I have this recurring nightmare in which I swim through amniotic fluid. Poppies litter the fluid, and a baby is lost somewhere amongst all the falling flowers, out of reach, beyond my thrashing hands. To keep the nightmare at bay, I lay awake in yet another hotel room, avoiding sleep. The man in bed with me has his back turned, constellations of freckles scattered on sunburnt skin. It’s obvious from the way his body teeters on the edge of the mattress that he has decided I am a one-night stand. I run my fingers along the map that is this new back, find a replica of Cassiopeia on his shoulder. I will remember his skin long after I have forgotten everything else about him. Slowly, I reach for the discarded condom on the floor, cup it in my palm. It is satisfyingly heavy. I tie another knot into the latex and slip out of bed.I find the next man in the Gare du Nord. The French have a lovely term for train station waiting halls: salles des pas perdus, rooms of lost footsteps. I am sitting at a crowded cafe, smoking a kretek — you know, one of those honey-tipped clove cigarettes — pretending to read the novel that last week’s man told me would be life-changing. It is not. I spot the next man through the throngs of passengers scurrying for their trains, and watch him slip off a wedding ring as he approaches to ask for a light. I can picture it, the conventionality of his life: the flat in some sleeper suburb, the overweight Labrador, the sad potted plants, the mortgage he can barely afford. He asks if he can sit down. There are no other free tables, and he has been stood up, he says with a little too much of a smirk in his voice. It is an obvious fib, which makes him more likeable. I don’t trust utterly honest people. They don’t see through my lies. The man asks about the book I am reading, and proceeds to tell me he found one of the author’s earlier novels had really opened his eyes to life’s possibilities. I apparently have specific tastes when it comes to lovers. So I tell him what he wants to hear, repeating what last week’s man thought of the book, opinions lifted from some newspaper review, no doubt. I tell him how seminal the book was during the Velvet Revolution in Czechia, how the writing burns with twentieth-century urgency. I’m not entirely sure what the Velvet Revolution is, but that hardly matters. It sounds violent and sensual, a metaphor for sex. The man orders an espresso. I blow clove smoke out of the corner of my lips and decide he looks like he has good genes. He will do. But this man wants to play pretend, makes us talk for hours to the lullaby of announcements, our heads and elbows creeping closer. By the time he finally offers to walk me home, I have watched two trains leave without me. I would tell him, but he might think it romantic. We fuck to the sound of traffic crawling along the Boulevard de Magenta. He runs his fingers over every inch of my skin, hesitating when he reaches the bump above my belly button, a healed piercing scar. “What’s this?” he asks, not looking up.“I don’t know,” I reply, making sure he knows this is not true. “It’s always just been there.” “A second bellybutton,” the man whispers, “A baby bellybutton.”He flicks the tip of his tongue over the hardened skin again and again. I have to restrain myself from curling up into a foetal ball, from nestling into his chest. I bury my face into the pillows instead, calming myself with the intermingled smells of sweat, dry-cleaning chemicals and dust. He works his way all around my body: right buttock, pubic hair, outer labia, inner thigh. When he reaches my kneecaps, I close my eyes and almost manage to imagine myself in love with him, caught in the cobweb of untruths we have spun. We fall asleep in each other’s arms. It takes all of my strength not to cry.I dream of poppies again, swimming, desperately trying to locate my unborn daughter. I dare not open my mouth for fear I might swallow her. Then, there is a sudden pull, a tug, a collapsing inwards. The red poppies scrunch into confetti and spiral down. Time slows to a slurry. Somewhere in the blood-flecked celebration, my baby is drowning. I know she is probably dead, but still, I search for her, that little bundle of me. The possibility that she could be alive, floating and calling out, is more terrifying than death. I scare myself awake, my nightmare baby screaming inside my head. The building groans deep within its foundations: the first underground freight train rattling below, or an empty metro. This means it is around four, four-thirty at the latest. Soon enough, rubbish trucks will clank down the boulevard, followed by an army of green-clad cleaners hosing down the pavements, drenching the city clean. I notice that this man has no moles, no blemishes. His skin is an anonymous wasteland. I lay perfectly still, trying to decide how long is too long to get up, gather my things and leave. Through the gaps in the curtains, aerials and pigeons fight for space. The sky has lost its pink glow—perhaps it is nearer five. I am already lonely. In the cramped bathroom, I bend down, still naked, to retrieve the full condom from the wastepaper basket. Under the flicker of fluorescent light, my piercing scar looks like a fish gill, breathing in and out and in again. My mother once told me fetuses have gills, some remnant of our reptilian past. I imagine my baby hungrily sucking oxygen from amniotic fluid, its umbilical cord linking us with love.
At the intersection between the Many-Worlds Interpretation and the Law of Assumption, you can bow out of the shitty life you’ve created for yourself and slip into an existence that’s basically your own personal heaven. People call this place your “desired reality.” Let me give you some reference points here.In my old reality, moving house was always an exercise in abject misery.But.Let me tell you how things unfolded after one night I used the “state akin to sleep” to visualize stepping through a doorway into a magical world of miracles and ease. On Monday morning I received notice that a distant relative had passed away and left me 90K.Ninety. Thousand. Dollars. I’d never had that much money. I was terrified, actually. All night I tossed and turned, grabbing my phone to research proper money management. Imagine—spending so much of my life plagued by a lack of money, then being blessed with a random windfall and suffering just as much anxiety if not more.But I needn’t have stressed myself. Because on Tuesday, I received a job offer. A very lucrative, very exiting job offer that was ridiculously up my alley: creative, remote, and part-time with, get this: full-time pay and benefits. FINALLY! A money-making opportunity I actually wanted! I accepted faster than I’d ever accepted anything. No hemming and hawing for days. Just a resounding YES from my very soul. And as soon as I accepted the job, I immediately felt better about the inheritance. I knew that no matter what happened, I’d still have plenty of money coming in. I was on cloud nine and didn’t think things could get better.But then they did. On Wednesday, I received a wire transfer from a previous employer that had failed to pay me. It was only $875, but it was a relief she finally did the right thing. And it was immediate money.On Thursday the trend continued. A talented artist reached out wondering if we could collaborate on a project. As he described it, I became more and more excited. I would have done it for free, but he offered me 15K up front. When he sent me the contract, I noticed I’d be receiving royalties as well. I was so happy I almost exploded, my entire existence projecting across the universe in billows of glitter, confetti, and flustered giggles. By Friday, my inheritance deposited into my account. I had no clue inheritance money could come so fast, but it did. And I was no longer afraid of it. This is when I embarked on the most joyful moving experience of my life: one in which I could just pick a rental and move there. Luckily, the city I had in mind was also the city where my project mate resided, so if we ever wanted to meet up, it would be easy.Easy.What a relaxing word.On Saturday. I found two quarters on the stairs. A paltry sum, I know, but I ended up needing exactly two quarters later that day. Easy.On Sunday, an ex showed up at my apartment out of the blue. He took me to brunch and gave me a care package filled with a soft plaid blanket, Illy ground coffee, a pack of hand-drawn tarot cards, a scented candle, and a dark academia novel. I was touched he knew me so thoroughly. Inside the book was five hundred dollars cash. Startled, I looked at him. He shrugged and kissed me. “I just want you to remember me.”“I will, always.”After brunch he drove me back to my apartment and opened my door for me so I wouldn’t have to juggle my care package and keys.Easy.It was still a new word to me, but I was growing quite fond of it.As I packed boxes, a task that usually felt like it took months and often culminated in a harried moving day, I was delighted to find that I did it all in a week. Never in my life had I packed that fast. The funny thing is, I didn’t rush. I didn’t beat myself up for having so many Christmas decorations. I didn’t fret about everything making it to the other side in one piece. In fact, several times I caught myself smiling and—gasp—humming some jaunty tune. I knew that no matter what, I’d be fine.Moving day was interesting. As I watched the moving truck ramble away, I imagined my boxes and furniture arranged in a snug Tetris formation, shifting only slightly as they traversed bumpy roads, wide turns, and all that distance. I got my cats set up with their beds, food, water, and litter box in the back of my friend Woody’s conversion van. Then I hopped into the passenger seat, where we listened to Billy Joel and Jhene Aiko and Chapelle Roan and Eric Church. We drank coffee from Starbucks and Dunkin and BP and Cracker Barrel. We stopped to pee often, though the ride was so consistently flat that our bladders probably wouldn’t have bothered us much if we didn’t. We coasted down perfectly paved highways. There were very few people on the road, and the ones that were seemed to just glide into the next lane, allowing Woods and I to continue our smooth trajectory the entire way.Finally, we pulled into the driveway. I savored the feeling of my legs carrying me up the porch stairs, the beautiful weight of my cat in my arms. Woody carried my other cat, and we smiled at each other before entering the house, an adorable little Victorian with a woodburning fireplace and a pantry and a clawfoot tub and a tall wooden fence completely enclosing the sunny, grassy backyard. Yes, everything was exactly as I hoped it would be. A miracle, considering I never saw the place in person before signing the lease. I’d done everything remotely and hoped for the best. And this house is the best. It’s hands-down the most peaceful place I’ve ever lived. Thank goodness for my real estate agent, who made the whole process, well…Easy.To this day, it seems the universe is conspiring to deliver me money, ease, and convenience. I don’t even worry anymore that I’ll randomly wake up back in my old shit heap of a life. My desired reality would never let me go like that. It cradles me to its bosom like a devoted mother, this absurd thing of happiness and ease, and for that I am profoundly grateful.
My father dug his own grave. But he didn’t use it right away. For years, the grave lay unfilled and inviting. All he would do was visit it once in a while, stand by its empty feet, and sigh. I don’t know if it was a sigh of relief or impatience. He made us promise to leave the grave unmarked once everything was in its place. Everything has its place. I slept in the grave once. But not on purpose. It’s ill-advised to read meaning into sleepwalking so I won’t try. All I know is that I woke up surrounded by the peeling dirt and I didn’t feel scared. Whenever my mother and I asked him why he dug the grave, he would only say “everything in its place.” He never bothered to change the subject. He’d let the phrase punctuate his conclusion and shrug silently against our repeated retorts. No desire to fan any spark back into life. Every time the same dance—we’d either give up gracelessly and leave the room or let our irritation move us to another conversation topic. I told myself I’d never be like him. But when I woke up in the grave I didn’t get up right away. The walls fit my shoulders well. For a moment my tinnitus almost ceased. I didn’t feel safe but there wasn’t any fear either. There was space to rest, blue sky seeping in through my periphery as I inhaled the earth-soaked dew. I don’t know how long I stayed down there. I like to think that I would’ve felt days pass by, but let’s be honest. It can give purpose to dig a grave. That’s what I thought to myself when he first started to dig. Stabbing violently at the ground instead of yourself. To carve away at something new. And when there’s nothing left but a hole in the ground maybe the first thought is, “Finally, a place for me.” But then why not immediately jump in? Why leave the gap to scab and grow stale? Perhaps the digging is a merely a reminder. That in order to fill a grave one has to dig first. And perhaps by the time you’re done the callouses that have grown make everything a little easier to handle. And you remember that no matter how much you dig, you’re going to die anyway.
With just enough water in the tub to sluice through its gills as it thumps its caudal fin and arches its spine the carp could stay there for far longer than it will take to prepare the vegetables for the stock which the carp’s head and bones and skin and any parts not reserved will be joining the next morning. Its jelly eye fixes on the water stained ceiling which it doesn’t see as anything but part of what is above because the carp has never seen water stain or been even wet before the tub. When its head seizes up it catches the silver of the drain the carp knows as the moon because the moon controls the tides of the river where it lived as the drain controls the water into the tub. A ring of reddish soap scum circles the drain and if the carp could turn a bit it would see the same ring lining the upper third of the tub but the carp has never been on its side or front or back or anything because until the tub it wasn’t even but in the tub it is now the carp in the tub. All of this the carp tells the boy in the plaid pajama set. In his bed under the itchy wool blanket layered over the duvet over the kicked down flat sheet the boy thinks he is awake because he can hear the carp’s ceaseless thumping. He is awake because the carp is in the tub and would be awake even if the tub was far away like Hackensack or Ontario. Cocooned in the itchy wool blanket he creeps to the bathroom. It is dark except for the moon silvering everything inside. The carp thumps.Water slaps against the sides of the tub and beads across its scales.The boy places a finger on its side, retreating at the feel of its twitch. The carp thumps, unregistering.He places his finger again, stroking its dorsal fin. It is smooth against the pad of his index. He moves to put his palm on its abdomen, feeling the flex and roll of its muscles. Thump. Thump. Thump.Tomorrow they will use a rolling pin. Slit its gills to bleed and become water. The boy in the plaid pajama set feels the itchy wool blanket start to slip off his shoulders. One of his hands is white knuckled on the edge of the tub. The other wet on the carp. The blanket puddles on the ground.The carp’s thumping up and down a prayer to the tub and the water and the moon and the hands that plucked it from the water and the hands that placed it and the hands that will kill it. He presses, feels its bones. He will have to help pick them out of the meat tomorrow before they grind it.The carp has not known pressure like this. And it won’t. Because to know it it has to exist on the other side of it and the carp won’t. The pressure is now and so is the carp and when the pressure is gone the carp will not feel absence. The carp is where it is and takes no meaning from it. It is drowning and it is tight but as soon as it is not it won’t be.The edge of the tub is cold on his cheek. He wants to sleep but he is crying now.He doesn’t think the carp is sad. Or scared. But it is thumping in the tub because of him. In five years he will become a Bar-Mitzvah and with every step towards the Bimah he will think, Blessed are You, Adonai, our God, Ruler of the Universemay the fire alarm go off before I get to the Torah. Blessed are You, Adonai, our God, Ruler of the Universemay the ceiling fall before I get to the Torah. Blessed are You, Adonai, our God, Ruler of the Universemay Aunt Harriet have a heart attack before I get to the Torah. But God will let him get up on the Bimah and let his voice crack during his parshah and so he will learn lesson one: God is a bullshit artist.
Driving through the Detroit suburbs, cutting through traffic, honking and cursing at other drivers, the brothers make their way to the crematorium. It is difficult to keep up with the long hearse. Traffic seems to move automatically for it just as it blocks the brothers’ car.“I know,” the older says to the younger.“Yeah?” the younger asks. They are still navigating the void which now defines their relationship—the change from middle-and-youngest to older-and-younger.“I was just agreeing that I probably shouldn’t have told Nana to shut the fuck up.”“Coulda been handled better,” the younger says.They pass a Big Boy, but the large, cherubic statue of the eponymous boy is nowhere to be seen.“He could be anywhere.”“If she just,” the older brother continues, “—she wouldn’t stop talking about how hard it was to put on her bra this morning. We’re closing the coffin and that’s what you’re talking about?”“You know how she is. Besides, it was sorta funny,” the younger says.Sirens wail from behind them, and the car lurches onto the shoulder along with the rest of traffic, trying to avoid the glittering pieces of glass and shattered reflectors ground into the curbside. A police cruiser passes, black and emotionless. A few minutes later, more sirens, and another cruiser—this one tailing an ambulance—passes before speeding off to the right through the next intersection. “Nice blinker, asshole,” the older brother shouts, gunning the engine to catch the hearse again. They have the address for the crematorium. It is printed in embossed letters on nondescript business cards in each of their breast pockets. Neither reaches for theirs. Instead, they weave through traffic—cutting off HVAC trucks, minivans ferrying children to soccer games, classic cars taken out for the beautiful weather—unable to bear the thought of the hearse leaving their sight. They have to remain together for the final trip.“I thought you were going to get arrested,” the younger brother says.“It’s fine, those cops were driving worse than me.”“No, I mean a few days ago. When the cops came, after—you know.”“I just don’t see why they need to be involved. It was hospice, not a fucking crime scene.”The younger brother lets silence hang in the air. They both need it, have been entertaining aunts and uncles, cousins they’ve only met once before, friends and acquaintances of tenuous and forgettable relation. It is what they are supposed to do, and maybe if they make themselves useful, they can forget everything else. Like how, as children, the boys used to fight over who got to die first – which of the three in their war games, their cops and robbers, would make the sacrifice so the others could live another day. It always devolved into the two others pulling the dead one up, changing the rules at the last minute—no, you didn’t die, it’s my turn—until they fell on each other in a hilarity of fists and dying breaths, swoons and skinned knees. And always, always they were on the same team, all robbers and rebels, the cops and enemy soldiers hiding in the tall wheatgrass, shadows conjured by the darting eye.At the crematorium, the funeral director reiterates that, per Michigan law, someone must accompany and identify the body before cremation. She says there were issues in the past where people were given anonymous ashes—usually from horses. After all, she tells them—her hands open and upturned as if trying to prove she has nothing to hide—a person just doesn’t leave that much ash. People always expect more. Nothing up this sleeve or that.They follow her into the back room. It is not difficult to identify their brother. They’d just seen him. And then they are ushered out by the director and an attendant, asked to wait for a few minutes please.The brothers make coffee in the waiting room. It is every waiting room, every doctor’s/dentist’s/attorney’s. The magazines and pamphlets differ only in content, not form. Navigating the Steps of Grief. How to Ask for Help. Mourning a Loved One. The younger brother points out that the front of the building doesn’t even say crematorium—just Services. The older brother says that the steps of grief were actually developed for hospice patients, were meant to help people accept their own deaths and not others’, which should be obvious because only the dying have assurance that their grief will end.Then they make more coffee, because really, there’s nothing else to do. Then the younger brother says something that cracks the older one up, sets them both laughing and laughing so hard someone comes from a side room to check in because they must be mistaken, it must be keening cries and not laughter, or perhaps the two men in charcoal suits were tricked by the sign and don’t know where they are, but they assure her it is their brother in the long cardboard box in the back being packed away for a final delivery, and it is ok because they are still laughing, cannot take their minds off of the joke, whatever it was, because then they will think about how the younger brother reached into the casket to trim his brother’s beard before the ceremony, how the older one had screamed at the cops to get their hands off, can’t a man even fucking die, how their little fists had grown into hands that still sought one another, wanting to pull each other up and say no, you didn’t die this time, it’s my turn, how this is the last time their three bodies will be in the same building and then the director comes from the back room saying they’re ready, and of course they thank the man who is waiting for them beside the furnace, not simply because they are supposed to, in fact they really mean it, are deathly serious when they ask how his day has been while he points at the cardboard box on the conveyor belt, instructs them to say their goodbyes and to press the small green button, and the older brother says it’s a shame that it’s a button and not a lever, that this moment should have some more memorable tactile input than a button, and the younger one points out that it’s not even a button, just an image of a button on a touch screen, all signs and simulacra play pretend make believe and then the conveyor is going and the box trundles past with its awful lightness its terrible weightlessness reminding them how easy it was to lift him that last time so light the box must be empty because how could they not expect more not expect the ashes to escape somewhere beyond sight or touch or representation and what was the joke again how did it go?
Your wife was overjoyed when your uncle drowned in three inches of water at the bottom of a cave. It meant your family would inherit his house. Although you both wished it wasn’t in such tragic circumstances. That’s what you kept saying to people. Not that you had any strong feelings about him or his death. You barely knew him. Was spelunking in Chile a normal pastime of his? Nobody knew him well enough to tell you. Not at the funeral, not during the will reading, nor when you took his place in his very respectable neighbourhood. They would say he was a strange man. An eccentric, one elderly lady had said kindly, more kindly than was necessary. While your wife ripped everything in your uncle’s dingy house out to start again, you took a strange, small set of stairs down to the piss room. That’s what you’d both end up calling it later. It wasn’t quite in the basement, but also wasn’t on ground level. It was as if your uncle had specifically requested the room be created, on its own separate level. Inside, it was a perfect square, lined with shelves which were, in turn, lined with jars of piss. All in the same type of jar, large and wide, which distorted the wall behind in varying shades of yellow. All were labelled with numbers you could discern no meaning from. Some were so aged the piss had turned dark and rusty inside, winking metallically at you, standing outside the piss room door.
2
Ten years later, the piss jars stood, immovable. Your wife had wanted to get rid of them as quickly as possible. She thought them disgusting, a reminder of a sad old man, not well and not liked. The more you’d learned about your uncle, gleaned through the stacks of papers found throughout the house, the more the two of you understood him to be a bad man. Not just an unkind or cold man, but a man who actively worked to disparage and ruin those around him. There was a time where your wife even believed the jars of piss to have played a role in his evil deeds. Maybe they were cursed, she’d whisper to you in the night. You didn’t know any more than she did. Despite the overwhelming physical evidence, you secretly believed your uncle to be misunderstood. You fought to keep those jars. Not only to preserve them, but to live alongside them. At first you could say it was because of the difficulties of moving so many heavy jars up into the daylight surface of the house, not to mention the horrors of accidentally dropping one. But now, with your wife ten years tired and your children ten years grown, arguing to keep the piss room feels futile. But every time you’d looked at it and thought how much more sensible it would be for you to use this room for storage, or a home gym, or a man cave, visions of your uncle, choking to death in an inch of stagnant water sprang into your mind.
3
Your uncle had started spelunking late in life. Like almost everything else, he did it alone. The drowning seemed to be a long-overdue inevitability. There were many letters from his old instructor begging him to take a buddy next time. One of these days he wouldn’t come home. The last day you saw your kids, you got a letter from your father. It spoke of the day you were born, and the hopes your father had had for your future. It apologised for how hard things had been when you were younger. It told stories of your uncle when he was a young man, the paths he chose that led him to this end. He loved his brother, but he was a troubled soul, your father told you. He needed things others didn’t. After that letter, more came. Official documents from your wife’s solicitor. Late payment notices for the electric company, complaints from the HOA. Then, one handwritten and yellowed, from your uncle. It detailed his plan to reach out, just when he knew your resolve would be close to giving out. He told you not to listen to your wife or your father. They had a vested interest in this plan going wrong. He knew you’d be up for the challenges this lifestyle would demand of you. He knew there was something different in you from the first day he saw you. You would be the one to hold this heavy burden. Not just for yourself, but for all of mankind. None of this surprised you. You have left the fear and uncertainty of earlier years behind you. You are chosen. You are capable. You are not going to die face down in a puddle and you are not going to become your father. You are the guardian of the piss and you are going to live forever. You slot both letters into the piles of yellowed papers in your office. The piss jars glitter at you in the darkness and you linger for a moment before you close the door.
Althea Downs spends all summer break in her bedroom. Through the pivot roof window, the sun deep fries her no matter where she sits. She drinks berry-kale smoothies and listens to macabre podcasts that give her strange dreams about swimming pools full of blood. She showers at midnight and sweats through the entire night, wakes up cocooned in sheets so soaked you’d think the scale would finally plunge below 100. It does not. She thinks about killing herself, but only casually. This is her tenderest hobby, lazy and indulgent, she spoils it like a rescue. It’s not really death she craves so much as unbirthing herself. She’d like to root out each trace of her existence and unbecome. But dying doesn’t do that, nothing does, once you’ve been alive you can’t escape that fact, so suicide is only a recreational pastime, a little romantic reverie that softens the worst edges of her existential ennui. She would like to be transported out of her body and into something grand, but she’s scared of going into the real world. She hates her knees. She hates the bumps on her skin, the length of her fingers, how her body smells. Summer, which should be stunning and memorable, sneaks away into the night and her heart atrophies. In September, she moves into her college dorm and meets Pilvi. Pilvi is from Finland but speaks with no trace of a foreign accent. She adds liquorice-infused honey to her liquorice tea and eats salmiakki pastilles out of a black and white chequered paperboard box. Althea isn’t sure if she’s satirising her Finnish identity through exaggeration or if this is all genuine. She also isn’t sure if a potential distinction would even matter. She has tightly permed blonde hair and a half sleeve of tattoos. Right above her elbow are two black birds mid-flight, which she explains to be ravens from Norse mythology. On the other side of her arm, there’s Moomintroll surrounded by flowers. She’s reading a book about healing your inner child. The cover is pale green with a border of daisies. It feels ironic to read this book before you’re even done with college. Althea still feels like a child, outside as much as inside. But maybe if she does as the book instructs, her body will catch up and finally grow some tits.‘How is it?’ Althea asks.Pilvi looks towards her and, after Althea nods at the book, says, ‘Readable.’ ‘Does your inner child need a lot of healing?’ ‘My childhood was staggeringly non-traumatic,’ she says. ‘The worst thing that happened was when I saw a lynx eat a fox in our garden.’‘That sounds gory.’‘Yeah,’ she says. ‘But that’s nature.’ Pilvi is studying economy psychology and isn’t going to be a therapist, but Althea imagines her as one anyway. She’d either be awful or really quite good, all depending on whether patients would feel judged enough to change their behaviour. Althea’s childhood was offensively non-traumatic as well. Guiltily, she sometimes daydreams that something awful happened to her—her softball coach, who always paid special attention to her, grooming her or some creepy stranger pushing her into a cinema restroom stall to molest her or her parents’ old Toyota somersaulting off a gravel road and tattooing the seatbelt to her chest. But everything was stable and safe and she did well in school and wasn’t the first or last to get her period and yet she feels wrong and scared and disgusting and sometimes it’d be nice if she could say she feels all of those things because of X. ‘I find pop psychology interesting,’ Pilvi says. ‘That’s why I’m reading it.’ Sunday night of their first week, they agree that they want college to be unforgettable, so they make bucket lists for the first year. Althea stares at the lined page in her journal for two minutes before she grabs her phone and starts googling bucket list ideas and what to put on bucket list and bucket list 100 items. A lot of the suggestions are very stupid: dye your hair, be a bridesmaid, make soap. Making soap cannot seriously be a life goal. Practise yoga, learn to surf, eat frog legs. Yuck. And Althea doesn’t think she really wants to learn to surf, nor bungee jump, snorkel, skydive, rock climb, or one of the other extreme sports that are apparently mandatory bucket list additions. Everyone wants to write a book and see the Northern Lights. The wedding industry also makes frequent contributions. She recognises that this—looking at what other people want to engender her own wants—disrupts the entire point. The fact that she can’t by herself think of anything specific that she wants is depressing. And it’s not that she wants nothing. She regrets that she wasted this summer, feels like that’s what she’s done with her entire life, and she wants to do better now. That’s why they’re making these lists. But does she really want to go vegan for a month or did she just see it on someone else’s bucket list? Does she actually want to go to Disney World? She doesn’t even remember watching Disney movies as a kid. Have sex, she finally writes. This desire is born more from a need to fill a void than for wanting the thing itself. Sex will probably be fine, decent, but more importantly, she will no longer be a virgin, which feels embarrassing in a deep, absolute way. Like Cain’s mark, her own failure smeared across her forehead. Other than that, she can only think of vague shit like: stop being a loser and do something cool. Pilvi has fifteen points on her list. She wants to ace all her classes, get an eyebrow piercing, and do molly. ‘Have you ever?’ she asks. Her expression, when she looks at Althea, is impressively blank. She sucks on a salmiak liquorice. ‘No,’ Althea says. She has not done any drugs, not even weed. She adds molly to her own list because it seems romantic and adventurous, even though she has no idea how she’d acquire it.‘What else is on yours?’ Pilvi asks. ‘Have sex,’ she says. ‘Dress up for Halloween.’ That sounds lame when she says it. ‘Like—something hot, you know?’ ‘Oh yeah. Like a playboy bunny?’ ‘Something like that,’ she says. She imagines herself in something appallingly slutty, fishnet tights and a glitter leotard with a plunging V-neck, sleek heels and hot pink lipstick. In the fantasy, she gets gloriously drunk and she’s so charming, so funny, everyone likes her and she’s not afraid of anything, no longer the girl who locked herself in her bedroom all summer, no, she’s alluring, she’s hot, she’s so fuckable and nothing hurts and she loses her virginity in a threesome and life is finally happening, life is finally larger than her loneliness and dread, life is finally—here.
***
Five weeks into the autumn term, Pilvi buys MDMA from a junior named Kyle. Google says it can trigger extremely high fevers, liver failure, kidney failure, heart failure, convulsions, cardiac arrest, and more. Now there’s a bucket list, Althea thinks darkly. Google also says it has proven successful in treating PTSD, so how’s that for healing your inner child? She puts on make-up in preparation, even though they’re going to get high in their dorm room. She wears a dark red lipstick and brown mascara. Pilvi changes into black sweatshorts and a matching sports bra before she crosses her legs on the carpeted floor. Her socks have little pizza slices on them. Sharing the first pill feels religious. Althea puts one half on Pilvi’s tongue and Pilvi feeds her the other half. Then they both have a long sip of the same can of cherry blossom LaCroix through green straws. Pilvi closes her eyes and lies down on the floor. The effects crawl closer until they’re suddenly just there, blaring through Althea’s nervous system. Strangely, she feels her mouth move into the shape of a big smile. Everything in the room—the scratched-wood single beds and decorative pillows, the storage boxes and paper bin, the neat row of liquorice boxes on Pilvi’s side of the desk—suddenly has an aura. All of it glows faintly. When Althea looks at Pilvi, she’s kind of glowing too. She wishes they’d gone out for this—outside, the world must be so beautiful: all the fallen leaves crisp and the colour of old pennies and gingerbread cookies, girls in knee socks and miniskirts, fuzzy candyfloss clouds on the jammy sunset sky. And everyone is beautiful and lovely, everyone is worthy of attention, Althea wants to talk to them and touch their hands and smile, smile the way she’s smiling now, her heart satiated and overripe. She puts her hand on Pilvi’s knee and it feels weirdly good; her palm tingles and she wants to touch her harder, dig in her fingertips and leave a mark. She wants Pilvi to also touch her. Maybe with her mouth. Pilvi has been talking about one of her professors, Oonagh Bartlett, nursing her own obsessive crush for weeks. She lectures with nearly mechanical precision, smells like shea butter, wears her box braids in a top bun, and is happily married. Pilvi wants to have sex with her anyway; she’s even added it to her bucket list. Althea asked if this had anything to do with some unhealed inner child trauma, and Pilvi laughed. Pilvi’s laugh is very nice, it has a glow to it as well. It always bursts out of her like a champagne cork. Althea doesn’t have any professors she would like to have sex with. She also has no classmates she’d like to have sex with, so progress on her bucket list has been slow. But now they’re high on molly (so she can tick that off) and she’s thinking about foxes and lynxes and Pilvi’s mouth (which is beautiful). Her fears have been sandpapered into a small, smooth pebble which she can easily ignore. Her awe is wide, her hope so raw. Her hand moves up Pilvi’s thigh and Pilvi blinks slowly at her, her glowy eyelashes flutter against her cheekbones, her glowy collarbones are begging to be touched just like everything in Althea’s body is begging to be touched. She remembers that she could die from this and it’s okay. She wants to tell Pilvi that she is so beautiful but she just kisses her instead. Pilvi melts further into the floor and kisses her back, fingers tangled loosely at the back of her nape. This is what Althea should’ve been doing all summer: ridden her bike to the beach and gone to house parties and flirted with everyone. She should’ve been kissing every single girl that looked at her, spritzed herself with a new perfume sample every day, waded waist-deep into the cold water, hotboxed a shed with her best friend and shotgunned weed, but she didn’t have a best friend, she didn’t even have a close-enough friend, she was too afraid to talk to anyone who could see her. She would’ve made such a good ghost. Maybe one day. Her tongue moves lazily in Pilvi’s mouth; she bites her lower lip. She licks against her teeth. Pilvi breathes out this little hurt-animal sound and rocks upwards, sweatshorts bunching between their bodies, and it feels so good and gorgeous. Althea touches her belly, her waist, and keeps kissing her. If the MDMA in her bloodstream curdles now and paralyses her heart, it really wouldn’t be the worst thing to happen.
It tastes so god I can’t hav another bite I say — and the hole of evrybody jus shuts up like oh is she about to stop? Loud one second and then gasping like is this reel? I hear somone literallay go holy fuk is that the end of Mis Plasteek? They’re holding out ther phone recording as they say, Guys I can’t beleev I’m catching this on video, plees like and subscribe.Meenwile I see the Produser behind the curtain mouthing to me: okay nice, now milk it. Which is jus wat we rehursed. The guy with the phone is holding it for a selfee so he can be in the shot. Guys this is reel, this is monewmental, He says. Though some person next to him yaps, Hey I din’t buy tikets so ur dumass could blok my vew with a camra. And so on.The Produser’s noding his hed in reel satisfakshun. I giv him a wink like oh yah we totallay get each other. We kno wats happenin.He offen says to me, Sweethar, make them go wow this is reelly happenin and/or I din’t buy first row tikets for nothing, like it’s the experieuns of a liftime, etsetra etsetra.Well, this is wat I do rite about then: I hold the las bit of plastek up to my mouth and bulg out my cheeks like nope I’m dun. Maybe I burp a litle. Maybe I wip some reel blod from my mouth but don’t bothr to cleen it. I look ofstage and say, Sir I don’t think I can do this anymor, even as the Produser's givin me the thumbs up from behin the curtan. He yells somthin loud then, or makes the dogs bark. People go, Did you hear that? Is she bein forsed to do this?But of corse what the Produser said/did was jus nonsens, jus part of the show. And thos dogs by the way arn’t mad at all.It’s arond heer I shake a litle. Like I’m scared. Like I’m gonna brake or apolagize to the audiunse — Hey sorre folks, I been so rite up til now, but I jus can’t do this anymor. With reel teers in my eyes. Ha ha. Jk.I remembr one time durin this part a guy tride to hop on stage saying to me, I’m Dad! I’m ur Dad! And it throwed me jus for a sec. Like my chest went hollo. I din’t kno this guy. I new that. But he got up to me. He was rite in fron of my fase, lookin in my eyes. He hopped over the fens and burs up onstage. Then he grabed my arm and said, Look at what they dun to u. For a momen I din’t kno ware I was.My litl sweehar, He said, holding my hand. I wasn’t evn breething. It was the way he said it, like in a dreem.I’ll tak u away, He said.Then the securty delt with him, carreed him away. I don’t kno wat I wud hav don. I jus sat ther, not evn moving. The Produser whisper-yelld over to me, Hey! Remember las bite!Wat? I thoght. I din’t evn kno ware I was. Oxigen! The Produser yelld. And I took a deep breath and coffed it bak out. It felt like the air got stuk insid me. I was liteheded. Teers wer fillin my eyes.Wat is hapnin? I herd someon say.I jus couldn stop my eyes from waterin. My wrist was throbin. Everythin was spinnin around. Then the lites cut and nobody coud see a thing.Or maybe my eyes were shut. I don’t kno. I remembr bein in the makeup room with the Produser whisper-yellin somethin I couldn heer. Aparenly they weeled me ofstage and had to run the defribrilator. I droold all over my shirt.Someon yelled from ouside I stil love you, Mis Plasteek! Do you kno ware you are? The Produser kept askin me, Do you kno? Then I herd the Produser’s ring and him going Helo as he answrd a call. He stepped away. I reely was in the makeup room—I saw this as I opend my eys. But wat? I kep thinking. The plastek was still on the plate in fron of me. I neerly brought it up to my mouth, looking at my fork, but I stopped because I smelled burnt sugar in the air. A cake was sittin on the counter with burnt waxy sparklers sunk in the top. The Produser was already eatin a slice with his fingers, lickin it off the tips.And the door was wide open. Not like open-open—craked—like a mouth almos don chewin, breething a litl thru the lips. I stared at it.The Produser was still talkin on the phone. His ring was buzzin again but he din’t pick up. He was sayin things like no she’s fine, no I got it, etsetra etsetra.Meenwile my head felt as tho someon was slamin it in the door—empty and bam, bam, bam. Like my skul was craking and my body was froze up, all pumped ful like a mannekin, and all I could feel everythin pushin around inside me.But I was on the other side of the door alredy. Throwin it all out of my mouth, moovin down the hall, not in my mind.And my hands were on the weels. The cold air was bushin pas my cheeks. I herd him call from behin me-–Hey! Com back heer! But I was far.My face nevr looked like it had befor, tryin to hold back my excitemen.Because that’s when the walls of the hallway backdrop lift, all the furnitur gets pushed off by the crew, and evryon remembrs I’m stil on stage. Then the Produser weels me center—my body tips.And the audiunse lets loose my favorite part.
You’re all so thin and beautiful. I only wanted to be like you. To want for nothing. To live in a gorgeous Tribeca loft. To wear Brunello Cucinelli and Loro Piana like it was nothing. To show up to morning drop-off at P.S. 234 with an expensive blowout and a full Alo set, en route to pilates. You lived the life I thought I deserved. One day. For now, I was supposed to be your yoga teacher. Your guide. I wanted my body to look like all of yours, but I was the reason yours looked the way they did. Well, it was partly me, and partly your private chefs, your nutritionists, your meal delivery services. Your microbiome mojo salad, your yoga bunny breakfast, your metabolism super powder smoothies. You filled my hospital room with flowers. Peonies and white roses. The designer kind that arrived in sturdy gift boxes. The types I’d seen in my Instagram feed to celebrate influencers’ birthdays in Dubai and anniversaries at the Ritz Carlton. I resisted the urge to peel off the EKG patches that dotted my chest. To roll the adhesive residue between my fingertips. Instead, I closed my eyes and listened to the rhythmic beeping, almost soothing in its sterility. I snapped a picture of the boxed white roses and posted it to my story, as if it were a Valentine’s Day gift from my husband and not a sympathy gift from my yoga students. The roses looked so crispy and white and clean in their black box. Their fragrance the antidote to the boxed mashed potatoes and stale urine smell of the hospital. Lying in my hospital bed, I imagine I’m here to deliver a baby. I imagine the roses are a push present, motivation to get me through hours of labor. I picture myself cradling a baby boy in my arms, just like you all have done. They look like you. I’d like to look like you too. Students. It’s strange to call you my students. If anything, I’m yours. You teach me how to be. I ignored the warnings, believing myself to be invincible. Believing the risks to be overblown. Heart attack. Stroke. Sure, okayyy. Maybe if you’re out of shape. Maybe if you’re old. I’m a goddamn yoga sculpt instructor. I’m 23 years old. If I have nothing else to offer, I have my youth. And you, my students, seem to love that about me. I have something you don’t. Had something, anyway, before this self-inflicted heart attack, which is what my doctors are now saying it was. Time. You wanted my youth. I wanted your everything else. I’ve been lying to my care team. I squirm in my bed as they try to discern why an otherwise healthy young woman might be stuck here, in this position. I could tell them I was abusing speed, but I’d rather see if they can figure it out. I first learned about speed on Reddit. It sounded too good to be true. These chronically online bodybuilder types didn’t care about the risks. They were motivated, like me, by the end result. By the optimization of our bodies to look exactly the way we want them to. They taught me to stack ephedrine with caffeine pills and aspirin. Warned me that I’d be carded at CVS for buying the ephedrine from behind the counter, but not stopped. Your bodies were my inspiration. You lived lives that made them possible. Easy, even. You resided in palatial apartments with elevator doors that opened right into your living rooms. I lived in a Chinatown two-bedroom with three other girls, all of us willing to do whatever it took not to go home to Long Island. Early mornings teaching yoga sculpt, late nights working bottle service at Marquee and TAO. I’m only making money when I’m awake, so I try to stay up and up and up. The speed helped with that. It felt too good to be true. This little cocktail allowed me to transcend my need for food. For sleep. I could make money around the clock. I could look like you. I buzzed with manic energy, ran laps up and down the West Side Highway. Vowed never to sit down when I could be moving. Taught more yoga sculpt classes, subbing whenever I could. Picked up more shifts at TAO. Brought home more in tips with my new body. My energy was infectious, one guest told me beneath burning sparklers.My heart pounded as I moved through sun salutations, but I paid it no mind. My chest pounded as I handed out flutes of Dom from the tray balanced precariously on my shoulder. My body shrunk. The packed club felt easy to glide through when I was high. It felt like I could fly over the crowds, straight to VIP. I’m too embarrassed to admit what I’ve done to myself. To be like you. To look like you. I thought I’d found a cheat code. Who cares that it made my thoughts race. Everything race. There aren’t enough hours in the day to do anything else but move fast. I look at the box of flowers you bought me and cringe, filled with shame. I’m not telling anyone what I’ve done. And when I’m all better, I’ll go back to class and teach you how to keep those bodies you already have. Those bodies I so badly want to inhabit.
Josie uses her key to let herself and her sister Amy into Cora’s apartment. She walks in first, then turns to see Amy standing in the doorway, hand braced against the doorframe. Josie says, impatiently, “Come on.” Finally, Amy enters this apartment their mother lived in for three years, moving here after she injured her knee and at last accepted that it made no sense for an older woman to be living in a house with two sets of stairs. But Amy has never seen it, because she’s so stubborn and unforgiving. Watching her older sister walk slowly into the apartment reminds Josie, painfully, of their mother. After she got sick Cora slowed down too, as if just moving her body hurt.Josie opens the window over the kitchen sink. It’s stuffy, the air stale. The apartment has that unlived-in feeling of coming home after a trip. Cora had been in the hospital for twelve days prior to dying, during which Josie came here only once, to pick up her alpaca shawl and pairs of cozy socks. But it’s very neat. There are three plates and a coffee mug drying in the dish rack. Cora never used her dishwasher—“What’s the point?” she’d say. “It’s just me.”. Now Josie puts the plates and the coffee mug in the cabinet. It’s not a big apartment, all one long floor with the bathroom and the bedroom in the back. Nonetheless it’s pretty. Their mother has great taste.Had. Watching Amy look around, Josie wonders what Amy will want, will claim. The painting over the decorative fireplace is quite valuable, for instance. Amy must remember that painting; their mother bought it years ago. It was inspired by a photograph of a girl sitting in a cornfield with her legs bent behind her. The girl in the photograph was crippled, couldn’t walk, though you can’t tell that from the photograph, or from the painting. At any rate, it’s worth money. There are other things in the apartment worth money. Josie wonders whether Amy is assessing these items—the artwork, the knickknacks on the end table, a ceramic pear, a Murano blown-glass vase—and calculating their value. She studies Amy, in her cowl-neck cashmere sweater. Amy, like Cora, values material objects. Earth signs, both of them. Josie feels her lips tighten and thin into a grimace. Amy pauses by the framed photograph of the three of them on the end table, taken that day they went to Point Reyes and ate three dozen oysters—so many oysters! It’s the one photograph of Amy in the living room, though Josie knows there’s another one by Cora’s bedside table, taken after Amy’s graduation from Smith. The living room photo flatters Amy more than Josie, who is squinting. They used to argue about photos. “Delete that one! I have a double chin!” Watching Amy, Josie hopes she feels bad. The heat of the feeling surprises her, since just yesterday she was telling her friend Bridget “My relationship with Mom was good—well, Mom was complicated, but mostly good. I’m worried that Amy will take her passing much harder than me, because they were estranged.” But now, she wants Amy to feel shitty. To confront her rigidity and selfishness. To brim with impossible regrets.How hard could it have been to visit Cora in the hospital? To make peace? Every time Josie visited her, she saw her mother turn to the door, see her, and a flash of disappointment would slip over her face. Because of course Cora would have hoped that the silver lining of dying is that Amy would want to see her. “Mom is dying.” Josie told Amy that, two weeks ago. The only time Amy had come up in conversation was towards the end, when Josie was holding her mother’s bony hand and Cora looked into her eyes and said, “Tell her—” She never completed the sentence, and after waiting a minute, Josie said, “I will, Mom.” And she will. Someday. At some point Amy might ask, “Did Mom give you any message for me?” and Josie will tell her, because Josie knows perfectly well what Cora meant to say, even if she never in fact said “Amy” or completed her own thought. But Amy will have to ask! She will have to fucking ask.Josie watches Amy pause in front of the loveseat and coffee table—that’s where their mother used to sit and watch TV, her Brit Box detective shows, and do her needlepoint. Her sewing basket is on the coffee table, as always. Amy bends, fishes inside of it, and grabs Cora’s embroidery scissors. She always bought the same kind of scissors, tiny ones shaped like a stork, the upturned beak the blades. The loops you stuck your fingers through were the legs. “I want these,” Amy says, looking at Josie. How they loved those scissors when they were little girls! They always wanted to play with them, to cut out their paper dolls and snowflakes. “They are not a toy,” Cora would say, sternly. Also: “Be careful!” Though Josie understands that she probably meant be careful not to cut yourself, not what she’d assumed then—be careful not to damage my scissors. The sisters regard each other. The scissors are lovely, but not valuable. They probably cost less than forty dollars. Amy isn’t asking permission, Josie thinks. She isn’t saying “May I have these?” She gives permission anyway, as if the scissors are hers to dispense. “Take them,” says Josie, putting peculiar emphasis on the verb.
