Cyrus Shams
Keady University, 2015

Maybe it was that Cyrus had done the wrong drugs in the right order, or the right drugs in the wrong order, but when God finally spoke back to him after twenty-seven years of silence, what Cyrus wanted more than anything else was a do-over. Clarification. Lying on his mattress that smelled like piss and Febreze, in his bedroom that smelled like piss and Febreze, Cyrus stared up at the room’s single light bulb, willing it to blink again, willing God to confirm that the bulb’s flicker had been a divine action and not just the old apartment’s trashy wiring.

“Flash it on and off,” Cyrus had been thinking, not for the first time in his life. “Just a little wink and I’ll sell all my shit and buy a camel. I’ll start over.” All his shit at that moment amounted to a pile of soiled laundry and a stack of books borrowed from various libraries and never returned, poetry and biographies, To the Lighthouse, My Uncle Napoleon. Never mind all that, though: Cyrus meant it. Why should the Prophet Muhammad get a whole visit from an archangel? Why should Saul get to see the literal light of heaven on the road to Damascus? Of course it would be easy to establish bedrock faith after such clear-cut revelation. How was it fair to celebrate those guys for faith that wasn’t faith at all, that was just obedience to what they plainly observed to be true? And what sense did it make to punish the rest of humanity who had never been privy to such explicit revelation? To make everyone else lurch from crisis to crisis, desperately alone?

But then it happened for Cyrus too, right there in that ratty Indiana bedroom. He asked God to reveal Himself, Herself, Themself, Itself, whatever. He asked with all the earnestness at his disposal, which was troves. If every relationship was a series of advances and retreats, Cyrus was almost never the retreat-er, sharing everything important about himself at a word, a smile, with a shrug as if to say, “Those’re just facts. Why should I be ashamed?”

He’d lain there on the bare mattress on the hardwood floor letting his cigarette ash on his bare stomach like some sulky prince, thinking, “Turn the lights on and off lord and I’ll buy a donkey, I promise I’ll buy a camel and ride him to Medina, to Gethsemane, wherever, just flash the lights and I’ll figure it out, I promise.” He was thinking this and then it—something—happened. The light bulb flickered, or maybe it got brighter, like a camera’s flash going off across the street, just a fraction of a fraction of a second like that, and then it was back to normal, just a regular yellow bulb.

Cyrus tried to recount the drugs he’d done that day. The standard bouquet of booze, weed, cigarettes, Klonopin, Adderall, Neurontin variously throughout the day. He had a couple Percocets left but he’d been saving them for later that evening. None of what he’d taken was exotic, nothing that would make him out and out hallucinate. He felt pretty sober in fact, relative to his baseline.

He wondered if it had maybe been the sheer weight of his wanting, or his watching, that strained his eyes till they saw what they’d wanted to see. He wondered if maybe that was how God worked now in the new world. Tired of interventionist pyrotechnics like burning bushes and locust plagues, maybe God now worked through the tired eyes of drunk Iranians in the American Midwest, through CVS handles of bourbon and little pink pills with G 31 written on their side. Cyrus took a pull from the giant plastic Old Crow bottle. The whiskey did, for him, what a bedside table did for normal people—it was always at the head of his mattress, holding what was essential to him in place. It lifted him daily from the same sleep it eventually set him into.

Lying there reflecting on the possible miracle he’d just experienced, Cyrus asked God to do it again. Confirmation, like typing your password in twice to a web browser. Surely if the all-knowing creator of the universe had wanted to reveal themselves to Cyrus, there’d be no ambiguity. Cyrus stared at the ceiling light, which in the fog of his cigarette smoke looked like a watery moon, and waited for it to happen again. But it didn’t. Whatever sliver of a flicker he had or hadn’t perceived didn’t come back. And so, lying there in the stuffy haze of relative sobriety—itself a kind of high—amidst the underwear and cans and dried piss and empty orange pill bottles and half-read books held open against the hardwood, breaking their spines to face away—Cyrus had a decision to make.

Two Years Later
Monday
Keady University, 6 Feb, 2017

“I would die for you,” Cyrus said alone to his reflection in the little hospital mirror. He wasn’t sure he meant it, but it felt good to say. For weeks, he had been playing at dying. Not in the Plath “I have done it again, one year in every ten” way. Cyrus was working as a medical actor at the Keady University Hospital. Twenty dollars an hour, fifteen hours a week, Cyrus pretended to be “of those who perish.” He liked how the Quran put it that way, not “until you die” but “until you are of those who perish.” Like an arrival into a new community, one that had been eagerly waiting for you. Cyrus would step into the fourth-floor hospital office and a secretary would hand him a notecard with a fake patient’s name and identity on it beside a little cartoon face on the 0–10 pain scale where 0 was a smiling “No hurt at all” face, 4 was a straight-faced “Hurts a little more,” and 10 was a sobbing “Hurts worst” face, a gruesome cartoon with an upside-down U for a mouth. Cyrus felt he’d found his calling.

Some days he was the one dying. Others, he was their family. That night Cyrus would be Sally Gutierrez, mother of three, and the face would be a 6, “Hurts even more.” That’s all the information he had before an anxious medical student in an ill-fitting white coat shuffled in and told Cyrus/Sally his daughter had been in a car accident, that the team had done all they could do but couldn’t save her. Cyrus dialed his reaction up to a 6, just on the cusp of tears. He asked the medical student if he could see his daughter. He cursed, at one point screamed a little. When Cyrus left that evening, he grabbed a chocolate granola bar from the little wicker basket on the secretary’s table.

The med students were often overeager to console him, like daytime talk-show hosts. Or they’d be repelled by the artifice of the situation and barely engage. They’d offer platitudes from a list they’d been made to memorize, tried to refer Cyrus to the hospital’s counseling services. Eventually they would leave the exam room, and Cyrus would be left to evaluate their compassion by filling out a photocopied score sheet. A little camera on a tripod recorded each exchange for review.

Sometimes the medical student would ask Cyrus if he wanted to donate his beloved’s organs. This was one of the conversations the school was training them for. The students’ job was to persuade him. Cyrus was Buck Stapleton, assistant coach of the varsity football team, devout Catholic. Staid, a 2 on the pain scale: “Hurts a little bit.” The little cartoon face still smiling even, though barely. His wife was in a coma, her brain showed no signs of activity. “She can still help people,” the student said, awkwardly placing his hand on Cyrus’s shoulder. “She can still save people’s lives.”

For Cyrus, the different characters were half the fun. He was Daisy VanBogaert, a diabetic accountant whose below-knee amputation had come too late. For her, they’d asked him to wear a hospital gown. He was a German immigrant, Franz Links, engineer, with terminal emphysema. He was Jenna Washington, and his Alzheimer’s was accelerating unexpectedly quickly. An 8. “Hurts a whole lot.”

The doctor who interviewed Cyrus for the job, an older white woman with severe lips and leaden eyes, told him she liked hiring people like him. When he raised an eyebrow, she quickly explained: “Non-actors, I mean. Actors tend to get a little”—she spun her hands in tight circles—”Marlon Brando about it. They can’t help making it about themselves.”

Cyrus had tried to get his roommate Zee in on the gig, but Zee’d blown off the interview. Zbigniew Ramadan Novak, Polish Egyptian—Zee for short. He said he’d slept through his alarm, but Cyrus suspected he was freaked out. Zee’s discomfort with the job kept coming up. A month later, as Cyrus was leaving for the hospital, Zee watched him getting ready and shook his head.

“What?” asked Cyrus.

Nothing.

“What?” Cyrus asked again, more pointedly.

Zee made a little face, then said, “It just doesn’t seem healthy, Cyrus.”

“What doesn’t?” Cyrus asked.

Zee made the face again.

“The hospital gig?”

Zee nodded, then said: “I mean, your brain doesn’t know the difference between acting and living. After all the shit you’ve been through? It can’t be like . . . good for you. In your brain stem.”

“Twenty dollars an hour is pretty good for me,” Cyrus said, grinning, “in my brain stem.”

That money felt like a lot. Cyrus thought about how, when he’d been drinking, he’d sell his plasma for that much, twenty dollars a trip, his dehydrated hangover blood taking hours to sludge out like milkshake through a thin straw. Cyrus would watch people arrive, get hooked up, and leave the facility in the time it took him to give a single draw.

“And I’m sure eventually it’ll be good for my writing too,” Cyrus added. “What’s that thing about living the poems I’m not writing yet?”

Cyrus was a good poet when he wrote, but he rarely actually wrote. Before getting sober, Cyrus didn’t write so much as he drank about writing, describing booze as essential to his process, “nearly sacramental”—he really said it like that—in the way it “opened his mind to the hidden voice” beneath the mundane “argle-bargle of the every-day.” Of course, when he drank, he rarely did anything else but drink. “First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you!” Cyrus would announce proudly to a room, to a bar, forgetting from whom he’d lifted the line.

In sobriety, he endured long periods of writer’s block, or more accurately, writer’s ambivalence. Writer’s antipathy. What made it almost worse was how much Zee encouraged Cyrus whenever he did write something; Zee’d fawn over his roommate’s new drafts, praising every line break and slant rhyme, stopping just short of hanging them up on the apartment refrigerator.

“‘Living the poems you’re not writing?’” Zee scoffed. “C’mon, you’re better than that.”

“I’m really not,” Cyrus said, sharply, before stepping out the apartment door.

When Cyrus pulled into the hospital parking lot, he was still pissed off. Everything didn’t have to be as complex as Zee constantly made it, Cyrus thought. Sometimes, life was just what happened. What accumulated. That was one of the vague axioms from his drinking days to which Cyrus still clung, even in sobriety. It wasn’t fair that just because he was sober, everyone expected him to exhaustively interrogate his every decision. This job or that job, this life or that. Not drinking was Herculean enough on its own. He should’ve been afforded more grace, not less. The long scar on his left foot—from an accident years before—pounded with pain.

Cyrus signed into the hospital and walked through the halls, past two nursing mothers sitting side by side in a waiting room, past a line of empty gurneys with messy bedding, and into the elevator. When he got to the fourth-floor office, the receptionist had him sign in again and gave him his card for the afternoon. Sandra Kaufmann. High school math teacher. Educated, no children. Widowed. Six on the pain scale. Cyrus sat in the waiting room, glancing at the camera, the “Understanding Skin Cancer” chart on the wall with gruesome pictures of Atypical Moles, Precancerous Growths. The ABCs of melanoma: Asymmetry, Borders, Color Change, Diameter, and Evolution. Cyrus imagined Sandra’s hair crimson red, the color of the “Diameter” mole on the poster.

After a minute, a young medical student walked into the room alone, looked at Cyrus, then at the camera. She was a little younger than him, wore her auburn hair behind her head in a neat bun. Her impeccable posture gave her a boarding-school air, New England royalty. Cyrus reflexively hated her. That Yankee patrician veneer. He imagined she got perfect SATs, went to an Ivy League school, only to be disappointed by Keady as her medical school placement instead of Yale or Columbia. He imagined her having joyless, clinical sex with the chiseled son of her father’s business partner, imagined them at a fancy candlelit restaurant dourly picking at a shared veal piccata, both ignoring the table bread. Unaccountable contempt covered him, pitiless. Cyrus hated how noisily she opened the door, sullying the stillness he’d been enjoying. She looked at the camera again, then introduced herself:

“Hello, Miss Kaufmann. My name is Dr. Monfort.”

“Mrs. Kaufmann,” Cyrus corrected.

The medical student glanced quickly at the camera.

“Erm, excuse me?”

“Mr. Kaufmann may be dead, but I am still his wife,” said Cyrus, pointing to a pretend wedding ring on his left hand.

“I, I’m sorry, ma’am. I was just—”

“It’s no problem, dear.”

Dr. Monfort set down her clipboard and leaned her hand against the sink she’d been standing near, as if resetting. Then, she spoke: “Mrs. Kaufmann, I’m afraid the scans have revealed a large mass in your brain. Several large masses, clumped together. Unfortunately, they’re attached to sensitive tissue controlling breathing and cardiopulmonary function, and we can’t safely operate without risking severe damage to those systems. Chemotherapy and radiation may be options, but due to the location and maturation of the masses, these treatments would likely be palliative. Our oncologist will be able to tell you more.”

“Palliative?” Cyrus asked. The students were supposed to avoid jargon and euphemism. Not “going to a better place.” Saying the word “dying” as often as possible was recommended, as it eliminated confusion, helped hasten the patient through denial.

“Uhm, yes. For pain relief. To make you comfortable while you get your affairs in order.”

Get your affairs in order. She was doing terribly. Cyrus hated her.

“I’m sorry, Doctor—what was it? Milton? Are you telling me I’m dying?” Cyrus half-smiled as he said the one word she’d yet to speak out loud. She winced, and Cyrus relished her wincing.

“Ah, yes, Miss Kaufmann, ah, I’m so sorry.” Her voice sounded the way wild rabbits look, just on the cusp of tearing off out of sight.

“Mrs. Kaufmann.”

“Oh right, of course, I’m so sorry.” She checked her clipboard. “It’s just, my paper here says ‘Miss Kaufmann.’”

“Doctor, are you trying to tell me I don’t know my own name?”

The medical student glanced desperately back at the camera.

A year and a half ago in early recovery, Cyrus told his AA sponsor Gabe that he believed himself to be a fundamentally bad person. Selfish, self-seeking. Cruel, even. A drunk horse thief who stops drinking is just a sober horse thief, Cyrus’d said, feeling proud to have thought it. He’d use versions of that line later in two different poems.

“But you’re not a bad person trying to get good. You’re a sick person trying to get well,” Gabe responded.

Cyrus sat with the thought.

Gabe went on, “There’s no difference to the outside world between a good guy and a bad guy behaving like a good guy. In fact, I think God loves that second guy a little more.”

“Good-person drag,” Cyrus thought out loud. That’s what they called it after that.

“Of course not, Mrs. Kaufmann, I’m absolutely not trying to argue,” the medical student stammered. “The paper must have misprinted your name. I’m so sorry. Is there anyone you’d like us to call?”

“Who would I have you call?” Cyrus asked. “My principal? I’m all alone.”

Dr. Monfort looked clammy. The red light on the camera was blinking on and off, like a firefly mocking their proceedings.

“We have some great counselors here at Keady,” she said. “Nationally ranked—”

“Have you ever had a patient who wanted to die?” Cyrus interrupted.

The medical student stared at him, saying nothing, pure disdain radiating from her person, barely bridled fury. Cyrus thought she might actually hit him.

“Or maybe not wanted to die,” Cyrus continued, “but who just wanted their suffering to end?”

“Well, like I said, we offer a wide range of palliative options,” she hissed, staring at Cyrus, Cyrus-Cyrus, beneath Mrs. Kaufmann, willing him toward compliance.

He ignored her.

“The last time I thought I wanted to die, I got a fifth of Everclear, ninety-five percent alcohol, and sat in my bathtub drinking it from the bottle, pouring out a bit on my head. One pull for me, one for my hair. The aim was to finish the bottle that way and then light myself on fire. Theatrical, no?”

Dr. Monfort said nothing. Cyrus went on,

“But when I’d finished maybe just a quarter of the bottle, I realized suddenly I didn’t want to burn everyone else in the apartment complex.”

This was true. That little flicker of lucidity, light, like sun glinting off a snake in the grass. It happened a few months before Cyrus had gotten sober, and it wasn’t until he was already good and drunk that he even remembered the existence of other people, and the fact that fire spreads, that if he lit himself on fire in a first-floor apartment bathtub, everyone else’s apartments would likely catch fire too. Booze worked that way sometimes, clarifying—briefly—what his mind couldn’t. It was like sitting in the optometrist’s office, booze flashing its different lenses in front of your face and sometimes, for a second, it’d be the right prescription, the one that allowed you to catch a glimpse of the world as it was, beyond your grief, beyond your doom. That was the clarity alcohol, and nothing else, gave. Seeing life as everyone else did, as a place that could accommodate you. But of course a second later it’d zoom past clarity through a flurry of increasingly opaque lenses until all you were able to see would be the dark of your own skull.

“Can you believe that?” Cyrus went on. “I needed to be drunk to even consider that a fire that consumed me in a bathtub wouldn’t just go out on its own.”

“Mrs. Kaufmann . . . ,” the medical student said. She was wringing her hands, one of the “physical distress behaviors” Cyrus was supposed to note in his evaluation.

“I remember actually sitting there in the bathtub, doing the calculus of it. Like, do I even care if I take other people with me? These strangers. I had to work out whether or not they mattered to me.

How fucked up is that?”

“Mrs. Kaufmann, if you are struggling with thoughts of suicide, we have resources . . . .”

“Oh c’mon, just talk to me. You want to be a doctor? I’m sitting in front of you, talking. I ended up walking myself outside the apartment complex, wet with the alcohol, though not too wet, it evaporated quickly I think, I remember being surprised at how wet I wasn’t. There was a little grassy patch between our building and the one next to us, a picnic bench with one of those built-in charcoal grills. I remember thinking that was funny, lighting myself on fire next to a grill. I brought out the Everclear and the lighter, I remember—this is bizarre—it was a Chicago Bears lighter. I have no idea where it came from. And I sat there at the bench feeling, despite the Everclear in and on me, I remember sitting there feeling, not happy exactly but simple, maybe? Like a jellyfish just floating along. Someone said alcohol reduces the ‘fatal intensity’ of living. Maybe it was that.”

Outside the clouds had grown fat and dark with rain, the whole sky a wounded animal in some last frantic rage. The hospital room had a tiny little window high on the wall, probably placed there so people from the street couldn’t look in. The medical student didn’t move.

“Do you have this organ here?” Cyrus asked her, pointing at the base of his throat. “A doom organ that just pulses all the time? Pulses dread, every day, obstinately? Like it thinks there’s a panther behind the curtain ready to maul you, but there’s no panther and it turns out there’s no curtain either? That’s what I wanted to stop.”

“What did you do?” the medical student asked, finally. Something in her seemed to have relaxed a little, conceded to the moment’s current.

“I went back inside my apartment.” Cyrus shrugged. “I wanted to stop hurting. Being burned alive felt suddenly like it’d hurt a lot.”

Dr. Monfort smiled, gave a tiny nod.

Cyrus continued: “I took a shower and passed out. I remained. But so did the dread. I thought getting sober would help, that came later. Recovery. And it did, in its way. Certainly it made me less a burden to the people around me, created less dread in them. But it’s still in me, that doom organ.” He pointed again at his neck. “It’s in my throat, throbbing all day every day. And recovery, friends, art—that shit just numbs it for a second. What’s that word you used?”

“Palliative?”

“Right, palliative, yeah. All that stuff is palliative. It stills the suffering, but it doesn’t send it away.”

The medical student paused for a moment, then took a seat on the chair across from Cyrus. She was tinted with black-blue rays from the window as if marked by some celestial spotlight. She said, very deliberately, “You know, Mrs. Kaufmann, it’s entirely possible, common even, to have psychological co-morbidities. It sounds like you’ve been getting help for addiction issues, which is great. But you may also have another diagnosis alongside it that’s going untreated, an anxiety disorder or major depression or something else. It could be useful for you to seek help for those as well.” She smiled a little, then added, “It’s not too late, even with the tumors.” It was her way of inviting Cyrus back into the performance, and he obliged. He felt suddenly flush with embarrassment.

Cyrus behaved agreeably through the rest of the act. When they finished a few minutes later and the medical student left the exam room, he wrote her a quick but glowing report before rushing out of the hospital in a flurry of shame.

The post Not All of His Problems Are a Performance appeared first on Electric Literature.

In the beginning there is Adina and her Earth mother. Adina (in utero), listening to the advancing yeses of her mother’s heart and her mother in the labor room, vitals plunging. Binary stars. Adina, swaying in zero gravity. Térèse, fastened to the operating table. The monitor above the bed reports on their connected hearts: beating heart, heart, beating heart, beating. Térèse’s blood pressure plummets as Adina advances through the birth canal; she has almost reached Earth. At this moment, Voyager 1 spacecraft launches in Florida, containing a phonograph record of sounds intended to explain human life to intelligent extraterrestrials.

It is September 1977 and Americans are obsessed with Star Wars, a civil war movie set in space. Bounding to the stage after hearing her name, a Price Is Right contestant loses her tube top and reveals herself to a shocked Burbank audience. In the labor room of Northeast Philadelphia Regional, no one notices Térèse’s plummeting blood pressure. Something lighter and more conscious detaches and slips beneath the body on the table, underneath the floor and sediment, landing in a corridor of waist-deep water. Behind her, unembodied darkness. Far in front, over an expanse of churning waves, a certain, cherishing light. Térèse wants the light more than she wants health, more than she wants this baby’s father to become a shape that can hold a family. She forces one leg through the water then the other, trying to paddle herself like a vessel.

The contents of Voyager 1’s record were chosen by Carl Sagan, a polarizing astronomer who wears natty turtleneck-blazer combos and has been denied Harvard tenure for being too Hollywood. Carl and his team have assembled over a hundred images depicting what they decided were typical Earth scenes: a woman holding groceries, an insect on a leaf. The sounds include Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode,” the sorrowful cries of humpback whales, and recordings of the brain waves of Carl’s third wife. Footsteps, heartbeats, and laughter. Destination-less, Voyager 1 will travel 1.6 light-years: farther than any human-made object. At a press conference Carl says that launching this bottle into the cosmic ocean is intended to tell “the human story.”

The astronomers hoped to include the Beatles’ “Here Comes the Sun,” but Columbia Records asked for too much money. It’s hard to make human beings believe in things.

Also not included is 1977’s top hit “Barracuda,” though every story hummed that year over the upholstered dividers of United States of America or yelled between cars pinned atop Auto World pistons or delivered through the eldritch mists of Beautyland’s perfume section is told over the twinned guitars of the two-sister band from Chicago. It plays on the radio in the nurses’ station at Northeast Regional. A speck of Panasonic rustle between songs.

The current is too strong; Térèse makes no progress. The light remains distant. She cries out. The fright of a huge suck pulls Adina through to big white. Térèse regains consciousness under unfriendly lamps, baby on her naked chest. The baby is too small. Her skin and eyes appear lightly coated in egg. She is placed under a phototherapy lamp. Lit blue-green by the mothering light, yearning toward its heat, she appears other than human. Plant or marine life, maybe. An orchid or otter. A shrimp.

Adina: noble

Giorno: day

Térèse watches through the nursery window as her new daughter fails to reach the light.

Adina will hear this story several times in her life and in her imagination Térèse will wear a strapless red corset and capelet like Ann Wilson on the cover of Little Queen, only Sicilian, and with roller skates, humid late-season wind blowing through the doors. Her hair will glisten darkly with Moroccan oil, too coarse to relent to the popular feathering style.

In reality, Térèse has been arranged into a wheelchair by the nurses, feeling retracted to Earth by an unkind thread. The collar of her hospital gown falls beneath her collarbone. Her baby unrolls a tiny fist and she thinks of her unchained friends, Adina’s father among them, on their way to the club. She is too tired to realize that pursuing him is following the promise of a dead star. The nurses chat about the Price Is Right contestant. Did it on purpose, one says. The first part of Térèse’s life is over. He will never again beg to hold her perfect nipple in his mouth. She will never again be wild Térèse dancing on the lit floor at Bob and Barbara’s. Her parents will not support her. She is this tiny baby’s mother, mother, mother. The she in Adina’s head.

In Adina’s imagination, her mother will gaze through the nursery window, electric guitar chevroning behind her. In reality, Térèse is perforated by exhaustion, parentless, barely returned from death’s corridor. Even the hospital gown refuses to help; its foolish smile exposes half a perfect breast.

But the womb is Adina’s second lost home. The first has already tumbled three hundred thousand years away. A planet in the approximate vicinity of the bright star Vega, in the northern constellation of Lyra. Intelligent extraterrestrials have sent their own probe in a form and to a location no academic—not even Carl Sagan—could anticipate.

It is an interstellar crisscross applesauce. Two celestially significant events occurring simultaneously: The departure of Voyager 1 and the arrival of Adina Giorno, early and yellowed like old newspaper. If like a newspaper Voyager intends to bring the news, this baby is meant to collect it, though no one knows that yet, including her. Even as the spacecraft breaches the troposphere, the delicate probe stretches her fist toward a heat lamp in the pediatric ward of Northeast Regional, having just been born—or landed—depending on perspective, premature. Wriggling, yearning, recovering in heat, full head of thick black hair, at the moment she is still mostly salt and feeling.

This family, trying, lives across from Auto World in Northeast Philadelphia. Their apartment comprises the bottom floor of a two-unit brick building attached to another brick building, attached to another brick building, and so on, et cetera-ing down the highway. These are starter row homes. This is a starter family. The complex’s lawn, newly mowed, emits a pleasant fecund smell to the cars speeding by and to Adina’s father, where he crouches, glaring at a screwdriver. If he keeps his city job they’ll move to the suburbs where within years he will not rent but own an unattached house. They’ll have a yard that’s only theirs, a grill, a tree, and enough space for each family member to do things alone. There is no solo activity in the row home across from Auto World. Being a father is alien to this man but he’s trying. Today, he will use metal to add wood to wood and produce a swing, the way a man plus a woman and baby makes a family.

Each row home is designed like a cadaver lying flat on a table: at the prow of the apartment is an abbreviated entryway that normally holds Adina’s kicked-off boots and her mother’s neatly arranged work pumps, hallway like a throat leading to the open kitchen, the torso a family room big enough to hold a couch and a half-moon table covered in the open faces of their books, a fart of a bathroom, two small back bedrooms. Wood paneling. Everything possible painted beige. In front of Auto World a flying man twists and gyrates, making Adina and her mother giggle as they pull into their driveway.

Four-year-old Adina wakes from a nap and moves through the apartment, surprised to find the family room empty. Where are they? She believes she is the nucleus of every interaction and while she sleeps her parents pray for her to wake. She is still inactivated. She is still upturned to the sun. She cannot stop thinking about the bunnies she saw on the lawn the previous day under a bush, heads pressed together in a soft shamrock.

There are no cookies in the jar and the fridge is filled with off-limits bottles. Kid math: if her mother is rustling in her bedroom then her father must be in the backyard. There is still as much chance Adina will go to her father as her mother. She pauses. The home itself—every crock on the shelf, every bill—seems to pause.

The swing wins. Adina longs to sit weightless on a piece of oak fastened to rope. The vehicle of upward thrust. There is no reason to have a swing. This makes the swing an anomaly because in addition to its intended purpose every object in the apartment must also function in two or three other ways. Everything repurposed, everything salvaged. Even she, the child, was meant to fulfill several things at once: to be silent, useful, hardworking, a credit to her father.

That morning, her mother pulled a fax machine from a neighbor’s trash and, holding it aloft like a prized marlin, engaged in conversation with herself. “Why would anyone throw this out? Probably because they want the latest model. But it could clearly be a planter!” (Anything about to be trashed was first tried as a planter.) “It even comes with paper!” (She unearthed the roll from the trash, brandishing it in front of herself and Adina.) “I’ll bet it works. Paper! People are crazy.” (People were always crazy.)

Her father said it was ugly and no one he knew had one in their home and it should stay in “the child’s” room.

“Fine,” her mother said in her not-fine voice and carried the fax machine to Adina’s room where it claimed most of her bureau’s top. Except for the paper tray, city-pigeon gray, the machine was the color of the orthopedic shoes the employees wore at her mother’s job. A slim phone posed beside a bank of flat buttons with scripted numbers that glowed when her mother plugged it in. Portals to the business world.

Adina’s mother slid a sheet of paper into the tray. “Who should we fax?”

Adina didn’t know any phone numbers except her own. Her mother dialed: 215-999-1212. The machine whirred to life, trembled pleasantly as it pulled the paper through itself, went silent.

“What happens now?” Adina heard her father in the backyard, readying his tools. The woosh of cars on the street. A clicking sound from a private place inside the machine. A sheet of paper launched from an internal chamber Adina and her mother had not anticipated. An error message: no answer.

Adina’s mother’s eyes were wide. “Incredible.”

It is impossible to be unhappy on a swing. Even at four, Adina knows this. She wants it to be finished so she can be as happy as she needs to be. She wants her father to swing her until she is high enough to reach the porch’s tin ceiling.

“Is it finished, Daddy?”

But some immeasurable slanted expression over breakfast has dug a divot into him. Her mother thinks he’s weak or unable to build a swing. She thinks she’d be better off alone. He is. He is. She would be. Even though the plates are his, the table his, the yard, the everything is provided by him. The nail’s failure to find purchase in the flaccid wood has dug that divot even farther. Now this brown berry kid wants to check his progress? Is he finished. Thank you, how about.

Her father’s neck bulges with veins in an unmatchable shade of red. He pushes Adina out of his space. Maybe he forgets the five concrete steps leading to the shared yard when he pushes her again. The concrete and the trimmed grass offer little to cushion her brief fall. Falls.

In the kitchen her mother lifts a glass of water to her mouth. She drinks eight a day, soundlessly, one after the other. She hears a neighbor call her name and hurries to the backyard where Adina is a quiet lump on the pavement.

How long does Adina stay outside the realm of human voices? Seconds? A century? She wakes to her mother shaking her, screaming go back inside to a constellation of worried neighbors. Earth to Adina. Come in, Adina. Adina reboots. Some things return immediately and some take time. A tin taste sours her mouth. Her mother’s steel grip on her shoulders, helping her stand. Her father’s gaze locked on the abandoned tools on the ground. Adina is activated.

That night, Adina “wakes” in a room designed to appear as a classroom. The English alphabet borders the walls. An aquarium with blinking blue fish and a shelf filled with globes. The scene is stitched from what she has seen from classrooms on television and the visit she made to the grade school she will attend the following year. They are using human objects so she will understand.

Her superiors are an area near the front of the class that shimmers and evokes the sense of the singular plural. Multi- souled, multi-personed Shimmering Area. The closest human word for how they communicate is intuiting. They intuit toward Adina and she receives the message. This is her native tongue. It makes sense that she dreams in it and that using it fills her with ease. She intuits the Shimmering Area is both a location and a doorway.

The lights dim. An ivory screen descends from the top of the chalkboard and fills with projected images. A switchboard operator pulls a line from a connection. Two housewives talk on the phone. A formally dressed man ducks into a telephone booth to make an emergency call. Adina consults the Shimmering Area for whatever is next.

A familiar object flashes onto the screen, the fax machine her mother pulled from the trash. A disembodied hand feeds a sheet of paper with nondescript handwriting into it and presses the large green key. The paper churns through the mechanism. As it emerges on the other side, the machine and paper glow. Joyful sparks beam out.

Adina wakes in her Earth bedroom, nostrils filled with the tang of cleaning supplies. She lazes in and out of sleep, considering a space near the door where morning light has collected into the shape of a ship. Seeing the fax machine on her bureau, she remembers the images from her dream.

She writes on a sheet of paper:

I am an Adina.

After thinking about it, adds:

Yesterday I saw bunnies on the grass.

She feeds her note into the machine and presses the green button. The paper jolts through the tumbler with a robotic scanning sound.

It is so early even the boulevard is silent. Her mother is asleep in her bedroom and Adina is awake in her own, hovering next to an office machine, unsure what to hope for. After a moment, a red light she hadn’t noticed activates. Incoming fax! A sheet of paper squeaks through the tumblers.

DESCRIBE BUNNIES.

The post Humans Are the Most Alien Creatures appeared first on Electric Literature.

When Pan Ruliang was studying, he had a bad habit: the pencil in his hand would not stay still—right there in the margins of his book, it was always sketching a little person. He’d never studied drawing and it didn’t interest him much, but the moment his pencil touched paper, a line would start bending around, all on its own, drawing a face in side-view profile. Always the same face, always facing left. He’d been drawing that profile since he was little, it was so familiar it flowed. He could draw it with his eyes closed, or draw it with his left—in which case there’d be one difference only: the profile drawn with the right hand was rounder and smoother, the one drawn with the left more jaggedy, the points sharper, the hollows deeper—a picture of the same person looking thin, after a serious illness of some sort.

No hair, no eyebrows, no eyes, just a line running from the top of the forehead to the underside of the jaw, a simple line really, but you could tell it wasn’t a Chinese—the nose pushed out a bit too much. Ruliang, like the good young man that he was, loved his country, but the people of his country didn’t impress him overmuch. All of the Westerners that he knew were movie stars, or the sparkling, debonair mo-te-er who graced cigarette or soap advertisements; the Chinese that he knew were his father, his mother, and his brothers and sisters. His father was not a bad man, and he was out all day long working at his business; Ruliang saw him so seldom, it couldn’t amount to actual repugnance. But his father, after dinner, would sit in the living room, drinking on his own, with a side of fried peanuts, and then his face would turn all red and shiny and oily, just like a typical small-shop boss. His father did run a shop that made and sold pickles and fermented sauces, and in that sense had to count as a shop boss; but still . . . seeing as the man was his father, he ought be an exception to that type.

It wasn’t the drinking—Ruliang had no problem with that. Someone who’s been dealt a great blow, be it in love or at work, can stumble into a liquor-lined bar, groping walls as he goes, then climb onto a stool and hoarsely call out: “Whiskey, hold the soda.” Bracing his head in his hands, he can fall into a daze, one lock of hair falling forward, dolefully, into eyes that stare straight ahead, unblinking, totally empty . . . all of that makes good sense and merits sympathy. Drinking too much isn’t good, of course, but when it’s done like that, it has to count as a classy kind of degeneracy.

His father, on the other hand, had this miserable way of pouring rice wine out of the tin can in which he’d warmed it and into a teacup with a broken-off handle, and then, sitting with Ruliang’s mother while she ran the day’s accounts, he’d drink his wine while they chattered, he going on about his things, she about hers, neither of them heeding the other. And if he noticed the kids hankering for something to eat, sometimes he’d dole out a few peanuts each.

His mother, as was usual in such a case, had no education and was a piteous woman who, crushed by the oppression of old social norms, had sacrificed her entire life’s happiness; and she loved her son dearly but had no way of understanding him; the only thing she knew how to do was cook for him, urge him to eat more, then sadly see him off at the door, where her thin, wispy white hair was ruffled by a bleak breeze.

Annoyingly enough, Ruliang’s mother’s hair was not white, at least not yet, and if she did get a white hair or two, she plucked it out. And you never saw her crying when she was frustrated; instead, you saw her turning on the children till they were the ones crying. Then, in her spare time, she’d listen to Shaoxing folk opera or clack away at mahjong.

Ruliang’s two older sisters, like him, were in college. They wore face powder and rouge and were not particularly good looking yet refused to accept the obvious. Ruliang rejected any woman of his sisters’ sort.

But it was his younger brothers and sisters who were the most annoying: all those dirty, useless, clueless, utterly childish children. It was their existence that made his parents and older sisters go on lumping him with them, forgetting that he’d already grown up; that, for him, was the most hurtful, distressing part.

He never opened his mouth at home. He was a sole, solitary observer, looking at them with cold eyes, and his eyes, owing to the immensity of his contempt and indifference, turned light blue: it was the greenish blue of a little stone, or of someone’s shadow, early in the morning, on frosty ground.

But nobody noticed. His disapproval did not cause a moment’s discomfort to anyone. He was not a very consequential person.

Ruliang spent almost no time at home. When his classes were over, he went to a language school to study German, partly because he was studying medicine, for which German would be helpful, but also to avoid having dinner with his family—night school classes ran from seven to eight-thirty. Today, for instance, it wasn’t yet six-thirty, and already he was in the student lounge, sitting close to the charcoal brazier and looking over his homework.

A handful of magazines and newspapers were strewn across a long countertop in the lounge, and on the other side, hidden by a newspaper, sat someone who surely was not a student—reading a newspaper in German had to be beyond the level of even the most advanced students. The red nail polish on the fingers holding the paper was cracked and splotchy. It must be the woman typist who worked in the school director’s office, he decided. The woman put the paper down, turned the page, folded it over, and leaned over the countertop to read it. A thick spill of curly yellow hair hung down; her coat, made of light wool in a narrow plaid, had a green pocket-handkerchief that went nicely with her green blouse.

A shadow fell across the newspaper, cast by her own upper body. Furrowing her eyebrows, she turned sideways to get better light. When she turned her face away, Ruliang felt a shock of surprise: she had the exact same profile he’d been sketching here, there, everywhere, ever since he was little, the only profile he knew how to draw—it was unmistakable, that line running from the top of the forehead to the underside of the jaw. No wonder he’d thought that the Russian woman he’d seen when he was registering for class looked somehow familiar. It had never occurred to him that the face he’d been drawing belonged to a woman—and a beautiful woman no less. The line that ran from the top edge of her upper lip to the base of her nose was a bit too short—a sign, people said, that a person wouldn’t live long. The winsome charm of a woman destined not to live long wasn’t something Ruliang had ever mused over, but he could feel right away how the brevity of that line suffused her face with childlike beauty. Her hair was not exuberantly yellow; sunbeams would be needed, probably, to make it the genuinely golden blonde of Mother Mary. But it was that very vagueness of her hair, at the temples and in the eyebrows, that made her profile stand out so clearly. A marvelous feeling of joy rose up high in his heart: it was as if he’d created, with his own hands, this entire person. She was his; whether or not he liked her couldn’t even be a question for him, because she was part of himself. It was as if he could just walk over and say, “Oh, it’s you! You are mine, didn’t you know?” Then gently pluck her head off and press it into his book.

She seemed to have noticed the dazed way he was looking at her. Ruliang hurriedly dropped his gaze and looked at his book. The upper margins of those pages, everywhere filled, on the left and on the right, with a face drawn in profile: he couldn’t let her see that, or surely she’d think it was her face he’d been drawing! Ruliang grabbed a pencil and started scribbling, urgently, over the faces, but the scritch-scratch he was making only drew her attention. She leaned over, took a good look, and smiled. “That looks right, it really does look like me.”

Ruliang mumbled something indistinct and the pencil in his hand went on storming across the page, scribbling and scribbling till a good half of it was blackened out.

She reached over and pulled the book towards her with a smile. “Let me have a look. I wouldn’t have known how I look from the side if I hadn’t had some photos taken the other day and one was a profile pose. That’s why I could see right away that it’s a sketch of me. It’s a nice sketch, but why aren’t the eyes and mouth drawn in?”

Ruliang couldn’t figure out how to tell her he couldn’t draw eyes and mouth, couldn’t draw anything except this one side-view profile. When she looked at him and saw how embarrassed he was, she thought it was because he wasn’t used to speaking English and couldn’t formulate a response. To keep things going, she changed the question: “It’s really cold today—did you come by bicycle?”

Ruliang nodded. “Yes. It will be even colder tonight, after class ends.”

“That’s right. Doesn’t sound fun at all. Who is your teacher here?”

“Schmidt.”

“Is he a good teacher?”

Ruliang nodded again.

“But,” he said, “the class is too slow and I get bored.”

“Yes, but he doesn’t have much choice. The students are at different levels, and some can’t keep up.”

“That’s the trouble with group classes. It’s not as good as having a private tutor.”

Using one hand to prop up her head, she leafed through his book in a causal manner. “How much have you covered already?” She turned back to the first page and read his name aloud: “Pan Ruliang . . . my name is Cynthia Rubashov.” She picked up a pen to write it for him in a blank space somewhere, but there weren’t any left: each and every page of the book was filled up with faces drawn in profile—her profile. Ruliang, staring, was in a fix: he couldn’t just grab the book from her and yet his whole face had turned bright red and his cheeks were burning. Cynthia was blushing too—like a pink-winged moth resting on a lampshade, the faintest, most fleeting hue of rosiness touched her cheeks; she closed the book quickly, with a pretended show of nonchalance, and found a place on the cover where she could write out her name for him.

“Have you lived in Shanghai your whole life?” Ruliang asked.

“I lived in Harbin when I was little. I used to speak Chinese but now I’ve forgotten it all.”

“That’s a pity!”

“I’d like to start learning again, from the beginning. If you’d be willing to teach me, we could do a language exchange and I’ll teach you German.”

“I’d love that!”

The bell rang right then for the start of class. Ruliang stood up and reached for his book; Cynthia pushed down on it and slid it towards him. “How’s this?” she said with a smile. “If you’re free tomorrow at noon, we can try having class together. You can find me at Yih Tung Trading Company in Ssu-shêng Tower, on the ninth floor. That’s where I work during the day. No one’s there at lunchtime.”

Ruliang nodded and repeated, “Ssu-shêng Tower, Yih Tong Trading Company. I’ll be there.”

Then they parted. Ruliang couldn’t sleep that night, not till very late. This Cynthia . . . she had misunderstood, she thought he’d quietly fallen in love with her and was secretly drawing her face in his book, her face only, over and over again. She thought he’d fallen in love with her and yet she was, in a very obvious way, giving him a chance like this. Why was that? Could it be that she . . . .

She was a capable girl, worked in a trading company by day, then part time at a night school—but still she was, at most, his older sisters’ age? And yet she was utterly unlike them. A well-behaved girl, as everyone knows, should stay away from a person whom she is sure likes her, unless she plans to marry him. That’s how things are in China, and in other countries too. But . . . doesn’t everyone like spending time with someone who likes them? How could she be expected to spend time only with those who did not like her? And maybe, for Cynthia, there wasn’t anything more to it than that. He’d better not misunderstand; that’s what she’d already done. Best to avoid heaping even more misunderstanding onto this situation.

But was it really a misunderstanding?

Maybe he did love her but hadn’t even glimpsed that possibility. She’d seen it before he had—women, they say, are more intuitive. The whole thing was rather strange—he’d never been one to believe in foreordained encounters but really, this whole thing was quite strange . . . .

The next day, Ruliang put on his best Western suit then felt a bit of a fool, getting so smartly dressed to go see her; at the last moment, purposely sloppy and nonchalant, he threw on an old faded scarf.

As he headed to school in the early morning, all the little trees’ wintertime leaves seemed to have crystal-gelled into golden beads. He pedaled facing the sun, with his book bag swinging from the handlebar; strapped to the rear rack was a bare bone, T-shaped and chemically preserved. It had, at some point in the past, been the leg of a person—a leg that had once pedaled a bicycle, perhaps. Ruliang, facing the sun, pedaled on, and all around his warm body, the wintry wind blew. The sun that shines on the living doesn’t reach the bodies of the dead.

He grabbed hold of a tramcar that was speeding past and spun alongside it, almost flying. He could see, through the window of the tram, two women inside sitting face-to-face, chattering on about something, heads nodding after each sentence or so, their black eyelashes glazed white by the sunlight. Face-to-face they sat, wrapped up in some fascinating story they shared, and their lashes in the sunlight were blinking and white. The sun that shines on the living doesn’t reach the bodies of the dead.

Ruliang had a belly full of bubbling-hot breakfast and a heart full of happiness. He’d often felt it before—this happiness that had no particular reason—but today he thought: it must be because of Cynthia.

From somewhere off in an empty field came the sound of a dog’s loud, repeated barking. From a school, the ringing of bells. The bell sounds were golden, floating aloft in a linked chain, a small, fine line drifting along in the clear sky. In just one lock of Cynthia’s yellow hair, up there, each curling tendril was a little bell. Cynthia, adorable Cynthia.

He skipped the last of his morning classes and raced home to change his scarf instead, the bright white, brand new one now deemed, through dint of much deliberation, the better fit.

On his way he passed, in the middle of some open, unmanaged land, a newly built Western-style house, quite fancy; much to his surprise, this radio too was playing Shaoxing folk opera. Flowing through the curtains of coral-pink lace, a broad, bland voice belted out “Eighteen Pull-Drawers.” The last gasp of a dying culture! Here in these gloriously elegant surroundings the woman of the house was exactly like his own mother. Ruliang did not want a woman who was like his mother. Cynthia, at the very least, was from a world entirely unlike that one. Ruliang put her in the same category as everything clean and lovely, like college scholarships, like football matches, like German-made bicycles, like the New Literature.

Although Ruliang’s studies were in the medical division, he was a lover of literature. He felt sure that if he weren’t so busy, and he drank more coffee, he could write poignant, powerful things. His total faith in coffee was inspired not by its aroma, but by that complexly constructed, scientific silver pot with a crystalline glass lid. In much the same way, it was the constantly bright, brand-new gleam of doctors’ medical devices, when taken out, one by one, from their leather cases—all that ice-cold metal in intricate little shapes that could do anything–that inspired at least half of his devotion to medical science. Most awe-inspiring of all was the electrotherapy machine—its exquisite, toothed gears spun tirelessly, making a spark-lit jazz tune that was crisp, clear, uplifting. Modern science was the only indisputably good thing in an otherwise defective world. Once a person had become a doctor and put on that clean white coat, a father who ate fried peanuts with his rice wine, a mother who liked Shaoxing folk opera, and snobby older sisters in tacky face powder—none of them could have a hold on him.

Ruliang’s sights were set on that future. And now a Cynthia was added to that future. Reaching his dream would require, he knew full well, a great deal of hard work over a long period of time. A medical degree took seven years and he still had far to go: getting into a relationship with a Russian girl while still in the midst of his studies—it didn’t make any kind of good sense, no matter how you looked at it.

He cycled past yet another fancy house where Shaoxing opera was spinning out from the radio, that wide, flat, quavering voice in which nothing could be bright as day or dark as night; it was like a room in broad daylight, with a lamp turned on—confounding, buzzy, not natural.

The Shaoxing opera damsel was singing “The more I pore over it, the more upset I fee-eel!” The beats were steady, entirely predictable. It suddenly struck Ruliang that the world of Shaoxing opera audiences is a steady, predictable world—and he himself was not steady at all.

His mind was a-whirl. When he got to Ssu-shêng Tower on the Bund, he was still fidgety, worried now about a different thing. If he arrived too early and any of her officemates were still there, wouldn’t that be embarrassing? But if all of them had left already, that would be embarrassing too. He loitered about for quite awhile, then finally took the elevator up. When he pushed the door open, there was Cynthia sitting alone at a desk by the window. He was caught off guard—she seemed different from the person he remembered, though it couldn’t count as a memory per se, since it’d only been one day since they’d met. Still, over this short while, he’d been thinking about her intensely and at great length, an over-thinking through which he’d lost touch with reality.

The person he saw now was an ordinary, somewhat pretty young woman whose hair was indeed yellow, but with layers of light and dark yellow and, at the roots, an oily chestnut color. Apparently she’d just finished a quick lunch; when she saw him coming, she crumpled the wrapping into a wad and tossed it in the waste basket. While talking to him, she kept dabbing at the corner of her mouth with a handkerchief, unsure about any breadcrumbs that might’ve gotten stuck in her lipstick. She dabbed carefully to avoid smearing lipstick over the edges of her lips. Her feet, hidden under the desk, were clad only in flesh-colored stockings; for the sake of comfort, she’d kicked off her high-heeled shoes. From where Ruliang sat, on the opposite side of the desk, his own feet kept hitting either her feet or the empty shoes; it was as if she’d grown an extra pair of feet.

He got annoyed, then quickly blamed himself for that: why this resentment towards her?  Because she took her shoes off in front of people? Working all day at the typewriter, her feet must get numb from all that sitting, one could hardly blame her for relaxing a bit. She was an actual human being, a person made of flesh and blood, not some phantasmic dream he’d invented: there was a heartbeat in the rose-purple sweater she was wearing—he could see that heartbeat, and feel his own heart beating too.

He decided that from now on he wouldn’t talk to her in English. His pronunciation wasn’t good enough! He didn’t want to give her a bad impression. Once he’d become fluent in German and she in Chinese, they’d be able to talk freely. Right now, all he had at his disposal were phrases from the textbook: “Are horses more expensive than cows? Sheep are more useful than dogs. New things look better than old things. Mice are very small. Flies are even smaller. Birds and flies can fly. Birds are faster than people. Light is faster than anything. There is nothing faster than light. The sun is hotter than anything. There is nothing hotter than the sun. December is the coldest month.” All these solid, unshakeable maxims so sadly lacking in subtlety, wholly inadequate for conveying his meaning.

Will it be sunny tomorrow?
Perhaps it will be sunny.
Will it be rainy this evening?
Perhaps it will be rainy.

They all sounded old, these conversation textbook writers, each and every one of them solemnly droning along.

Do you smoke cigarettes?
Not a lot.
Do you drink alcohol?
Not every day.
Don’t you like to play cards?
No. I hate gambling.
Do you like to go hunting?
Yes, I love getting exercise.
Read. Read a textbook. Don’t read fiction.
See. See a newspaper. Don’t see a play.
Listen. Listen to instructions. Don’t listen to rumors.

All day long, and for all he was worth, Ruliang turned these phrases around, back and forth, this way and that, and the lamentable thing was that they couldn’t be made to imply even the barest hint of tenderness. Cynthia, however, was not constrained, the way he was, by textbook talk. Even though her Chinese wasn’t very good, she’d get the general gist and, with no fear of embarrassment, just let her mouth do the talking. If she ran out of things to talk about, she’d tell him about her family. Her mother was a widow who’d remarried, and Rubashov was her stepfather’s name. She had a younger sister named Lydia. Her stepfather worked in a trading company too; his salary wasn’t enough to support the family, so things were hard for them. Cynthia’s vocabulary was limited, her grammar clumsy and bold; this regularly made the things she said a harsh, utterly unvarnished reality.

One day, she started talking about her sister: “Lydia is very worry.”

“Why?” Ruliang asked.

“Because get marry.”

Ruliang was shocked. “Lydia is married already?”

“No, because no boyfriend. In Shanghai, not many good Russian man. British, American, also not have many. And all gone now. German can only get marry with German.”

Ruliang fell silent. After awhile, he finally said, “But Lydia is still young. She doesn’t need to worry.”

Cynthia, with a very slight shrug of her shoulders, said, “Is right. She still young.”

Ruliang was getting some understanding of Cynthia now. It was something he’d rather not be doing, really, because once he did understand her, he wouldn’t be able to go on dreaming.

Sometimes, when they still had time left after class, he’d invite her out for lunch. Dining together in a restaurant was not a big deal, the most anxious moment coming when it was time to pay the bill, because he wasn’t sure how much tip he should leave. Sometimes he bought a box of snacks and brought it to class: she’d spread her book flat and use it as a plate, and after the candy bits and walnut pieces had gotten scattered across the whole desk, she’d close her book with the crumbs still in it, not minding in the least. He didn’t like those sloppy manners of hers, but he forced himself to turn a blind eye to all that. He picked out only what was most poetic about her to notice, and to savor mentally. He knew that what he was in love with wasn’t Cynthia. He was in love with being in love.

He looked up “love” and “marry” in the German dictionary, and secretly taught himself to say, “Cynthia, I love you. Will you marry me?” He never said it aloud to her, but those two sentences were always on the tip of his tongue. If, for a single moment, his attention wavered, he wouldn’t be able to keep those fatal words from slipping out—fatal because, as was perfectly clear to him, it was his own fate at stake. A hasty, rushed marriage could easily ruin his whole life. But…just thinking about it was very exciting. If she heard those words, then no matter how she answered, she too would feel how exciting it was. If she accepted, he’d be provoking, for sure, an enormous uproar in his family; it’d be world-shaking even though he’d never counted for anything before.

Spring came. Even the textbook said: “Spring is the prettiest season in the year.”

One evening, as dusk fell, rain came drizzling down so he didn’t ride his bicycle home from school; he took a tram instead. While on the tram he once again leafed through that German language textbook he carried with him everywhere. It said:

I get up every day at five o’clock.
Then I get dressed and wash my face.
After I wash my face, I take a walk.
After I walk, I eat breakfast.
Then I read the newspaper.
Then I work.
At four o’clock in the afternoon, I stop work and go to exercise.
Every day, at around six o’clock, I take a shower. Then, at seven o’clock, I eat dinner.
In the evening, I visit friends.
At ten o’clock at the latest, I go to bed. I get a good rest so I can work hard the next day.

An entirely standard kind of day. Getting dressed and washing one’s face—that was for the sake of good form at a personal level. Reading the newspaper, absorbing governmental directives and crusades—that was for the sake of fulfilling one’s responsibility to the country. Work—that was for the sake of fulfilling one’s responsibility to family. Visiting friends—that was an “extracurricular activity,” worth a few points as well. Eating, taking walks, exercising, sleeping—all for the sake of maintaining efficiency in one’s work. Showering—that looked to be extraneous. Maybe, for those who had wives, showering was for the wife’s sake?

This schedule could appear to be theoretical, but the truth was that the vast majority of those who’d formed a family and built a career, even though they couldn’t match that pattern exactly, didn’t fall too far out of step with it. And this, Ruliang knew full well, was the root of his criticism of his father: it was because his old dad didn’t care much about good form and good taste. A son had the right to find fault, when his father was like that and, from higher up, so did the man’s wife; and, above that, society.

The textbooks put it this way: “Why are you so slow? Why are you rushing around? You were told to go, why didn’t you go? You were told to come, why didn’t you come right away? Why are you hitting people? Why are you scolding people? Why won’t you listen to me? Why won’t you do things the way we do them? What’s the reason why you do not follow rules? What’s the reason why you do not behave properly?”

After that, the textbooks gave submissive pleas: “I’d like to go out for two hours, would that be okay? I’d like to go home early today, would that be okay?”

And then the sorrowful, self-admonishing lines: “No matter what, don’t let yourself get reckless. No matter what, don’t expect to get everything you want.”

Ruliang put his hand down on the book and, the moment he looked up at the fine rain outside the tram window, saw a movie billboard advertisement that proclaimed in huge lettering: “The Soul of Freedom.”

He fell into a long trance. The tram ran along, shaking and rattling, all the way from Mohawk Road to Avenue Road. There were two willow trees on Avenue Road, their remaining leaves now golden beads, crystal-gelled. Dampness stretched along one great swathe of gray wall. The rain had stopped. The evening sky streamed up and away, into the expanse. Young people’s skies are boundless, young people’s hearts fly away to far-off places. But in the end, human beings are timid. The world is so big, they need to find something in which to get tangled up.

It’s only the young who are free. As people get older they slip, inch by inch, into the swamp of habitual life. Refusing to marry, refusing to have kids, avoiding a fixed way of life: that won’t work either. People who live all alone have their own kind of swamp.

It’s only the young who are free. Once they start learning about the world and the rarity of their freedom first dawns on them, they can’t keep it in their grasp. It’s the very preciousness of freedom that makes it seem to burn in one’s hands—a person who has freedom goes around knocking his head on the ground, submissively, to others, begging them to take it from him.

It was the first time Ruliang had seen this far into things. He swore off, immediately, the idea he’d had of asking Cynthia to marry him. He wanted to go on being young for a few years yet.

He couldn’t go on studying German with her, it was too dangerous. He prepared a little speech to explain things to her. That day at noon, he went to her office as usual. When he opened the door, she was at that moment on her way out, hat on head, purse in arm, nearly running straight into his chest. She gasped and put a hand to her mouth. “What a memory I have! I meant to phone you and say not to come today, but I’m so mixed-up I forgot! I have to do some shopping during my lunch break so we’ll have to skip class today.”

Ruliang went out to the street with her. In a nearby dress shop, she looked at nightwear, morning gowns, and slippers, and asked about the prices. There was a three-tiered wedding cake in the display window of a coffee shop, with a price tag of 1500 yuan. She stopped and looked, bit her fingernails awhile, then kept going. After they’d covered a little more distance, she said to him, with a smile, “I’m getting married, you know.”

Ruliang could only stare at her, unable to speak.

“You should say ‘Congratulations to you,’” Cynthia smiled.

Ruliang could only stare at her—was it relief that he felt? or just shock?

“Glückwunsch zur Hochzeit,” Cynthia smiled. “It’s right there in the textbook, have you forgotten?”

“Glückwunsch zur Hochzeit,” Ruliang said, smiling weakly.

“I’m quitting my job at the trading company and at the night school. We’ll have to put our studies aside for now, and later on—”

“Oh, of course,” he said quickly. “We can see about that later on.”

“Anyway, you have my phone number.”

“That’s for your mother’s place. Where will you two live after you’re married?”

“He’ll move into my family’s place.” Cynthia spoke very quickly. “Just for now. It’s hard to find housing these days.”

Ruliang nodded in agreement. They were walking past a shop whose display window had been painted over in green, almost to the top. Cynthia was looking straight ahead, and that profile that he knew so well was cast into sharp relief by that theatrical backdrop of green; it seemed that her face was a little red, but it wasn’t the glow of happiness.

“Tell me, won’t you,” Ruliang said, “what kind of person he is.”

Cynthia’s large, pale eyes could not conceal a small edge of worry. Her reply came with something self-defensive, alert: “He works at a police station in the Ministry of Industry. We’ve been together since we were little.”

“Is he Russian?”

Cynthia nodded.

“He must be good-looking,” Ruliang said with a smile.

“Very,” Cynthia said with a small smile. “You’ll see him at the wedding. You have to come.”

It did seem like the most natural thing in the world—a young, good-looking Russian, a junior-rank policeman, someone she’d known since childhood. But Ruliang knew for a certainty that if something better had come along, she would not be marrying this man. Ruliang was himself sufficiently the fool, what with this falling in love just for the sake of falling in love. Could it be that the woman he’d loved was making a more irreparable mistake—getting married just for the sake of getting married?

A long while passed without an invitation arriving, and he thought she must have forgotten to send him one. But then it did come—for a date in late June. Why had they delayed all this while? Was it finances, or was she struggling with her decision?

He decided he’d go to her wedding feast and drink himself into stumbling stupor. It never occurred to him he’d have no chance to drink at all.

The pointed top of the Russian church dome, seen through the blurry mist of drizzling rain, was like a pale green garlic bulb in a glass jar, steeped in white vinegar. There weren’t many people in the church, but still it was full of rainy-day shoe-leather stink. The priest had thrown on a vestment made of satin that was heavy and gold-brocaded, like a tablecloth; his hair flowed down over his shoulders, long and profuse, intertwining with his gold-yellow beard, and the sweat poured out, making the damp hair stick, in layer after layer, to his face and scalp. He was a big, tall, handsome Russian man, but his face was red and bloated from drinking too much. He was a lover of drink, spoiled by women in bed—and at this moment so close to dozing that his eyes were barely open.

The choirmaster who stood next to the priest had the same look and attire although he was a smaller, shorter man. He had a big voice, though, and led the choral response with such force that his forehead was clenched and the sweat streamed down from a head stripped bald by heat.

An altar boy slipped out silently from behind the altar, bearing a platter. He was a dark, pockmarked Chinese, wearing a black cassock over white hemp-cloth pants, scuffing along in shoes worn without socks. He too had long hair, oily dark and draping down, half-curtaining his cheeks, like a ghost—not the kind of ghost in Tales of the Supernatural from Liaozhai Studio, but the kind in a pauper’s barely interred corpse, with pale grubs wriggling in and out.

After he’d brought the two wine goblets, the boy next brought out two wedding crowns. The crowns were borne aloft, as custom required, several inches above the heads of the bride and groom, by two tall men who’d been chosen from family and friends. There in the shadowy dimness of the odorous church sanctuary, the priest kept on reciting the litany, the choir kept on singing. The groom looked uneasy. He was an impetuous, yellow-haired young man, and while he did have a classically shaped straight nose, he didn’t look like someone with much promise. He’d thrown on an old white suit, faded and fairly ordinary, but the bride was in a magnificent white satin formal. One of the two old women sitting next to Ruliang said the bride’s dress was rented, the other was sure it was borrowed; huddled together, they argued it out for what seemed like hours.

Ruliang had to admire Cynthia—and by extension, had to admire women everywhere. Cynthia was the only beautiful person in that entire wedding ceremony. She seemed determined to make for herself something beautiful to remember. Holding in both hands a white candle, she bowed her head piously, the upper part of her face in shadow cast by the veil, the lower part in light cast by the candle: in the flickering of that shadow and light, a pale smile could be seen, just barely. She had made for herself the air that a bride should have, all that mystery and solemnity, even though the priest was sloppy and listless, even though the altar boy was unbelievably dirty, even though the groom was on edge, and even though the dress was rented or borrowed. This was her day, and she had to make something memorable out of it, something to reminisce about when she’d grown old. Ruliang’s heart ached and his eyes misted over.

When the ceremony was over, everyone rushed forward and, one after another, exchanged kisses with the groom and the bride; then they were gone. A tea was to be held at the home, for a small group of relatives only. Ruliang hung back, far in the back, lost in a trance. He could not kiss her, couldn’t just shake hands either—he was afraid he’d start crying. He slipped out on his own, quietly.

Two months later, Cynthia phoned him to ask if he’d help her find a little work teaching English, German, or Russian, or maybe typing, because she was getting bored from staying at home. He knew she needed money.

A little while later, he had a classmate who wanted a tutor in English so he called back to tell her, but she’d fallen ill, and it was serious.

He hesitated a day and a night, then decided to risk the forwardness of a visit to her place, just this once—knowing full well that a stranger wouldn’t be allowed into her bedroom, but feeling he had to make this attempt, had to do something. As it happened, the only other person home that day was her sister Lydia, a free-wheeling, romantic girl, pressed from the same mold, it seemed, but the dough this time was a little too yeasty; she was bulgy and billowy, not trim and tidy like her older sister. Lydia led him right into Cynthia’s room.

“Typhoid fever,” she said. “The doctor said, yesterday, she’s made it through the critical phase. It was a close call.”

At the head of her bed, on a little chest of drawers, was a photo of her with her husband. They were facing the camera, so the picture didn’t show his straight, classically shaped nose. The room smelled like Russian people. From where she lay on the pillow, Cynthia looked over at him, eyes dim and lethargic, barely open. A filmy indifference coated her gaze as she looked out at the world, turning her light blue eyes colorless. She closed her eyes and turned her head away. Her jaw and neck were extremely thin, like a jujube after it’s been sucked clean, with only a skim of fruit flesh still on the pit. But the line of that profile was still there, it had scarcely changed at all, the same line that he’d drawn till it flowed, all in one stroke, from the top of the brow to under the jaw.

After that, Ruliang no longer made sketches of little people in the margins of his books. His books now were always perfectly clean.

The post Perfection Sketches Easily for the Young appeared first on Electric Literature.

I was a child of the 1960s. Three network stations or fresh air; take your pick. No pocket computers for entertainment in dark-age suburbia. We read our comic books ragged and played catch with Dad in the backyard. He created shadow puppets on the wall to amuse us before bed. Elephants, giraffes, and foxes. The classics. He also made some animals I didn’t recognize. His hands twisted to form these mysterious entities, which he called Mimis. Dad frequently traveled abroad. Said he’d learned of the Mimis at a conference in Australia. His double-jointed performances wowed me and my older brother, Greg. Mom hadn’t seemed as impressed.

Then I discovered photography.

Mom and Dad gave me a camera. Partly because they were supportive of their children’s aspirations; partly because I bugged them relentlessly. At six years old, I already understood my life’s purpose.

Landscapes bore me, although I enjoy celestial photography—high-resolution photos of planets, hanging in partial silhouette; blazing white fingertips emerging from a black pool. People aren’t interesting either, unless I catch them in candid moments to reveal a glimmer of their hidden selves. Wild animals became my favorite subjects. Of all the variety of animals, I love predators. Dad approved. He said, Men revile predators because they shed blood. What an unfair prejudice. Suppose garden vegetables possessed feelings. Suppose a carrot squealed when bitten in two . . . Well, a groundhog would go right on chomping, wouldn’t he?

If anybody knew the answer to such a question, it’d be my old man. His oddball personality might be why Mom took a shine to him. Or she appreciated his potential as a captain of industry. What I do know is, he was the kind of guy nobody ever saw coming.

My name is Randall Xerxes Vance. Friends tease me about my signature—RX and a swooping, offset V. Dad used to say, Ha-ha, son. You’re a prescription for trouble! As a pro wilderness photographer, I’m accustomed to lying or sitting motionless for hours at a stretch. Despite this, I’m a tad jumpy. You could say my fight or flight reflex is highly tuned. While on assignment for a popular magazine, a technician—infamous for his pranks—snuck up, tapped my shoulder, and yelled, Boo! I swung instinctively. Wild, flailing. Good enough to knock him on his ass into a ditch.

Colleagues were nonplussed at my overreaction. Me too. That incident proved the beginning of a rough, emotional ride: insomnia; nightmares when I could sleep; and panic attacks. It felt like a crack had opened in my psyche. Generalized anxiety gradually worked its claws under my armor and skinned me to raw nerves. I committed to a leave of absence, pledging to conduct an inventory of possible antecedents. Soul searching pairs seductively with large quantities of liquor.

A soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend offered to help. She opined that I suffered from deep-rooted childhood trauma. I insisted that my childhood was actually fine. My parents had provided for me and my brother, supported our endeavors, and paid for our education; the whole deal.

There’s always something if you dig, she said. Subsequent to a bunch more poking and prodding, one possible link between my youth and current troubles came to mind. I told her about a game called Tiptoe Dad taught me. A variation of ambush tag wherein you crept behind your victim and tapped him or her on the shoulder or goosed them, or whatever. Pretty much the same as my work colleague had done. Belying its simple premise, there were rules, which Dad adhered to with solemnity. The victim must be awake and unimpaired. The sneaker was required to assume a certain posture—poised on the balls of his or her feet, arms raised and fingers pressed into a blade or spread in an exaggerated manner. The other details and prescriptions are hazy.

As far as odd family traditions go, this seemed fairly innocuous. Dad’s attitude was what made it weird.

Tiptoe went back as far as I could recall, but my formal introduction occurred at age six. Greg and I were watching a nature documentary. Dad wandered in late, still dressed from a shift at the office and wearing that coldly affable expression he put on along with his hat and coat. The documentary shifted to the hunting habits of predatory insects. Dad sat between us on the couch. He stared intently at the images of mantises, voracious Venezuelan centipedes, and wasps. During the segment on trapdoor spiders, he smiled and pinched my shoulder. Dad was fast for an awkward, middle-aged dude. I didn’t even see his arm move. People say sneaky as a snake, sly as a fox, but spiders are the best hunters. Patient and swift. I didn’t give it a second thought.

One day, soon after, he stepped out of a doorway, grabbed me, and started tickling. Then he snatched me into the air and turned my small body in his very large hands. He pretended to bite my neck, arms, and belly. Which part shall I devour first? Eeny, meeny, miny moe! I screamed hysterical laughter. He explained that tickling and the reaction to tickling were rooted in primitive fight or flight responses to mortal danger.

Tiptoe became our frequent contest, and one he’d already inflicted on Greg and Mom. The results seldom amounted to more than the requisite tap, except for the time when Dad popped up from a leaf pile and pinched me so hard it left a welt. You bet I tried to return the favor—on countless occasions, in fact—and failed. I even wore camo paint and dressed in black down to my socks, creeping closer, ever closer, only for him to whip his head around at the last second and look me in the eye with a tinge of disappointment. Heard you coming from the other end of the house, son. Are you thinking like a man or a spider? Like a fox or a mantis? Keep trying.

Another time, I walked into a room and caught him playing the game with Mom as victim. Dad gave me a sidelong wink as he reached out, tiptoeing closer and closer. Their silhouettes flickered on the wall. The shadows of his arms kept elongating; his shadow fingers ended in shadow claws. The optical illusion made me dizzy and sick to my stomach. He kissed her neck. She startled and mildly cussed him. Then they laughed, and once more he was a ham-fisted doofus, innocently pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose.

As with many aspects of childhood, Tiptoe fell to the wayside for reasons that escaped me until the job incident brought it crashing home again. Unburdening to my lady friend didn’t help either of us as much as we hoped. She acknowledged that the whole backstory was definitely fucked up and soon found other places to be. Probably had a lot to do with my drinking, increasingly moody behavior, and the fact that I nearly flew out of my skin whenever she walked into the room.

The worst part? This apparent mental breakdown coincided with my mother’s health tribulations. A double whammy. After her stroke, Mom’s physical health gradually went downhill. She’d sold the house and moved into a comfy suite at the retirement village where Grandma resided years before.

The role of a calm, dutiful son made for an awkward fit, yet there wasn’t much choice, considering I was the last close family who remained in touch. Steeling my resolve, I shaved, slapped on cologne to disguise any lingering reek of booze, and drove down from Albany twice a week to hit a diner in Port Ewing. Same one we’d visited since the 1960s. For her, a cheeseburger and a cup of tea. I’d order a sandwich and black coffee and watch her pick at the burger. Our conversations were sparse affairs—long silences peppered with acerbic repartee.

She let me read to her at bedtime. Usually, a few snippets from Poe or his literary cousins. I’ve gotten morbid, she’d say. Give me some of that Amontillado, hey? Or, A bit of M.R. James, if you please. Her defining characteristics were intellectual curiosity and a prickly demeanor. She didn’t suffer fools—not in her prime, nor in her twilight. Ever shrewd and guarded, ever close-mouthed regarding her interior universe. Her disposition discouraged “remember-whens” and utterly repelled more probing inquiries into secrets.

Nonetheless, one evening I stopped in the middle of James’ The Ash Tree and shut the book. “Did Aunt Vikki really have the gift?”

Next to Mom and Dad, Aunt Vikki represented a major authority figure of my childhood. She might not have gone to college like my parents, but she wasn’t without her particular abilities. She performed what skeptics (my mother) dismissed as parlor tricks. Stage magician staples like naming cards in someone’s hand, or locating lost keys or wallets. Under rare circumstances, she performed hypnotic regression and “communed” with friendly spirits. Her specialty? Astral projection allowed her to occasionally divine the general circumstances of missing persons. Whether they were alive or dead and their immediate surroundings, albeit not their precise location. Notwithstanding Dad’s benign agnosticism and Mom’s blatant contempt, I assumed there was something to it—the police had allegedly enlisted Vikki’s services on two or three occasions. Nobody ever explained where she acquired her abilities. Mom and Dad brushed aside such questions and I dared not ask Aunt Vikki directly given her impatience with children.

“I haven’t thought of that in ages.” Mom lay in the narrow bed, covers pulled to her neck. A reading lamp reflected against the pillow and illuminated the shadow of her skull. “Bolt from the blue, isn’t it?”

“I got to thinking of her the other day. Her magic act. The last time we visited Lake Terror . . . .”

“You’re asking whether she was a fraud.”

“Nothing so harsh,” I said. “The opposite, in fact. Her affinity for predictions seemed uncanny.”

“Of course it seemed uncanny. You were a kid.”

“Greg thought so.”

“Let’s not bring your brother into this.”

“Okay.”

She eyed me with a glimmer of suspicion, faintly aware that my true interest lay elsewhere; that I was feinting. “To be fair, Vikki sincerely believed in her connection to another world. None of us took it seriously. God, we humored the hell out of that woman.”

“She disliked Dad.”

“Hated John utterly.” Her flat, unhesitating answer surprised me.

“Was it jealousy? Loneliness can have an effect . . . .”

“Jealousy? C’mon. She lost interest in men after Theo kicked.” Theo had been Aunt Vikki’s husband; he’d died on the job for Con Edison.

I decided not to mention the fact that she’d twice remarried since. Mom would just wave them aside as marriages of convenience. “And Dad’s feelings toward her?”

“Doubtful he gave her a second thought whenever she wasn’t right in front of his nose. An odd duck, your father. Warm and fuzzy outside, cold tapioca on the inside.”

“Damn, Mom.”

“Some girls like tapioca. What’s with the twenty questions? You have something to say, spill it.”

Should I confess my recent nightmares? Terrible visions of long-buried childhood experiences? Or that Dad, an odd duck indeed, starred in these recollections and his innocuous, albeit unnerving, Tiptoe game assumed a sinister prominence that led to my current emotional turmoil? I wished to share with Mom; we’d finally gotten closer as the rest of our family fell by the wayside. Still, I faltered, true motives unspoken. She’d likely scoff at my foolishness in that acerbic manner of hers and ruin our fragile bond.

She craned her neck. “You haven’t seen him around?”

“Who?” Caught off guard again, I stupidly concluded, despite evidence to the contrary, that her thoughts were fogged with rapid onset dementia. Even more stupidly, I blurted, “Mom, uh, you know Dad’s dead. Right?”

“Yeah, dummy,” she said. “I meant Greg.”

“The guy you don’t want to talk about?” Neither of us had seen my brother in a while. Absence doesn’t always make the heart grow fonder.

“Smart-ass.” But she smiled faintly.

In the wee hours, alone in my studio apartment, I woke from a lucid nightmare. Blurry, forgotten childhood images coalesced with horrible clarity. Aunt Vikki suffering what we politely termed an episode; the still image of a missing woman on the six o’clock news; my father, polishing his glasses and smiling cryptically. Behind him, a sun-dappled lake, a stand of thick trees, and a lost trail that wound into the Catskills . . . or Purgatory. There were other, more disturbing recollections that clamored for attention, whirling in a black mass on the periphery. Gray, gangling hands; a gray, cadaverous face . . . .

I poured a glass of whiskey and dug into a shoebox of loose photos; mainly snapshots documenting our happiest moments as a family. I searched those smiling faces for signs of trauma, a hint of anguish to corroborate my tainted memories. Trouble is, old, weathered pictures are ambiguous. You can’t always tell what’s hiding behind the patina. Nothing, or the worst thing imaginable.

Whatever the truth might be, this is what I recall about our last summer vacation to the deep Catskills:

During the late 1960s, Dad worked at an IBM plant in Kingston, New York. Mom wrote colorful, acerbic essays documenting life in the Mid-Hudson Valley; sold them to regional papers, mainly, and sometimes slick publications such as The New Yorker and the Saturday Evening Post. We had it made. House in the suburbs, two cars, and an enormous color TV. I cruised the neighborhood on a Schwinn ten-speed with the camera slung around my neck. My older brother, Greg, ran cross-country for our school. Dad let him borrow the second car, a Buick, to squire his girlfriend into town on date night.

The Vance clan’s holy trinity: Christmas; IBM Family Day; and the annual summer getaway at a cabin on Lake Terron. For us kids, the IBM Family Day carnival was an afternoon of games, Ferris wheel rides, running and screaming at the top of our lungs, and loads of deep-fried goodies. The next morning, Dad would load us into his Plymouth Suburban and undertake the long drive through the mountains. Our lakeside getaway tradition kicked off when I was a tyke—in that golden era, city folks retreated to the Catskills to escape the heat. Many camped at resorts along the so-called Borscht Belt. Dad and his office buddies, Fred Mercer and Leo Schrader, decided to skip the whole resort scene. Instead, they went in together on the aforementioned piece of lakefront property and built a trio of vacation cabins. The investment cost the men a pretty penny. However, nearby Harpy Peak was a popular winter destination. Ski bums were eager to rent the cabins during the holidays and that helped Dad and his friends recoup their expenses.

But let’s stick to summer. Dreadful hot, humid summer that sent us to Lake Terron and its relative coolness. Me, Greg, Mom, Dad, Aunt Vikki, and Odin, our dog; supplies in back, a canoe strapped up top. Exhausted from Family Day, Greg and I usually slept for most of the trip. Probably a feature of Dad’s vacation-management strategy. Then he merely had to contend with Mom’s chain-smoking and Aunt Vikki bitching about it. Unlike Mom and Dad, she didn’t do much of anything. After her husband was electrocuted while repairing a downed power line, she collected a tidy insurance settlement and moved from the city into our Esopus home. Supposedly a temporary arrangement on account of her nervous condition. Her nerves never did improve—nor did anyone else’s, for that matter.

We made our final pilgrimage the year before Armstrong left bootprints on the Moon. Greg and I were seventeen and twelve, respectively. Our good boy Odin sat between us. He’d outgrown his puppy ways and somehow gotten long in the tooth. Dad turned onto the lonely dirt track that wound a mile through heavy forest and arrived at the lake near sunset. The Mercers and Schraders were already in residence: a whole mob of obstreperous children and gamely suffering adults collected on a sward that fronted the cabins. Adults had gotten a head start on boilermakers and martinis. Grill smoke wafted toward the beach. Smooth and cool as a mirror, the lake reflected the reddening sky like a portal to a parallel universe.

Lake Terron—or Lake Terror, as we affectionally called it—gleamed at the edge of bona fide wilderness. Why Lake Terror? Some joker had altered the N on the road sign into an R with spray-paint and it just stuck. Nights were pitch black five paces beyond the porch. The dark was full of insect noises and the coughs of deer lurching around in the brush.

Our cabin had pretty rough accommodations—plank siding and long, shotgun shack floor plan with a washroom, master bedroom, and a loft. Electricity and basic plumbing, but no phone or television. We lugged in books, cards, and board games to fashion a semblance of civilized entertainment. On a forest ranger’s advice, Dad always propped a twelve-gauge shotgun by the door. Black bears roamed the woods and were attracted to the scents of barbecue and trash. And children! Mom would say. The barbecue set the underlying tone; friendly hijinks and raucous laughter always prevailed those first few hours. Revived from our torpor, kids gorged on hotdogs and cola while parents lounged, grateful for the cool air and peaceful surroundings—except for the mosquitos. Everybody complained about them. Men understood shop talk was taboo. Those who slipped up received a warning glare from his better half. Nor did anyone remark upon news trickling in via the radio, especially concerning the Vietnam War; a subject that caused mothers everywhere to clutch teenaged sons to their bosoms. “Camp Terror” brooked none of that doomy guff. For two weeks, the outside world would remain at arm’s length.

Mr. Schrader struck a bonfire as the moon beamed over Harpy Peak. Once the dried cedar burned to coals, on came the bags of marshmallows and a sharpened stick for each kid’s grubby mitt. I recall snatches of conversation. The men discussed the Apollo program, inevitably philosophizing on the state of civilization and how far we’d advanced since the Wright brothers climbed onto the stage.

“We take it for granted,” Mr. Mercer said.

“What’s that?” Mr. Schrader waved a marshmallow flaming at the end of his stick.

“Comfort, safety. You flip a switch, there’s light. Turn a key, a motor starts.”

“Electricity affords us the illusion of self-sufficiency.”

“Gunpowder and penicillin imbue us with a sense of invincibility. Perpetual light has banished our natural dread of the dark. We’re apes carrying brands of fire.”

“Okay, gents. Since we’re on the subject of apes. We primates share a common ancestor. Which means we share a staggering amount of history. You start dwelling on eons, you have to consider the implications of certain facts.”

Mr. Mercer shook his head as he lit a cigarette. “I can only guess where this is going.”

“Simulation of human features and mannerisms will lead the field into eerie precincts,” Dad said.

“Uh-oh,” Mr. Schrader said. “This sounds suspiciously close to opshay alk-tay.”

“Thank goodness we’re perfecting mechanical arms to handle rivet guns, not androids. Doesn’t get more mundane.”

“Mark it in the book. Heck, the Japanese are already there.”

“Whatever you say, John.”

“Researchers built a robot prototype—a baby with a lifelike face. Focus groups recoiled in disgust. Researchers came back with artificial features. Focus groups oohed and ahhed. Corporate bankrolled the project. We’ll hear plenty in a year or two.”

“Humans are genetically encoded to fear things that look almost like us, but aren’t us.”

“Ever ask yourself why?”

“No, can’t say I’ve dedicated much thought to the subject,” Mr. Mercer said. “So, why are we allegedly fearful of, er, imitations?”

“For the same reason a deer or a fowl will spook if it gets wind of a decoy. Even an animal comprehends that a lure means nothing good.” Dad had mentioned this periodically. Tonight, he didn’t seem to speak to either of his colleagues. He looked directly at me.

“Shop talk!” Mom said with the tone of a referee declaring a foul.

Mrs. Schrader and Mrs. Mercer interrupted their own conversation to boo the men.

“Whoops, sorry!” Mr. Mercer gestured placatingly. “Anyway, how about those Jets?”

Later, somebody suggested we have a game. No takers for charades or trivia. Finally, Mrs. Mercer requested a demonstration of Aunt Vikki’s fabled skills. Close magic, prestidigitation, clairvoyance, or whatever she called it. My aunt demurred. However, the boisterous assembly would brook no refusal and badgered her until she relented.

That mystical evening, performing for a rapt audience against a wilderness backdrop, she was on her game. Seated lotus on a blanket near the fire, she affected trancelike concentration. Speaking in a monotone, she specified the exact change in Mr. Schrader’s pocket, the contents of Mrs. Mercer’s clutch, and the fact that one of the Mercer kids had stolen his sister’s diary. This proved to be the warmup routine.

Mr. Mercer said, “John says you’ve worked with the law to find missing persons.”

“Found a couple.” Her cheeks were flushed, her tone defiant. “Their bodies, at any rate.”

“That plane that went down in the Adirondacks. Can you get a psychic bead on it?”

Aunt Vikki again coyly declined until a chorus of pleas “convinced” her to give it a shot. She swayed in place, hands clasped. “Dirt. Rocks. Running water. Scattered voices. Many miles apart.”

“Guess that makes sense,” Mr. Mercer said to Mr. Schrader. “Wreck is definitely spread across the hills.”

Mrs. Schrader said under her breath to Dad, “Eh, what’s the point? She could say anything she pleases. We’ve no way to prove her claim.” He shooshed her with a familiar pat on the hip. Everybody was ostensibly devout in those days. Mrs. Schrader frequently volunteered at her church and I suspect Aunt Vikki’s occult shenanigans, innocent as they might’ve been, troubled her. The boozing and flirtation less so.

The eldest Mercer girl, Katie, asked if she could divine details of an IBM housewife named Denise Vinson who’d disappeared near Saugerties that spring. Nobody present knew her husband; he was among the faceless legions of electricians who kept the plant humming. He and his wife had probably attended a company buffet or some such. The case made the papers.

“Denise Vinson. Denise Vinson . . . .” Aunt Vikki slipped into her “trance.” Moments dragged on and an almost electric tension built; the hair-raising sensation of an approaching thunderstorm. The adults ceased bantering. Pine branches creaked; an owl hooted. A breeze freshened off the lake, causing water to lap against the dock. Greg and I felt it. His ubiquitous smirk faded, replaced by an expression of dawning wonderment. Then Aunt Vikki went rigid and shrieked. Her cry echoed off the lake and caused birds to dislodge from their roosts in the surrounding trees. Her arms extended, fingers and thumbs together, wrists bent downward. She rocked violently, cupped hands stabbing the air in exaggerated thrusts. Her eyes filled with blood. My thoughts weren’t exactly coherent, but her posture and mannerisms reminded me of a mantis lashing at its prey. Reminded me of something else, too.

Her tongue distended as she babbled like a Charismatic. She covered her face and doubled over. Nobody said anything until she straightened to regard us.

“Geez, Vikki!” Mr. Mercer nodded toward his pop-eyed children.

“I mean, geez Louise!”

“What’s the fuss?” She glanced around, dazed.

Mom, in a display of rare concern, asked what she’d seen. Aunt Vikki shrugged and said she’d glimpsed the inside of her eyelids. Why was everybody carrying on? Dad lurked to one side of the barbecue pit. His glasses were brimmed with the soft glow of the coals. I couldn’t decipher his expression.

Mood dampened, the families said their goodnights and drifted off to bed. Mom, tight on highballs, compared Aunt Vikki’s alleged powers of clairvoyance to those of the famous Edgar Cayce. This clash occurred in the wee hours after the others retired to their cabins. Awakened by raised voices, I hid in shadows atop the stairs to the loft, eavesdropping like it was my job.

“Cayce was as full of shit as a Christmas goose.” Aunt Vikki’s simmering antipathy boiled over. “Con man. Charlatan. Huckster.” Her eyes were bloodshot and stained from burst capillaries. Though she doggedly claimed not to recall the episode earlier that evening, its lingering effects were evident.

“Vikki,” Dad said in the placating tone he deployed against disgruntled subordinates. “Barbara didn’t mean any harm. Right, honey?”

“Sure, I did . . . not.” From my vantage I saw Mom perched near the cold hearth, glass in hand. The drunker she got, the cattier she got. She drank plenty at Lake Terror.

Aunt Vikki loomed in her beehive-do and platform shoes. “Don’t ever speak of me and that . . . that fraud in the same breath. Cayce’s dead and good riddance to him. I’m the real McCoy.”

“Is that a fact? Then, let’s skip the rest of this campout and head for Vegas.” Mom tried to hide her sardonic smile with the glass.

“Ladies, it’s late,” Dad said. “I sure hope our conversation isn’t keeping the small fry awake.” His not-so-subtle cue to skedaddle back to my cot left me pondering who was the psychic—Aunt Vikki or Dad? Maybe he can see in the dark was my last conscious thought. It made me giggle, albeit nervously.

Greg jumped me and Billy Mercer as we walked along the trail behind the cabins. Billy and I were closest in age. Alas, we had next to nothing in common and didn’t prefer one another’s company. Those were the breaks, as the youth used to say. The path forked at a spring before winding ever deeper into the woods. To our left, the path climbed a steep hill through a notch in a stand of shaggy black pine. Mom, the poet among us, referred to it as the Black Gap. Our parents forbade us to drink from the spring, citing mosquito larvae. Predictably, we disregarded their command and slurped double handfuls of cool water at the first opportunity. As I drank, Greg crept upon me like an Apache.

He clamped my neck in a grip born of neighborhood lawn-mowing to earn extra bucks for gas and date-night burgers. “Boo!” He’d simultaneously smacked Billy on the back of his head. The boy yelped and tripped over his own feet trying to flee. Thus, round one of Tiptoe went to my insufferably smirking brother. Ever merciless in that oh-so-special cruelty the eldest impose upon their weaker siblings, I nonetheless detected a sharper, savage inflection to his demeanor of late. I zipped a rock past his ear from a safe distance—not that one could ever be sure—and beat a hasty retreat into the woods. Greg flipped us the bird and kept going without a backward glance.

The reason this incident is notable? Billy Mercer complained to the adults. Dad pulled me aside for an account, which I grudgingly provided—nobody respects a tattletale. Dad’s smirk was even nastier than Greg’s. Head on a swivel, if you want to keep it, kiddo. He put his arm around my brother’s shoulders and they shared a laugh. Three days in, and those two spent much of it together, hiking the forest and floating around the lake. The stab of jealousy hurt worse than Greg squeezing my neck.

Near bedtime, we set up tents in the backyard, a few feet past the badminton net and horseshoe pit. The plan was for the boys to sleep under the stars (and among the swarming mosquitos). Mrs. Schrader protested weakly that maybe this was risky, what with the bears. Mr. Schrader and Mr. Mercer promised to take watches on the porch.

Odin stayed with me; that would be the best alarm in the world. No critter would get within a hundred yards without that dog raising holy hell. And thus it went: Odin, Billy Mercer, a Schrader boy, and me in one tent, and the rest of them in the other. We chatted for a bit. Chitchat waned; I tucked into my sleeping bag, poring over an issue of Mad Magazine by flashlight until I got sleepy.

I woke to utter darkness. Odin panted near my face, growling softly. I lay at the entrance. Groggy and unsure of whether the dog had scented a deer or a bear, I instinctively clicked on my trusty flashlight, opened the flap, and shone it into the trees—ready to yell if I spotted danger. Nothing to corroborate Odin’s anxious grumbles. Scruffy grass, bushes, and the shapeless mass of the forest. He eventually settled. I slept and dreamed two vivid dreams. The first was of Aunt Vikki spotlighted against a void. Her eyes bulged as she rocked and gesticulated, muttering. Dream logic prevailing, I understood her garbled words: Eeny! Meany! Miny! Moe!

In the second, I floated; a disembodied spirit gazing down. Barely revealed by a glimmer of porch light, Dad crawled from under a bush and lay on his side next to the tent. He reached through the flap. His arm moved, stroking. These dreams were forgotten by breakfast. The incident only returned to me many years later; a nightmare within a nightmare.

Over blueberry pancakes, Dad casually asked whether I’d care to go fishing. At an age where a kid selfishly treasured an appointment on his father’s calendar, I filled a canteen and slung my trusty Nikon F around my neck and hustled after him to the dock. Unlike the starter camera I’d long outgrown, the Nikon was expensive and I treated it with proper reverence. Film rolls were costly as well. Manual labor, supplemented by a generous allowance and a bit of wheedling, paid the freight. Mom, a stalwart supporter of the arts, chipped in extra.

She encouraged me to submit my work to newspaper and magazine contests, in vain. Back then, the hobby was strictly personal. I wasn’t inclined to share my vision with the world just yet, although I secretly dreamed big dreams—namely, riding the savannah with the crew of Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom.

The sun hadn’t cleared the trees as we pushed away from the dock. Dad paddled. I faced him, clicking shots of the receding cabins and birds rising and falling from the lake and into the sky. He set aside his paddle and the canoe kept on gliding across the dark water.

“This is where we’re gonna fish?” I said.

“No fishing today.” After a pause, he said, “I’m more a fisher of men.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Time to begin reflecting on what kind of man you are.”

“Dad, I’m twelve.” I inherited my smart-Alec lip from Mom.

“That’s why I don’t expect you to decide today. Merely think on it.” He could see I wasn’t quite getting it. “Ever since you showed an interest in photography, I had a hunch . . . . ” He cupped his hands and blew into the notch between his thumbs. Took him a couple of tries to perfect an eerie, fluting whistle that rebounded off the lake and nearby hills. He lowered his hands and looked at me. “I planned to wait until next year to have this conversation. Aunt Vikki’s . . . outburst has me thinking sooner is better. Sorry if she frightened you.”

“Why did she fly off the handle? Are her eyes okay?” I hoped to sound unflappable.

“Her eyes are fine. It’s my fault. The Vinson woman was too close to home. Anyhow, your aunt is staying with us because she can’t live alone. She’s fragile. Emotionally.”

“Vikki’s crazy?”

“No. Well, maybe. She’s different and she needs her family.”

“She and Mom hate each other.”

“They fight. That doesn’t mean they hate each other. Do you hate your brother? Wait, don’t answer that.” He dipped his paddle into the water. “What’s my job at the plant?”

“You build—”

“Design.”

“You design robots.”

“I’m a mechanical engineer specializing in robotic devices and systems. It’s not quite as dramatic as it sounds. How do you suppose I landed that position?”

“Well, you went to school—”

“No, son. I majored in sociology. Any expertise I have in engineering I’ve learned on the fly or by studying at night.”

“Oh.” Confused by the turn in our conversation, I fiddled with my camera.

“Want to know the truth?”

“Okay.” I feared with all the power of my child’s imagination that he would reveal that his real name was Vladimir, a deep cover mole sent by the Russians. It’s difficult to properly emphasize the underlying paranoia wrought by the Cold War on our collective national psyche. My brother and I spied on our neighbors, profiling them as possible Red agents. We’d frequently convinced ourselves that half the neighborhood was sending clandestine reports to a numbers station.

“I bullshitted the hiring committee,” Dad said. He seldom cursed around Mom; more so Greg. Now I’d entered his hallowed circle of confidence. “That’s how I acquired my position. If you understand what makes people tick, you can always get what you want. Oops, here we are.” Silt scraped the hull as he nosed the canoe onto the shore. We disembarked and walked through some bushes to a path that circled the entire lake. I knew this since our families made the entire circuit at least once per vacation.

Dad yawned, twisting his torso around with a contortionist’s knack. He doubled his left hand against his forearm; then the right. His joints popped. This wasn’t the same as my brother cracking his knuckles, which he often did to annoy me. No, it sounded more like a butcher snapping the bones of a chicken carcass. He sighed in evident relief. “Son, I can’t tell you what a living bitch it is to maintain acceptable posture every damned minute of the day. Speaking of wanting things. You want great pictures of predators, right?” I agreed, sure, that was the idea. He hunched so our heads were closer. “Prey animals are easy to stalk. They’re prey. They exist to be hunted and eaten. Predators are tougher. I can teach you. I’ve been working with your brother for years. Getting him ready for the jungle.”

“The jungle?” I said, hearing and reacting to the latter part of his statement while ignoring the former. “You mean Vietnam?” There was a curse word. “But he promised Mom—”

“Greg’s going to volunteer for the Marines. Don’t worry. He’s a natural. He’s like me.” He stopped and laid his hand on my shoulder. Heavy and full of suppressed power. “I can count on your discretion not to tell your mother. Can’t I?”

Sons and fathers have differences. Nonetheless, I’d always felt safe around mine. Sure, he was awkward and socially off-putting. Sure, he ran hot and cold. Sure, he made lame jokes and could be painfully distant. People joke that engineers are socially maladjusted; there’s some truth to that cliché. Foibles notwithstanding, I didn’t doubt his love or intentions. Yet, in that moment, I became hyper aware of the size of his hand—of him, in general—and the chirping birds, and that we were alone here in the trees on the opposite shore of the lake. Awareness of his physical grotesqueness hit me in a wave of revulsion. From my child’s unvarnished perspective, his features transcended mere homeliness. Since he’d stretched, his stance and expression had altered. Spade-faced and gangling, toothy and hunched, yet tall and deceptively agile. A carnivore had slipped on Dad’s sporting goods department ensemble and lured me into the woods. Let’s go to Grandma’s house!

Such a witless, childish fantasy. The spit dried in my mouth anyhow. Desperate to change the subject, perhaps to show deference the way a wolf pup does to an alpha, I said, “I didn’t mean to call Aunt Vikki crazy.”

Dad blinked behind those enormous, horn-rimmed glasses. “It would be a mistake to classify aberrant psychology as proof of disorder.”

He registered my blank expression. “Charles Addams said—”

“Who’s that?”

“A cartoonist. He said, ‘What is normal for the spider is chaos for the fly.’ He was correct. The world is divided between spiders and flies.” He studied me intently, searching for something, then shook himself and straightened. His hand dropped away from my shoulder. Such a large hand, such a long arm. “C’mon. Let’s stroll a bit. If we’re quiet, we might surprise a woodland critter.”

We strolled.

Contrary to his stated intention of moving quietly to surprise our quarry, Dad initiated a nonstop monologue. He got onto the subject of physical comedy and acting. “Boris Karloff is a master,” he said. “And Lon Chaney Jr. The werewolf guy?”

“Yeah, Dad.” I’d recovered a bit after that moment of irrational panic. The world felt right again under my feet.

“Chaney’s facility with physiognomic transformation? Truly remarkable. Unparalleled, considering his disadvantages. Faking—it’s difficult.” One aspect I learned to appreciate about my old man’s character was the fact he didn’t dumb down his language. Granted, he’d speak slower depending upon the audience. However, he used big words if big words were appropriate. My desk-side dictionary and thesaurus were dog-eared as all get-out.

While he blathered, I managed a few good shots including a Cooper’s hawk perched on a high branch, observing our progress. The hawk leaped, disappearing over the canopy. When I lowered the camera, Dad was gone too. I did what you might expect—called for him and dithered, figuring he’d poke his head around a tree and laugh at my consternation. Instead, the sun climbed. Patches of cool shade thickened; the lake surface dimmed and brightened with opaline hardness. Yelling occasionally, I trudged back toward where we’d beached the canoe.

He caught me as I rounded a bend in the path. A hand and ropy arm extended so very far from the wall of brush. A hooked nail scraped my forehead. Look, son! See? Instead of pausing to peer into the undergrowth, I ran. Full tilt, camera strap whipping around my neck and a miracle I didn’t lose that beloved camera before I crashed through the bushes onto the beach.

Dad sat on a driftwood log, serenely studying the lake. “Hey, kiddo. There you are.” He explained his intention to play a harmless joke. “You perceive your surroundings in a different light if a guardian isn’t present. Every boy should feel that small burst of adrenaline under controlled circumstances. Head on a swivel, right, son?”

I realized I’d merely bumped into a low-hanging branch and completely freaked. By the time we paddled home, my wild, unreasoning terror had dissipated. It’s all or nothing with kids—dying of plague, or fit as a fiddle; bounce back from a nasty fall, or busted legs; rub some dirt on it and walk it off, or a wheelchair. Similar deal with our emotions as well. Dad wasn’t a monster, merely a weirdo. Aunt Vikki’s crazed behavior had set my teeth on edge. The perfect storm. My thoughts shied from outré concerns to dwell upon on Dad’s casual mention that Greg planned on going to war and how we’d best keep on the QT. Not the kind of secret I wanted to hide from Mom, but I wasn’t a squealer.

He remained quiet until we were gliding alongside the dock. He said, “Randy, I was wrong to test you. I’m sorry. Won’t happen again. Scout’s honor.”

It didn’t.

Toward the end of our stay, the whole lot of us trooped forth to conduct our annual peregrination around the entire lake. We packed picnic baskets and assembled at the Black Gap. Except for Dad, who’d gone ahead to prepare the site where we’d camp for lunch. Another barbecue, in fact. Mr. Mercer brought along a fancy camera (a Canon!) to record the vacation action. He and I had a bonding moment as “serious” photographers. Mr. Schrader, Dad, and a couple of the kids toted flimsy cheap-o tourist models. Such amateurs! Mr. Mercer arranged us with the pines for a backdrop. Everybody posed according to height. He yelled directions, got what he wanted, and joined the group while I snapped a few—first with his camera, then my own. I lagged behind as they scrambled uphill along the path.

We trekked to the campsite. Hot, thirsty, and ready for our roasted chicken. Dad awaited us, although not by much. None of the other adults said anything. However, I recall Mom’s vexation with the fact he hadn’t even gotten a fire going in the pit. She pulled him aside and asked what happened. Why was he so mussed and unkempt? Why so damned sweaty?

He blinked, pushed his glasses up, and shrugged. “I tried a shortcut. Got lost.”

“Lost, huh?” She combed pine needles out of his hair. “Likely story.”

That winter, drunken ski bums accidentally burned down the Schrader cabin. Oh, the plan was to rebuild in the spring and carry on. Alas, one thing led to another—kids shipping off to college, the Mercers divorcing, etcetera—and we never returned. The men sold off the property for a tidy profit. That was that for our Lake Terror era. Greg skipped college and enlisted with the United States Marine Corps in ’69. Mom locked herself in her study and cried for a week. That shook me—she wasn’t a weeper by any means. My brother sent postcards every month or so over the course of his two tours. Well, except for a long, dark stretch near the end when he ceased all communication. The military wouldn’t tell us anything. Judging by her peevishness and the fact she seldom slept, I suspect Mom walked the ragged edge.

One day, Greg called and said he’d be home soon. Could Dad pick him up at the airport? He departed an obstreperous child and returned a quieter, thoughtful man. The war injured the psyches of many soldiers. It definitely affected him. Greg kibitzed about shore leave and the antics of his rogue’s gallery of comrades. Conversely, he deflected intimate questions that drilled too close to where his honest emotions lay buried. Dumb kids being dumb kids, I asked if he killed anyone. He smiled and drummed his fingers on the table, one then another. That smile harked to his teenaged cruelness, now carefully submerged. More artful, more refined, more mature. He said, The neat thing about Tiptoe? It’s humane. Curbs the ol’ urges. Ordinarily, it’s enough to catch and release. Ordinarily. You get me, kid? We didn’t speak often after he moved to the Midwest. He latched on with a trucking company. The next to the last time I saw him was at Dad’s funeral in 1985. Dad’s ticker had blown while raking leaves. Dead on his way to the ground, same as his own father and older brother. Greg lurked on the fringes at the reception. He slipped away before I could corner him. Nobody else noticed that he’d come and gone.

Aunt Vikki? She joined a weird church. Her erratic behavior deteriorated throughout the 1970s, leading to a stint in an institution. She made a comeback in the ’80s, got on the ground floor of the whole psychic hotline craze. Made a killing telling people what they wanted to hear. Remarried to a disgraced avant garde filmmaker. Bought a mansion in Florida where she currently runs a New Age commune of international repute. Every Christmas, she drops a couple grand on my photography to jazz up her compound. I can’t imagine how poster photos of wolves disemboweling caribou go over with the rubes seeking enlightenment. Got to admit, watching those recruitment videos shot by her latest husband, my work looks damned slick.

And full circle at last. My coworker startled me; nightmares ensued; and creepy-crawly memories surfaced. Cue my formerly happy existence falling apart. Two AM routinely found me wide awake, scrutinizing my sweaty reflection in the bathroom mirror. I tugged the bags beneath my eyes, exposing the veiny whites. Drew down until it hurt. Just more of the same. What did I expect? That my face was a mask and I peered through slits? That I was my father’s son, through and through? If he were more or less than a man, what did that make me?

On my next visit, I decided to level with Mom as I tucked her into bed.

“We need to talk about Dad.” I hesitated. Was it even ethical to tell her the truth, here at the end of her days? Hey, Ma, I believe Pop was involved in the disappearances of several—god knows the number— people back in the sixties. I forged ahead. “This will sound crazy. He wasn’t . . . normal.”

“Well, duh,” she said. We sat that there for a while, on opposite sides of a gulf that widened by the second.

“Wait. Were you aware?”

“Of what?”

Hell of a question. “There was another side to Dad. Dark. Real dark, I’m afraid.”

“Ah. What did you know, ma’am, and when did you know it?”

“Yeah, basically.”

“Bank robbers don’t always tell their wives they rob banks.”

“The wives suspect.”

“Damned straight. Suspicion isn’t proof. That’s the beauty of the arrangement. We lasted until he died. There’s beauty in that too, these days.” Mom’s voice had weakened as she spoke. She beckoned me to lean in and I did. “We were on our honeymoon at a lodge. Around dawn, wrapped in a quilt on the deck. A fox light-footed into the yard. I whispered to your father about the awesomeness of mother nature, or wow, a fox! He smiled. Not his quirky smile, the cold one. He said, An animal’s expression won’t change, even as it’s eating prey alive. May sound strange, but that’s when I knew we fit perfectly.”

“Jesus, Mom.” I shivered. Dad and his pearls of wisdom, his icy little apothegms. Respected, admired, revered. But replaceable. A phrase he said in response to anyone who inquired after his job security at IBM. He’d also uttered a similar quote when admonishing Greg or me in connection to juvenile hijinks. Loved, but replaceable, boys. Loved, but replaceable.

“He never would’ve hurt you.” She closed her eyes and snuggled deeper into her blankets. Her next words were muffled. I’m not sure I heard them right. “At least, not by choice.”

Mom died. A handful of journalist colleagues and nurses showed up to pay their respects. Greg waited until the rest had gone and I was in the midst of wiping my tears to step from behind a decrepit obelisk, grip my shoulder, and whisper, “Boo!” He didn’t appear especially well. Gray and gaunt, raw around the nose and mouth. Strong, though, and seething with febrile energy. He resembled the hell out of Dad when Dad was around that age and not long prior to his coronary. Greg even wore a set of oversized glasses, although I got a funny feeling they were purely camouflage.

We relocated to a tavern. He paid for a pitcher, of which he guzzled the majority. Half a lifetime had passed since our last beer. I wondered what was on his mind. The funeral? Vietnam? That decade-old string of missing persons in Ohio near his last known town of residence?

“Don’t fret, little brother.” Predators have a talent for sniffing weakness. He’d sussed out that I’d gone through a few things recently, Mom’s death being the latest addition to the calculus of woe. “Dad told you—you’re not the same as us.” He wiped his lips and tried on a peaceable smile. “They gave me the good genes. Although, I do surely wish I had your eye. Mom also had the eye.” The second pitcher came and he waxed maudlin. “Look, apologies for being such a jerk to you when we were kids.”

“Forgotten,” I said.

“I’ve always controlled my worse impulses by inflicting petty discomfort. Like chewing a stick of gum when I want a cigarette so bad my teeth ache. I needle people. Associates, friends, loved ones. Whomever. Their unease feeds me well enough to keep the real craving at bay. Until it doesn’t.” He removed a photo from his wallet and pushed it across the table. Mom and Dad in our old yard. The sun was in Dad’s glasses. Hard to know what to make of a man’s smile when you can’t see his eyes. I pushed it back. He waved me off. “Hang onto that.”

“It’s yours.”

“Nah, I don’t need a memento. You’re the archivist. The sentimental one.”

“Fine. Thanks.” I slipped the photo into my coat pocket.

He stared at a waitress as she cleared a booth across the aisle. From a distance his expression might’ve passed for friendly. “My motel isn’t far,” he said. “Give me a ride? Or if you’re busy, I could ask her.” How could I refuse my own brother? Well, I would’ve loved to.

His motel occupied a lonely corner on a dark street near the freeway. He invited me into his cave-like room. I declined, said it had been great, etcetera. I almost escaped clean. He caught my wrist. Up close, he smelled of beer, coppery musk, and a hint of moldering earth.

“I think back to my classmates in high school and the military,” Greg said. “The drug addicts, the cons, and divorcees. A shitload of kids who grew up and moved as far from home as humanly possible. Why? Because their families were the worst thing that ever happened to them. It hit me.”

“What hit you?”

“On the whole, Mom and Dad were pretty great parents.”

“Surprising to hear you put it that way, Greg. We haven’t shared many family dinners since we were kids.”

“Take my absence as an expression of love. Consider also, I might have been around more than you noticed.” He squeezed.

As I mentioned, despite his cadaverous appearance, he was strong. And by that, I mean bone-crushing strong. My arm may as well have been clamped in the jaws of a grizzly. I wasn’t going anywhere unless he permitted it. “They were good people,” I said through my teeth.

“Adios, bud.”

Surely it was a relief when he slackened his grip and released me. I trudged down the stairs, across the lot, and had my car keys in hand when the flesh on my neck prickled. I spun, and there was Greg, twenty or so feet behind me, soundlessly tiptoeing along, knees to chest, elbows even with the top of his head, hands splayed wide. He closed most of the gap in a single, exaggerated stride. Then he froze and watched my face with the same intensity as he’d observed the waitress.

“Well done,” he said. “Maybe you learned something, bumbling around in the woods.” He turned and walked toward the lights of the motel. I waited until he’d climbed the stairs to jump into my car and floor it out of there.

A long trip home. You bet I glanced into my rearview the entire drive.

In the wee desolate hours, short on sleep due to a brain that refused to switch off, I killed the last of the bourbon while sorting ancient photographs. A mindless occupation that felt akin to picking at a scab or working on a jigsaw. No real mental agility involved other than mechanically rotating pieces until something locked into place. Among the many loose pictures I’d stashed for posterity were some shot on that last day at Lake Terror in ’68. The sequence began with our three families (minus Dad, who’d gone ahead) assembled at the Black Gap and waving; then a few more of everybody proceeding single-file away and up the trail.

I spread these photos on the coffee table and stared for a long, long while. I only spotted the slightly fuzzy, unfocused extra figure because of my keen vision . . . and possibly a dreadful instinct honed by escalating paranoia. Once I saw Dad, there were no take-backsies, as we used to say. Dad hung in the branches; a huge, distorted figure hidden in the background of a puzzle. Bloated and lanky, jaw unslung. Inhumanly proportioned, but unmistakably my father. His gaze fixed upon the camera as his left arm dangled and dangled, gray-black fingers plucking the hair of the kids as they hiked obliviously through the notch between the shaggy pines. His lips squirmed.

Eeny. Meeny. Miny. Moe.

The post The Family Game I Never Wanted to Win appeared first on Electric Literature.

The two brothers met by chance near the ice machine in the hallway of the seventh floor of the Marriott Hotel on Liberty Avenue.

Liberty, if followed north for eleven miles, led to a squat stone building, two hundred yards from the main prison campus, in which was contained the chamber, the apparatus, and the drugs used to put prisoners to death. The two-lane road was colored by hardy wildflowers growing through cracks in the median, and was lined with street signs warning travelers not to litter or drive drunk or pick up hitchhikers.

Tomorrow, the two brothers would travel this road, in separate cars, at separate times.

Gerald and Tom Hoefler had not seen each other in five years, since Tom’s marriage to Abigail in 2003, and the brothers were not expecting to see each other until tomorrow, during the viewing, and then only for an hour or so. Running into Tom at the ice machine with the hand-written OUT OF ORDER sign stuck on with a Band-Aid made Gerald feel cheated, as he had no desire to see his brother at all.

“Gerald.”

“Tom.”

They tucked their respective empty ice buckets under their arms, and shook hands.

“No fuckin’ ice,” said Tom. “Huh.”

“Yeah.”

“What you up to these days, Gerry?”

Three minutes of conversation, and it was over. Gerald trudged back to his room. He tried to call Miriam, but cellphone reception was poor in the hotel room, so Gerald was forced to call on the room phone at God knows how many cents a minute.

“He looks like he’s been roughnecking,” said Gerald, sitting on the edge of the queen bed, the polyester rustling as he moved. “Or something like it, anyway, he’s all burnt and leathery and Marlboro Man and full of himself. Miriam?”

“I’m here.”

“He had a crushing handshake,” continued Gerald, studying his right hand in the low light. “The bastard. Nothing like that limp, week-old celery stalk he used to shake with, way back when he was making trillions at Polk & Sons. Do you remember that? Mariam, goddammit, why are you being so quiet?”

“Tomorrow is a lot larger than just seeing your brother, Gerald. You only have to tolerate his company for a little while, then you’ll be on your way home.”

“Wrong, Miriam. I’m having dinner with him tonight, in the lobby restaurant.”

A brief but steep silence, like the sound of space between the stars.

“Why’d you agree to that?”

“I invited him. And I don’t know why.”

Gerald had done it out of guilt. A spasm of compensatory fraternal obligation had taken him over in the hallway by the ice machine. Gerald had been a rotten older brother, a bully and a shamer, before and after Faye had been killed. Something about seeing Tom unexpectedly made him feel an instant of compassion and regret; it was during this instant that he invited Tom to meet him at The Corral, the bar and grill attached to the hotel.

“Gerry,” said Miriam, as if her husband had dozed off at a dinner party.

Gerald stood up, juggling the phone while pulling on a clean pair of jeans and tucking in a button-down shirt. He swallowed two fingers of warm gin from a dented silver flask he’d won in a game of poker in high school, and declared to his wife that they better have goddam steak in the goddam restaurant. And ice.

“And I’m gonna pay for dinner, no matter what.”

“He’ll get the check if he has to stand up and pluck it out of your hand. You know that.”      

“Well, listen to this: I’m gonna go down early, give the restaurant my credit card first, tell them to just add 25% to whatever the total is when the meal’s done, run the charge, and bring me my card back. He’ll never even see the check. Ha!”

“You’re behaving like a twelve-year-old.”

“I don’t give a goddam goddamn.”

“Remember, he lost a sister, too.”

Miriam rarely ever referred to Faye, and almost never to her death. It was one of the first things Gerald came to love about Miriam—she always created a place where the tragedy and all its poisons were forbidden. But Gerald slowly came to resent this. He began to interpret her reticence not as a protective shell but as a product of an indifference that had always been there: an indifference whose first and most signal manifestation came as her decision to sleep in different bedrooms, a separation that soon extended to most aspects of their lives. It seemed the only times they ever engaged in a substantive conversation was by telephone while he was away. 

“You make me feel like I’m back in family therapy, Mir, for Christ’s sake.”

Gerald listened to the interstellar silence on the other end of the line.

“Miriam?”

Gerald could tell his wife was holding her breath.

“Never mind,” he said. “Call me later. Room 714.”

Tom was already sitting at a table, looking at the plastic stand that contained a list of The Corral’s beers and cocktails.

“What’s it like still being in high school, Gerry?” said Tom, standing up to give his brother another mangle of a handshake. Gerald resisted the urge to roll his brother’s knuckles around and make him yelp. He could do it. He’d always been stronger. But he didn’t want to embarrass the man so openly.

“Well, students don’t change much,” said Gerald.

Tom gave his brother a big smile. He’d gotten his teeth fixed; the old yellow picket fence, almost brown at the gumline, had been rebirthed as a row of Styrofoam-white implants that reminded Gerald of slammed front doors. Tom may have renounced his former, stock-brokering life, but he’d obviously held on to some of the fortune and vanity he’d acquired living it. Hell, let him pay for dinner.

“Nice and stable,” said Tom, returning to his study of the drink menu. “Like you.”

“What can I get for you boys,” said their waitress, a young woman that Gerald thought bore a slight resemblance to what he imagined Faye would have looked like had she been alive the last twenty-nine years. The waitress’ brown hair, like Faye’s, fell in shallow waves to her shoulders where it rested in lazy whorls, and the end of her nose was dimpled with the same tiny pock that would disappear when she smiled. The waitress was half-smiling now, because Tom had asked her if she wanted to come up to his room after her shift to see his etchings.

“I’m up la-a-ate,” Tom said to her, elbowing her on the hip.

Gerald wanted to hit him hard enough to knock all the money out of his mouth, but instead he ordered a double gin and tonic. Tom put his hand near the crook of the waitress’ naked elbow, looked up at her blushing face with what Gerald thought was subtle mockery, and ordered a shot of Bulleit and a Budweiser. She left, not smiling.

Tom, it turned out, was not a roughneck, but a road-construction crew member, working long hours busting asphalt for the Nevada Highway Department.

“I’m the only white guy,” said Tom, inscrutably.

“That right,” said Gerald.

The waitress brought drinks. Tom completely ignored her. There was no steak. Gerald ordered pork tenderloin. The menu offered half a rotisserie chicken. Tom ordered two. Gerald gathered up the menus, handed them back to the waitress, and looked at her with a smile that he hoped was invested with suitable apology for the actions of his brother. She did not return it.

As they ate, Tom told his brother about his life, the deals he’d made, the pussy he’d scored, the jobs he’d had, the adversity he’d beaten, the money he’d squandered. He never mentioned his wife. Faye did not come up, either. She never did.

“What’d you quit Polk for, anyway?” said Gerald.

“You know, to get out there and experience real life, to say adios to that office and the two-thousand-dollar ergonomic chair and Darren Chiu, that waxed prick.”

Gerald suspected there was more to it than that, and that the law might be involved, but he didn’t really want to know what it was, and besides, he was sure his brother would deny any suggestion that anything outside his realm of control could possibly have happened.

He waited till Tom’s mouth was full, then asked a question to which Gerald already knew the precise answer (which was 5:25 PM): 

“Any idea what time we’re supposed to be there tomorrow?”

“I don’t know,” Tom said, through a clot of rotisserie chicken. “Around five. Which is a pile a crap, because afterwards I’m gonna have to drive nonstop to get back to work on time. Why can’t they have it at dawn, like in the rest of the fucking country? Everybody knows they put assholes to death at dawn in the United States. It’s the American Way. Anyway, we’re digging up a section of old frontage road off US 9 near Darrow. It’s gonna be 116°F by afternoon, and I gotta—”

“What do you think about tomorrow?” said Gerald.

“—drive all night, so tomorrow’s bullshit better be over within 30 minutes—”

“Tom.”

“—because if I’m not there that bitch Marisol, the only chick on the crew, big, like two kegs stacked up, lots to prove—”

“Jesus.”

“—will be in charge, and she always fucks shit up.”

“Maybe you ought to skip it altogether, then, Tom.”

“Skip what?” said Tom, a greasy knife in one hand, the other clenched like the fist of a newborn.

“Tomorrow, Jesus.”

Tom put his knife down, cracked his knuckles.

“Maybe I will.”

A different waitress came to the table and asked if they needed anything.

“Where’s our waitress?” said Tom, raising his lip like a theater curtain to reveal his teeth; his slur of dentition.

“She’s, um, no longer with us.”

“Serious? said Tom, grinning. “Dead?”

“Coffee, dessert?”

“Peach crumble and a drip,” said Tom.

Gerald ordered another gin and tonic. The waitress brought it, and the check. Tom pinched it right out of her hand, and immediately handed it back along with a black American Express card, even before she could finish saying Thank you for dining with us.

After dinner, Tom went up to his room while Gerald sat at the bar and drank gin until it got close to midnight, then paid his tab and went upstairs.

Miriam hadn’t called. He called her.

“Gerry, Sorry I didn’t call, I fell asleep—”

“No you didn’t, but it’s all right.”

He told his wife about dinner, about how his brother had come early and fucked up his plans to pay the bill.

“What did he say about . . . your sister and everything?”

Gerald could not think of a time his wife had ever spoken Faye’s name aloud. He tried to unscrew the lid on his silver flask of gin without making a sound, but it squeaked in a telltale way that filled the hotel room, the space between his ears, and the air in the phone receiver. Miriam heard it, he knew, he knew.

“Nothing,” said Gerald, almost shouting, to drown out the echoes of the telltale flask. “He didn’t say shit.”

“He never has.”

Neither have you.

It was exactly ten months after five-year-old Faye vanished from her bed one night, that Michael Lee Farris, an unemployed crane operator, confessed to kidnapping Faye and later led investigators to her remains. It was another year, at his trial, that photos were displayed that Farris had taken of Faye after he’d raped and asphyxiated her; photos that Tom was forced to look at—three-foot color enlargements pinned to big rolling bulletin boards—because he was to be called to the witness stand that day; photos that Gerald was spared because his testimony was never needed, as it had been Tom—not fast-asleep Gerald—who had seen a long-haired figure in the yard carrying a bundle into the cone of the streetlight, and who Tom pointed out in court as the man he’d seen.

Alone in their section of the viewing room—other relatives of more of Farris’ victims had their own sections, each separated by mobile partitions of large sheets of plywood painted white—Tom sat in the front row, an arm’s length from the lowered curtain, and Gerald sat in the center of the room.

Tom turned around.

“Gerry, you won’t believe this, but that waitress, the one that was ‘no longer with us,’ you know I was only messing with her at dinner, but I guess she took me seriously because she banged on my door around two in the morning, and I was dead asleep, she was kinda drunk, and she wanted to talk about something, I couldn’t tell what, because she was crying like a whupped child the whole time, but she eventually quit and let me fuck her, saying some incredibly dirty stuff in my ear. She was gone before I woke up.”

Tom turned back around to face the curtain. 

Gerald studied the room. He was wondering where his parents would’ve sat, had they not ultimately succumbed to grief in their own ways when the curtain raised, revealing a small beige room, in which were eight people: two men in white coats, three guards, a man and a woman in dark suits, and Michael Lee Farris, who was strapped to a table, one arm stretched out at a 45° angle and battened to a narrow length of greenish-blue Formica attached to the table.

A crackle as a microphone turned on. The woman produced a wrinkled piece of paper and read a summary of the warrant for execution. She asked Farris if he had a brief statement he would like to make. He said nothing. He closed his eyes and turned his head away from the viewing room.

Tom stood up. He said fucking coward, with a low, clenched ferocity. In another section of the viewing area, crying could be heard, and in another, a woman yelled something Gerald couldn’t understand. Tom sat down again. An IV was inserted into a vein in Farris’ arm. One of the technicians injected a liquid into the IV, waited a moment, then injected another. Farris faced the ceiling and opened his eyes. He turned red in the face and opened his mouth, as if for a dentist. He remained in this posture for a full minute, then appeared to shudder, and, finally, to relax. Fourteen minutes passed, and the other technician listened to his heart for a moment, then nodded. The curtain lowered.

Someone came into the viewing area and asked if Tom and Gerald wanted to speak to the media. Tom ignored the question, staying put, his back to the room. Gerald declined an interview and left.

Four years later, during lunchtime in a crowded line at a Korean grocery on Greenwich Street in Manhattan, Gerald found himself standing behind a woman who he realized after a moment was Tom’s wife, whom he hadn’t seen since their wedding nine year earlier. She was examining an array of various slaws in a glass case. She caught Gerry looking at her in the reflection and turned to face him.

“Please keep your eyes to yourself,” she said.

“Uh, Abigail?” said Gerald. “It’s Tom’s brother, Gerry.”

She stared at him for a moment, then smiled, and hugged him unexpectedly.

“Oh, Gerry. Gerry! How are you doing? Still in Chantilly with . . . .”

“Miriam. Yes. I’m in town for a teacher’s conference.”

“You were always so stable,” said Abigail, stepping out of the line, pulling Gerald along by the elbow. “I’m so sorry I never wrote to you or anything, especially when that man’s, um, death, was, you know, happening, but I . . . .”

Something about the timbre of her use of the word “stable” suggested that things with Tom were not. Abigail was so close to his face he could see the ruff of fine wrinkles under her eyes. Gerry had always thought she was attractive, but now even more so. He imparted himself a delectable moment where he imagined she would come to his room at the motel, and he’d tell her everything she’d ever wanted to know about her ex in-laws, about Faye, about Tom, about Miriam, about Michael Lee Farris, about the execution, about himself, and afterwards they would have sex, and more sex, all through the next day, pausing only to feel again what it was like to be falling in love.

“That’s okay,” said Gerald, sensitive to Abigail’s hand, still on his elbow.

“Did it give you, you know, a sense of closure?”

Gerald especially hated that phrase.

“Not really.”

“Tom would never talk about it,” said Abigail, letting go of Gerald’s elbow. “He wouldn’t talk about family either.”

“Yeah,” said Gerald, fighting the urge to touch his own elbow, where Abigail’s hand had been.

“We’ve been separated. A long time now. Years. But you probably already knew that.”

“I didn’t.”

“Yeah, well, after he got out of prison for that embezzling thing at Polk, he started taking on these low-paying physical labor jobs to say screw you to the Man, but we ran out of savings, and he moved us back here so he could try brokering again. He figured enough time had passed for him to make a fresh start. Within a couple months he was making tens of thousands a week and sleeping with a floor messenger who evidently had sexual habits he hadn’t encountered before, and which pleased him in ways I never could.”

Embezzling. He should have guessed.

Tom felt absolutely no cold, righteous glee at this news. He just felt empty, like a fresh-dug grave.

Abigail, possibly upset with herself for going into such personal detail with someone she’d met only a couple of times, looked down, then accidentally backed into a shelf of analgesics. Gerald reached out to steady her.

“He’s still here, in Hell’s Kitchen,” she said, holding on to Gerald’s forearms. “Tom, I mean. I never see him. I’m on Chambers, a little spot with a shaft of sunlight for my orchids in the morning. And how long are you in town?”

“Two more nights, early flight out Saturday.”

Gerald had nothing more to say. He tried to think of something, but nothing came to him except his lessons at school, and the words I want to fuck you.

“Where are you?” said Abigail.

“Warrington Inn, at York and 75th.” After a moment he added, “Room 307.”

Abigail reached up and kissed him on the cheek, close to his lips, the corners of their mouths intersecting for an instant.

“It’s nice to see you, Gerry.”

After that day’s round of conference meetings, on the long walk back to the hotel, Gerald picked up two bottles of not-inexpensive wine, an Italian red and a South African white, plus a fifth of Bombay Sapphire. Restless, he wanted to take a walk, but he was afraid he would miss Abigail on the outside chance she chose to come by. He watched the Weather Channel, carefully poured gin into his old poker flask, and sipped it right back out, flask after flask, until early evening, when Miriam was due to call. She did not. He slept, but lightly, starting awake whenever he heard what he thought was a knock, and then falling back to sleep when he realized it was not.

The next day he woke with the sharp, well-defined hangover that attends costlier spirits—a keening, polished awl pushed through his optic nerve. He skipped the conference altogether and stayed in the hotel all day, the bottle of red wine on the luggage counter, the white in a bucket of ice that he renewed every few hours. Miriam again did not call.

It wasn’t until 3:30 in the morning that Gerald gave up the last shred of hope that Abigail would visit, or at least telephone. Around 4:15, Gerald called his wife.

“Gerald, what’s the matter for god’s sake? Are you all right?”

“Why didn’t you call me?” he said. He would not open his flask right now. “Tonight or last night?”

“I wasn’t feeling my best,” she said. Gerald knew she was waiting for him to ask her why, and he also knew that she knew he never would.

“A phone call was going to exacerbate your symptoms?”

“Don’t drink and dial, Gerry,” said Miriam.

“Where did you learn that phrase? And I’m not drinking, goddammit.”

“You’ll never change,” said Miriam.

“Everybody else calls that ‘stability.'”

“Who everybody?”

Gerald—wondering if somehow his wife had intuited his subtle but open invitation to another woman and his desire to make the most of it should that invitation be answered—paused.

“Nobody!”

“Jesus, Gerald,” said Miriam, with what to Gerald sounded like fragile mirth. “Is there someone there with you?”

Gerald laughed, a bitter snort that was really about Abigail’s never showing up, but which he hoped sounded to his wife like an incredulous snigger.

“I’m not even going to answer that.”

Miriam didn’t bother to suppress a sigh this time.

“Oh, Gerry.”

“Oh, Gerry what,” he said.

Miriam hung up.

Three weeks later, on a late Sunday afternoon back in Chantilly, while Miriam was out getting their Subaru inspected, Gerald powered up his Mac, and googled CUNY Law Staff Directory, where he found an email address for Abigail.

Dear Abigail,

I’ve been thinking about you. With apologies for being blunt, I’d like to come back up to New York to see you. Maybe we can get dinner.
Let me know your thoughts. I can come anytime.

Gerry

Gerald hit send. He received an immediate response.

Gerald,

I must have somehow given you the wrong idea. I’m sorry, but I’m not interested. I wish you well.

Abigail

Gerald struggled to compose a response, one in which he seemed outwardly contrite, but between whose lines a careful reader could see that he blamed her for misleading him. Gerald worked at it for hours, but finally just deleted everything.

Miriam was not yet home. Maybe the car had failed inspection, and she was out getting it fixed. Gerald admitted to himself that this was unlikely on a Sunday evening. Gerald thought about calling her, but instead he sat on the couch to watch the Weather Channel and drink gin from his little high-school flask. A few hours later, near midnight, and still no Miriam, Gerald called her. But she didn’t answer, and he left no message. He considered calling around to the hospitals, but in the end did not. As he was falling asleep, he tried to convince himself that he really hoped she would be home sometime soon; that he was worried about her, but he knew the truth.

He woke early the next morning, alone. He wandered through the house to verify that his wife was not home, peeked into the driveway to make certain the car wasn’t there, then thought about calling the police. Instead, he called in sick to work, saying he’d be out for the next few days, poured himself three fingers of gin in a frosted tumbler (the flask had gone missing, like it had run away, a beaten dog finally fed up), and searched for pornography on the internet.  

The next day, still alone, he googled old girlfriends, finding Facebook pages for two of them and an email for another. He wrote to all three, one of whom responded with a confession that she still thought about him sometimes, and might like to get together, but that she was living in Los Angeles with a man whom she didn’t want to deceive, and who might react with thorough violence should he discover any shenanigans.

Later in the week, his wife still gone, some of Miriam’s friends began calling. But Gerald didn’t answer, or listen to their messages. On Friday afternoon, the phone rang, and it was with a mixture of despair and fury that he noted it was Miriam herself calling. She left a message less than fifteen seconds long. Gerald did not listen to it.

Early Saturday morning, he gathered what the gist of her message must have been when he noticed through the living room window that a Penske moving truck had backed into his driveway, and that three men, two unknowns in dark blue overalls, and Miriam’s father, Barry, were making their way up the walk.

Gerald stood in his robe, a frosted tumbler of gin in one hand, a remote control in the other, and listened for the clangor of a key in a lock.

The post Brotherhood Is a Life Sentence appeared first on Electric Literature.

Children hopped along the logs arranged as stepping-stones in the playground; Lewis stood next to them and stared at his shoes. Big, black shiny plastic shoes, with big black laces. He was sure the shoes didn’t affect it. He just had to concentrate. He was standing upright, ready to go, with his head tilted sharply downwards, looking at his shoes and the ground beneath them. Tarmac, with hundreds of little stones in it, in between which were little pockets of dirt and over which climbed the occasional ant, fighting its way through a field of boulders, sometimes carrying a small bit of twig as an extra burden. He would often stare at the ants, coming and going. But this was a distraction. He closed his eyes.

“What are you doing, Lewis?”

He looked up, and there was Matthew. He liked Matthew. Lewis lowered his head again. “I’m trying to float.”

Matthew looked at him to learn his technique, and after some consideration commented, “It’s not working.”

“I know” said Lewis, “it does sometimes though.”

And Lewis kept trying, kept staring at his feet, then closing his eyes for extra concentration and hoping—expecting—to open them and to see that his feet were maybe an inch or two above the ground, and then perhaps he could lift a little higher, and move forward, like a hovercraft. But it wasn’t happening this time.

Matthew looked a while longer before getting bored and then turned and ran off at full speed to somewhere not very far away, briefly looking back again at Lewis just in case he’d succeeded. Maybe it was the shoes.

Lewis often dreamed he was floating, because you often do dream of things you like doing. But it wasn’t only in his dreams that he could float, he knew exactly how to do it. There were two ways really—one was by doing what he was doing and concentrating and then you may get a little bit of lift. He remembered on a good day being able to float from log to log while the other children could only jump.

The other way—once you’d had a bit of practice—was like extending a jump. You’d push forwards and up with one foot and when both feet were in the air you’d just hold it; still moving forwards, but not down. Sometimes you could only hold it a little bit before your feet slapped down back to the ground, but if you caught it at the right point you could float forward for quite a while, and that was when you were like a hovercraft. He remembered seeing the stones in the tarmac passing beneath his shoes. You had to look down to do it, otherwise it wouldn’t work.

He couldn’t remember exactly when he had last done it. It was starting to seem like it might have been a long time ago and he hoped he hadn’t lost the ability. He saw that the last boys had left the logs and now there were only girls jumping around them, but instead of just jumping from log to log they were running around as well and brushing past him. It wouldn’t be possible if other people touched him. Miss Pearse rang the bell.

Lewis realized with horror that his friends were going to classroom nine in the middle hut. He’d completely forgotten this was a Thursday. Lewis could never remember what class he had at what time but it mostly didn’t matter, because they were nearly always in classroom seven anyway and he’d quickly figure out what the subject was. On Thursdays it was different—Mr. Durant came in, and Mr. Durant used classroom nine.

No one liked Mr. Durant. If there was a Mrs. Durant everyone was sure that even she wouldn’t like him. Mr. Durant had one role in life and one job in the school, and that was to be horrible. Unlike the other teachers he didn’t run tutor groups, didn’t patrol the playground, didn’t do sports or teach any particular subject, but for two hours every Thursday he would take Lewis’ group in classroom nine. And he would just talk at them. Horribly.

If you were ever going to be told off, it would be by Mr. Durant. If you were ever going to be told off for not even having done anything, it was by Mr. Durant. He just seemed to like doing it. The other teachers even seemed to feel sorry for the children going into Mr. Durant’s class. He definitely wasn’t with the other teachers; Robert had said he always went home straight after his class and a few weeks ago Lewis himself had seen him, getting into his car and driving off, with an hour of school left to go.

Lewis felt sick as he walked into the class, but so far had got away without punishment. Paul was crying after he couldn’t sit down because there were no chairs left and Mr. Durant had shouted at him for it. He had to stand. Everyone else was keeping it together, grim-faced. Mr. Durant had begun to talk. No one knew what he was talking about, he just seemed angry.

“Now, we’ve something different today,” he said. The children hadn’t noticed, but there was a metal roll clipped to the top of the blackboard, out of which Mr. Durant scrolled down a large map of the area and clipped it into position at the bottom of the blackboard.

“Now this,” he said, pointing at the map, “is where we live.”

Lewis knew this, he liked maps. He thought for a moment this might be okay, if they were going to start looking at maps.

“And this, he said, pointing again, “is RAF Chinholt.”

Again, Lewis knew this; you often couldn’t hear the TV when the jet fighters flew over.

“It’s only four miles away, you could walk it. It’s a key Soviet target, and when the Russians bomb us you will all be killed in an instant.”

Everyone was still, and the shock stopped Paul from crying just as it caused a couple of the girls to start. Mr. Durant carried on talking, but no one heard anything else he said. Lewis couldn’t believe how horrible he was. Because Mr. Durant didn’t like the Russians Lewis thought that they must be okay, and he hoped and hoped that the Russians would win.

It had rained a bit, and Lewis had stepped in a puddle by mistake and got his left sock wet. It was cold, but his mum had started lighting the fire and asked Lewis to hold the paper up against it to get it going while she went back to chatting with Uncle Derek in the kitchen. He had no idea who Uncle Derek was.

He held the paper tight against the fireplace to stop the draft getting in and blowing the fire out. Right in front of him, on the paper in coarse black and white print were a big pair of boobs. He couldn’t help looking at them. Before he knew it the growing fire had sucked the paper into the fireplace and set it alight—just a small part in the middle, but spreading, and heading for smiling Samantha and the boobs. He had no choice but to grab the poker and smash the paper into the fire so bits wouldn’t float out and add more burns to the carpet. He hit it and hit it and hit it until all bits of paper were safely in the grate, burning with the other wood and paper. He held the poker in place a while and watched as flake after flake of grey ash floated up the chimney. His mum called him.

“Lew, why don’t you go out and play in the garden for a bit?”

It seemed odd that she was calling him Lew in front of Uncle Derek, she never called him Lew, ever. He was embarrassed by it.

“Go up and climb your tree or something and I’ll call you when your dinner’s ready. We’ve just got some grown up things to do.”

Uncle Derek didn’t look at him but Lewis could see he was smiling. “Okay.” Lewis left them to it.

It was a great tree, easy to climb and taller than the top of the house. They were on the very edge of the town and he could look across most of it from the top. As the sky turned red and the birds flew back home to the trees at the back of the field behind him he noticed wisps of smoke come out the top of a couple chimneys on the next street and the street beyond. Dotted around the town as far as he could see, little strands of smoke began to rise up, more and more and getting thicker and thicker as the fires grew beneath them and the sky got darker—as another day came to an end, as the days before had come to an end.

Lewis’ tummy rumbled as he lay in bed the next morning. He tried to convince himself that discomfort was pain, and that the pain was enough to get him off school. His mum gave him some milk of magnesia—which he liked—and agreed he could stay off, but he would have to walk to the shop to buy her some cigarettes.

Because they lived so much on the edge of the town it was quite a long walk to the nearest shop, but not as far as when he had to walk to school when he couldn’t get a lift. There were five small roads he had to cross and two large roads, only the last of which had traffic lights, but he was a sensible boy and good at crossing roads. It wasn’t very busy anyway. He looked left, looked right and left again and then crossed.

His shoes still hurt. These were the only shoes he had at the moment and his mum said they’d get better the more he wore them, but they seemed to be getting worse. This would be a good time to float. Even if he couldn’t float he could do the next best thing, and he started doing extra-long strides so he’d have less far to walk. With each step he tried to make the stride longer until it was almost a jump; left and then right, his feet slapping down and sliding a little on the tarmac, stretching and pointing his tip toes out to land as far forward as possible. He began to get into a rhythm—one, two, step, one, two, step— and the awkward movement began to feel more natural and flowing.

Maybe, if he stretched really far and concentrated hard one of the little jumps would hold and he could glide forward just a bit. Maybe before his first foot started falling he could pull up the other one quickly and they could glide forward together, holding him just above the ground, perhaps until the next street. But every step landed heavily and awkwardly as before and he never could pull up his back foot quickly enough. He closed his eyes for the next step, trying at least to make it a bit longer. And it worked. Although it felt the same and he landed just as heavily, when he opened his eyes he was sure the step had carried him at least half as far again as the last one. Happy that he had achieved at least this much he continued walking normally again.

“Hello Lewis. Hang on, let me just serve this gentleman first, I know what you’re here for.”

Lewis waited. It was a funny little shop, all black where other shops were white, and everything was stacked up high and all around the edge. It was too small to have all the things in it that it had, it was only the size of a room, except it had a counter halfway across in the middle. The old couple who ran it were also too old to be running a shop, Lewis thought it all just looked wrong. But they were friendly, so that was okay.

It wasn’t the old woman who came out of the door at the back with a new crate of tinned soup, but a young woman. Lewis wondered where the old woman was.

“Right Lewis,” said the man, “a packet of fags for your mum and a slice of luncheon meat for you, yes?” The old man sliced some luncheon meat before he could say anything and wrapped it in plastic. Lewis didn’t know if his mum had phoned ahead so he didn’t know if he was supposed to have the luncheon meat or not, but the price ended up the same as it usually was for cigarettes anyway, so he had enough money.

Perhaps cigarettes were cheaper this week. The young woman seemed unhappy though, and was staring at the man. Lewis said thank you, put the cigarettes in his pocket and took the luncheon meat in his left hand. He liked luncheon meat. He rolled the round slice of it into a tube and as he walked home he blew it like a whistle. As his spit made the end of it soft he’d bite that bit off so that the whistle got shorter and shorter until it was all gone.

“The law says no cigarettes to anyone under 16, not 10!” the young woman said to her grandfather.

“Oh, they’re not for him, I know he’s not going to smoke them. I don’t need to worry about the stupid law,” he said.

She carried on stacking while he stood there behind the counter, the shop now empty of customers. He thought he’d lighten the mood—”I went to the zoo the other day. There was just one dog there,” he said.

“Why do you always tell that joke when that boy’s been in?” she asked.

“Do I? Maybe his dad told it me.”

“Well, I’ve heard it anyway,” the young woman said, before stepping back out into the storeroom. He savored the silence and stillness for a moment, then for the sake of completion mumbled to himself, “it was a shih tzu,” while wiping the meat slicer clean.

He thought back to the boy’s dad, times when he’d come in the shop before he got ill, when Lewis was no more than three or four years old. Lewis’s dad was a nice fella and would often chat. He seemed to get on with everyone. He remembered sometimes seeing him and the manageress of the Safeway walking up the street together, chatting and laughing with each other, each holding Lewis’ hand and lifting him into the air as they walked, and Lewis looking at the ground pass beneath his feet without a care in the world.

The post A Childhood That Defies Gravity appeared first on Electric Literature.

It had begun at dawn as they got off the plane, sparse plashes on the runway. By the time the coach deposited them at the Marhaba Aparthotel it was a slanted, dancing deluge. For three days they had been lying on their narrow beds, eating crisps and reading the guidebooks they should have read before the holiday was booked. From time to time they went to the balcony to examine the sky for a break in the clouds. Therese did not feel entitled to complain. Noreen had wanted to go to the Canary Islands, which according to Sky News were enjoying lows of 21 degrees Celsius. The same forecast assured them that the band of low pressure hanging over the northern tip of Africa would move off late on Tuesday. Their last night.

Therese had wanted to go somewhere exotic. To wander through a bazaar crammed with pyramids of heady spices, to drink amber‑hued mint tea from a gold‑painted glass. She had wanted to eat rich meats with her fingers while belly dancers and snake charmers whirled around her. She had wanted to go to Morocco or Egypt, but in her haste to get away had got mixed up. They were in Tunisia, not in a Berber village or by a Phoenician ruin, but in a purpose‑built concrete resort arranged around a new marina, as neat and airless as an architect’s model. Government‑controlled souvenir shops and blocky, modern cafés lined a promenade edged with palm trees still so tender they coiled in on themselves in the gales. To be fair, the Mediterranean was just a few yards away. They had seen it once, when a wave broke across the seawall and sent turbid water frothing over their shoes.

The waiter brought their cappuccinos. Noreen took out her phone and began scrolling through her messages. Therese left hers in her bag, so she wouldn’t be tempted to check again whether Donal had replied. She recognized the couple beside them from the flight. They were sitting in silence, their chairs turned to face the sea, shuffling coins around on their table. They flagged down the waiter and paid him. As he counted the money, the woman said, Every time you turn there’s one with a hand out. Young local men sat in clusters, smoking cigarettes and drinking shots of coffee. Some were with Dutch or German women who spoke English with heavy accents and traced smiley faces in the condensation on their beer glasses. There was clearly a want in them. What were they like, flirting with nineteen‑year‑olds they were old enough to have reared? And what could a boy like that see in a menopausal woman with bad highlights and a parched cleavage?

Noreen put her phone down and took a sip of her coffee.

Jesus, she said.

What’s wrong?

Mammy’s giving out about the Meals on Wheels. Says she won’t see a proper dinner till I’m back. The bowels will be trína chéile for the next fortnight. How are your lot?

Grand, said Therese. A stream of messages had come from Donal the previous evening. Enjoy, you deserve it. We miss you so much. He’d sent a video of a labradoodle playing the Moonlight Sonata on a baby grand, which was most unlike him. He’d even used emojis. Maybe he really was sorry. Therese sent him a curt inquiry about the school run, to which he still hadn’t replied. She kept her emojis to herself.

We need to find something to do later, said Noreen.

Will we have a look through the brochures?

I’ve looked already. All those places are outside, she said. It’s bucketing. And I’m choosing today. If there’s nothing else shaking I’m going on the piss.

The previous day, Therese had suggested they go to the market in the next town. They took a taxi to the medina and wandered through a network of gloomy alleyways.

They passed crates of small round turnips and radishes the size of tennis balls, bunches of mint and dill and savory. Butchers were selling merguez and chunks of sinewy goat from kiosks that didn’t have refrigeration. They saw no ceramics or leather goods or carpets, just tables laden with enamel saucepans and plastic utensils. When they emerged half an hour later, empty‑handed, their taxi driver was still there.

He’d better not charge us for waiting, said Noreen.

The man let out a sigh and started the meter. The resort is very new, very nice. Why do you go to old dirty places?

We want to go where the locals go, said Therese.

Local people do not have a choice.

Well? Noreen was saying. Do I get to choose or what?

Yeah, said Therese. You can choose.

They paid the bill and zipped themselves back into their damp fleeces. On the way out of the café, Noreen picked up a flyer and pushed it into her bag. They bent into the rain and ran back to the hotel.

In the room, they draped their wet things over a radiator. Noreen sat on her bed and took out the flyer. She read it front and back and handed it to Therese.

This might be nice, she said. On one side there was a photograph of a young woman draped from neck to knee in the whitest towel, slim legs slanted stiffly to one side, skin glistening. Her kohled eyes were looking up at the camera.

She was in a steamy room decorated with tiles in shades of turquoise and azure and gold. The price list for the Milk and Honey Hammam was on the other side. It’s not cheap, but there’s nothing to spend money on here, said Noreen. All I’ve bought is duty‑free.

It’s not the money. We should go on a trip. Maybe over toward Tunis.

I, said Noreen, wouldn’t be into that.

Can you not go to the spa by yourself?

I don’t want to go by myself! And you said I could choose.

It was Therese who had booked the wrong resort in the wrong country in the wrong season, after all. Oh, for God’s sake, she said. I’ll go if you come on a trip with me in the morning.

You’re on. She went down to the desk to book the total luxe package.

Therese took out her phone. Nothing. She didn’t want to talk to Donal, yet was annoyed by his silence. What was he at? Sending her cute videos and blushing emojis, then ignoring her.

Noreen came back and clapped her hands. They would be collected from the lobby at a quarter to three. She got two glasses from the bathroom and shook a bottle of rum at Therese, who prepared to explain again that drinking was a bad combination with the meds, that alcohol was a strong indicator for her strain of cancer. But she was tired of explaining, of denying herself. Feck it, she said. It’s not much fun being good all the time.

Noreen let out a whoop that was too big for the room. She poured two drinks, putting so little Coke in her own it looked like ginger ale. She shook salted almonds into a bowl and they brought their glasses out to the covered balcony. The storm billowed across the street below. Taxis, their lights blurred, deposited and collected holidaymakers, pulling off slowly and turning left in the direction of the promenade. Therese looked at Noreen. Grim, she said.

It’s not too bad.

You’re just being nice.

It’s great to get away.

Up to a point.

Noreen took their glasses inside to refill them. Maybe it wasn’t so bad. Better than looking at Donal for the week.

If we’re going to Tunis we might as well go the whole way. Beyond Carthage, said Therese.

I don’t even know where I am now. I thought we were going to Lanzarote.

It was an ancient city. The ruins are well preserved, and they’re a few miles after Tunis. Beyond them there’s a lovely village.

Therese got the guidebook and showed her a double‑page photograph. Whitewashed houses were built into a hillside so steep they seemed to overhang each other. Doors and windows and ironwork had been painted in shades of blue, and carpets of bougainvillea crept over walls and terraces. Blond tourists sat on sun‑bleached patios and looked out over the shimmering Bay of Tunis. Sidi Bou Said, she said.

It’s hard to believe it’s the same country, said Noreen.

A sudden gust caught some rain and threw it across the balcony. They went indoors.

Reception called to say their car had arrived. They weren’t ready. Therese didn’t have time to brush her teeth and her mouth was waxy from eating nuts. On the way down, Noreen answered everything Therese said with a loose laugh. When the lift doors opened, the few people who were sitting around the foyer were looking in their direction, Noreen’s guffaws clearly audible from a couple of floors away. A tall, slim man in jeans and a suit jacket was waiting by the desk. He said his name was Giuseppe. He brought them outside to his car, a model of Fiat Therese had never seen before. Noreen sat in the front beside him.

Loving the motor, she said.

Giuseppe put a plastic card in a slot and the dashboard lit up.

Buongiorno, said a deep electronic male voice.

Buongiorno yourself, said Noreen and slapped her thigh. Her movements had become expansive and inaccurate, and she knocked her elbow against the back of Giuseppe’s hand. The gold Rolex watch on his wrist was loose and made a tinny jangle.

Are you French, Giuseppe?

Italiano.

Very nice, said Noreen. Therese bit the inside of her cheeks to keep a laugh in. Noreen looked at her in the rearview mirror and stuck her tongue out.

Giuseppe braked hard when he needed to slow and took corners in third gear. When they got out, Therese put her hands on the roof of the car to steady herself. The flyer had shown a traditional bathhouse; they were outside the annex to an office block, a flat‑roofed concrete building with a row of high windows. Inside, they were greeted by a young woman wearing a white tunic and trousers, like a nurse’s uniform. She was heavily made up, her hair covered by a scarf. She led them into a changing room, gave them baskets for their belongings. She handed each of them a towel and a piece of turquoise tissue paper. Noreen unfolded hers. It was a pair of disposable knickers. She held them up in front of Therese’s face and tugged the elastic on the waistband in and out.

Ah here, said Therese.

They undressed with care, folding each garment as it was removed, placing it in the basket. The paper rustled beneath their towels as they wriggled into the surgical pants. Just as they were ready, Giuseppe came into the room. Therese looked around the walls and ceiling; he had come in so promptly she wondered had he been watching them on a monitor. She and Noreen stood side by side, their feet in white cotton slippers. Giuseppe stepped forward and tugged their towels away. It reminded Therese of a trick she had seen on TV when she was a child, involving a tablecloth and stacks of clattery china. Giuseppe looked at Therese’s body for a second longer than was polite. His removal of the towel was so flamboyant he would lose face by giving it back to her. Noreen crossed her arms over her breasts. They squashed out above and below, blue veined and creamy like Stilton.

He brought them into a steam‑filled room with wooden benches around the walls. Rain dashed the windows. Condensation ran down beige tiles. It was like the changing rooms in the public pool at home.

Relax, said Giuseppe, an instruction that filled Therese with anxiety. He left the room.

At first they sat facing each other, Noreen giving the floor a stellar smile. At least you’re thin, she said, without looking up. Then she stood. I’ll come over beside you, she said.

Therese’s moisturizer was trickling down her face and into her mouth. She could taste chemicals and salt. Noreen’s face was deeply flushed, her eyes pink streaked. It’s a bit mad, she said.

Just a bit.

Probably normal for here, though.

Therese didn’t think it was normal at all. Most of the local women covered their hair, wore long sleeves with loose trousers or ankle‑length skirts. She doubted many of them came to the Milk and Honey to be stripped nearly naked by Giuseppe. Noreen leaned back and closed her eyes, lids flickering like a child feigning sleep. Therese looked down at herself. Her right aureole was beginning to dimple, the nipple hardening. Sweat was coursing steadily now, over her throat, down along her sternum, collecting under her breasts. After months spent trying to keep them dry, they felt slimy and dank.

Giuseppe came back with fresh towels. Therese wound hers around herself. Noreen pushed her chin forward and puffed out a jet of rummy breath. She draped her towel over her arm and winked at Therese as they followed him into the next room. He took their towels again and ushered them under the showerheads that ran along one wall. The tepid water was bracing after the hot steam. A man came in, shorter and older than Giuseppe. He was barefoot and holding a tin bucket. He went at whatever was in it with a brush, eyes lowered. Giuseppe said something to him in Arabic. The man knelt beside Noreen. He flicked a clot of mud at her thigh and spread it outward, up and down, back and forth, until her haunch was covered.

Therese had an urge to flee but could only watch and wait. The man finished with Noreen and began to work on her. The mud was cold at first, then tight, the skin on her thighs and hips constricting as it dried. Her arms then, the brush skimming along the length of them and back. He twirled two fingers and she turned to face the wall. Long strokes now, the cloy of wet earth at the nape of her neck, in the elastic of the ludicrous turquoise knickers. Therese didn’t feel drunk anymore, just full of dread. She wanted to take the brush, smear herself in mud, cover her scars. Another twirl of his fingers and she could bear it no more.

No, she said. Thank you.

At first, when the tubes and drains had been removed, after the ragged blackened whorls had been shaved away, Therese had thought it looked pretty good. Clothed, her breasts looked better than ever; the left one had always been slightly bigger than the right and now they were the same size. She had refused a silicone implant. Even tooth whitening seemed unnatural to her, and she couldn’t bear the idea of a pouch of chemicals under her skin. The flesh to make a new breast had been taken from her abdomen, leaving a flat stomach and a pink groove that smiled from hip to hip. The reconstruction was a patchwork of flesh in different shades and textures, some run through with silvery stretch marks, some tanned, all tacked on to the milky shreds of what the surgeons left behind.

Noreen’s mud had dried to the dun‑gray of a wallowing mammal. It cracked when she bent an arm to scratch herself. The man ran the shower and hunched under the water with her, scrubbing at her with a loofah, limb by limb, torso back then front, brown droplets flaying his white clothes. When he was done, Noreen stood freshly pink and smiling.

It was Therese’s turn. Her scars grew bleary in the steam and splashing mud. Since the surgery she had thought about her skin differently, as though it was a fine veneer that mustn’t be scraped or tarnished. Now it felt raw, new. The man’s work was done. He bowed and backed away.

In the next room, an attempt had been made to temper the spartan buffness with candles and a diffuser that was panting sandalwood. Oud music was playing low in the background. Noreen claimed a massage table.

That sounds like sean-nós, she said. It’s shite.

Therese lay down. In private, she could face her body, her scars. Exposed like this she had to take on the reactions of other people, had to absorb their discomfort, their revulsion. She had only managed to attend counseling twice, as the weekly trip to Dublin wasn’t feasible. There was a support group in town, but she couldn’t bear the thought of sharing her feelings with friends of friends, women she knew to see. The breast nurse in the hospital had given her a booklet that she read until she had learned it by heart, ticking off the phases as they passed. Her cancer became old news. She hadn’t needed further treatment. She was still here.

Noreen shifted onto her side.

Are you all right, hun?

Fabulous.

Giuseppe came back in his shirtsleeves. He took off his cuff links; they were showy like his watch. Therese wondered at a boy his age in such a get‑ up, the impression he was crafting. He raised his arm and poured oil from a height as if he was partaking in a sacrament. Therese looked at the ceiling. She tried not to think about the slaps his hands made as he pummeled at the mounds and troughs of Noreen Foley’s body. She tried not to look but turned her head in time to see him clamp his palms over Noreen’s breasts and move them in a circular motion, more erotic than therapeutic.

It was a glorified brothel, with a clientele of desperate women. Giuseppe dressed as he did to appeal to golf widows from northern Europe, to women who found themselves single at an age when being alone made them feel ridiculous. He probably wasn’t even Italian. She and Noreen fitted right in.

Therese lay on her front with her face in the hole, her real breast flattened out and tingling at the graze of the towel, the new one a sturdy knot of flesh that felt nothing. He began at her tailbone and kneaded his way up to her shoulders. He hesitated then rolled her onto her back. The corner of her mouth was twitching.

Donal couldn’t stand to touch it. Once she had taken his finger and pressed it to the skin between the seams. He had forced a smile but pulled away when she placed it where the nipple used to be. Afterward he treated her to the full gamut of his foreplay repertoire, including a foray down below, which she didn’t even like. She doubted Donal much liked it either; he had stayed at the clean end when she was giving birth to the children.

A hard kaa sound then a slow inhalation came from the next table. Noreen had fallen asleep. Giuseppe held the almond‑scented oil above Therese’s scars, red lines like Biro marks, above the scraps of skin that held her heart in, some ribbed with silver, some tanned, all cut from her. She nodded.

Back in the hotel, Therese decided against a full shower, wanting to leave the oil on her body. She washed her hair over the bathroom basin. When she came out, Noreen was waiting with a drink. Therese took a sip. Her stomach heaved. Since the surgery, she had only been drunk once, on the night of the pink champagne. Noreen held her glass up.

Here’s to getting away. And to Geppetto and his wandering hands.

Giuseppe. And I can’t believe you just put me through that.

You loved it.

Feck off.

Thanks for coming with me. I go on holiday by myself no bother, but it’s nice not having to.

In the past Therese had pitied Noreen, the diet she started every Monday, the framed inspirational quotes she hung on her walls. Now she saw she had no right. Being alone wasn’t the worst thing. It’s great Donal doesn’t mind you going off by yourself, said Noreen.

Makes no odds to him. It’s during term time.

Dishy Donal.

He hadn’t put “dishy” in his profile. Cultured. Sensitive. Discreet. The three words her husband used to describe himself. To make other women want to fuck him.

They changed clothes and put on makeup. They took a taxi around the corner to a restaurant. It was quiet with warm lighting. Therese took the wine list from the waiter. She chose the most expensive white; she was in the habit now of wasting money, flaunting the silliness at Donal. He could hardly object.

She had discovered his purchase by accident. She rarely looked at their bank account. They didn’t have a big mortgage, and their salaries, after a slashing at the start of the downturn, had stabilized. There was even a little to spare, so neatly had they been living. Donal persuaded Therese to buy a new car. She wondered now if guilt had made him want to spoil her. Or perhaps it was a diversionary tactic, that she might not notice his five‑hundred‑euro transaction if other new payments were going out. But he had entered one extra digit on the car payment plan and the first installment had bounced. Therese saw the other payment and contacted Visa to report an error. The boy at the end of the phone asked her to hold while he checked. When he came back on he was tactful. Later, when she clicked on the site and found Donal’s profile, she replayed the conversation in her head and heard amusement in the boy’s voice. How stupid she must have sounded. There must be some mistake. No one from this house would be on a site like that.

Plates of food were carried past them to a table of local men, plump globe artichokes with a little pot of something on the side that smelled lemony, astringent. It wasn’t on the menu. The waiter recommended some traditional dishes. They both ordered a briq, a pouch of papery pastry filled with crab and egg. Noreen babbled ceaselessly, managing to finish her starter before Therese began hers, and drink most of the wine. Their couscous royale arrived. It was served in green and yellow pottery bowls, with a darkly spicy red paste on the side and a jug of broth. Noreen shook the empty bottle at the waiter. They were the only people in the room who were drinking alcohol. He brought two fresh glasses with the wine and asked who would like to taste.

Lob it in there, boss. We’ll soon tell you if there’s something wrong with it, said Noreen.

He was trying to be professional, but Noreen was pushing the clean glasses back at him. He poured wine from the new bottle into their greasy glasses and left it in the cooler. Noreen took a long drink. Jesus! she said so loudly the waiter rushed across the room.

Madame?

Mademoiselle. It’s rank.

I am so sorry. This is why I like to make the proper service.

Serv‑eece? she said. It has nothing to do with the serveece that you’re selling gone‑off wine.

I will bring another bottle.

Don’t bother, said Noreen. I’m sickened now.

The other diners had stopped talking. There was no need to speak to him like that, Therese hissed across the table at her. It was like dealing with a child. Not that Therese’s daughters would ever be so rude. Not in front of her, at any rate. Maybe they behaved badly when she wasn’t looking, like their father.

They paid the bill and hailed a taxi on the street. Noreen said they were going clubbing. End of. Therese could not even imagine what that might mean in Tunisia on a wet Tuesday in March. In the hotel foyer, they followed signs for Pepe’s Nite Club along a corridor. The place was huge and empty. The barman clapped his hands together.

What would the beautiful ladies like to drink tonight?

Therese asked for a Coke.

You’d be better off with something clean. Like vodka, said Noreen.

He gave them the cocktail list. It was full of misspelled sexual innuendo. Therese began to panic that Noreen would order her a drink with a pornographic name and leave her to claim it from the barman, so she went to a table and sat down. Noreen danced across the floor to her.

This is a gas, isn’t it? she said.

The DJ left his box. He walked toward them, one hip swinging wide as he moved, as though one leg was shorter than the other.

Do you mind if I join you? he said.

Therese minded very much.

Feel free, said Noreen. She took off her cardigan, revealing a floral maxi dress. A necklace with her name on it was partly buried in her clothes, a gold NO flashing in the disco lights. Everything else about her said yes.

The barman brought a tray of drinks. Sex on the Beach for two, he said. His name was Kamal.

Noreen prattled away gamely. The weather was a nightmare, but you’d see worse at home. The local food was delicious, but the wine! The hammam was so relaxing. The men looked at each other.

We’re going on a trip tomorrow, said Noreen.

Oh? said Kamal.

To Carthage. And Sidi Bou Said.

The DJ said his name was Joe. The barman called him Youssef. He was twenty‑two. The lighting made him look older, defining his nose, shading his temple and jawline. He told Therese he had green eyes. She didn’t know where to look.

The cocktail was so sweet her teeth were tingling. Joe offered her a cigarette. She put one in her mouth and Noreen screaked. You shouldn’t be smoking.

No one should be smoking.

You really shouldn’t, said Noreen. Therese had cancer last year. She did great with the surgery. She had one of them off. No chemo, though. Very lucky.

Stop, said Therese. Joe sparked a lighter under the cigarette. The smoke tasted revolting.

Me and Therese used to work together, said Noreen. I had to take leave of absence to look after my mother. Daddy died last year. We had an annus horribilis. She pronounced it anus.

You fucking eejit, Therese said softly. Noreen began to laugh.

Joe went back to the DJ box. He put on a slow song. Noreen roared “unbreak my heart” when the chorus started. Kamal went back to the bar and sloshed the contents of the ice bucket into the sink.

I’d say that pair are looking for the bonk, said Noreen as the song faded out.

They couldn’t wait to get away from us.

Fuck them. C’mere, are you glad we did that today?

Not really. I wasn’t expecting to have to show the world my mutilation.

It was only me. And the wee man with the bucket. And I’m sure Geppetto has seen worse.

Thanks.

Seen it all, I mean.

Noreen lifted her glass to her lips. Some of the drink didn’t make it and dripped from her chin. She wiped the back of her hand across her mouth, leaving her cheek and knuckles glistering with lip gloss. I was so looking forward to this holiday, she said.

Me too, said Therese. It wasn’t true. She had come to annoy Donal. She had begun withholding from him, denying him, in the hope it would make him feel as wretched as she did. Pathetic, really. There wasn’t much point in withholding yourself from someone who didn’t want you. The afternoon had been bizarre. A scrawny youth dressed like an eighties Roger Moore had touched her new breast, groped it and rubbed it because she had paid him to. He had scarcely drizzled oil over her when she became tearful. The skin was numb and monstrous beneath his fingers. I’m afraid of hurting you, Donal had said to her. She hadn’t been able to tell him that there was no sensation. It was dead, like a hide. In the months that followed they grew shy with each other. She thought it would pass. Then the car payment bounced.

When he came home from work that night, she was waiting at the kitchen table. She had drunk the best part of a bottle of pink champagne, a get‑well present. Later she regretted her choice of drink. Whiskey or brandy would have given the proceedings some gravitas. The confrontation was exhilarating. She had found herself online too, she told him. Oh yes. She had gone online to find out why. Cosmopolitan told her it was meaningless, that loads of middle‑aged men watched porn and preferred sex with strangers. As she was reading, ads for sex toys and vibrators had flashed at her. And you know what? She might buy some, because it wasn’t up to much, in fairness, that side of it, when she had to squash him in because he was a bit wishy‑washy in that department. It was intoxicating, getting to say anything and everything she had ever wanted to say. And there was so much, wasn’t there, that you could say to someone who had given up their right to fight back? Someone who stood in front of you full of a shame you could hardly bear to behold, because you were full of shame yourself.

She had tried to calm down. In fairness, she said, she didn’t blame him. It must be so dreary being married to her at the best of times. And now, with her Frankenstein boob and sensible clothes. To be honest, she wouldn’t mind being ridden sideways by someone new, a young fella with a langer you could hang a coat on. But in fairness, in fucking fairness, she would be actually embarrassed to put herself out there. As for the words he used to describe himself. Ha! Cultured. Sensitive! Discreet? Such a laugh, she said. Only she didn’t feel like laughing because she didn’t think anything would ever be the same again, and even though he had only set up the account, and there was no activity on it, and she could see he had tried to close it, it was too late. He had wanted to go elsewhere and now he could fuck away off elsewhere and into the spare room, where he still slept.

Noreen finished her drink and crossed the empty dance floor in the direction of the toilets. Therese followed her. She was in a cubicle, the door jammed open by her backside. Therese held her hair out of her face until she had finished retching.

I’m fucking twisted.

Therese leaned over her and pressed the flusher. Come on. We haven’t far to go.

When they came out Joe was gone. Kamal jiggled a bunch of keys until they were through the door. Noreen reeled between the walls on the way to the room. At the sight of her bed, she hurtled onto it in her clothes. Therese covered her with a bedspread and left a glass of water on the locker beside her.

There was a rap at the door. Joe was in the corridor, wearing a leather jacket.

I didn’t say good night, he said. His eyes were green, all right.

After he left Therese went out on the balcony. It had stopped raining. The flooding on the asphalt had begun to drop and the wind was down. She sat for a long time and watched the deserted street, night fading to dawn. There was a text from Donal. The kids had got hold of his phone and sent those daft messages. Her poor girls. They had taken to coming into her bed in the mornings, asking why their father was in the other room. If there was anything more shameful than getting a knee ‑trembler off a young fella in a hotel corridor, it was the idea of her daughters trying to make things right.

She was showered and ready by eight. She read the train timetable once more, memorizing where to change for the other line that would bring them along the coast.

She shook Noreen’s shoulder. Shift yourself, she said. Our train’s at eight forty.

Noreen heaved onto her side. I’m in rag order. And I’ve enough of looking at ruins living with the mother.

Therese threw a sachet of Alka‑Seltzer at her. What’ll you do for the day?

I might go back to the hammam. See what the story is with that Geppetto fella.

Therese walked to the station. It was dull, but there was warmth in the sky that seemed to promise sunshine. She sat by a window, relieved to be in transit, rattling away from the resort. She changed at Tunis, taking a path through a dilapidated part of town and boarding a train at another station. Noreen would have hated it. After a few stops, apartment blocks and auto‑repair stores thinned to show glimpses of scrub‑covered dirt, flashes of sea. The carriage was full, a party of French students taking up the rest of the seats. When the train arrived at Carthage she let them get off ahead of her. She waited until they had joined the queues and walked to where she had a clear view of the pale green sea. The seam of cloud had begun to break up. Weak sunlight slanted across the stone. The ruins were laid out in front of her, pooled with rainwater that glittered like crystals of salt.

The post Vacation Is No Escape From Her Sorry Husband appeared first on Electric Literature.

Check out the audiobook edition of this excerpt, read by award-winning actress Chloë Sevigny, from Simon & Schuster Audio.

Alice
FRIDAY

Opening night and, as soon as they could get Leontes’s detachable sleeves Velcroed on—the adhesive tape was moist and mucky in the record June heat, not sticking to the tunic—the show would begin. The sun had risen each day that week angry and blinking, baking the asphalt. Alice, sweltering, was tucked away backstage, hidden in the narrow wings.

Sadie had once observed that Alice’s favorite part of acting was disappearing. Alice couldn’t deny this was true. This may have been why she loved coming in with clean hair and knowing someone else would take care of the rest. She would be provided the exact words to speak, down to the punctuation, and directed where to stand. Told which shoes to wear to become queen of Sicily. Alice liked to place herself in others’ hands. She liked how easy it was to slip into another life.

And slip into another life she had. A year and a half ago, ditching the Bay Area—and her family, and her best friend—for Hollywood, to pursue stardust dreams she was scarcely sure she had.

It had all started in second grade, when Alice had auditioned for the school play, Under the Sea, and landed a role! She’d played a cold-water sea urchin who lived in the Shallows, the underworld of King Neptune’s marvelous kingdom. It was considered an undesirable bit part. Alice couldn’t sit down or pee. All the classmates, mermaids and starfish, shunned the monstrous urchin. Alice had one line she did not understand, about being turned into uni. Still, having been cast, in a role, to her, life could not be improved upon.

Now, in LA, things were more complicated. Staring down the nothing, the zero, the black hole, the unmanifest, the 100-percent-pure potential, the no-thing. Submitting headshots online, not even landing auditions.

But Alice’s mind was peaceful. She was inclined toward the world, and liked participating with it, even if that meant auditioning for a role and being rejected. She had what she realized so many actors lacked. She believed she had a right to be in the room.

Evenings, she worked at the lustrous lobby restaurant of a radiantly white beachside luxury hotel, where $500 a night meant rattan everything, soft-grid cotton blankets in organic shades, and buckets of seashells under museum lighting.

She worked downstairs, in the more casual, beach-level dining hall—Pico Boulevard sloped as it dropped to the shore. Elevators opened straight onto the dining room, out of which merry children poured with harassed nannies. The skinny silver flower vases were always tipping over, the paper teapot handle covers always slipping off. But the job supplied Alice with a chance to be her most refined self. She switched on the waitress role, maintaining a straight face as she logged infants’ orders for Pellegrino, circling back to inquire apologetically whether Perrier would suffice. The nannies nodded, catching her eye. She was glad they did not know she, too, came from a modest dynasty.

Though she didn’t need to, Alice always had a job, whether or not she was suited for them. During school, she had worked retail, at a boutique first, then a cruelty-free “skin hair and body formulations” shop, but had been rightly suspected by the manager of extending most patrons her employee discount after failing to ring up every fourth item. What could Alice say? She was a giver. It was just her nature.

And last month, she had put her waitress role on hold to return to the sweltering East Bay for rehearsals and for the show tonight—to the Brackendale, a pocket-sized community playhouse. The theater was in the basement of a large, underused movieplex—the kind that were vanishing everywhere, with the advent of streaming, on their last legs—elaborate with elevators. Audience members occasionally overheard a burst of volume, the action upstairs, giving the quieter live plays downstairs the feeling of a second-tier show.

The theater was located, providentially, not ten minutes from the childhood home of her best friend, Sadie. And yet, stunningly, Sadie had bailed on attending, with the excuse of a pre-booked trip with her boyfriend. Alice felt sure she was being punished. Sadie had never forgiven Alice for moving to LA “Doesn’t it bother you, to be a make-believe person?” she had inquired when Alice planned to pursue acting. Los Angeles was a place where Sadie, with all her managing, counseling, and advocating, wasn’t. A place where Alice could reinvent herself. Not that she would. Just that she . . . could.

Perhaps for the best Sadie wasn’t here. Tonight’s show was off to an unsound start—Archidamus’s microphone level was set to a higher input than Camillo’s, so his voice thundered and boomed. Alice was aware of the sound operator taking penitent notes beside her; he’d have to recalibrate the mics’ volumes.

Rehearsals were one thing, but it was different tonight, the proceedings activated by the presence of the audience. There were particulars Alice hadn’t noticed before. The curtains were cheaply made: by no means velvet, not even velour. The sound operator had been munching Pringles before showtime and the can stood upright on the audio monitor beneath the call-board. His breath smelled of sour cream and onion. It was so hot the windows of the theater could fold and melt. Pity the audience. Alice hoped they’d be able to forgive it.

“Pardon,” a stagehand tech whispered, scooting past with a rack of polyester-fleece prop sheep.

Every mistake that night counted; any extension of the show’s three-week run would be provisional. Truth be told, there were still eight or ten lines in the play that Alice did not understand. She did not have the Folger edition many of her castmates had fluffed up with sticky tags. The edition gave a synopsis of every scene. Alice did not want to look as if she needed footnotes to digest something so handily absorbed that the entire audience broke into merriment before Leontes was even through with the line.

Why Alice didn’t just SparkNotes them she could not say. Hermione’s lines of dialogue were straightforward enough. That was the benefit of playing an openhanded character. No machinations, no dissembling wordplay, no complex, conflicting motivations.

Goodness was clear. Decency made sense.

Alice readied herself, positioning her velvet bodice with voluminous sleeves tight over her jeans. If the small details were sound, the rest would follow. She tried to summon regality. At her cue, she took a steadying breath and her place at center stage, beside her wrathful, insecure, and tyrannical husband. Hot, hot, the lights were. She felt her freckles flush. Her face, really: every inch was blanketed with them. Back one middle-school summer, at Fernwood summer camp, a hardy, indelicate girl—probably sensing the effect Alice had already even then over the male gender in general and specifically the one male she coveted—had accosted Alice in the dining hall, waving a napkin: “Oops. I thought you had mud on your face. I guess it’s just your freckles.” Mean, mean, girls were mean.

As a teenager Alice’s face had resolved into beauty—like a camera brought into focus. And Alice’s fate was set. Her fate: to be exquisite. Alice knew it, couldn’t help knowing—even as she knew it would have benefited her not to know. An innocence impossible to retain when she saw the facts plastered across the face of every person whose eyes she met.

A handful of lines later, Alice moved downstage left, to lay her hand on Polixenes’s elegant, ornamented arm, radiating heat under the embellishments. She squinted out at the shifting audience—only forty people, though it looked like an ocean. She was scanning for her best friend’s mother, who had come in her stead. Or who was supposed to have—though Alice had comped her ticket, she knew she was liable not to show.

As a renowned feminist, Celine was a woman who defined what women were. Gender was a construct, she alleged, smiling lopsidedly, daring someone to hold her to account. Bio-sex meant nothing. Simple as that.

Alice was surprised that someone who wrote about women’s solidarity could have such a complicated relationship with her own daughter. Sadie had shrugged when first introducing Alice to her mother. “Sometimes moms have charisma and sometimes they don’t.” Alice hadn’t known they could.

Tonight, Alice knew Celine would report back to Sadie. Sanford Meisner could be there, and his opinion would matter less.

Alice stammered, “I had thought, sir, to have held my peace . . .” But before her character could even get through her line, she was being hauled off for sins she had not committed. The play was a tragicomedy and Alice felt unsteadied by the shifts in tone, finding them difficult to track.

“Away with her!” Leontes shouted, in the low growl he had cultivated over the prior week of rehearsals. He paused for audience reaction. The king, undone by his mania, exiles his one true ally: “To prison! He who shall speak for her is afar off guilty but that he speaks.” This spoken more limply than in the prior four days of rehearsals, when he had still been full of freshly cast bravado, and before the heat wave had hit like an anvil.

Alice was always surprised at the ease with which acting came to her. She did not want to be a movie star. Really, she didn’t. She just wanted to stretch her sense of self. She wanted to get to know other people, within the comfort of her own person. The only hiccup was that, as Alice understood it, genuine artistic expression required suffering. “Raise the stakes,” Alice’s teacher had advised. This, Alice was not sure how to do. She had never, as a rule, sought out suffering, never been attracted to it.

“You gods,” Alice pleaded, as Hermione. Pregnant and powerless, she is imprisoned for a crime she has not committed. Another actress might lose patience with the character’s abiding, saintlike composure.

Before Alice knew it, her character had died of grief, then revived, and reunited with her daughter, her husband’s allegations having been proven unfounded. Alice wondered if, out in the audience, Celine was thinking of Sadie. Alice hurtled through the final scene, then the stage lights bumped off, a zero-count fade to black. Then the lights were up again for curtain call.

Bowing blindly, Alice’s eyes swept over the audience. There she was. Once you caught sight of her, it was hard to see anyone else. That slow, rebel grin, lopsided, kind of cowboy. Her effortless lean, inclining from her waist, still slender at forty-seven, her hair tightly curled and slightly ragged. Scowling and alone, she remained seated. In an unfriendly mood, then. Celine.

She was a big-league lesbian, a patron saint of the case for social construction. Celine was as close as a sex critic came to a household name. Rumor had it that she had once been piloting a one-seater plane when it crashed into Buchanan Field, and waltzed away from the wreckage without a scratch.

As a child, Alice’s favorite cartoon character was the Brain, a mouse scientist with a bulbous noggin to accommodate his outsized brain. That was what she thought smart looked like. Now she thought it looked like Celine. Celine looked like she had spent time at distant, clandestine coral-sand beaches, like she had just sauntered in from a day in the sun. She made it appear effortless, to change the world.

In the theater lobby, the king was encircled and laureled. Alice struggled through the clamorous crowd, in heat so sultry it could burst a ripe fruit. The air wavered. There was the stage manager, Darius, who during rehearsals had begun steering Alice, only Alice, into position onstage with his arm encircling her waist. She knew he wanted something from her. If she had not relocated down to Los Angeles, she might have tried to figure out what.

Alice’s eye found her. Celine loitered in the dim light of a portico under the exit sign, her hair aflame, perfectly backlit by the white LED signage. She was leaning casually against a column, her set brow keenly directed at the greenroom outlet, not knowing that Alice would come out the opposite side. Celine was leggy, five-eleven, with well-built shoulders. She struck Alice as solid, durable as a mountain. Mother and daughter bore little resemblance, except when they crossed swords. In those moments, you could mistake one voice for the other.

Alice waved like a windshield wiper, but Celine didn’t see. Alice shouldered through the crowd, sidestepping a few well-wishers.

She cleared her throat to attract Celine’s attention. She wiped her forehead.

Celine turned left, straightened, and patted her pockets. She had a particularly masculine way of inhabiting a space. A demonic, flaring hank of orange hair tumbled over her forehead.

Her words cut through the thickness of the air: “There you are, hey-hi.” Her voice was scratchy over the rising noise and she smelled spicy, like men’s red deodorant. Just like Sadie’s, her skin glowed, lunar. “Didn’t see you come out.”

They moved together toward the dormant concession area. It smelled of the coffee that had been poured out after intermission.

“You lived.”

“What?”

That askew mouth, tilting when Celine smiled. “In Shakespeare, the women reliably—” And she made a casual noose gesture over her neck.

A dark and glossy bouquet of exotic flowers, tied oddly with a raggedy ribbon, hung limp at her side, as though she were trying to keep it from Alice’s line of sight. Here’s flowers for you was a line in the play. Hot lavender, mints, savory, marjoram, the marigold. What was hot lavender? Alice liked the sound of it. Celine tucked the bouquet behind her further. “Sadie insisted I come.” The words seemed prickly on her tongue.

Alice would not let this get to her. This was no slap in the face. It was just Celine, waiting for this little ceremony to run its course. Alice was habituated to Celine’s oddity of manner. And yet, for her uniform lack of social grace, Celine felt uncomplicated to Alice. She was just the way she was. Alice vowed not to let this diminish her.

As a teenager, Alice had come across a feature spread promoting self-confidence in a monthly magazine. A sunny-haired girl perched on the front stoop of a brownstone, smiling hugely with her teeth.

So unlike the mean models you usually saw, with drawn faces and drained bodies.

Alice had decided, in that moment, that happy people were beautiful. Much of her fate seemed to have been decided just then. She was grateful to have come across that photo, on what must have been an impressionable day.

“Rude of her not to come, you must be thinking,” Celine said, with deadly accuracy.

“That’s not true.”

What eyes Celine had. The better to eat you with. Celine’s tank top was road sign orange. Caution, her jacket said. Warning. Detour. “I’m sorry, have I said too much? I have a terrible habit of that.”

Alice searched Celine’s eyes to gauge which Alice she would prefer: the devotee or the disinterested. Alice suspected that her customary persona around Celine—quiet ghost gone unseen, veering clear of the friction between mother and daughter; occasionally trying to curry favor with household deeds, scouring the cast-iron pot and toting in the grocery haul—would not suit the occasion, that in this escalation of their proximity, something more was required of her.

“No, I’m glad you’re here.”

Celine’s eyes froze. Wrong, all wrong. In that family, they addressed one another with coolness and irony. “But I’m sorry if you had other things to do tonight—I mean, I’m sure you did.”

A little under two years prior, Alice had audited Celine’s Cal Berkeley class alongside Sadie—after a persistent campaign, she had talked her friend into it; convinced her that someday she’d regret not having seen what was said to be her mother’s best quality.

In the library, Alice had plucked Celine’s book of lesbian-feminist theory off the shelf. Sadie had been righteously indignant: “No big deal, just some casual reading by your best friend’s sworn enemy.” Alice had smiled to herself: Sadie and her mother shared a sense of drama. Sadie dismissed the major feminist text summarily: “It’s geurilla scholarship, derivative Paglia.” Once, while Celine and Sadie were squabbling in the kitchen, Alice had peeked into Celine’s office to admire the stack of pages on her desk, scrawled with handwriting black and perilous.

It made Alice sad, how unconscious Sadie was of her mother’s wonderful qualities of perception. Alice had been intoxicated by the book—Celine coming across, as Alice devoured the stream of saturated prose, like a friend Alice wished she had, an antidote to Sadie, the friend she did. The only way she could describe it was that she wanted to turn the text on its side, fry the text up, and eat it like a hamburger patty. The chapter on mother-love, “Nurturance and Tyranny,” was unapologetically about Sadie and managed to be, by turns, both razor-sharp and heartfelt.

The archaic myth of sexuality, Celine had written, is not just a façade but an overprotective armor against emancipation. A hard outer shell so that we feel the cold and the wind only in our private ocean, inside the conch shell in which we can hear the remote whisper of the self.

Alice should not have pointed out to her friend, the subject of the chapter, that it was like nothing else she had ever read. Sadie would not engage with the grist of the content, retorting only that Alice was impressed purely because it was the only book Alice had read that school year, focusing instead on having fun. It was not precisely true that Alice did not read. It was that she read the same books over the years, for comfort. She had an inclination for nice stories with nice endings. Pretty books with good morals: Louisa May Alcott and Laura Ingalls Wilder; stories of women facing a certain hardship and pulling through with aplomb. Each time she revisited, she saw something new.

Sadie read biographies and was interested in life in its most material terms.

Celine had come from Ohio, from nothing, her appetites propelling her like an engine. She was a hip, interesting person who had made her own way. Alice’s family was nothing like this. For the millionth time, Alice was struck by the dissimilitude. Alice had grown up in the upscale valley town of Moraga, where corn grew bearded with long blue silk. Though it was only twenty minutes by car, it was a different world. Alice felt a cramp of guilt at the thought. She had never been nearby without telling her mother, Hadley.

Seeming to decide something, Celine thrust her flowers at Alice, gripping the stalk far south, like the hilt of a sword. “Here.” Alice presumed she was meant to take them.

“These are from Sadie. Anthuriums. You’re supposed to snip the stems.” Celine rubbed the scar on her inner forearm. Alice nodded gamely. The flowers were scary: black-brown, plasticky vinyl, rubbery, with assaulting stamens. “Otherwise, they won’t drink.”

Darius’s eyes rippled in their direction, through the congested lobby, from the nucleus of his crowded circle. Alice knew he was holding out hope, one of these days, either during rehearsal or the run, for her to consent to an after-show drink. For once, she wished he would come over, spread his entourage’s chatter, and relieve Celine of her. If he’d asked for a drink right then, Alice would have said yes.

“That was nice of her.” Alice was a sucker for flowers. She had grown up with them. They did not seem frivolous to her, but essential. She breathed in deeply, the bloomy scent hitting deep in her belly. They probably were from Sadie. That would be like her, to go to the shop, select the flowers, wrap them, tie the ribbon, and drop them at Celine’s.

“Is your mother here?” Celine asked, a little sour. She had always been suspicious of Alice’s mother, mistrustful of Sadie’s open interest in her. Alice had vowed to invite her mother next week when the show’s kinks were ironed out. She suspected that Hadley thought, behind her façade, that her daughter was a nonstarter, like bread that wouldn’t rise. Not that Hadley, brisk and clarifying as sea air, inevitably halfway out the door before Alice could get a word in, would be idling, awaiting an invitation. She was used to hearing little from Alice.

“She doesn’t leave the house in this heat.” Alice tidied the scruffy ribbon on the bouquet. “It would be a whole situation.”

They stood there. Celine’s smell had softened. It was nice, actually, like spiced cloves mixed with sunny morning. When she still lived at home, Sadie had always hung both their sets of washed clothing outside to dry. She said it made the clothes last longer and made them smell of sunshine.

The bright light radiated from the popcorn vitrine and, in the clotted room, their two shadows merged into one. Alice was just wondering how to resuscitate the conversation when Celine shifted foot-to-foot. “You were really good.”

Alice gloated. She didn’t like approval. She loved it. She couldn’t live without it. It was why she lived.

Sidelong, Celine seemed to suppress something. “I mean that.” Her voice was shaky, not unkind.

“There was a prop flop. Did you notice?” Celine stared at Alice so that she had no recourse but to keep talking. “When the goatherd tripped on the tablecloth? And the whole feast came crashing down and Perdita stepped on a prop chicken, and it squeaked because it was a dog toy?”

“Fine, just a hiccup.”

“Was it all right, really?”

Together, they were gaining no ground, spinning wheels in gravel.

“I already said it was.” Celine hooked her jacket on her finger. “Sayonara.” And then, inexplicably, she paused, as if there were something more she wanted. She even leaned in for a brief, exhilarating moment before seeming to conclude the space between them was a gulf she would not breach. And then she turned heel, not offering so much as a handshake.

SATURDAY

Entering the relative cool of the theater the next afternoon, Alice could not help thinking about Celine’s awkward departure of the preceding night, and what it might mean. It drew Alice’s uneasy attention to the thing she hated most: upsetting others.

It was impossible to find a moment to call Sadie. Alice ducked into the scene dock, where the theater group kept set pieces—the cardboard pillars of the Sicilian court and the stuffed “exit-pursued-by-a-bear” bear—to call Sadie and ascertain how dismal Celine’s report had been. But as soon as she had settled in among the oversized chicken-wire-and-spray-foam enchanted oaks that signified pastoral Bohemia, she was called to makeup, where soft hands would layer foundation over the existing foundation Alice had not succeeded in removing the night before, and then Darius called her to the stage to rework a flawed bit of blocking.

The two best friends had not spoken since the week before, when Sadie had phoned just as Alice was leaving rehearsal, enlivened by an eccentric prospect. “Get ready for this,” Alice had said. “Someone in the show has a contact at Anaheim Disney. They’re casting for a new Cinderella. I’d ride in the parade, stroll around Fantasyland in PVC slippers, and sit at a banquet at the Royal Table. I don’t know if they actually serve dinner. What if it was actually fun, meeting kids and blowing kisses and strutting around in a sparkly hoop dress?” Sadie was deadpan. “Cinderella’s a blonde.”

“She wears a wig.”

“Get real, Alice. These are the things that ruin a career.”

Sadie saw the world with unclouded eyes, joyless but calm and cool as a lake.

“Natalie Portman was discovered at a pizza joint!”

“Stop shouting.” Alice could feel Sadie’s smile of veiled knowing, of always knowing better. “Don’t delude yourself. This is where your career and your substance of character go to die.”

Alice groaned inwardly. Anything less than Euripides or Ibsen was, according to both Sadie and Alice’s mothers, beneath a person of substance.

Sadie spoke drily. “Brain scans show actors have decreased brain activity in the regions that form a sense of self.”

“What is it about my acting that grates on you?” Alice asked, clicking her key fob and settling into her hatchback’s driver’s seat. Though her two-hour parking was up, she did not insert the key into the ignition. “You’re very hard on me.”

Alice tapped the steering wheel, ostensibly to the beat of the bubblegum pop song playing over her car stereo but really, she knew, to fill the silence. To the question What do you want to do? Alice had always wanted to reply, Can’t I just be?

“Listen.” Sadie sighed, softening slightly. “I think you’d make a great Cinderella. You’re so good with kids, you’re patient, and you’re beautiful, and it would be very like you to fall out of a shoe and leave it at an epic party. But not at a theme park. You’re better than that.”

The truth of Sadie’s tough counsel surfaced. She had softened, so Alice could, too. “You’re right. It would probably be depressing, and career suicide. How’s it going with Cormac?”

“Oh, god, horrible. I mean, he’s great. But I’m a nightmare.” “Clamshelling again? We should talk about why. Why you can’t be open with him.”

“No mystery there. It’s Mama’s prurient interest. PTSD much?”

Alice made a noise of acknowledgment. “You know, we did emotional recall in rehearsal today—dredging up our own pain to access a character’s.”

“Dig up any bodies?”

“Maybe.”

Maybe was an understatement. Once Alice started on her insecurities it was like Night of the Living Dead.

Exhumed: Alice’s feeling that she was blank and passive, bare and undeveloped.

Disinterred: Alice was a shadow person, a raw hunk of clay waiting to be shaped, a canvas on which others could express themselves, a coloring-book page.

Resurrected: Alice was a perfectly acceptable outline who required another person—whoever she happened to come across—to add the substance.

“Has anyone studied the psychological effects of all this?” Sadie asked.

Maybe this was why Alice allowed so many men access to her. Each one, substituting the prior, represented a chance at self-actualization, of shading her into completion. No wonder Celine had balked the night before.

These thoughts consumed Alice, back in the playhouse, and before she knew it, the show was on, and soon enough Camillo was saying, “Come, sir, away.” Lights out on Act II, ushering in the forty-minute stretch she was offstage, “imprisoned” by Leontes, possessed of a jealous rage, then dead.

Like a lizard into a wall, Alice slipped into the wings. Concealed for sixteen stage-years, Alice vowed to stay in character. She watched the mechanisms of the scene changes without seeing them, as if with a glass eye. Raise the front cloth, lower the tab. She peeked out at the blue-lit house.

Startled, she checked again.

Celine was in a similar seat as last night, if not the same one, shifting her weight in the cushioned folding chair, even wearing the same clothes, rumpled like she’d never gone home the night before. One could only imagine.

Alice hurtled through her performance, eyes fixed on Celine, herself transfixed among the assembled crowd. All the light was strange under the blue-white gels. Finally, Alice, as Hermione’s stock-still statue, thoroughly vindicated after enduring wrongful accusal, blinked into waking life, and the second act was concluded. Applause at curtain rolled over Alice like a wave. She raced offstage and bustled out of her costume, snagging it sidewise onto the hanger.

Turning from the rack, she saw that Darius had followed her into the clogged dressing room and was gawking, looking appalled as she swiped off her lashes. “I thought those were real!” He seemed wounded, as if she had deliberately misled him.

The costume designer snorted in Alice’s direction. “Isn’t that just like men?”

Alice, who did not like to generalize, swept around, gathering her belongings. Darius cornered her near the whirring fan. “Who was that woman last night?” he asked, bemused voice chirred by the blades. “My brother was seated next to her. He said she was rustling around the whole time, making noise fidgeting and slurping a soda.”

Alice had the sudden thought that perhaps Celine had come again because she felt bad about being rude the night before.

“I’m sorry.” Alice did not bother to remove her makeup. Her face, still contoured for the stage, was tight with a batter of foundation. She patted Darius’s arm on the way out. “Promise I’ll tell you later.”

Alice twitched. She had been watched, again, by Celine. She thought of texting Sadie to tell her that Celine came twice. Instead, she chased through the swarm of the exiting audience. Around her, the lobby erupted, but Celine wasn’t there.

SUNDAY

By the third night, Alice knew where to direct her attention. She fastened hot, agitated, steady eyes on Celine, who was present in the audience just the same as before, rooted in the same seat. From Alice’s marble pedestal, still as stone, something stirred inside her.

She focused on Celine the concentration of her performance. It was surely ill-considered and irresponsible. Celine had every right to rubberneck Alice—she was paying audience—but what right had Alice to return the thrill? Though she did not understand it, the charge of electricity was already ignited and, like a current, traveling a wire.

Around Alice, the stage lights deepened. She offered her performance to one single person. She even directed a condemnatory finger at Celine at, “Not guilty.” Alice’s costar, the king of the stage, attempted to regain her attention with an emphatic, effectless wheeze. No: tonight, the self-denying Hermione had a new focal point. Tonight, Hermione was having her fun.

After the bow, before house lights had a chance to rise and before Alice could wonder what she had done, she flew past her cast members, following the weak glow tape offstage into the wings.

The heat had risen, making Friday’s low nineties seem moderate in comparison.

The nominal back changing room was hot, despite the timeworn AC unit, and heavy with the scent of pickles and onions. “That was a penetrating performance,” a stagehand remarked, a little fearful. Alice felt a pinch in her stomach. “Anyone have a Tylenol?” No one did.

Her ardent performance had to have disconcerted the audience.

The heavy-chested costume designer was installed at the vanity mirror, at work on the hoagie sandwich she opened toward the conclusion of every performance. “This is delicious,” she said over the wax paper, “and profoundly hard to eat.”

Alice could not listen, kindled with the current that for the moment had no outlet. Her adhesive mink eyelashes stuck to her fingers. She wrangled with them, finally managing to flick them onto the vanity counter, coiled like dying caterpillars, rather than into their diminutive plastic case. The falsity of them dogged Alice suddenly, arousing in her a scorching antipathy. Why the ruse? Celine would never allow anyone to amend her. Why should Alice? Feeling emboldened, she flung her costume headlong over the hanging rack.

The costume designer swallowed hard. “Really?” She set down her sandwich. “You’re not going to hang that up?”

“I’m sorry.” Alice stepped into her street clothes, a fragile vintage housedress the color of a pale winter peach. Sadie said that Alice’s clothes always looked like they were about to fall off her body. Her heart sped along as she zipped up the side of the brittle, delicate dress. “In a rush.” She scooped up the mink lashes with a swipe of her finger and scraped them straight into the costume designer’s vinegary hands. Alice had taken such good care of them so far. She had been so meticulous. The costume designer looked up at her, aghast. Alice wished fleetingly that there were two of her. Sadie called it the Disease to Please; Alice hated to disappoint people.

Alice emerged into the still, languid heat and found Celine waiting at the front of the playhouse. She looked uncharacteristically small in her oversized white T-shirt, her button-down balled up in her hand. She leaned to one side, her smile wonky. She was wearing an edgy pair of high-top sneakers this time, kumquat and lime. She was lit by the adjacent street-level storefront, the crowd dispersing around her. Greeting Alice, Celine tugged at her earlobe. She mumbled something inaudible. Alice noticed her small breasts, all but nothing really, curved against her T-shirt.

“Some people are going out,” Alice said, her breath thin.

A car honked from the street, a ride anticipating its rider. Alice felt the world of concessions, the smells of coffee and popcorn, the anxieties of the play she was not sure she understood, fade.

Alice had begun to sweat. She pressed her fingers to her hot, doughy cheeks. Celine’s olive-colored eyes watched Alice’s fingers imprint her flushed skin.

“Don’t go,” Celine said, her smile off-center. Her eyes met Alice’s with a look that brought a warmth to the base of her stomach, a trailing, emptying feeling, like a drain. Alice felt something shift within her, substantial as Earth’s plates.

“All right.” Two words, easy enough to say. Then two more: “I won’t.”

Celine’s eyes brightened, lifted, then lowered with a forbidding finality. There seemed to be something they each wanted to say. The urge whispered through Alice. The lobby air was stifling, hot as a furnace. Five-blade ceiling fans spun pointlessly, far away at the room’s upper limits.

“Your place or mine,” Celine blurted out. It wasn’t a question; it was a certainty. The words evidently shocked Celine as she spoke them, the pull of a gun’s trigger disarming its operator.

Beneath Alice, the sun-warmed concrete seemed to slant upward. Sadie did not live, anymore, with Celine. Nonetheless, the place would be full of her. The answer came to Alice crisply. It was easy enough. Her Airbnb—attached to nothing, familiar to no one—was the only option. The street rippled. Feverish heat lifted from the asphalt. A police siren blipped, turning a corner. “Mine.”

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Frances and Ben are in their sweatpants on a Saturday morning. He has made the coffee, as he always does. She drinks more than her fair share of the pot, but always offers the final half-cup to Ben. They are sitting on the couch, a green velvet sectional. It’s new. Ben’s legs are stretched long across the loveseat. Frances’ are tucked into her body, which she has pressed tightly to Ben’s side. They are looking at Ben’s phone.

“This is the app I read about,” Ben says.

“It’s better than Tinder?” Frances asks, the steam from her coffee fogging up her glasses. Warmed, she leans her nose further into her mug. She looks sweet in the morning, her face puffy from sleep, her edges soft.

Ben looks at her. He says, “I think so, for what we’re looking for anyway. I mean, according to the internet.”

Ben and Frances have never online dated before. They met in college through Frances’ ex-boyfriend. The general abundance of possible hook-ups on campus rendered sites like OK Cupid irrelevant to them, a joke. Tinder didn’t exist. Still, both had bemoaned the tragedy of online dating with their single friends. It was shallow, they said. It was robotic, they said. It was the end of romance, they said. When they were alone together, though, they sometimes expressed a secret longing to have the experience. “Think of the good bad date stories we’re missing out on!” Ben would say, imagining sharing them with his friends over a beer. “Think of all the people we won’t meet!” Frances would say, imagining the myriad ways in which she might have been adored.

“So, what happens? I make a profile and you make a profile?” Frances asks.

“Or maybe we could do a joint profile? I think there’s an option to do separate profiles and sort of link them. But since we’re only seeing people together, I think that makes the most sense. Package deal.”

They had recently had a threesome with a young woman whom they met in real life, at a restaurant. It had been exciting, for Ben, to try something new. To see Frances anew, as the young woman saw her. He had been satisfied to have the young woman in their bed. He had also been satisfied to watch her leave. The next morning, in the warm glow of their private relationship, he kissed his wife on the forehead, which appeared slightly changed to him, its wrinkles smoothed out, fresh. She lifted her face without opening her eyes and kissed his mouth. Her lips broke into a big smile, and she said, “We should do that again.”

For as long as he’d known her, Frances had been a presence. When she walked into a room, she became a solid, foundational part of it—so much so that you might wonder how the room had held together before she arrived. It was something about being sure of herself, he thought. Something about the certainty of her personhood. It was something he admired, perhaps what had attracted him to her in the first place. Since her mother had died, though, Frances had faded, sometimes quietly into the background of her life, sometimes chaotically into her compulsions and anxieties.

But that morning, her wide smile, the morning light on her cheekbones . . . He felt his own face brighten as he said, “Yes, we should.” If he noticed the little pang that went through his chest, it felt less important than the fact that she was his Frances again, just for a minute.

And so, here they are, two weeks later, drinking coffee together, wearing matching gray joggers.

“What are we looking for?” she asks, turning the phone toward him. He looks at all of the little boxes you could check off, each a tiny want that might be satisfied. What are we looking for? he thinks. He feels suddenly overwhelmed by the question. By the number of options, which feels both too many and too few. He has a tendency to do this, to make existential the smallest thing.

“What are we looking for?” he repeats, as though to indicate that he doesn’t understand the question, even though he does.

“Yeah, like, singles? Couples? Women? It wants us to specify.”

“Well, a woman, right?”

“Yeah,” she says. “For sure. But, I was thinking, if you’re into it, what about a couple? I feel like everyone is just looking for a woman. It’s a little . . . I don’t want to say cliché but maybe? And it would be nice for there to be an even playing field, so I wouldn’t have to worry about whether the other woman feels left out or alone. You know, since we’re together and she’d be single. I could let that distraction go.”

“So it would be us with two women?”

“You’re cute when you daydream.” He laughs and she continues, “Yeah, sure. Or a woman and a man. Obviously, I mean, if you’re into it. It wouldn’t have to be like, the two of you. We could just see what it’s like. Swap or whatever, if you’d prefer. In the same room. It could be fun.” She says all of this very fast.

Ben is surprised. He has expressed only the most basic, surface-level attraction to men before, mostly in order to seem open-minded and cool to Frances. He hears himself say, perhaps for the same reasons, “Yeah, I’m open to trying anything once.”

Frances beams at him.

Together, they make a profile that says that they are interested in men and in women, in singles and in couples. They upload a photo of themselves that they took last year when they were in Italy with Ben’s family. They think it makes them look adventurous and not too pretentious. When they hit “publish,” they feel like a team.

Frances has had a hard time writing lately. She is a freelance ghostwriter, currently contracted to finish the memoir of a B-list child actor who starred in a popular sci-fi show in the 1990s. She has always been a good ghost. Each new client is a little mystery to her: someone whose personal voice, energy, and vision must be discovered and captured. It thrills her, actually, to explore someone else so intimately. To understand them from the inside out. She likes to disappear into the bodies of others, to snuggle in tightly.

Or, at least, she used to like this. Lately, she has felt uncomfortable about her work and the ease with which she lets herself vanish into it. She recently came across a memoir that she’d partially ghostwritten in a bookshop and perused it. In the acknowledgments—from which her name was omitted—the official author had referred to the book as her “baby.” That’s my baby, Frances found herself thinking. Mine. Her face had flushed angrily and then, just as quickly, she felt her eyes well up with tears, overcome by the memory of packing away her mother’s books last year, the little handwritten name plates in the front of each bearing her mother’s name: Rose. Rose. This book belongs to Rose. She left the bookshop, confused and tired and wishing she could control her emotional impulses, as she had once been able to do.

Her grief for her mother had felt hot at first, an animating force. But even that had gone cold. She tries to write, but she feels too empty, bereft even of the child star’s memories.

She reaches for her phone and pulls up the dating app. A man. A man and a woman. A man. A man. Two women. She swipes and swipes, each little flick of her thumb a lifeline. Each “like” a way back into the heat of her body.

Ben is in a faculty meeting when he feels his phone buzz in his pocket. He looks down as surreptitiously as possible and sees a text from Frances: SOS.

A hot rush of panic before he opens her next text. She has sent him a screenshot from the app, a picture of a man and a woman with their faces blacked out above a wall of text:         

GF and I are ENM couple (32M, 21F) looking for singles to play with, GGG & 420 Friendly!
Looking for MMF, FFM, FF, FWB
In the bdrm:  BDSM, mostly D/s, sometimes switch, DP, Ropes
Sag sun, Cap moon, Cancer rising, 8×7, Fully vaxxed!
If this sounds like u, HMU!

A follow-up: I am wading through alphabet soup!!!! What does this LITERALLY MEAN!?

He snort-laughs and covers it up quickly with a small cough. The Director of Graduate Studies, who still wears an N-95 mask to work each day, scoots loudly away from him.

He texts back with one hand under the table, Will bring home decoder ring.

Thirty minutes later, she follows up: In a near-future world, humans have all but disappeared. The earth has burned. Only bulls and cuckolds and brats and daddies and cumbeggars and sugarbabies remain. This summer, find out if Ben and Frances, the last regular human married couple in the world, have what it takes to survive.

Ten minutes later, also ft a unicorn. 

Over the next few weeks, they put their heads together, wade through the soup, and make meaning of the bios. Ben reads books about ethical non-monogamy. He reads More Than Two and The Ethical Slut and Polysecure. He wants to understand the concept logically before he experiences it emotionally. He leaves these books on Frances’ desk for her to read when he finishes them.

Frances does not read them. Instead, she puts her energy into navigating the app. She picks out the unicorns, a word which she now understands to mean bisexual women who are open to threesomes—rare, shining creatures who fascinate her. She picks out the normal-seeming couples whose profiles are written out in words, not in letters. She clicks “like,” she refreshes her app to see if she has been liked, she sends flirty messages. She receives a dick pic. She is repulsed—and then ashamed when the image pops into her head right before she comes later that night while Ben eats her out. She stands in her mirror and takes selfies. She learns how to angle her hips so that her butt appears round and shapely. She sends her first-ever nude to a woman called Jae, a “pansexual woman in an ENM relationship looking for feminine energies.” She feels her heart leap when Jae responds to her pic with a pic of her own. She wants to laugh. She has forgotten that a heart can actually leap, that this is more than a turn of phrase. She hasn’t felt the sensation since she was twenty years old. She is thirty-two years old and she has a crush!

A few nights later, she has a dream that Ben dies. At his funeral, she wears thigh-high leather boots and a corset. Everyone looks at her. She wakes up the moment she wraps the whip around her own throat.

When Ben is at work that day, she sends him the selfie that she had planned to send to Jae.

She and Ben meet Jae for cocktails. They laugh and flirt and navigate the awkwardness of a three-way makeout session in the parking lot when the bar closes. At home that night, tipsy and buoyant, Frances says, “She was a really good kisser, don’t you think?” And then they laugh until they cry because they can’t remember the last time they called someone a good kisser. The next morning, they can’t find Jae on the app and find they have no way to get in touch with her again.

“Ghosted,” Frances says, bereft, the feel of Jae’s mouth still on hers.

Their friends begin to wonder if they are okay, why they have disappeared. They receive a text from Ben’s best friend Max that says, Where are y’all?! If you’re hiding because Frances is pregnant, STOP! I promise to pretend not to notice that she’s not drinking.

“I’m not ashamed of what we’re doing,” Ben says over dinner that night. “It’s perfectly normal that we might want to explore before we start a family,.”

“I’m not ashamed either!” Frances says. “Not at all.”

“Maybe we should tell people what we’re up to,” he says. “Who cares if they’re weird about it. It’s not for them, it’s for us. Just us.”

And a little voice in her head, before she can stop it, whispers, It’s for me. This is mine.

A Few Questions and Helpful Comments From Frances’ Friends 

Wow. Honestly, I thought y’all had like . . . the perfect marriage. I’m a little relieved. Nothing is ever as good as it seems from the outside, you know?

So Ben gets to have sex with any woman he wants but it’s not cheating? How did he convince you to let him do that? Ted has been trying to get me to have a threesome for like, forever.

A lot of couples think they can save their marriage by opening it up, but really it’s just a band-aid. You should be careful. Don’t waste your prettiest years on this.

I cheated once, when we were engaged. Daniel knows. To be honest, I don’t regret it. It made me appreciate him more. 

Listen, your marriage is between you and you. I just know that I could never do it. I’m way too jealous. It’s hard work, but we just wake up and choose each other every day.

God, I miss it. That new relationship feeling. Is it as fun as I remember?

It’s not possible to love more than one person. Not like, really. I mean, sure, I love my friends, and I love my kids, and I love my husband. But that’s not the same thing.

Sorry but isn’t it a little naive to like “not believe in ownership”? It sounds like something one of Ben’s students would say! And anyway, is it so wrong to want to feel owned? We all want to belong to someone.

I dated a woman once in college and I never knew I had so many feelings. So. Much. Communication. Kill me. We’re all crazy.

Aren’t you, I don’t know, a little afraid that you might be gay? I know the Kinsey scale says everyone is a little bit gay, but what if you realize you’re gay now? In your thirties?

Obviously Ben isn’t really interested in men. He’s just doing whatever you want. He’d do anything for you. He loves you so much.

Frances is making a risotto. Ben is sitting at the kitchen table flipping through the newest issue of Bon Appetit, which arrived in their mailbox that morning. They still subscribe to it and are unsure whether they should feel guilty about doing so.

Frances, rummaging in the miscellaneous drawer for a wine bottle opener, says, “Do you ever imagine me dead?”

Ben closes the magazine calmly and pretends to think. He says, “Hm. Only when I masturbate.”

The cork comes out with a loud pop. “Ben, what the fuck!” she says, tilting the bottle of Pinot Grigio over the Le Creuset, smothering the toasting rice.

“I have to kill you off before I sleep with all those naked women. It doesn’t feel fair otherwise.”

“Ben,” she says, turning to look at him.

“Frances,” he says, seriously.

She narrows her eyes at him, smirking. She wiggles the wine bottle in the air and asks, “Want some of this?”

“Sure,” he says, and gets up to grab two wine glasses from the cabinet.

Frances pours the wine. They clink their glasses together. She adds a ladle-full of warm stock to the pot.

“Franny. Why are you asking me if I ever imagine you dead?” Ben asks, standing just behind her, letting himself linger in the buttery scent of the softened onions. He runs a hand through her hair and then down her back.

She pauses for a moment and then shrugs. “Just curious. I imagined your funeral the other day.”

“Comforting!”

She turns to face him. “That’s not weird. Surely you’ve imagined my funeral.”

“Sure. I’ve imagined it,” Ben says, and takes a sip of wine.

“Well, how do you see yourself at it? I’m just curious. Do you imagine yourself in a suit in the front row? About to get up and make everyone weep with like, a perfect eulogy about me? Or do you think you’ll be a crying mess? And everyone is worried about you because maybe you showed up in your sweatpants or something.”

“Frances,” he says, and reaches out to touch her shoulder, a look on his face that is more earnest than Frances wants it to be.

“Hold on,” she says. She turns from him, adding another ladle of stock even though it’s too early.

“Hey,” he says, and turns her back around. He pushes a little strand of hair, stuck to her forehead from the steam, behind her ear. She lifts her glass to her mouth and tilts it awkwardly between them to take a sip. “First of all, I won’t be attending your funeral because I require that I die first. Second of all, at my funeral, I expect you to look fucking stunning. If you don’t, I’ll haunt you.”

“You don’t get to claim dying first,” she says, surprised to feel the quaver at the back of her throat. “That’s not fair.”

“Fine,” he says. “But just so you know, if you die first, I’ll be at your funeral in a stained T-shirt and boxers and will probably have Dorito dust all over my fingers. I’ll cause a scene because I’ll run up to your casket and wail into it, leaving big orange fingerprints all over your dead body.” He takes a long, nonchalant drink of wine. “The choice is yours.”

Frances wipes her eyes and drinks another sip of wine, too. She smiles and says, “You know. You don’t have to kill me off in order to sleep with a bunch of hot women. Especially not in your imagination. That’s the whole point of this whole thing.”

Ben shrugs, kisses her on the top of her head and grabs a wooden spoon to give the risotto a stir. “I know. It just feels wrong.”

She takes the spoon from him and says, “I’d rather be alive.” 

One morning, they wake to find that they have connected on their app with a couple—a man and a woman named Adam and Celeste who identify themselves as polyamorous and both bisexual.  “We’re very much in love and will prioritize our primary partnership. We are looking for another man and another woman in a similar situation to connect with sexually and emotionally,” their profile says. They appear to be in their mid-thirties, a bit crunchier than Ben and Frances. Adam is white with dirty-blonde, shoulder length hair slightly more wild than Ben’s. He has a neck tattoo of a butterfly and an eyebrow piercing. His flannel shirt partially conceals a chest tattoo. Celeste is racially ambiguous. Her skin is slightly darker than Adam’s and is freckled across her nose and cheekbones. She wears no makeup and her long hair is wavy and untamed, falling over her linen dress. Both are lovely, Frances thinks, but her eyes are drawn to Adam in the photo. This makes her feel complicated, sitting next to Ben. She feels a pulse of attraction, imagines her fingers running down the lines of the tattoo, discovering its final shape.

“What do you think?” she asks.

“I mean . . . they sound like us. It sounds like what we’re doing, right?”

“Sort of. Yeah. I mean, I hadn’t really thought of this as like, polyamory. It feels a little”—Frances gives a grimace and fake shiver— “mushy.”

“Ha. Yeah, I know what you mean. Like, I don’t want to go out and hold hands with two other people at an outdoor concert.”

“Gross.”

“But also . . . I think that’s a pretty reductive picture of polyamory. Because we do want to try dating another person or another couple together. And we do want to like them. And get to know them. And not just like, wife swap. Or swing.“

“Grosssss.”

“Yeah. I mean, those just feel pretty cold. And pretty hetero.”

“Are you . . . are you definitely open to a guy?” Frances feels herself hoping.

Ben puts on his professorial face, the one he affects whenever he has been thinking hard about something and has decided it’s finally ready to voice. “Yeah. It’s been on my mind since you mentioned seeing a couple. I feel like . . . I mean, honestly, I feel like you can’t know what you like until you really try it. And whatever I fucked around with as a kid doesn’t really count. I think if we’re going to do this, we should really do it. Like, really try new things and experiences together.”

Frances is overcome by a swell of emotion. She is still surprised, sometimes, when Ben is exactly who she hopes he is. She feels lucky, undeserving. And she also loves getting what she wants. “I love you,” she says. “So . . . group sex. A foursome is group sex, right?”

“I think so. Yeah. Group sex.”

She scoots her body closer to his in the bed, brushes her fingers along his arm. “It’ll be hot to see you with another guy.”

He laughs, grabs her hand and kisses her fingertips. “Is it weird to say that I also think it’ll be hot to see you with another guy?”

She blushes, her hand still touching his mouth. “Not weird. Hotter.” With her other hand, she sets down her coffee. They fuck and forget to message the couple until hours later.

Whenever Ben and Frances have sex, it is intimate, connective. They feel closer afterward, as though their bodies fit together more comfortably. As though the other’s skin has become more magnetic. But whether or not their sex has ever been “private” is up for debate. When Ben kisses Frances, his mouth is on Frances’ mouth. But he is also kissing a version of Frances who exists only in his memory, a little less lined, a little rounder in the face, as she was when he met her. When Frances runs her hands down Ben’s back, she is touching Ben. But she is also touching a Ben who exists only in her imagination, a little more confident, a little more dominant, a little less inhibited. They fuck each other, but they also fuck a thousand other versions of each other who come and go unbidden. And sometimes, when they fuck each other, they are also fucking other people: old boyfriends, old girlfriends, their hot yoga instructor, the guy from that show, the people from that porn that once got them off, an accidental friend who might walk in. In the room, they are alone. They work to make each other come in the ways that only they know exactly how to do. But it happens all at once, every time: the doors burst open. Behind their closed eyes, they are suddenly surrounded by bodies, watching, touching, being touched; being just a little bit prettier, a little bit sexier, a little bit dirtier than the real Ben or Frances are. It’s hot, having group sex. They do it over and over again. And then they come and the other people vanish. Their counterparts come together and coalesce, once again, into one self, one body, a little older and a little worse and infinitely more lovable. They look at each other, their faces sweaty and wrinkled around the eyes where those younger selves once laughed, and they see each other. They pull together, tight.

They meet Adam and Celeste for drinks after a week of texting.

“Do I look okay?” Frances asks as they get out of the car. She is wearing a skirt and Doc Martens, a look which she hopes will read a little bit queer and not as a grown woman trying to look young.

“You look perfect. Do I look okay?”

Ben looks, as he always does to Frances, unacceptably better than her. In his glasses and sweater, he reminds Frances of those Oscar Isaac thirst traps from Scenes From a Marriage. Her heart swells with pride and contracts with envy. She grabs his hand and they walk in together.

They have agreed that, most likely, nothing will happen between the four of them tonight. They want to get to know them first. They want to establish healthy, clear boundaries. Tonight, they will just get a feel for them. That’s the plan.

But they are perfect. More magnetic than their photos and exuding an affection for one another that has the strange effect of enveloping Ben and Frances, too. Celeste is a music teacher and waxes poetic about her students and her favorite classical pieces. Adam, it turns out, is the co-owner of a brewery where Ben and Frances, in their mid-twenties, played weekly trivia. To all four of them, this feels—improbably and after several cocktails—like fate. “We must have met you before!” Ben says, twice.

When Adam and Celeste walk up to the bar to pay their tab, Ben turns to Frances and asks, “Do you think they like us?”

Frances, flushed and giddy, says, “Totally. We’ve been a delight!”

“We are a delight!” Ben agrees.

“They’re talking about us,” Frances whispers into his ear, looking over at the bar where Adam and Celeste are bent low over the check.

“Checking in? About tonight?” Ben speculates.

“Probably.”

“Well . . . what do you think?” he asks, his eyes twinkling. She has seen this look before: it’s the same one he had when they left their number for the woman at the restaurant.

“I’m game if you’re game. I feel comfortable with them,” she says.

Ben nods frantically.

When they return to the table, Celeste says, “So . . . no pressure, but do you want to come over for another drink at ours?”

They barely make it through the door before Celeste runs her fingers through Frances’ hair and kisses her. “Is this okay?” she asks. Frances nods, her words lost in the sudden, overwhelming physicality of her own body. A brief intrusive thought: Will Ben be okay kissing Adam? When she imagined having sex with the two of them, she thought that she would kiss Adam first. It was both deeply exciting and pragmatic to her. Ben would feel more comfortable starting with Celeste. But now, with Celeste’s mouth on hers, watching Ben grab the back of Adam’s neck, pragmatism feels ridiculous. She might have laughed if everything didn’t feel so urgent, so immediate, so encompassing.

When they talk about it afterward—all four of them, still naked, trying to remember who did what when, how Ben ended up on the floor with Celeste, how Frances ended up biting Adam’s neck as Ben went down on him, how Frances found herself lying underneath Celeste as she was being fucked from behind by Adam—they find that they have no idea how any of it happened. It felt, to Frances, like dissolving into a feeling and then watching herself be reassembled again, sweatier and more content. They laugh as they try to trace their movements, all four still entwined in the bedroom. They have no idea how they came to be there.

The sky is a light gray-purple when Frances and Ben get home. They crawl into bed together. Before they fall asleep, they have sex again, their bodies still brightly alive.

A Few Questions and Helpful Comments Ben and Frances’ Friends Have About Adam and Celeste

How’d it happen, anyway? Were you just trying to spice things up and it got . . . I don’t know . . . out of hand? No judgment! We don’t have sex nearly as much as we used to, either.

Okay, help me out. If you like them, and they like you, and nothing ever goes wrong, and you fall in love, what happens? Are you going to like, move in together? Raise kids together? Like . . . what’s the goal?

A foursome just feels like a lot of legs.

So, Frances, how pretty is Celeste? I feel like I would want her to be uglier than me so that I wouldn’t have to worry about it. Like, worry that her boobs are bigger or that she’s skinner or whatever. I’d want to be the hot one. Although, I guess at the same time, I want her to be super hot, since we’re having sex. I don’t know. Are you attracted to Celeste, like actually, or do you just wish that you looked like her?

Is it weird, to see your partner with someone else? I feel like it could be sort of hot.

What kind of protection are you using? Condoms? What about like, herpes? It’s just that it seems like they’re the kind of people who have sex with a lot of other people.

Could you two stop touching each other? We get it. You’ve had some kind of sexual awakening.

So, were you always bisexual and just didn’t realize it? Or is it something you’re just kind of . . . trying out? Like a kink?

I hope this isn’t weird to say, but I haven’t seen you this happy in a long time, Franny. It’s nice.

After they have been sleeping together, the four of them, for about a month, Celeste texts Frances and asks if she wants to come over to watch a movie because Adam is out of town. Totally cool if it’s not where y’all are. But we’re feeling comfortable with same-gender one-on-one hook-ups since it’s what we originally planned on.

They had told Ben and Frances, a week or so before, that they hadn’t intended on dating together. Celeste wanted to date a woman, and Adam a man. But they liked Frances and Ben, and so adjusted their plan.

When she reads the text, Frances feels herself flush. She has been dying to see Celeste one-on-one. She loves the group sex, loves how it strengthens her bond with Ben, as though they are one side of a regular couple, a singular person with shared quirks and insecurities and desires. It’s hot—and somehow hotter every time. But she has found herself, once or twice, frustrated when she is pulled away from Celeste by Ben or Adam. She has cultivated a pulsating desire to figure Celeste out: to learn exactly how she likes Frances to touch her, and where and when. She wants desperately to understand Celeste, inside and out.

When she shows the text to Ben, she downplays her desire, terrified that he won’t be willing to cross this particular boundary. But Ben only shrugs and says, “Hm. Kind of weird, don’t you think?”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know. It’s not risky to go one-on-one with the same gender, but it is risky to go one-on-one with the opposite gender? It’s a little bi-phobic, right? It privileges heterosexual relationships as more meaningful than queer ones.”

Frances hadn’t thought of it that way, but she agrees instantly. “Totally,” she nods.

“Like, it’s the same old thing, just in woke language about personal boundaries. The basic idea is that two women together can’t be anything more than fun and sexy—because their ‘real’ desire will always be for men.”

As he speaks, Frances finds herself getting worked up. It annoys her, suddenly, the idea that Celeste feels comfortable dating her, but not Ben, because she is somehow non-threatening to Celeste’s primary relationship. She would be as likely to leave Ben for a woman as for a man, she thinks to herself proudly.

“. . . And just on a personal level, I feel differently.” Ben is still speaking. “Maybe I’d be jealous if you were on a date with Adam. But it wouldn’t be any different than whatever jealousy I might or might not feel if you go hang out with Celeste. It’s just about me feeling left out, either way. And that’s my problem, not yours—and definitely not, like, our problem. Because in the end, you would never leave me for a woman or for a man, equally.” 

“Right,” Frances says, and leans in to kiss him. “I was just thinking almost the exact same thing.”

The first time she spends the night with Celeste, Frances is unsure of herself. When they are alone, Celeste feels like Frances’ friend. They open a bottle of wine and pop popcorn and watch Bridget Jones’ Diary. They argue about whether Hugh Grant is sexy or gross. They swoon over Colin Firth. The more comfortable Frances gets, the more she fears that she and Celeste are kidding themselves, that they’re just two married, straight women playing queer.

But then, there is Celeste’s hand on her thigh. There is the way she leans into her shoulder when she laughs. There is the way she licks the butter off the tips of Frances’ fingers.

When they get in bed, Frances’ earlier fears feel ridiculous. She pulls Celeste’s body back into hers, wraps her legs around her, pushes her hair to the side and bites her neck. She licks all the way up to her earlobe and then pulls her T-shirt off. It catches on Celeste’s left earring and they laugh, feeling silly. They pause, try again. Frances kisses along the edges of Celeste’s left ear and sighs into it. She cups Celeste’s breasts, and her hands, which had been empty, are full. She brushes her thumbs across Celeste’s nipples and thrills when they harden, amazed that something her body does can change the very structure of another woman’s body. She moves one hand down slowly and is overcome by something like pride when she feels how wet Celeste is. This is for me, Frances thinks. Celeste’s body is doing this for me. She presses two fingers onto her clit and then Celeste says, “Wait.”

Her heart stops, briefly, when Celeste pulls away from her. Her chest and stomach, which were hot and sweaty, now seem just cold and wet, exposed to the air. But Celeste doesn’t get up; she only leans over to her bedside cabinet and pulls out a small blue vibrator.

“Is this okay?” she asks, her voice barely hiding an embarrassed tremor.

“Oh,” Frances says, feeling a little unnecessary suddenly, like an intruder.

“It’s not you,” Celeste says quickly. “It’s just a lot easier for me to come this way. Alone, too.” A little pleading look which breaks Frances’ heart.

“I want it to be good for you,” Frances says, unsure. Celeste smiles, clicks to the setting she wants, and hands the vibrator to Frances. It fits perfectly in her palm.

“Stay here,” Celeste says as she leans back into Frances and pushes her hand back down to her clit. She holds Frances’ hand with her own, pressing it down hard. Frances feels Celeste relax and loosen in her arms. This is what Celeste looks like when she’s alone, Frances realizes. She feels like a ghost, watching something that ought to be private. It occurs to her that this is a good feeling. She wonders if Adam has ever seen Celeste like this. The thought makes her face grow hot with desire. Frances pulls Celeste’s body deeper into hers and, when Celeste comes, both of their backs arch together. When Celeste turns around and goes down on Frances, she comes almost immediately, before she has a chance to question how vulnerable she and Celeste have made themselves to each other.

Afterward, she asks: “Do you use that with Adam, too?”

Celeste laughs a small laugh. “Yeah, I do now. It’s pretty easy to use during sex. I have another one that’s specifically for partner play.”

“I’ve never used a vibrator with Ben. Honestly, I don’t really use one at all. They’re too strong or something. I don’t know. I’m a little vanilla I think.”

“So vanilla you’re having regular group sex,” Celeste says, and Frances laughs, embarrassed. “I didn’t use it with Adam for a long time, though. He was weird and jealous about it at first, like he wanted to prove he could be better. It sucked. It just meant I had to fake it to have a good time with him. He came around, obviously. It doesn’t matter how you come, it’s just nice to do it together.” 

“Yeah,” Frances says. “I agree.” But inwardly, she feels herself flinch. Had Celeste been pretending when they’d had sex before, in a group? Frances had faked plenty of orgasms in her life, even sometimes with Ben, though the shame she felt afterward usually eclipsed any of the performance’s convenience. Wouldn’t she be able to recognize a fake orgasm, even if Ben or Adam couldn’t? The idea that she might have missed something so basic unsettles her. Her climaxes had been real. Did that mean she was too easily satisfied?

Her discomfort must color her face because Celeste asks, “Is everything okay?”

“Do you . . . can you only come with the vibrator?” Frances asks, embarrassed. “Because I thought . . . “

“Oh god,” Celeste says. “Sorry! I shouldn’t have mentioned faking it. No, I don’t need it. It just helps, sometimes. Especially if I’m feeling nervous.”

“I make you nervous?”

Celeste smiles. “In a good way.” She kisses Frances, more tenderly than usual, and touches her cheek. “Wow,” she says. “That was way easier to explain to you for some reason.”

Frances feels a sense of warmth creep over her, a sense that she and Celeste are in something together, a team.

A List of Frances’ Worries

1. That her friends no longer believe she has the perfect marriage.
2. That she no longer has the perfect marriage.
3. That Celeste feels like what they are doing isn’t sex but foreplay.
4. That maybe she isn’t attracted to Celeste but only wants to look like her.
5. That she might not ever be able to untangle the difference between being attracted to women and wanting to look like them.
6. That when her mother died, she lost the only experience of total, full, unhesitating love she would ever be granted.
7. That she might always be doomed to love people more than they love her.
8. That, by wanting to be loved by other people, she might be less lovable to Ben.
9. That she might end up alone.
10. That she might, currently, be the happiest she has been in a long time.

Ben has been preparing, for the last three weeks, to get fucked in the ass.

He and Adam have been on one solo date. They drank beer and played pool at Adam’s brewery and, eventually, talked about their past experiences with men. Ben’s were confined to his childhood—group masturbation with other boys, the occasional shameful blow job, and, once, when he was fourteen, a painful attempt at anal sex. Adam did these things at around the same age, but then, in his mid-twenties, he became curious about his sexuality and had, for about nine months, been the secondary partner to a married gay man ten years his senior. They talked about shame and confusion and desire until, after he had shut down the bar, Adam pushed Ben backward into the pool table and blew him. “I like you,” he had said to Ben. “I like you a lot.”

A List of Ben’s Worries

1. That he might be bisexual.
2. That, by being bisexual, he might be less attractive to Frances.
3. That he might not be bisexual.
4. That, by not being bisexual, he might be less attractive to Frances.
5. That he is boring.
6. That, at some point, Adam and Celeste will realize that he is merely an uninteresting person who is married to an interesting person.
7. That, when Frances also realizes he is an uninteresting person, he will be left behind.
8. That he might end up alone.
9. That Frances might, currently, be the happiest she has been in a long time.

When he gets home from the brewery, flushed and a little bit embarrassed, Ben gets into bed next to a sleeping Frances. He pulls up Amazon on his phone and orders the anal training kit that Adam recommended.

To his surprise, he likes it, likes the feeling of being full, likes the depth of a prostate orgasm. He wonders if this is what it feels like for Frances when she comes when he is inside of her.

Try this next, Adam texts him. It’s a link to a vibrating butt plug. I like to use this with Celeste too.

Ben has never really liked taking the dominant role in the bedroom with Frances. It feels unnatural to him. In their regular life, Ben finds pleasure in succumbing to Frances’ whims, to letting her be in charge. He likes being at Frances’ mercy. And so, in some ways, lying face-down on their bed while she pushes a vibrating butt plug into his asshole feels perfectly comfortable, perfectly right—like something he had been wanting to do without knowing it.

“Is this okay?” she keeps asking as she pushes deeper into him. He feels that he ought to be put off by her timidity, but he isn’t. He likes saying, “Yes, it’s good.” He likes being the one to determine whether or not it is okay and good, even as he lies ostensibly powerless. He likes her hand on his back, pressing down softly. He likes it when she leans forward and lightly kisses his shoulder with the final push. He’s not sure whether his pleasure comes from the almost motherly way she is attending to him or from the sense that she might violently rip him open. He doesn’t really care.

The next time the four of them have sex, he finds himself drawn to Adam, wanting to be grabbed by him, to be pushed face-down on the bed by him, to be crushed. But when Adam turns around and asks Ben to fuck him, Ben loses his erection. He’s not sure why and though Adam redirects him kindly and with care, he is ashamed. He comes that night with Frances on top of him, his eyes on her face the whole time.

He still wants Adam. But he finds himself making excuses not to get together with him alone. Adam doesn’t push it.

Upon Reflection, Their Friends Have A Few More Thoughts

Actually, I think it’s really smart of you and Ben, getting it all out of your system before you start having kids. You won’t have time for stuff like this after. Trust me.

What if Frances gets pregnant? I mean, won’t you always be worried it isn’t really yours?

You will stop seeing them—and anyone else—when you start trying to get pregnant, right? It’s a sacred time for the two of you. It really feels special.

How could Ben possibly be okay with someone else having sex with you when you’re pregnant!? Aren’t you worried you’ll get an STI? That’s like, really, really bad for the baby.

You guys seem so happy right now, though. And you’re still young, you’ve got a few more years to waste. No problem with just having fun for a while. Kids can wait. The whole thirty-five thing is really a myth!

What are you going to tell your kids? Kids see everything. You can’t keep an open marriage hidden from them. What if they tell your parents? Kids will say anything!

I don’t know. It takes a village, right? Trust me! I could have used a few extra sets of hands.

It’s just that this stuff can be really confusing and damaging for kids. I’ve seen it. We have some kids like that at school.

You know, historically, children reared collectively were more likely to survive. In prehistoric societies, babies were breastfed by multiple women. Is there a filter on your app to find lactating women? Ha!

Ben begins to feel like the odd one out. He barely sees Celeste anymore. Frances gets together with her while he’s teaching his evening class, or on nights that he has plans with Max—relaxing nights that sometimes feel like the only ones that aren’t focused on sex and dating. Lately, it seems to Ben that Frances is in an intimate relationship with her phone. Rather than plugging it in by the bed when she gets home, or tossing it somewhere and forgetting it, Frances begins to keep it on her in the house. In the pocket of her sweatpants or within eyesight, on whatever table is closest to her. When it vibrates, her body vibrates with it. Ben has become just another human body, warm in the night. He tries to be okay with it. He doesn’t want to spoil anything for her. He can tell that her phone is making her happy.

Sometimes, when Frances opens the phone and finds what she desires—that little word on her home screen: Celeste—she closes it immediately, not wanting the moment to be over. She wonders for a few minutes what the text will say. She tries to keep from smiling.

In spite of herself, and despite the fact that such a text would be in patently poor taste, she can’t help herself from thinking: Tell me you love me, tell me you love me, tell me you love me. It feels subversive—more subversive, at this point, than the sex itself. Celeste never does say it, though sometimes, Frances thinks, she hints at it. When she texts, I can still feel you on my skin, for instance. Or, I was thinking about last night all day. One of my students asked me if I was smiling so much because I had a crush <3. Texts of this sort can buoy Frances for days at a time.

Does she love Celeste? She isn’t sure. She knows that, one evening when she is in bed with Celeste after they’ve both come, she is bursting with the word. She is facing Celeste, their heads on one pillow, her leg draped over Celeste’s hip, her wet thighs still pressed hard into her skin. She is looking directly into Celeste’s eyes and running her thumb across her eyebrow. The word is taking up all of the air space in her lungs, and she feels like she might suffocate from wanting to say: I love looking at you. I love the way your bangs stick to your forehead when you sweat. I love the way your hair feels in my hand. I love the acne scars on your back, a little constellation. I love the way your nipples get hard in my mouth. I love the softness of your stomach. I love the first time I reach my hand up your skirt and feel how wet you are. I love the way you taste. I love the way you feel next to me in bed. I actually, unironically, think you might be the most beautiful woman in the world.

Instead, she breathes, hard and fast and eager.

She knows all of the jokes about lesbians—What does a lesbian bring on a second date? A U-Haul. Ha ha—and begins to wonder if women fall in love more easily than men. Or are women just more likely to mistake infatuation for love?

“It’s called limerence,” Ben tells her one night when she can’t hold it in any longer. They’d made fish tacos for dinner and, at the last minute, decided to also make margaritas. They eat on their back porch. Frances is at the mercy of the warming air, the salty rim, the sour-sweet alcohol. Her second drink has reminded her of how much she wants to touch Celeste’s body, but also of how much she trusts Ben. He understands her, she thinks, and can help her. 

“Limerence?” she asks, savoring the lilting syllables. It’s a word that sounds like salt on a rim, like sparkles on the hem of a dress. She doesn’t know what it means, but she knows instantly that it is what she feels for Celeste.

“Yeah,” Ben says, sitting up straight and beginning to beam in the way that he does when he knows something that Frances doesn’t. “I read about it in that book on polyamory and attachment styles. I think I left it out for you.”

“Oh right!” Frances says, unsure if this is one of the books she has pretended to have read. “Remind me.”

“It’s that really intense feeling you get at the beginning of a relationship, when all you can think about is the other person. It can feel like love—or like romantic love anyway—but it’s more obsessive. You’re fixated on the other person and your feelings for them, and all you want is for them to reciprocate. It’s really normal. Nothing to like, worry about.” He is saying this to Frances, but also to himself. He has been telling himself not to worry a lot these days. He lets the words play on repeat in his head.

“So, it’s basically just a crush?” Frances asks, disappointed.

“Yeah, but they didn’t want to make you feel like a teenager, so they invented a new word.”

“Honeymoon phase?”

“They also didn’t want to be heteronormative.” Ben crosses the porch and runs his hand through her hair, rubs his nose against hers. “Don’t worry,” he says, quietly. “It’s intense, but it’ll be over soon.” And it’s worth it, he thinks, to see her this happy again. This energetic. It’ll be over soon, he repeats to himself.

She begins to grieve almost immediately.

The more she thinks about it, she realizes that, of course, she is not in love with Celeste. Celeste really pisses her off. She reminds herself of this often. Celeste is nitpicky and defensive. She corrects Adam all the time, in front of everyone. She appears to be jealous of Frances when the four of them have sex together, breaking in when Frances is with Adam. She believes in astrology. She thinks cilantro tastes like soap, or pretends to think cilantro tastes like soap in order to have a thing. She talks about people’s auras. She is a dog person. She keeps her house at a sweltering seventy-eight degrees.

But the thing is: she keeps her house at a sweltering seventy-eight degrees because she likes to be nearly naked at home, likes to appreciate the difference between her couch’s soft velvet and her dog’s scraggly fur on her legs, likes to feel the vibrations of her guitar against her belly, the hum of the earth as it carries her slowly through space.

Frances knows these things, and knowing these things makes it impossible for her to stop thinking about Celeste. In the time it takes Celeste to type out a text, Frances can imagine their entire life together at home in their bras and panties. A future contained in three little dots.

Perhaps it doesn’t matter whether she loves Celeste. What matters is that she be next to Celeste, that her body be one of the grounding pulses against Celeste’s skin. What matters is that feeling—amorphous and tender, sororal and sexual—of being held by her. She lives in it, fully, for the next two months, trying to savor, and not to define, the warmth of eating dinner with Celeste on her porch, of sharing gossip about their friends with Celeste’s hand on her inner thigh, of watching TV naked under a blanket together, Celeste’s head on Frances’ shoulder.

Two weeks pass in which there is little to no contact between any of the four of them; all but Frances are busy with work, in and out of town. No one seems as willing to spend time on one another as they once were—as Frances still is. She sits at home and hopes her anxiety will transform into the almost-manic, obsessive state from which she produces her best ghostwriting.

It doesn’t. Instead, she spends two weeks sending careful, casual texts to Celeste every other day or so, to remind Celeste that she exists. Sometimes they are links to songs she is listening to, which she thinks will make her seem interesting and which, if closely considered, contain hidden hints of longing. Sometimes the texts say things like, How did your meeting go? Sometimes they are just emojis—hearts, a sun hat with a bright green ribbon around it. One day, in a fit of daring and melodrama, she sends a snippet from a letter that Virginia Woolf wrote to her lover, Vita Sackville-West, in 1927: “I like your energy. I love your legs. I long to see you.” She receives perfunctory responses that are perfectly amicable, and perfectly devastating.

Frances worries she has done something wrong, that she has come on too strong for Celeste. She has been told hundreds of times in her life that she is an “intense person,” and indeed she thrives on emotional brinks. Not everyone is like this, she reminds herself. Celeste savors her independence more than Frances does. Frances savors the feeling that her heart is between someone else’s teeth.

“I’m sure it’s nothing,” Ben says.

On a Saturday morning, Frances wakes up to a text: Free for a coffee? Her heart begins to race. Yes, she responds, and though she has typed the word, she feels out of breath as though she has screamed it. She blinks and refocuses her eyes. The text is from Adam, not from Celeste. Something shifts in her belly.

She leaves Ben on their green velvet sectional, no longer quite new, to have his coffee alone. Ben doesn’t mind the solitude. He definitely doesn’t. He rarely has the house to himself, since Frances so often works from home. He settles in to enjoy his book. He reads a sentence, takes a sip of coffee. He reads the same sentence again, and then again. He stands, runs his fingers through his hair. He likes to be alone in the mornings, likes to stretch out across the couch, likes to put on whatever music he wants. He definitely likes this. He puts his half-empty coffee cup back in the kitchen, blaming the caffeine for his inability to concentrate. Eventually, he gives up and goes to the grocery store.

Frances and Adam get out of their cars at the same time, both feeling a little awkward.

“Hi!” she says, walking up confidently to hide her nerves.

“Hi,” he says. He stops and they hug.

Though she’s not really sure she wants to, Frances kisses him quickly on the mouth. He kisses her back because he doesn’t know how not to.

She lets out a little laugh and says, “Let’s go in.”

They each order large black coffees at the counter. Adam pulls out his credit card and insists on paying. Though it is only a $2 cup, Frances feels uncomfortable letting him, though she can’t articulate why, even to herself.

Once they’ve settled into a quiet table in the corner of the coffee shop and have completed their requisite pleasantries, Adam says, “Frances, I don’t know how to start.”

A hot wave of something rolls through her body. “Just say it,” she says.

“I . . . well, I guess I want to say . . . I don’t know . . . .”

To Frances’ surprise, Adam’s eyes fill with tears. He sees her notice and wipes his eyes, embarrassed. She fills with affection for him, this sweet man. She remembers the first time she saw him, in the app. Suddenly, she longs, as she did then, to reach out to him, to run her hands along the lines of his tattoos. She wishes she had made more time for him as an individual.

“Adam,” she says, keeping her hands in her lap. “It’s okay. Whatever it is, it’s okay.” She has no idea if this is true, but she can’t keep from saying it. She wants to enfold him in promises.

“I need to ask you . . . ,” he wipes his face again and then lets out a loud, surprising growl of frustration. “Sorry. This is embarrassing.”

“It’s not.”

“It is. I . . . I’m here because . . . I need to ask you to stop. To stop seeing Celeste. Please.” He says this to his coffee cup and then picks it up, takes a long drink.

“I don’t . . . what do you mean, to stop?” Frances knows what he means; but if she pretends that she doesn’t, perhaps he won’t be able to articulate what he wants her to do, and she won’t have to do it.

“It’s . . . affecting us. Her seeing you. I feel . . . well, we’ve been fighting. Please. She knows I’m here talking to you. She’s . . . well, she agrees with me. It’s become too complicated. She’s . . . well, I don’t know how to . . . she’s more emotionally invested in you than she wanted to be. She’s always had a hard time separating sex from . . . well, you know.”

From love, Frances thinks. She allows herself to think it, just for a second. She loves me. The whole time she has loved me. Her heart swells.

“Wait,” she says, willing her mind to catch up. Willing her body to sit still. “Are you breaking up with me? For Celeste?”

“I think it’s more . . . I think we need to focus our energies on just each other for a while.” Adam runs his hand through his hair. “I’m sorry this is so weird. We were up all night. She said she couldn’t do it, not yet. See you, I mean.”

“When can I see her?” The pull feels so strong suddenly. If she can only see her, she thinks, Celeste will change her mind.

Adam looks alarmed. He looks into her eyes for the first time all morning. “I don’t know,” he says. “I think . . . I think I’m asking you not to see her. To please step away.”

“Do I . . . Do I have a choice?” she asks, her heart beginning to fall, her mind beginning to catch up.

Adam hesitates. “Yeah,” he says. “But please.”

For a second, she feels angry. She has no power. Adam knows she has no power. Her choices, she knows, don’t matter at all. She never gets to keep the things that keep her alive. To her horror, she feels her own eyes start to fill up with tears. She feels her hand shake. Her anger dissipates as quickly as it appeared. She is suddenly afraid she will crumble.

“Okay,” she says, getting up, leaving her full cup of coffee on the table. She begins to leave, but then turns around. “It’s your responsibility to tell Ben. I’m not doing it.”

Ben receives a text from Frances: Please don’t talk to me when I get home. As he is reading, Adam calls him. He walks through the produce section, weighing his options as Adam explains. He feels, as he selects a bunch of bananas—not too ripe and not too green—a wave of relief wash over him. The feeling surprises him—and then it doesn’t. He won’t have to be the one who calls off the relationship. He can remain, in Frances’ eyes, the open-minded, non-jealous husband he wants her to have. He feigns sadness and disappointment for a while and then hangs up the phone. He pays for his purchases.

Without looking around, Frances goes straight to the bedroom when she gets home. She sits down in front of her mirror and watches her face contort and redden. She gets a text. Celeste. Her heart pulses. She puts her phone down. She waits. She picks it up and opens the text. Im sorry. This is hard for me too. It makes her sad. It makes her angry. She wants to respond, I am the one who this is hard for! Me! But she doesn’t have the resolve. She begins to cry and doesn’t stop for a long time. She wants more: more time, more Celeste. She spins through hundreds of ways that she might have been able to hold onto these things—had she behaved differently, said something differently, lived differently. Ghostly versions of Celeste’s body brush up against hers in her grief. She will never touch Celeste again.

I am heartbroken, Frances thinks. These words actually roll through her head. She lets them sit in her mouth, unsaid. She savors their taste. I am heartbroken. Her eyes have almost swollen shut. I am five years married and I am heartbroken. Then: Ben. The thought of him makes her cry even more.

When her tears finally begin to slow, she takes out her phone. Holding it in one hand, she takes a picture of herself in the mirror. She’s not exactly sure why she does this, except that she wants some kind of evidence. Proof that this thing happened to her. Proof that she is a ruined, messy, broken-hearted person who maybe fell in love with the wrong person and who hasn’t, yet, died. “You’re still alive,” she says quietly to her reflection. “You’re more alive.” Then she gets in bed.

When Ben brings a bouquet of lilies and bottle of wine home from his grocery run, she hugs him hard around the neck and sobs into his shoulder. He kisses her on the top of the head and she folds herself into Ben’s steady, warm body. He exhales and, with Frances’ face safely pressed into his chest, he allows a shameful smile to creep across his face. It’s just the two of them. He settles in.

The post You Can’t Plan Feelings Out of a Foursome appeared first on Electric Literature.

He couldn’t bear going back to the apartment just yet. The apartment of the dead. When they’d been much younger he had shared the big bedroom with his older brother while their father took the small one in the back for himself. Issa recalled the bouts of barely controlled rage and weeping that ensued each time their old man thought his firstborn was not manly enough. It was a dance of endless humiliation between the two of them, starting in sixth grade for Hashem, when he came home from school one day and asked if he could take violin lessons. The old man, busy making a banana shake for Issa after having just taught an advanced karate class, raised his head and looked at Hashem, dumbstruck. Issa was almost two years younger and even then he understood something was not quite right with this picture. Within minutes they were downstairs at the dojo, where a few of the higher belts were still practicing. Hashem was made to punch the heavy bag until he was out of breath. Then the old man made him do the chicken walk a half dozen times around the dojo before putting him to spar with a teenage purple belt.

Hashem, who had always found excuses to avoid the dojo, stands there with a nervous smile on his face. Their father telling the other boy to attack. Attack what? Issa thinks to himself even then. Attack Hashem’s desire to learn the fucking violin? He is nine years old and has been going to the dojo religiously for about half a year and wants to protect his brother but has no idea where his loyalty lies. He worships the old man and imagines what their father is doing will somehow cure Hashem of something. He does not know what that something is yet, but when he sees the other boy throwing a halfhearted mawashigeri roundhouse kick to the side of Hashem’s face and pulling back at the last moment he wants to go out there and rip the boy’s face apart, even though the other boy is twice his size. Suddenly, the old man’s anger washes over them like wildfire. There are several other students in the dojo, standing mesmerized at this display of wrath by a sensei who has never before shown a lack of control in their presence. No one understands it. No one says a word. And then their father is raising his voice and warning the purple belt to either fight with his eldest son or never come back to the dojo again.

This time the boy attacks with a low maegeri front kick that catches Hashem in the inside thigh. The boy closes the distance and throws a lunge punch just above Hashem’s right eye. He does not follow through with more punches, though. He looks embarrassed. And then Issa is running at him. The moves he has learned in the last half year at the dojo are out the window, and all he knows to do is to try to wrestle the kid by going for his legs.

The teenage boy shoos him off.

“Touch my brother again I’ll kill you,” he hears himself shouting ineffectively.

Hashem is rolled into a ball on the floor, holding his face, crying softly. Their father stands there with glass eyes, surely astounded at the wickedness he has just caused and looking as if he has just woken up from a bad dream. The purple belt bows and retreats.

The image stopped cold for Issa right there. He could not recall what had happened next. There was no talk of violin lessons ever again. Nor did their father ever lose his cool at the dojo like that again. But this was the last time Hashem stepped into that space. Something had been broken. And something had been built—a tall wall between them, for the remainder of the abbreviated lives of these two men, both of whom Issa had adored and who hated each other.

Then came the change in their bedroom arrangements. Issa had to move into the small bedroom by himself, and their father took the big bedroom and made Hashem his roommate. It was, in a way, the absolute worst punishment he could have inflicted on the two boys, taking away Hashem’s privacy and at the same time forcing Issa, the younger brother, to have his. And the next few years turned into a cold war punctuated with bouts of seasonal brutality that ended in Hashem crying in one corner of the apartment and their father feeling remorse in another. At school, Hashem was beloved and, unlike Issa, a perfect student. The more their father heard praise from school about Hashem and his grades, the angrier he seemed to get, and he devised yet more tests of manhood, which Hashem failed at spectacularly. One day, the old man decided Hashem had to learn how to ride a motorcycle; it ended in the bike falling over Hashem and the hot exhaust scalding half his leg. More than once, the three of them had to go hiking in the mountains north of the city and learn to stake tents and shoot bows and arrows. Another failure. If Hashem didn’t like karate, how about learning to box or wrestle or do judo? It was one thing after another, a desperate quicksand of man-making that always ended in disappointment and heartache. As time went by, Issa moved up through the ranks at the dojo and his belt colors changed. During the silent mokuso meditation intervals at the beginning and end of practice, he’d often wonder what their father was thinking. Did he think about Hashem then? Was his mind completely blank? Did he ever think about the men who still thought him an enemy of the revolution?

He had loved this man. And sometimes he hadn’t. More than anything, he had wanted his father to love Hashem. Or at the very least cease trying to turn the older son into a version of himself. The wash of bad memories didn’t fade with age but rather lingered and just grew more stale. Like the time after the old man put Hashem in a vicious chokehold up there in the mountains. Back at the apartment Issa had taken the small picture of the old man from his military days and ripped it in half. For days he’d hidden the photograph, ridden with guilt and fear that their father would find it. He did find it, years later. It was taped together but still showed the rip down the middle. The old man put the photo away and didn’t ask about it, no doubt thinking it was Hashem who had wanted to destroy his mug and not the younger son.

What a relief when Hashem finally left home. As if a huge boulder that the three of them had been carrying was at last lifted. From his second year of high school, Hashem had refused to cohabit in the same room with the old man. To make peace, Issa had given him the small bedroom back and took to the sofa in the living room. Many nights he’d just go to the dojo and sleep there, leaving the old man and his brother to their silent revulsions. The stale scent of sweaty gi uniforms would always linger on his skin from those nights at the dojo. He had imagined even back then that the sourness was that of men’s odium of one another. All men. It permeated everything, unwashable.

He walked aimlessly for a long time. The fasting month, Ramadan, would be coming around, and soon it would be summer. The previous summer had been unbearably hot, and tiny, white airborne creatures had invaded the city in swarms. They got into your mouth and hair and eyes, they stuck to car windshields and hung from trees. No one was sure what they were or where they had come from. It was a version of the day of the locusts but lasting an entire season in scorching heat. Sometimes he wondered if Hashem and their old man weren’t better off gone from this world, or at least this city. Some of the old man’s best martial arts students had eventually ended up running their own dojos. A few were famous now. Others notorious. But times had changed; nowadays it was the full-contact competitions that drew crowds. Few were interested in the old discipline of a traditional karateka. And who could blame them?

He sat for a while on the benches at Hasanabad Square until weekend crowds started emerging from the metro. Then he followed them to the junction of 30-Tir Street and Imam Khomeini Boulevard. They had recently cobblestoned this part of the city and set out food kiosks. Street musicians jammed the sidewalks, and a huge i <3 tehran neon sign shone off a wall of the Malek National Library. Hashem had loved going to all sorts of libraries when they were kids. He was also an avid book thief. For a long time the books he read went completely past Issa. One time Hashem’s desk he’d seen a book titled Of Mice and Men. He was still in elementary school, and the title in  Persian—Moosh-haa va  Adam-haa—had really repulsed him. It seemed sinister to his young mind, even if he did not yet know what sinister was. He questioned the rationality of his brother’s universe on these occasions. But he was also a soldier, there to defend Hashem, even if he did not quite know from whom and why. But as the years passed and Hashem’s library expanded, he began to take a new interest in his brother’s books, and their variety eventually became his own entry point into literature. By now theater had taken over Hashem’s world. He was about to finish high school with dazzling grades, and their father could no longer force him into the dojo to humiliate him for loving an art form, as he had done with the violin. There was one book, Issa recalled, that never left his backpack: Shakespeare Our Contemporary. Issa thinking: I know who Shakespeare is. We read about him in some class. But why “our contemporary”? It seemed Hashem might always be trying to provoke their father with books out of the range of the old military man’s understanding, and frankly Issa’s understanding as well. It would take several years of studying at the university and fully catching up to Hashem’s reading list before he began to get an  inkling—a library with a shelf full of thin books by a man with hair like an eraser, Samuel Beckett; a book of poems by W. H. Auden, with the deeply lined face of a man whose gaze was a mixture of defiance and wisdom; and of course Hashem’s film heroes with exotic, sexy, and excessively beautiful European names: Bresson, Pasolini, Fassbinder. “Look after my books,” Hashem had asked him when he was finally leaving home. And he had, religiously, even getting a shelf built for them by hand. These were the very books that their father often thought of as the culprits stirring his firstborn toward that unreachable place where only shame lay.

One day he’d come home to see the old man boxing all the books.

“Pedar, what are you doing?”

“I’m taking them to the bookshops along the university and selling them or giving them away. Maybe I’ll throw them in the sewer. I don’t know yet.”

“But they’re not yours to do that with.”

The old man had looked up at Issa. “What did you say?”

“Those books are my amanat. They are in my care. A man has a duty not to betray an amanat. You know that.”

“These books turned your brother kooni. You understand, son?”

“Books don’t turn a person into one thing or another. And so what if they did? I’ve read most of those books by now. They’re really mine.”

“Yes, and I can tell you’re turning into a homo like your brother.”

It was the first time, and last, that in so many words he’d told his father to go fuck himself.

They remained there like two combatants. Issa stood his ground. “I’m not betraying my brother like you betrayed your son.”

The old man came at him then. His yokogeri side-thrust kick purposefully missing him by barely an inch but denting the wall with a loud boom. The old man could have crushed him. But Issa still did not budge. And the old man did not pursue the subject again. The books stayed.

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