and then feels like an idiot.But he doesn’t seem to mind the distinction she’s drawn between the two of them. “Make sure you’ve got it pointed away from your head. That’s the first thing you need to learn.” He’s grinning, his teeth small and chipped in the crescent moon of his smile. He teaches her the anatomy of the rifle, demonstrating with his rough woodblock hands: “This is the action. This is the safety. This is the trigger…” He makes her recite every part until she’s got it memorized as well as the topography of her own skin. Only then will he let her hold it. He says: “Only ever point the rifle at things you are willing to destroy.”She nods seriously. She thinks of aiming it at every tree on her property, at her house, at her mother’s car. Into the open cavern of her own skull.___When he lets her start shooting, he stands next to her, as though he can guide her shots just by his presence. She misses and misses until finally she doesn’t. It’s a rabbit, small and delicate when it was making its way across the grass, but when she picks the body up it’s ugly, heavy, waterlogged with death. Nothingness spreads through her. It’s after her first kill that she learns what David tastes like. Not rust, or moss, or even metal. He tastes like what you might find at the bottom of a pond. Like something that was once green but slowly turning liquid, falling apart to rot. She doesn’t hate it. There’s none of that artificial bubblegum flavor she’s tasted on other boys, no chemical chapstick taste, no spearmint mouthwash. It’s realer than life. As real as death. It draws her in, makes her reach out for more, and he pulls away too soon—smiling, knowing. He teaches her how to bring down deer. They’re fast and shy, but a single buck can feed a family for months. Their slim bodies, so elegant in life, lose all their grace at the moment of the bullet’s impact, and what was once a whole animal splinters into a collection of fractures: spasms, synapses blindly firing, intricate circuitry torn apart. Every kill earns her a kiss. The loamy warmth, the taste of decay, is addictive. The nothingness spreads through her like poison or wine. They go to the forest more and more. They take turns, passing the rifle back and forth between them: a deer for Julia, a fox for David. Julia’s mother doesn’t notice her absence because she doesn’t notice anything anymore. Except the TV, and her cans of beer, and cigarettes that she smokes with fingers that grow increasingly thin and whittled down, like brittle sticks of wood. David doesn’t talk about his family, but she knows that he knows about hers. He pulls her close as they hunt frogs in the ponds, not wasting bullets but crouching low to the ground and trapping them in coffee cans, listening to the frantic thump of their bodies, the sound like wet beating hearts. “Should we name them?” he asks. “What’s the point? We’re killing them anyway.”She can tell he’s not fooled by her casual tone. A twinge of disdain crosses his face. “You mean, you could never kill anything with a name.”___In the evening the fields turn leaden gray like the skin of her parents. Like her mother with her fingers that will soon be the same size as her cigarettes. Like her father dying sunk full of morphine, painkiller rushing silver through his veins, hospital walls closing in around him like an artificial womb. They stop by the edge of the forest. The wheat is as tall as it will ever be. David is by her side, the cool pale of his eyes reflecting the sky. There aren’t any deer here, just a neighbor’s cat, not even thirty feet away. “See her?” Julia asks. She is the one holding the rifle.“Yes.”The cat doesn’t notice them. Her name is Luna, Julia remembers. Luna or Lulu, something like that. Her tabby pattern blends in with her surroundings, melts her into them like a stripe of paint blurring into a stone-colored background. She slinks through the wheat thinking herself unseen. “Lulu,” David whispers, soft as a thought. Soon she will disappear into the woods. Only a few more steps until she’s in; only a few more seconds left for Julia to make a shot. “Your turn,” David says.The feeling of her own heart beating is what makes her raise the rifle to her shoulder. She aims, stares down the barrel. She thinks about how they both have hearts, her and David, her and Lulu, her and all the things she’s killed. How everything with a heart is fair game. The trigger like a bone under her finger, and then the crack, the nothingness blossoming outward from a central point.The two of them stand motionless in the algal gloom, in the murky raucous dark. David smiles. And although it’s ostensibly an expression of openness, of transparency and warmth, something about it makes her think of a trap twisting shut.
Catfishing happens at night and the bait smells like blood and cheese. We fished for what felt like hours in a cloud of mosquitoes, and we only caught one fish. We pulled it to the floor of the boat, and I couldn’t believe it actually looked like a cat. It fought hard, flailing wildly. The man called it a beastly motherfucker, his foul language thrilling my sister Ellen and me. “You know catfish got tastebuds all over their bodies?” he said. “They’re just swimmin’ tongues. You lick one and he’s lickin’ you right back.”“Gross!” we screamed. “Why would you lick a catfish?” He laughed. “Knowin’ that, why wouldn’t you?”When the fish finally succumbed, we laid it in a cooler full of ice, its glassy eyes cold and detached. The man promised us fried catfish sandwiches the next day, which I’d never had and didn’t know I wanted until right then. To eat this very fish would be primitive in a way for which, at age ten, I didn’t possess words or experience. Every fish I’d ever eaten had come from a blue Styrofoam tray, wrapped in layers of plastic that encased a dozen different smells, all of them factory and none of them sea.We slept in the car, something I don’t think was planned because there was only one blanket. The man made do with a thick canvas coat, putting the driver's seat down as far as it would go and resting his hat over his face. Ellen and I curled up in the backseat and held hands all night, the way otters do to keep from floating apart. She couldn’t sleep so I whispered to her everything I knew about dogs, making friends, black holes, puberty, Christmas, Egyptian mummies, different types of candy, and kissing.In the morning, we sat up and saw two deer, a mother and a baby. The man told us to be still, don’t make a sound. The pair walked past the rear window, their soft dappled fur nearly brushing the glass. On the way home, the man dropped us at a Wendy’s and said he was going to find a payphone. “Let’s get your mom on the line,” he said. I was happy to have a break from the car. The smell of the catfish was beginning to leak in from the trunk. Even on ice it was starting to spoil. He handed me a twenty-dollar bill. “That’s ten each,” he said. “More than enough, but don’t spend it all.” Wendy’s had recently launched a ninety-nine cent menu. We ordered modestly, just a burger and small fries each, and a Frosty to share. We didn’t want to get into more trouble. Then we went outside and looked for the man, for his car, and found neither. We stayed there for hours, spending the rest of the money. First, Ellen was thirsty, so I bought her a soda. Then she was hungry, so I bought her some chicken nuggets. Then she was scared, so I bought us both another Frosty. On our table grew a mountain of sweating yellow cups, cardboard boxes, and greasy wrappers. We somehow knew not to draw attention to ourselves, sitting out of view of the employees and moving tables every half hour. Each time I ordered more food, I told the cashier, “My mom said to buy this”, but the employees didn’t care. They weren’t thinking about us at all. We quietly sang Bruce Springsteen songs, avoiding eye contact during “I’m On Fire.” Hey little girl is your daddy home, did he go and leave you all alone mmmm-hmmm.“Darlington County” felt better, full of references to things like union connections and World Trade Centers, things we didn’t understand but flew off our tongues with less self-awareness. I told Ellen the man was coming back, of course he was, he probably had trouble finding a phone. She gulped and nodded. I looked out the wide windows to see if there was somewhere else to go, but everything outside held much more uncertainty than the Wendy’s booth. There, in the plastic refuge, we were safe.I told Ellen that Dave Thomas was a real person and he named Wendy’s for his daughter, also real. I wasn’t sure if she really looked like the grinning, freckled girl who stared up at us from our pile of trash. She was almost certainly never left behind at a Wendy’s, or anywhere for that matter. She was loved. I told Ellen everything I knew about leprechauns, monkeys, Garbage Pail Kids, dreams, Hawaii, Helen Keller, bras, weddings, and secret diaries with locks and tiny keys. We spoke about the doe and the fawn we’d seen when we woke up that morning, walking past the car, oblivious to our presence. We named them after ourselves.We ran out of things to talk about and began to eat whatever was left, picking at the smooth edge of a hamburger bun, the skin of a baked potato. Ellen ran her tongue around the inside of a fry box and I was jealous I’d never thought to do that.Then she whimpered. Our eyes met; her mouth twisted terribly. She had an accident – too much stress, too much grease. I took her into the bathroom, which smelled of lemon disinfectant and urine, and in the stall, I helped her remove her shoes, socks, and pants. We threw her underwear into the trash and buried them. The stink of feces persisted, filling the tight space. Ellen cried hot tears while I wiped her legs with wet paper towels oozing with electric blue soap that rubbed her skin until it stung. I removed my own shoes, socks, and pants and gave my underwear to her. I was fine without them, but she would not be. She needed them to feel safe, a thin shield against the world. It was getting dark when the man came back. I watched his wiry frame move across the parking lot, silhouetted against an astonishing pink and purple sunset. He walked with purpose until we locked eyes through the glass, and then he hesitated. I suppose there are things in life that feel right in the moment but will grate at your being over time, leaving you porous. You become a sieve, unable to hold anything for any amount of time without remembering the awful things you did. Maybe he came back because he didn’t want to be a sieve for the rest of his life and leaving two young girls at a Wendy’s will do that to you. He saw us through that window and knew he was nothing but fucked. Many years later, I entered this Wendy’s into Mapquest and found it was over two hundred miles from home. To get to the catfishing lake, we had gone up and over the Rocky Mountains, passing several ski resorts. On the drive, in each direction, when we approached Hot Sulphur Springs, the car filled with the stench of rotten eggs, and both times, Ellen opened her eyes and asked who farted. We’d laughed on the way there, but no one laughed on the way back. The man raged as he drove, telling us how our mom had tricked him, said she had an emergency and could he take us for a night. He said she begged and cried, and having no kids of his own, he didn’t know what to do with children, didn’t know how much attention we required. He said he’d do anything for her, move mountains, drain the widest river. He kept referring to her littlerendezvous, which I made a note to look up later, but I couldn’t find it in the dictionary because it’s not spelled how it sounds. Over and over, he said he should have known. He never stopped talking, comparing her to all sorts of animals: snake, dog, cow, pig. He used other words too: bitch, whore, liar. He called her a fucking slut and then apologized for swearing. I dozed off with Ellen’s head in my lap and woke to see a roadside sign with reflective white letters that said Denver 87 miles. Ellen snored loudly, the seatbelt tight under her chin. The man was still talking circles, though quieter, hissing to himself. It was darkest night by the time we got home. Our unwashed hair absorbed the smell of oil and the char of beef hung on our coats. He dropped us at the end of our cul-de-sac, told us to go up to our own house and ring the bell. We climbed from his car, bedraggled and drowsy, and before we slammed the door, his last words came floating out.“I didn’t touch you. I didn’t touch neither of you. You be sure to let her know. I ain’t going down for something I didn’t do.”I woke up in my own bedroom, the cheap blinds no match for the bright Colorado sun. I rolled over and faced my sister, searching for the night in her hot morning breath.
In my mouth, your name is silt and sweet freshwater, like the stream that bounded you and yours into that space the rest of the village didn’t dare cross. Yong’en—Yong—En—Yongen. 永 for forever and 恩 for a kindness. It must have meant my kindness; you have never been kind to me, my Yongen. When we were girls you would organize the other kids so that as soon as my attention flagged, they would peel away from me–your long hair and shrill laughter flickering on the wind at the front of the pack. It was a shock every time, a reminder of my own freakishness. Proof of your own belonging. We understood each other in this way, marginal from each other. At the end of the day, we were the two who would sling our patchy knapsacks over our shoulders and trudge the long way down a longer dirt road back to the nothing and nowhere place we came from. You would kick every stray scrap of metal you found, just to see how far it could skitter. Yongen, have you ever loved me as I love you? I love you. I love you like I love the solid handle of an axe in my hands, the surety of its useful violence. I love you the way I love the chick we raised into meat, enough to slit your throat myself. I know now that your mother hired me not because of my inherent talent—although I have learned quickly what is expected of me—but for my unique ability to shoulder a necessary cruelty. Yours, and then later, mine. *We all wondered about the pigs your family kept, away from the rest of the animals. The day your grandmother died, some upperclassman asshole paid off the funeral home to tell him if anyone showed up. And, of course, no one did. What supposedly were her ashes were interred in the community shrine and we dutifully visited every Zhongyuan with our fragrant joss and tacky paper bills that came in stacks, plasticked together straight from the city. We mourned. I stopped trimming the ragged edges of my hair in solidarity with you, close enough to be considered a familiar person by now. Your mother spoke idly about her at dinner, each of us drinking the rich, steaming pork bone broth that fed us that winter. When we got in a childish spat–a pillow fight–we spilled your grandmother’s hair all over the ground. Still speckled pepper and not entirely grey. When your mother hurried into the room, sewing kit in hand and sterner than she’d ever been, I finally understood the peculiarities of your family. Your spirits were stubborn, sticky. Leave anything of the body unused and the soul would never rest, doomed to wander the earth, unaware. Your mother startled at night, when you were too deep in sleep to notice and I was in the kitchen, sharpening her tools. She clutched at my sleeve often, paranoid that she had not done enough, that something of her mother was left behind, her essence congealed in a leftover morsel of her body like meat fibres stuck between her teeth. To leave anything behind was anathema to her–unfilial, ungrateful. She would have eaten clay had it been baked with her mother’s leftover blood, gobbled it down like soup tofu, its dark red delicacy. * I abruptly remembered the first time I had stepped foot on your family’s land—your mother was teaching you how best to butcher: she had your small hand encompassed in hers, fingers wrapped around a wicked blade. One cut, Yongen, she said, and you twisted your face inelegantly, like you were about to cry. But you didn’t flinch when you made the fatal slash. Your mother took the now-dead animal from your hands and drained its thick, dark blood from the clean cut you made so well. That night, we tossed the sweet chicken meat with mala spices, peppercorn and fresh onion; we fried the skin and licked crispy fat off our lips. When we picked the bones clean, we tossed them back into the already steaming broth, meant to last the week. You could never handle your spice, so I carefully scraped all that gritty red off your food, poured just enough soy sauce over to salt it well, and you ate what I fed you. Your mother offered me a job and a place to stay the next day. It was my job to scrub the bleeding basin clean—not a drop left over, she said, and I instinctively knew she meant it literally. I rubbed the little plastic tub until my fingertips hurt and wrinkled, rinsed it out half a dozen times so the water ran out clean and clear as a spring when I was done, and your mother gave me a chicken bone still bursting with marinated flavour to suckle on as reward. Afterward, she told me to chew hard until the pieces splintered under my molars. Swallow. *How did we end up here, Yongen? The branch, splitting you open. The dirt road with its skid marks like regret. I’d fallen beside you, but I was intact, miraculously. Your soft mouth, open in a scream. *“Did your mother make you eat after lao lao’s funeral?” I asked you, my teeth against your skin. You opened your mouth and moaned, low and long. “Don’t make me say it,” you panted, grasping onto my arm. “That’s so fucked up.” “What about Xiao Lu? When he drowned in the river that year?” Your cousin, pearly eyed and dimple-cheeked. Fat rolls still on his chubby arms. It was a strange year. All our crops flooded too, that fatal river overflowing with fresh rain, but our table was plentiful that spring. We feasted. 五花肉 bubbled in wine and dark soy, a rust coloured marinate that swallowed the gritty pieces of rock sugar greedily. A broth so thick and freshsweet it warmed me up inside out for the whole evening.“Don’t,” you said again, but I could see it in your eyes. Saliva flecked your lips. I wondered if you were thinking of that abundance again. Or if you were only scared. *You blinked, one fat tear rolling over your cheek. “You’ll take care of me?” you asked. “After?” I imagined your mother dutifully stuffing her own mother’s hair in that pillow. I imagined myself winding your long hair into braids, bundling branches with it, ready to burn. Carefully, I rubbed my way up your spine. You watched me with wide eyes, your lips parted. Through the blotchy red and your pinked eyes, I thought there was the beginning of some flush suffusing your face. I had left your hair half cleansed; some of it fell across your lips and left behind easy strings of crimson, your own blood streaking your mouth. My fingers found what I was looking for. The branch was thick, twisted, its surface ribbed where it pushed its way into you. The edges of you around it all soft. Skin taut. Slippery with more fluid. I leaned into you and you pulled me in close, your other hand winding in the waist of my shirt. “Please,” you told me, and for the first time, it wasn’t some form of denial, so I hugged you tender and started working you open. I fucked you before I ever kissed you, Yongen. The branch primed you for it, introduced the notion of being open to your body, at once so soft and yet so unyielding, but I was the one who pulled you apart. You clung to me as I eased the tip of my finger into you, crooked so I could find the right angle. Your lips moved soundlessly, your eyes fluttering shut. I slipped in one, then two, rocking slow enough to ease you into it. Your skin was stubborn. Even with the ragged edge, you tore so slowly. “Trust me,” I said, even marred and terrified, you answered me automatically with a soft sound, a nod. I would be grateful to you, Yongen. I would leave no trace behind.
Delusion of control has long been a fascinating yet unnerving symptom of schizophrenia and other psychoses, as well as derealization and depersonalization disorders. While some antipsychotics do show promise in treating this symptom, treatment resistance is common and can be stymying, and no therapy specific to it exists. The inventive paradigm described here will be a game-changer for people with this condition. The inspiration for our intervention comes from the famous, decades-old experiments by Benjamin Libet, who observed using electrophysiological techniques that the neural impulse that generates motor actions occurs several hundred milliseconds prior to the action, and more importantly, a few hundred milliseconds prior to one's own awareness of the intention to move. This occurs in stark contrast to the commonsense and foundational notions of individual agency and free will. The explanation proposed at the time and largely accepted since is that efference copies generated by the motor cortexlead to a retrodicted sense of ownership, known henceforth as antedating. In a small subset of psychiatric patients, this efference copy appears to be absent (confirmed using EEG data, see figure 1) leading to a lack of felt ownership of one's actions. This explanatory gap then often sadly leads to fabricated explanations and delusions, such as that one's actions are being controlled by a third party, be it a demon, machine, alien entity or mad scientist. Fortunately due to the simplicity of the mechanism at work, rectifying the feeling which serves as the initial trigger for such thoughts becomes fairly straightforward. While Libet himself did not anticipate such an application of his work, or even make the connection between his observed data and psychotic experience, in more recent decades, researchers and clinicians have pioneered the use of non-invasive ways to use electromagnetic waves not only to measure but also to induce or suppress human neural activity. One such method, gaining in popularity as a treatment for medication-resistant depression, is transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS). This technique uses electrodes attached to the scalp to administer magnetic pulses to various brain regions, most commonly the left frontal cortex. Its effectiveness has had a huge impact within the field and on patients' lives, financial cost of the treatments notwithstanding. The mechanism behind this treatment, that of activating or suppressing any superficial brain area, gives it enormous and broad potential, potential which has largely gone under-utilized.In addition to its use in research studies focusing on decision-making, it has also been applied to the treatment of depression and other disorders. This study marks the first of its kind using tDCS to treat delusion of control, by simulating the missing efference copy. As a pilot study we used only one patient, with the intention of following up with a larger study using a sample test group. Our reasons for this are technical but also include some difficulty in recruitment for a therapy this novel and ambitious, despite its total safety. Persons with severe psychiatric disorders are a category for which many legal and logistical protections exist within experimental research, even when the research concerns topics of interest to that group specifically. Furthermore, psychotic patients who are not wards of the state or under the care of other legal guardians who act as medical representatives for them (and most of them are not) may be apprehensive to engage in an experimental study this different from existing approved treatments. This hesitancy, far from paranoia, can be understood empathically as a reaction to systematic marginalization and dismissiveness in a world that is perhaps already seen as confusing and hostile through the lens of disorganized perception and cognition. However, it is lamentable that the potential benefits of our treatment are difficult for this population to realize even when explained clearly, as our attempt to help mitigate the differences in processing and ease the fluency with which they interact with the world and with others is most definitely an admirable goal. Our hope is that with the positive data from this pilot study we will gain traction in recruiting volunteers, and that any further studies will cement the benefits of this therapy as well as the complete lack of ill effects. The participant, a 28-year-old Asian male diagnosed with schizophrenia four years previously and on antipsychotic medication, had recurrent, near-constant delusions of control. He acted as his own control by completing some routine physical tasks both with and without applied magnetic stimulation, and completing a semi structured interview before and after the tDCS. The physical tasks were given by instructions: bend your arm at the elbow, open and close your hand five times, pick up a ball and throw it at a target. The interview contained standard assessment criteria for positive and negative symptoms of schizophrenia, although the particular focus of our lab centered on the questions concerning the symptom of interest. "Do you ever feel as though someone else, or something else, is controlling your actions for you?" In the first interview, the patient answered "Yes, most of the time." and then went on to give an elaborate description of aliens from Venus beaming electric rays into his arms and legs. We asked him if he felt this way during the tasks he'd just completed, and he answered in the affirmative. We then applied the electrodes to target the motor cortex and re-issued the same set of instructions. The patient complied, his face still blank and affectless, but beneath that mask, mild surprise. We removed the electrodes and sat him down in a different room, where we'd done the first interview, and asked him the same set of questions. His answers were the same, uncannily so, the same wording, as though he had it memorized. But the shifting tone in his voice, which parts lilted and how, made it different enough from the first time so as not to be strange. Then we got back to "Do you ever feel as though someone else, or something else, is controlling your actions for you?” The patient paused, almost furrowed his brow a little. "Did you feel like this during the last set of tasks?" I prodded. "No," he said. "I guess I didn't." The exit interview he gave subsequently provided ample assurance of the safety and comfort of the procedure. While repeat administration over multiple sessions would likely be necessary in order to have a lasting effect, observing whether this can occur is one of our future directions for this research. With adequate insurance coverage, these sessions could be made accessible and affordable for anyone who can be convinced of the benefits. The success of this therapy is no trivial accomplishment applying merely to the treatment of a miscellaneous fringe symptom, as ultimately the core of our very humanity stems from our subjective experience of acting as free agents in the world, capable of making deliberate choices when interacting with our surroundings. When we are cruelly robbed of this liberty by the malfunctioning of our brains, we are reduced to the status of mere automatons living a flattened and colorless existence. In restoring the sense of agency to these lost souls, physicians are doing no less than reigniting the spark of purpose, and reinvigorating the animus that has dulled. The current that flows from the electrodes placed in the wearable cap can thus fundamentally restore the ghost in the machine.
Your wife’s gym friend is drunk. Not outrageously drunk, but too drunk to drive. According to her, he went to a work happy hour thing that morphed into a dinner thing which became a cocktails thing and now he is stranded somewhere in the city. There are no Ubers apparently or the wait is too long, so he calls your wife and asks for a ride, that is, of course, if it’s alright with you.“I don’t understand,” you say. “He’s getting kicked out of the bar?”She’s standing near the door with car keys in her hand. “No, just drunk. I said that already.” “You’re really going downtown now?” She taps her phone. “It’s not that late.” You turn off the TV and say you’ll come too. Your wife drops her keys and they crash on the tiles. “Perfect,” she says, picking them up.
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It’s just after Christmas last year that your wife declares war on her gunt. When you ask her what a gunt is, she lifts up her shirt and pulls down her pants and points to the crepey pouch of tissue on her lower stomach. Say goodbye, she says, grabbing and shaking it. To her credit, she follows through. Your wife wins the war against her gunt. She wins the war and just keeps going.And at first, there’s no issue. Not really. The gym is her space, her time. You’re happy for her, even. You have your places too. Your own gym, for example. Your office friends, you’re close with them. You know intimate things about each other. Brad from account services tried to kill himself in college, for example, and Sue Ann the media planner recently had plastic surgery on her vagina. But they know you as well, know when something’s off. It is Brad, in fact, who brings it up first. Comes over for a beer one night and asks where your wife is.“At the gym,” you say.“Didn’t she go this morning?” Brad says. “Didn’t you mention that?”“That was a class,” you say. “Boot camp or something. This is free weights. Or yoga, I forget.”“Does she do that a lot, go to the gym twice a day?”“Well,” you say. “She usually goes three times.” Brad takes a long drink of beer, wipes his mouth, looks away, and says jesus.
#
Your wife’s gym friend is wearing an untucked black shirt with the top three buttons undone. He is sitting in the passenger seat and giving you directions to his condo. Your wife follows behind, driving his car, which is some kind of SUV off-road type thing. It’s got a big stovepipe situation coming out of the hood, which he says comes in handy more often than you might think.He talks about work. He asks you what you do. When you tell him, he makes a face and says, “Damn dude!” Looking over, you notice your wife’s gym friend must shave his chest. You can tell because he has stubble. It distracts you for some reason. You roll a yellow light and pull over on the next block to wait for your wife to catch up.“Ah, just keep driving,” your wife’s gym friend says. “She knows where she’s going.”
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You’d be more concerned if there was more to be concerned about. There’s a thing called trust, you tell Brad and Sue Ann. I trust her, you say. Ten years, you remind them. That’s a long time. But they don’t look convinced. They think it’s weird, all the time at the gym. And it’s not their fault, they just don’t know, don’t understand the extent of the situation. You’re not one of these shithead husbands. You do the dishes, your own cooking. You’re not ignorant or moody. You’re an adult, goddamnit. It’s how you’ve always been. Virtually nothing has changed since the day you were married. Hell, you wore your tux last Halloween and went as James Bond. You tell them you’re exactly the same person you were on your wedding day. The microwave in the breakroom bleats in bursts of three.“So, okay,” Sue Ann says. “Maybe that’s the problem.”
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“How does she know where you live?” you ask your wife’s gym friend. You are still pulled over, waiting for the light to change and your wife to join you.“Hmm?” he says.You swallow and repeat the question. Behind you, your wife flashes her brights.“Oh, she’s taken me home from the gym before,” he says.“What?” you say.“Sometimes I jog there,” he says. “Double exercise, you know.”“Right,” you say, putting the car into gear. “Double exercise.”
#
It’ll take you three weeks to look at your wife’s phone and when you do, you’ll see her gym friend’s penis in the folder for recently deleted photos. You’ll be shocked by its color, its fluorescent redness. You’ll think, did he use a filter? Does he have high blood pressure? Is there something else medical going on here? You’ll look down at your own crotch. So normal looking, so boring. How can you compete with a day-glo dick? You can’t, you think. You can’t, of course.You’ll throw the phone against the wall. You’ll think, I should throw the phone against the wall. Then you’ll realize you already did that. You’ll pick it up and throw it against the wall again. A buzzer will go off in your ears. Your wife will come into the kitchen. She’ll be screaming at you, that was the buzzing. She’ll follow you out to your car, sawing like a cicada. You’ll leave the house and go to Brad’s and against Brad’s advice, you’ll return home a few hours later. For five days, your wife will refuse to go to the gym. She’ll lie in bed sobbing, begging for you to talk to her.On the sixth day, she’ll move in with her gym friend, into the condo where you dropped him off that night. Over the next couple months, she’ll intermittently try to get back together. She’ll text you baby names and call late at night. Your lawyer will advise you to not pick up. Your lawyer will also advise you to not prevent her access to the house, so when she asks to pick up some stuff, you’ll say that it’s fine, just don’t bring her gym friend. He’ll come along anyway.Your wife or whatever she is at this point, will run off upstairs to collect her things and leave you in the kitchen with him.He’ll say that none of this is her fault and that he understands how you’re feeling. He’ll say that neither of them meant for this to happen, but that it’s against nature to deny true love. He’ll say that in a couple years, we’ll laugh about this. You’ll tell him quietly that you’re going to punch him in the face. He’ll do this shitty laugh scoffing thing and shake his head and say he’s trying to have a mature conversation and so that’ll be when you punch him in the face. He’ll fall down, out of surprise mostly, and without thinking, you’ll kick him as hard as you can in the back, the spot where the kidneys are. You’ll do this a great number of times. He’ll writhe around on the ground. You’ll step on his head a little and grind his face against the kitchen floor. Something religious will fill your chest when you hear his nose crunch under your foot. Your wife will hear the yelling and come running and see the blood on the white tile and faint, but when she comes to, she will be looking at you in a whole new way, and it will disturb you, it will turn your stomach, because you’ll realize that somewhere in all this violence, the seeds of your eventual reconciliation have been planted.
#
You keep the car running as your wife walks her gym friend to his door. Driving him home was your good deed for the day, you reason. There’s really no point in overthinking things. Tomorrow’s Thursday. You can take Friday off. There’s nothing wrong that can’t be fixed by a long weekend. Your wife gets back in the car, turns the heat up full blast, says something you can’t hear. You ask her to repeat it. She says never mind.
The girls were odd. They didn’t make friends, we realized too late, they collected people. A cab driver who barely spoke English, a barista with a middling art career and infected lip piercing, the neighborhood dog-walker-cum-psychedelics-dealer. We decorated their lives, and we wanted to. We were ravenous to. Every text message, every invitation to the graveyard or the beach, we simply couldn’t say no. Their magnetism was a thing to behold, a gift to feel.They ate little, like birds, claiming assorted food allergies none of us had heard of and none of us questioned. They went to a loosely qualified doctor who tapped their temples and told them their guts were full of parasites. They believed they were witches, and given the power they had over us, none of us was eager to dispute this.We loved their ardent devotion to each other, and wondered how any of us could be so lucky as to populate their orbit. They dropped tabs on our tongues like fairy godmothers and we thought we were blessed. Their friendship was fast—none of us knew the propulsion was drugs, not truth. None of us knew it hit hard and quietly like an acid trip then faded out with sullen indifference.So when they disappeared, separately and then together, the hole they left behind was so ragged none of us could stop purging long enough to breathe. And realize.“The thing is,” a friend says to me while he changes lanes on the 101, “there are friends, right. And then there are the people you do drugs with.”I reject this notion, soundly, a week after Anastasia disappears and an hour before Antonia does. It isn’t hard to know where they’ll be on a Sunday afternoon, and I just want to believe them. All the same, I can’t seem to stop crying.A therapist—I can’t remember which one of the five I see—asked me what was worth fighting for, what was so brilliant about Anastasia that I couldn’t stop fixating. The answer seemed obvious: everything was brilliant about her; she shone like Saturn itself on the night of the new moon; she floated through this life, ethereal and untouchable, and for a while she’d bothered to look me in the eye. I wanted to devour her whole, become her. But when I opened my mouth to spill this soliloquy, all that dribbled out was, “Oh, my god. I don’t know.”I’d touched the fabric of the universe for a good seven months, and her sudden absence felt like a rebuke, like a rejection of my being. Our souls had tangled that afternoon in the freezing water of the Kern River. I’d dropped to my knees in the current, splashing up to my neck, and let out a primal scream so deep and vibrational I felt all the errors of my life simply exit my body. And she was right beside me, crying, smiling, pointing to a blue jay and saying it was the soul of my grandfather watching me. I’d never felt so loved in my life.“Were you not on five scant grams of shrooms?” my friend interrupts, blaring his horn at a mountain lion attempting to cross the freeway.I hobbled out of the water after a brave thirty seconds. She stayed in for twenty minutes, claiming she’d done so much work on her nervous system the cold actually felt good. I felt properly chastened for not doing enough work on my nervous system for the cold to actually feel good.I never knew, and still don’t, why I was collected. Me, a soft housing department inspector who’d been called to investigate a burst pipe in their apartment that burbled out red water like Kool-Aid. When I arrived, they’d piled everything on top of everything else. They were huddled together atop an armchair atop the couch atop the bed, limbs tangled, bright eyes fixed on me. There was a good eight inches of acid red water devouring their floor. Two ducks had flown in through an open window, dipping their beaks and coating their feathers in vermillion. They said they regretted calling me because they loved the ducks.As the last drop of liquid drained, and as I scrawled my illegible signature to the final report, they clambered down from their tower and asked if I wanted to be their friend. Creatures of this magnitude had never approached me—I had cystic acne and scoliosis—and yet here they were, looking me deep in the eye and handing me a piece of lilac paper with one phone number on it along with a half-gram mushroom. The floor and lower eight inches of their apartment were freshly red. It never faded, not as long as I knew them. They’d point to the low water mark at parties and say it was the water that sent me, Brayden, to them. It was A Sign from The Universe to Conjoin Our Paths, as in all of our Past Lives.I couldn’t shut up about them. Not then, not now.“Of that,” my friend says, nearly missing the exit to the canyons, “I am well aware.”They shared a purple cell phone so you never knew which of them was responding to your text. I was saved in their contacts as Moonbeam☽, and this made me feel special. They used a lot of ☆sparkles☆ and rarely my name. Sometimes Antonia would tell me to meet her at the graveyard after dark, to hop the fence and skirt the guards. I did it three times, tearing my pants at the crotch and not saying a word about the blood seeping through the knees. She’d dance under the full moon, a diaphanous dressing gown she’d stolen from a set she’d worked on (the only time I ever heard her mention a job) billowing around her in dramatic fashion. This was when she confessed to her kleptomania, in small sighs as she caught her delicate breath. She stole once a day, every day, from big box stores. Mostly supplements and probiotics. She had a lifetime cache of them in her closet. She admitted this with such resigned pride it seemed ridiculous that everyone wasn’t stealing. In total and over time, I stole $927 worth of goods from the mega–hardware store. Just $23 shy of grand larceny. It did, I have to admit, feel incredible.Life with them was outrageously beautiful. I simply mattered more, in this life, under their attention. We all felt this way, though I doubt any of us would have the nerve to admit it. They seemed to access a current of existence that none of us had known existed, and they pulled us into its flow. The rules as we’d known them seemed arbitrary and small; their world was a kind of floating, a soft ease. They called me, a man truly ugly as sin, the most beautiful being they’d ever seen, stroking my craggy cheeks. It seemed that after thirty-two years of thin, pale light, I might finally see color.And then Anastasia stopped speaking to me. She wouldn’t look me in the eye at parties and shrugged away from my hand on her shoulder. She’d gaze indifferently at the wall as I left their apartment, whispering wistfully that she loved me in a child’s mocking tone. When I asked her what was wrong, she’d sigh, “Nothing, Moonbeam. Nothing.” Their texts were increasingly Antonia-coded, and nobody believed my sweating panic, until Anastasia said she’d enjoyed the relationship we’d had in the past and simply disappeared. The sinking in my stomach and the hole in my heart were surprising, even to me. I was so hollowed out I called off work for two days to sit on my couch in abject silence. By Wednesday, I stood in a wrecked apartment downtown and let the upstairs pipes rain electric blue water on my head, soak my clipboard. By Thursday, I stood in a room made of mold and breathed spores with indifference, watching them grow across the clipboard. By Friday, I stood outside the girls’ apartment and looked through the window, my big greasy nose smashed against the glass. Half of the red stain was scrubbed away, as if the apartment were sawed in two. I was sawed in two. Antonia glided out of the bedroom and watched me through the glass, taking pity on me long enough to walk me to the park and let me cry on her shoulder while she fed me dekopon oranges in the dappled light. Anastasia merely went through her phases, she assured me with a honeyed tongue, just as the moon does. And I believed her. She slipped me half a tab of acid and we, too, went to the moon. Her laugh fluttered like crystal and her freckles sparkled. She promised I would always be her moonbeam. And I believed her.I still do.“Fuck, $15?” my friend cries, coming to a shrieking stop at the parking lot gate. He reverses and rams into the car behind us, which honks pitifully, and cranks forward again to find a street spot in front of someone’s second home. I start to cry again as we walk toward the secret stairs, blubbering behind my sunglasses. I showed them this beach. They took my hands, one on each side, as we walked down this road, waving at people out in their front yards tending to their succulents. A woman gave Anastasia a cutting that she popped in water and called Brayden once it grew roots long enough to live. Antonia plucked limes from trees so ripe mounds of exploded citrus blanketed the ground. We listened to the ocean, floated in the waves, and cried about our mothers. It was the best day of my life, I’m sorry to say.My friend and I descend the sand-coated stairs. There’s one huddle of figures on the beach, spread across striped blankets, that seems to breathe and expand. There are five in total, and the glittering shapes of Anastasia and Antonia render beautifully with every step, their laughs bounding across the walls of the cliffside. I know that sound in my marrow, the validation of it, that for the first time in my life anyone found me funny. As we approach, the laughter wanes and the companions defamiliarize. Where I’d assumed the cab driver and the infected barista and the dog-walker-cum-psychedelics-dealer I’d come to know and nearly love, instead: a convenience store owner who couldn’t speak at all, a bartender with an eyepatch, a feral-cat herder with a joint dangling from his lip. They look at me in expectation. The girls don't look at me at all.I attempt to say their names, but all that comes out is a pathetic squeak.“Hi,” my friend says breathlessly, his eyes affixed to the girls. A familiar wonder is on his syllable, and as I turn to cast him a glance, I suddenly disintegrate into the sand beneath his feet.They turn to him, lock their pinkies together. “What’s your name?” Antonia asks, so coolly taking the joint from the cat herder. She impossibly exhales a perfect ring of smoke into which my friend says his name. The girls turn to each other and giggle. “Who are you?”He is speechless for a moment, reduced to a stuttering moron, eyes glazed. “I’m a claims adjuster with plaque psoriasis and rheumatoid arthritis.”Anastasia beams, tossing her hair back into the sun, and asks, “Do you want to be our friend?” All he can do is nod, his jaw slack, bewitched. All I can do is stare up at him in horror, reduced to millions of aghast granules. The betrayal! The nerve. Anastasia jumps up, setting her manicured feet right on top of me, and takes his hand. Something feels familiar about the sand around me. It smells like old car, like espresso, like dog hair. Antonia takes one last toke and pops the joint into the eyepatched bartender’s mouth, slipping her hand into my friend’s other sweaty palm, her fingers laced through the crust of his plaques.“You have beautiful hands,” Antonia gasps, examining the red flakes across his knuckles. She kisses them one by one with childish glee. “Well, come on, Moonbeam,” Anastasia says, pulling their human chain to the water. His laugh booms across the sand, shivering every one of my grains, as he follows them into the sea.
It happened fast—a small wound opened in his side one day and soon his eyes were sunken, his mouth black. The doctors seemed to know even less than I did. He’d been so lively when they’d seen him, writhing as they placed him on the scale, lapping up the stale smells of the exam room. He tasted the air like a child in snow, curious, eager to devour the world. How could I make them understand? I had seen the sickness enter through his cut, the flicker of his being suffocated by pain. The pink infection crawling up his belly: too far, too fast. I couldn’t. He died. I found his body that night. It was never easy to tell whether he was sleeping; it was the empty limpness in my fingers, the stillness of the skin and the illness swimming in the pus beneath that told me he was dead. This was how we had always communicated: in slithered Ss and Cs spelling out a secret language. He never smiled. Sometimes I could read hunger in the anxious loops he drew around his tank, or intelligence in the considered script with which he scaled a bookshelf. I wondered if the disease had begun before the cut and I had simply failed to read the signs. Only now could I be certain of what he was saying: I am dead, I am dead, IIIIIIIIIIIII. But where to take him? The ground was hard and frozen, too cold a resting place for subtropical remains. The trash seemed unceremonious and sad, the rats greedy for a chance to turn the food chain on its head. The first few places I called laughed at me on the other end of the line: We do cats and dogs here, sir. Anything less domestic was too weird, too far-flung on the cladogram for funerary rites. Finally I found the number of a former veterinarian with four stars online who said that, for their feline rate, they would ‘process’ him—though when they mailed him back to me he would arrive in a little wooden box adorned with balls of yarn and mice and fish skeletons. That was fine, I said. He did like mice.I wrapped him in a garbage bag, and we took the train to the outskirts of town. Out the window I saw factories spewing smoke that slithered up the sky and dissolved into the gray clouds overhead. No one else had ridden this far out on the line; the only other people on the platform were disinterested ticket-takers, warm and drowsy behind the fogged glass of their climate-controlled tanks. Huge, faceless trucks rattled past me on the street, shining their headlights in my eyes. I kept my hands in my pockets, the garbage bag tucked under my arm, my lips turning rigid in the blistering wind. At the address I’d been given I found a small office with a man who was surprised to see me. Behind his desk hung a posterboard filled with faded polaroids of border collies, tabby cats, and corgis posing with teary-eyed humans in the entryway I’d just come in. He accepted the bag and offered his condolences; he seemed tickled to have something to burn beyond his regular kindling, and asked me questions about reptile care and cuddling. As I turned to leave I noticed that one of his ears was missing—mangled, as if bitten off.It was dark when I walked back onto the street. It had started to snow. One by one the streetlights flickered on; a pale shimmer appeared to glow upon the factory walls. Scales of silver spray paint under spray paint, shining with the names of those who’d vandalized this place before they left it. I looked up at the great smokestacks pouring chemicals into the atmosphere and the fat flakes falling down like ash and thought about the world. How all of this is a letter being written on a burning piece of paper. An empty skin, left behind.for Royal
The woman I had become accustomed to thinking of as my future daughter-in-law has taken off her white satin shoes but still wears her wedding gown. My son left her at the altar. I don’t know why she’s surprised, why she even went to the church—she keeps saying everything was arranged. I suppose that’s part of it. I’m grateful she has chosen to come directly from the church to the apartment, to me. She paces and cries out in her rage, the dress billowing. The wedding’s off. It’s clear that the rest of the family, the couple’s many friends, the officiator, all the invited guests have gone. He’s gone, she wails. I can’t pretend to share Claribel’s grief. Procumbent on the floor, I continue watching mukbang on the 65-inch TV. The open-plan apartment, with its luxurious furnishings, was supposed to be my gift to the newlyweds. Turkish carpets, new lighting fixtures, sectional sofa. No one has ever fucked on that sofa. Not yet. From the side of the room where romantic dinners will one day be prepared comes the soft whistling of a tea kettle. From the TV, at very low volume even though I love the audio component of mukbang as much if not more than the visual, come the smacking and slurping sounds of someone enjoying her meal. Between bites the pretty girl onscreen describes what she is eating—dumplings—and how they taste. I know what she says thanks to the English subtitles. (I’m keeping the volume down for Claribel’s sake.)She goes on weeping and shouting. I understand her need to vent. Memories of her and my son engaging in public displays of affection compete for my attention with the mukbang. When the mukbang loses, I turn off the TV. I look up at Claribel. In her eyes I see a scintilla of awareness that it’s going to be just her and me now. I’ve won. For months, I’ve been calling my friends by her name. Like when we spent the weekend at Lisa’s beach house. Claribel, I’d say, is there any soy sauce? Claribel, I mean Lisa, I’d correct myself, are you ready for a Boulevardier? All weekend, I kept slipping up like that. You’re obsessed with this woman, said my friends, laughing as they pointed out such mistakes. I couldn’t resist talking about Claribel. Saying things well within the bounds of normalcy, such as: She’s got a good job in hospital administration. She’s plus-sized and body-positive, she loves her body the way it is. She likes me, I told my friends. We’ve gotten close, so close that we have pet names for each other. She calls me Ducky, I confided. She defends me against her parents and other detractors. She even scolded my son one time when he called me a virago to my face. There’s an erotic element to your obsession, my friends warned. I suspected they were right. I may have taken advantage of my son’s fiancée’s affectionate nature. All I know is that I wanted to give Claribel my attention, preferably over a sustained period of time, and that I acted on that desire. My friends would never believe I could do that to my son. My friends—they’ve known me for a long time. They think of me as a loving mother. I, too, once thought of maternal love as unaffected by the passage of time. But as my son grew from infant to child to adult, he needed me less and less. My love shrank accordingly. Imagine a funnel. My love started out big and gradually decreased in size until it became as short and narrow as the human throat. I faced the consequences of my transgression only today, when my son entered the apartment unexpectedly at 9 a.m. It was the morning of his wedding day. His bride-to-be was stretched out on an antique silk rug, under the chandelier. She had come here because she needed to be alone. With me, she can be alone. I know how to give her the mental space she requires, even when we’re close to one another physically. When my son walked in, my head was resting on Claribel’s capacious ass. I was naked, as was she. My son looked at us and we looked back at him. He slammed the door on his way out. Claribel told me not to worry. She seemed to have no doubt the wedding would take place exactly as planned. I said I hoped she was right, and after she left, I meditated on love as a funnel-shaped object. I imagined refilling a small bottle of olive oil from a large can and how a funnel would make the job easier. I used to love my son so lavishly—I was a good mother. I hope I was.Now, except for the softly whistling kettle, it’s quiet. Claribel is no longer sobbing. She has run out of things to express regret about. If I were you, I say, I’d change out of that dress and into my going-away outfit. Claribel shakes her head at me in a disbelieving sort of way, but she goes out of the room and returns wearing a short, sleeveless dress. The tattoos that looked silly on a bride are now an adornment. All in all, Claribel looks better. Calmer. The tea kettle is still whistling. I say, Do you want chamomile or mint?
