She's Not There

She’s Not There

Karen W. Bridges

A creative project submitted to

Sonoma State University

In partial fulfillment of the requirements

For the degree of

MASTER OF ARTS

English

Committee Members:

Stefan Kiesbye

Noelle Oxenhandler

May 4, 2018

By Karen W. Bridges

ii Authorization for Reproduction of Master’s Project

Permission to reproduce parts of this project must be obtained from me. I do not approve the reproduction of this project either in part or in its entirety.

Date: May 4, 2018 Name: Karen W. Bridges

iii She’s Not There

Creative Project by Karen Winona Bridges

ABSTRACT

She’s Not There is a collection of short stories that will unsettle the reader. Each story is

grounded in a theme of isolation and disconnection. It begins with a prologue that will set the tone of betrayal, the pursuit of something or someone lost, and urgent longings for connection with other people that always seem to remain just out of reach. Subsequent stories probe deeper into these motifs—a man is followed by an ethereal and tortuous woman. Another woman, curious and undone by grief, turns to technology with hopes of healing with devastating consequences. A wife must insist on her own reality when her husband returns from an overseas trip seven inches shorter. The idea of a constant self, the process of memory, the notion that we know what is real, our ability to connect with other people—all of these dissolve as the characters encounter profound existential crises in everyday situations.

Table of Contents

Introduction 1

Works Cited 21

Prologue 22

Strange Cities 27

It’s a Good Life For Night Taking 38

The Hanged Man 60

Six Days in April 77

Seven Inches 92

The Lost Hour 114

v 1

Introduction of Project

When I entered the program, I was a secret writer. I began my undergraduate career as a dual art and art history major, but switched to anthropology as soon as I took a linguistics class. Language had always fascinated me (I was a French minor, as well) and

I was drawn to its intricacies, mechanics and evolution. I earned a BA in Cultural

Anthropology, which gave me a broad and extensive education in human nature, and addressed a lot of the same questions that fascinate writers: where do we come from, why do we do what we do? While I was not studying literature or creative writing directly, I was still writing in my free time and accumulating knowledge that enriched my writing, but I kept my creative work to myself.

I was drawn to Sonoma State’s graduate program because it was one of the few that offered an English degree and the opportunity to study literature as well as creative writing. In the eight years that had passed between getting my undergraduate degree and admittance to the program, my reading and writing was entirely self-directed. My stories, several short ones and a few attempts at novels, had never been shown to anyone. I thought my focus would be on nineteenth century English literature; I thought I would write a novel. But by the end of my first term in the program, everything had changed. I was introduced to Modernist literature and authors. The support and feedback I received in workshops bolstered my confidence, instilled an appropriate amount of humility, and helped me find a voice in genre and form. Throughout the next two years, my writing continued to develop and every class I took exposed me to literature I would never have read otherwise, and through that reading came ideas that influenced my work.

What follows is She’s Not There, a collection of short stories that is more than the sum of its parts. While they comprise a cohesive work with common themes, they also display my growth as a writer, and a spectrum of influences from Chaucer to Virginia

Woolf. Cultural, literary, and linguistic theory also greatly influenced my work.

Structuralism and post-structuralism, psychoanalytic theory as well as gothic themes, from Lacan, Derrida, and Kristeva, helped me consider my work on a technical level. I see my work, with its broad influences, as part of a variety of literary traditions but also something new. I want to create something unique, subversive, and quietly disruptive. It isn’t shocking or obvious, but my hope is that it will unsettle, disquiet, and linger with an audience long after the pages are turned.

Themes

Isolation and disconnection from society; guilt and grief

The root for this dominant theme is personal experience, but developed and nuanced by Modernist theory and writing. As a child, I moved around frequently, and I continued (and continue) to move frequently as an adult. Answering the question, “Where are you from?” requires a complex explanation. Beyond my personal experience, the contemporary debate about technology and social media, whether it actually connects us or distances us from each other or a sense of reality, and its effects on mental health interests me. Modernist literature, heavily influenced by psychoanalysis, also addresses the issue of isolation, and the limits of knowing another person or one’s self (indeed, the very idea of a self is questioned).

This theme is the most prevalent in my work and grounds every story in my collection. Every main character either lives alone or is experiencing a profound disconnection with a spouse. Characters like Gladys in “Six Days in April” and Andrew in “The Hanged Man” or the narrator in “It’s a Good Life for Night Taking” blame themselves to varying degrees for their inability to have successful relationships. All the characters experience a childhood trauma, and for Andrew these traumatic fissures are fueled by religious guilt to produce a sense of isolation so profound as to be paralyzing.

Time: Overlap of past and present

The Modernist’s preoccupation with time and the way we experience it led to innovative narrative forms, such as stream-of-consciousness. The adoption of standard time and time zones, artificial lights, and the industrial revolution led to a disconnect in the experience of time. (Greenblatt, 2056) The disorienting feeling persists today.

Virginia Woolf’s genre-defying novel Orlando addresses this disconnect:

This extraordinary discrepancy between time on the clock and time in the mind is

less known that it should be and deserves fuller investigation… It would be no

exaggeration to say that he would go out after breakfast a man of thirty and come

home to dinner a man of fifty-five at least. Some weeks added a century to his

age, others no more than three seconds at most. (72-73)

Experienced time rarely seems to fit with the linear model that governs our lives to such a great extent. Memories can also affect our experience and perception of time, and the science of memory and neuropsychology have always fascinated me. When we access memories, we alter them slightly—like editing a draft of a story (Schiller). Whenever we

4 remember or access that memory, it’s never the original version. We’re accessing the slightly altered, most recently saved “draft” of it. We are, in a sense, continually rewriting our own stories all the time. The act of remembering has so much in common to the act of writing, it’s difficult to not include this as a prominent theme in my stories.

I am also fascinated by how technology and artificial intelligence might be affecting memory, or at least our concept of it. Lately, my phone has started sending me notifications: You have a new memory! Intrigued and slightly terrified that my phone has the audacity to tell me what my memories are, I discovered that it has been, apparently on its own volition, creating montages of the photos I take and setting them to music. An alarming “memory” was a series of photos of my boyfriend (my phone now recognizes his face), set to poignant, “sentimental” music as though it were a collage you might have seen at his funeral. Essentially, my phone processes information about me, runs it through algorithms and regurgitated into information that might shapes how I people view the world and perhaps even how they change how I process memory.

The way that we use technology to discover more about how we perceive the world, while simultaneously using it to access our experiences and impress new ones upon us captivates and unsettles me all at once. The story where these themes of time disconnect, technology, and the way that memory and perception work are most evident is “It’s a Good Life for Night Taking”. The narrator feels the past encroaching on her every moment in the present. Her obsessive rumination over her past, as well as the experiences and dreams of others that are impressed upon her by watching their “memory videos” (accessed via data harvesting), causes a fissure in her conception of time and memory. By the end of the story, she can no longer distinguish between past and present,

5 her memories or those of others. She experiences the present in the grief of her loss of her husband and child, as well as the past in the conviction that another woman’s baby is her child, simultaneously. This entire story is told in the present tense to underscore and emphasize the narrator’s disconnect with past and present. For her, the past is immediate and her grief and trauma is just as visceral as it was the moment it first occurred. Time has not healed her wounds.

“Evacuation Orders” also incorporates the theme of time. The narrator is fleeing a fire, all the while remembering and pursuing his girlfriend who left him abruptly. His memories of her are interspersed with the present. For this story I subtly mixed the past and present tense. The narrator is much more lucid than in “It’s a Good Life” but still the memories are what is driving (literally) him in the present.

“The Lost Hour” overtly broaches the discontinuity of time in the opening paragraph. Due to the difference in the observation of daylight savings time around the world, Nia, who travelled to France, has had to set her clock ahead twice in the Spring but will only be setting it back once in the Fall. Although she understands how time

“works,” and that daylight savings time is a somewhat arbitrary annoyance to most people these days, she cannot help but feel that there is an hour of her life that she won’t get back, and in that hour, something else has been lost, but she can’t quite work out what it is.

Multiplicity of the Self and the notion of “Truth” and reality

Through the Disquiet International Writing conference, I was introduced to the works of Fernando Pessoa, namely The Book of Disquiet. Pessoa himself was known for

6 having a multitude of “heteronyms” complete with personalities for each. To him, these were not just pen names, but distinct and very real characters. He challenged the concept of a “true” or unified self.

Virginia Woolf does the same in Orlando: “For if there are (at a venture) seventy- six different times all ticking in the mind at once, how many different people are there not—Heaven help us—all having lodgment at one time or another in the human spirit?

Some say two thousand and fifty-two.” (225) The Enlightenment centuries earlier introduced and extolled the freedoms of the individual, emphasized personal responsibility and rights into Western society—and the Modernists challenged the very idea of the individual and the self. Orlando’s lifetime spans hundreds of years, and switches from male to female in the middle.

In She’s Not There, I approached the issue in relation to the way that these issues of identity can isolate us. In “Strange Cities” the narrator is confronted, repeatedly, with an aspect of himself. A twisted aspect of his personality, mental illness—something that seems both a part of him but also distinct. He can see her clearly, but he cannot touch her

(only she can touch him, and she alternates between violent attacks and soothing caresses) while others can only sense her presence. For him, she is very real—and her effects are real in the world. But it is ambiguous whether or not she exists outside of his perception.

I aim to have my stories revolve around the perception of truth, rather than establish anything absolute. One character may perceive something to be true, another character will have an entirely different perception. In “Seven Inches” Petra is horrified when her husband returns home from a work trip seven inches shorter than when he left,

7 but she is the only one who seems to notice—and he becomes increasingly angry and frustrated with her insistence otherwise. The story takes the phenomenon of gas-lighting to an extreme, and shows how fragile reality can seem, and how a dominant, particularly male viewpoint, when insisted upon, can make one feel insane, no matter how certain one is that one’s right.

Change and permanence

A theme that I think every generation grapples with, but particularly the

Modernists, is a rapidly changing society. This is also a contemporary concern worldwide. Climate change, technology’s staggering pace, the 24-hour news cycle clash with an insistence to leave our mark on the world somehow. Whether it’s having children, creating something, influencing people—or a conservative effort to slow progress, there are multiple ways we resist change and strive for a sense of permanence in our lives. I’m curious about where this drive comes from—if it’s cultural, biological, both, or impossible to tell.

I address this theme in “Evacuation Orders” which was first inspired by the fires in Oregon that burned through the Columbia River Gorge, but I continued to edit after the fires in Sonoma County directly affected so many people I knew. The fires brought a question to the forefront of these communities that I believe we think about in the background all the time: What really matters? A lot of people had only moments to decide which of all their possessions mattered the most to take with them when they evacuated. Some people lost their homes and all their possessions, but were repeatedly told that “at least you’re alive, that’s all that matters.” There’s some truth to that

8 statement, but homes are important and things can also be important. There’s a disconnect in being in the midst of an overtly materialistic society—regardless of how you feel about materialism—and suddenly when you lose everything, being told that none of it ever really mattered.

There also seemed to be an odd, apocalyptic feel to the landscape and the atmosphere in the time of the fires. Looking at photos of the Gorge in Oregon and neighborhoods in Sonoma County, completely charred and seemingly devoid of life, I couldn’t help but think of mutability and fragility. The narrator of “Evacuation Orders” tries to come to term with endings, death, and the value of things. His girlfriend is enthralled by the prospect of leaving everything behind. She claims to care only for experiences and once told him that “the greatest pleasures in life leave no trace,” but he misses the possessions he had to leave behind, possibly forever—he worked for them, they have meaning for him. His girlfriend wants change while he wants permanence—to stay in one place talking forever, and he hopes that someone might miss him when he’s gone. At the end, you might say he is stuck in between. He is heading east, towards sunrise and beginnings, he tells her he wants to be afraid and to embrace change—but he is also driven by the past and consumed by memories and dreams of her.

Why Short Stories?

I intended to attempt a novel during the program. I had one that I had been working on since I was about nine, and another that I had written during National Novel

Writing Month. I had not considered writing short stories until re-reading some of Annie

Proulx’s short stories, and during the first term of the program, I discovered that my

9 pacing and patience was more suited for short story creation. As I was exposed to more short stories during workshops and directed writing, I knew I wanted my thesis to be a collection of them.

I had the opportunity to study the short story form in-depth in my final term as a teaching assistant for Thaine Stern’s Junior Seminar on the short story in Modernism.

The curriculum was comprised of collections and anthologies of short stories by James

Joyce, Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf, and William Faulkner. Mansfield and Woolf were especially influential, as I will expand more on later, particularly in their incorporation of the post-impressionist art movement into the conceptualization of their work. The 1910 Post-Impressionist Exhibit, organized by Robert Fry at the Grafton

Galleries shocked London. Both Mansfield and Woolf attended, and the exhibit, artists, and social uproar were discussed at length in the Bloomsbury Group. Woolf would reflect on December 1910 as the pivotal moment in which “human character changed” (“Mr.

Bennett and Mrs. Brown”, 2). For Woolf, the Post-Impressionist exhibition and the uproar that followed would change the way she saw the world and the way she wrote.

Mansfield once reflected that the paintings taught her “a kind of freedom—or rather, a shaking free.” (Tomalin, 88)

Mansfield and Woolf were both intrigued by the idea of conveying a sense of the everyday, as well as just a facet of a moment, as opposed to Victorian-era Realism, which sought to convey the “truth” through faithful recording of details. This idea resonates with me as well—it draws on my art and art history knowledge and interests. What I like about short stories is the opportunity to give sketches or impressions of something with language, and let the reader fill in the rest with their imaginations. My writing is fast-

10 paced, in that I don’t linger too much on any one detail or scene. It’s a different way of engaging with the reader than a novel. In a novel you have a long time to get the reader to care about your story and characters, they settle in and get invested that way. With a short story, a reader becomes invested because there is so much creative work that is left up to them, in a way. Not that you want to be a lazy writer or tease your reader—there is of course a balance to strike, which for me is the biggest challenge of writing a short story.

My interests and what I want to convey in my writing is also suited to the short story format. What interests me is the everyday, small events that make up any life.

Novels incorporate those too—but the short story focuses on these and can take the smallest event and turn it into an epic, pivotal, universal experience. Conversely, the short story also takes broader themes to show how they manifest themselves even in small, everyday ways.

Authors, Works, Movements, and Theory that influenced me

I have already mentioned Modernist writers, especially Virginia Woolf and

Katherine Mansfield, as inspiration for much of the thematic content of my stories. Their diary entries and letters have also been instrumental in my writing process and technical aspects. One of Woolf’s diary entries has a most profound effect on me:

And what is my own position towards the inner & the outer? I think a kind of ease

& dash are good;--yes: I think even externality is good; some combination of

them ought to be possible. The idea has come to me that what I want now to do is

to saturate every atom. I mean to eliminate all waste, deadness, superfluity: to

give the moment whole; whatever it includes. Say that the moment is a

combination of thought; sensation; the voice of the sea…I want to put practically

everything in; yet to saturate. (Diary Vol. III, 209-210)

Woolf wrote this shortly after publishing Orlando. The novel was groundbreaking for her in the way she thought about and wrote about the conflict between binary ideologies, and in further developing what she wanted to accomplish through her writing, I see parallels in what I want to accomplish with my own. To focus on moments—but to make those singular moments, no matter how quotidian, extraordinary and evocative through language.

I came across Katherine Mansfield’s writings later in the program, and wish I had found them earlier. Mansfield had a riotous and tragically short life, yet managed to accomplish so much in the span of the last few years of her life. Her writing is dark, ironic, humorous, and visceral. My favorite scene in all of literature comes from her story

Prelude. One of the main characters, Linda, reflects on her feelings for her husband.

They’ve been married for years, have raised a family, and she loves and respect him. And yet, as she imagines “she could have done her feelings up in little packets and given them to Stanley. She longed to hand him that last one, for a surprise. She could see his eyes as he opened that….” (111) The last one is full of hate.

Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet is one of the most unique texts I’ve ever encountered. I first discovered it while attending the International Workshop named in his honor in Lisbon during the summer of 2017. For me, the most important and recurring theme is this idea that none of us are a truly a single person, but a series of people that come and go. We change, we grow, and often it feels like we (and others) are different people from one minute to the next. Pessoa was not the only person to write about this of

12 course, any number of other people have written about the idea of the myth of a unified self, including Woolf as I’ve mentioned above, but Pessoa is the only author I’ve come across to actually name his other selves—he viewed them not just as distinct personalities, but distinct individual lives. Here he describes the process:

By delving within, I made myself into many… I live off impressions that aren’t

mine. I’m a squanderer of renunciations, someone else in the way I’m I… To live

is to be other. It’s not even possible to feel, if one feels today what he felt

yesterday. To feel today what one felt yesterday isn’t to feel—it’s to remember

today what was felt yesterday, to be today’s living corpse of what yesterday was

lived and lost. (91)

This quote encapsulates so many of the themes that permeate my work: the notion of the self, isolation, memory. Like people, the book itself is a fragmented whole, a unified yet disparate amalgam of congruent and conflicting dreams, thoughts, despairs, triumphs, doubts, certainties, memories. It cannot be read the way one might ordinarily read a book, from beginning to end, because there is no true beginning or end. Its construction depends entirely on the editor and translator, as well as the reader. It defies order, categorization, and stable interpretation.

I’ve focused on mostly Modernist writing in relation to my thesis, as it’s the literature I’ve studied the most in the program. But there are a number of contemporary authors and works who have influenced my writing as well, though most of that reading has been personal rather than academic in nature. The two most influential authors are

Brian Evenson and Amie Barrodale. Evenson’s A Collapse of Horses collection shares many of the same themes as my own writing, and I focused on the way he whittles down

13 words and language to just the bare minimum but manages to create stories and scenes that unsettle and even horrify the reader. Particularly disturbing from the collection was

“A Report” about a man in an isolated prison cell. The story is nearly devoid of adjectives and adverbs; the terror comes from a remarkable starkness of prose that parallels the narrator’s isolated and bewildered state in the prison cell.

Amie Barrodale’s You Are Having a Good Time was the first collection of new and contemporary short stories I purchased and read. Barrodale’s collection mixes humor and absurdity in stories of everyday characters who all experience profound isolation and disconnection from each other and the world around them. “William Wei” in particular was influential to me. The main character’s lonely nighttime routines and confounding sexual experiences partly inspired my character of Andrew in “The Hanged Man”. I aspire to the same balance of humor and tragedy, detail and obscurity that she has mastered in this collection.

Unexpected Connections/How the program influenced me

One class I took that surprised me in how much it influenced my writing was

Professor Brantley Bryant’s Spring 2017 seminar on Chaucer’s Dream Visions. Having only previously read The Canterbury Tales, I was not even aware Chaucer had written anything else. But my curiosity and fascination with language expanded while reading

Middle English. Agonizing over all of the unfamiliar words brought my focus back down from the conceptual to the most basic linguistic level. I was reminded of how every single word matters. I considered how language evolves: how we shape it, how it shapes us. I also considered the act of writing and various forms, and it was curious to read something

14 from 700 years ago and wonder about what mattered then and whether or not some of the same things still preoccupies us today. Recognizing that the world was a vastly different place and conceived of differently, it is still alluring to think of some connection across ages and cultures, something rooted in the human experience that we can find a commonality in, or if a difference, be fascinated by and learn something from.

I was especially drawn to the Medieval notion of dreams and Chaucer’s interpretations of them. Dream theory was extraordinarily complex and for me there were some parallels to be drawn in the way that Medieval people conceptualized memory and self. One part of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, where Criseyde is debating whether or not to take Troilus as a lover, made its way into one of my stories. Criseyde dreams that an eagle tears out her heart and replaces it with its own:

And as she slep, anonright tho hire mette

How that an egle, fethered whit as bone,

Under hire brest his longe clawes sette,

And oute hire herte he rente, and that anone,

And died his herte into hire brest to gone—

Of which she nought agroos, ne nothing smerte—

And forth he fleigh, with herte lefte for herte.

(Book II, lines 925-931)

The image is lovely, disturbing, and grotesque and I reference the narrator reading about it in “It’s a Good Night For Life Taking”. In Troilus and Criseyde, one of the symbolic meanings of the dream is that Criseyde’s heart is no longer her own—similar to the identity and memory of the narrator in my story.

Workshop Experiences

I cannot recall a time in my life where I have been more nervous than the first time I read my work aloud in a workshop in this program. I hardly slept the night before,

I practiced with a tape recorder, I was generally dreading it. And yet, the workshop experiences I had in this program were one of the most rewarding things about it, and changed my entire perspective on the writing process.

Before, as I mentioned, I wrote everything in private, alone, and kept it secret. I imagined every writer must be a tortured Hemingway “bleeding” over a typewriter, laboring over every word alone until the final product is a perfect masterpiece, ready for publication. I dreaded the feedback of others: would it be ridiculous and shallow, or savage and cruel? But the vast majority of it was enormously helpful and encouraging. I learned to be more graceful in accepting criticism and also when to be confident in my abilities and writing decisions. I drew energy and inspiration from working with other writers, and recognized the importance of having a supportive community. The practice of reading and critiquing other’s work also helped me to think and analyze quickly, and improved my own analysis and editing process of my own writing.

Disquiet

In July 2017 I went to Lisbon to attend the Disquiet International Writing workshop. It was simultaneously exhilarating and terrifying. My social anxiety reached a peak as I wondered what I—novice, unpublished, meek and uncertain student—could possibly contribute in an environment of internationally recognized and published

16 authors. The anxiety kept me back—I did not speak up or socialize as much as I could have, but I also learned a great deal.

One of the things I had never considered before the program was the publishing market. This was a topic discussed in the program at great length and I was surprised to learn that more authors are turning to international markets, because literature is generally more valued by the public abroad than in the United States. Given the current political climate, with an administration openly hostile to public education, a free press, and funding for literature and arts, there was an urgency in the dialogue and several of the panel discussions centered around “writing under authoritarian regimes.” It was disheartening but also galvanizing—if there was ever a time to write and to be subversive, (it is always, really) it is now.

Challenges

One of the biggest draws of the MA program was being able to study Literature and Creative Writing together, as I love both, and the studies complement each other.

However, it is not an easy task to switch from analytical reading and critical writing to creative writing. During terms where my course load was seminar heavy, my creative process suffered, though I think overall my writing drastically improved as a result of studying literature and theory. What certainly improved was my ability to take a more distanced and critical eye to my revision process.

Confidence in my writing remains an ongoing project. I’ve learned so much over the course of this program, and I am confident in my knowledge but I’ve also become aware of how much more there is to know. I’ve seen my writing improve, but I’ve also

17 developed a more critical eye and a heightened awareness of my many challenges and areas of weakness. I find myself in an ambiguous space, where I loathe every single word

I write but am simultaneously compelled by flashes of brilliant phrases and inceptions, where I’m simultaneously propelled and paralyzed by all the things I have left to learn.

Figuring out “my process” was also a challenge. Sometimes I would have concepts for stories before I wrote them. This happened with “Seven Inches” where the overarching themes—duplicity, preservation, and paralyzation came before I had any specific characters or scenes in mind. I found that trying to create scenes and characters to fit the mold of these themes difficult, and ultimately these turned out to be what I consider my weakest stories.

I found the process that worked best for me was letting the writing come on its own volition. My best writing comes late at night, usually around three in the morning when I’m tired and some of the persistent restrictions of anxiety, planning, and all the day-to-day concerns are loosened, and natural creativity is less inhibited. This is where words, phrases, characters, entire scenes come to me at random, and I usually scribble them down on a notebook next to my bed or in a “notes” app on my phone. I will look at them the next morning and they’re usually quite bizarre, but it’s what makes the good writing unique and interesting. Similar episodes happen when I go for walks, although my time to do that is often limited—it’s a tactic I use when I’m stuck on a scene or story and it helps get creativity flowing.

What I found from all of this is that working from these scraps of scenes, words, visions, and phrases, finding ways to piece them together was how I created my best stories. It simply seems that for me, it is better to not have a recipe in mind, but rather to

18 see what’s in the fridge and play in the kitchen. It is a disorganized and chaotic process, but that’s the kind of person that I’m finally accepting that I am, and it’s also similar to how “real life” works. We have any number of random events strung along together from one moment to the next hour and into days and weeks, and from these events we create our own personal narratives, inventing cause and effects and telling our selves little stories as if “real life” fit into some kind of tidy narrative arc. It really doesn’t, when you think about it, and yet this is how we tell ourselves and each other stories, a lot of the time. In future stories I would like to experiment more with challenging the idea of the traditional narrative arc.

A glaring challenge of the master’s program, in both workshops and seminars, was lingering and careless sexism. It is a complicated issue that I am not sure how to address. It manifested itself in the behavior of some male students, who interrupted female students and dominated class conversation. In statements, tone of voice, behavior, in creative works and even in scholarship, the treatment and discussion of women both in person and in writing is still tinged with sexism. Whether the behavior is intentional or not, I cannot say, but I can say that it is rarely or never overtly addressed, and I believe it should be.

Sexism in academia is a subject worthy of a thesis in its own right, but I mention it only briefly here because it is a subject that has informed the writing of my female characters. It is also something that compels me, as a female writer, to continue to write

“different” female characters and stories about them. Angry women, “ugly” women, complicated women, miserable women—but women that cannot simply be dismissed as such. It also made me realize that, should I pursue teaching of English or writing, I will

19 absolutely be including sections in my curriculum on female authors, female characters, and how to go about thoughtfully writing and discussing them.

What I Want my Writing to Accomplish | Where I fit into the market:

Many short stories focus on a single moment, day, episode, or day in a character’s life. My stories tend to focus on a collection of brief moments, memories, episodes that come together to give a broader span of a life. They cover a great deal of ground in the limited space.

Friends and acquaintances often ask, “What are your stories about?” or “What kind of stories do you write?” I’m never sure how to answer. I say “gothic” or “horror” because those subgenres influence me, but it’s never felt accurate, and it seems to mislead people. They hear gothic and think “vampire novel” or Edgar Allen Poe; they hear

“horror” and think Stephen King. It’s possible there’s a disconnect between public perception and the range and variety within these subgenres, but if that is the case then I think we need more subgenres. I’d describe my stories as “unsettling,” and that is the feeling I want to leave the reader with. Nothing as intense as horror—I prefer nuance and subtlety. I strive to leave just enough unwritten, so as to make the reader return to my work, reread, reconsider the story and hopefully reconsider the way they think about the world.

Ford Madox Ford once wrote, in an article on literary impressionism, that artists

(and writers) must

employ all the devices of a prostitute… the artist must always be humble and

humble and again humble, since before the greatness of his task he himself is

nothing. He must again be outrageous, since the greatness of his task calls for

enormous excesses by means of which he may recoup his energies. That is why

the artist is, quite rightly, regarded with suspicion by people who desire to live in

tranquil and ordered society. (279)

This quote encapsulates what it feels like, for me, to write. Alternating between humility

(or humiliation) and excesses (or outrage), and nothing about my life is ordered or tranquil nor would I want it to be. Until this program I had kept my writing secret, and I hope that changes, but I hope to continue to write for the same reason I always have: because I have to.

Works Cited

Barrodale, Amie. You Are Having a Good Time. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016.

Chaucer, Geoffrey. Troilus and Criseyde. Edited by James M. Dean and Harriet Spiegel,

Broadview 2016.

Evenson, Brian. A Collapse of Horses. Coffeehouse Press, 2016.

Ford, Madox Ford. “On Impressionism.” The Good Soldier. Broadview Press, 2003, pp.

260-280.

Greenblatt, Steven, editor. Norton Anthology of English Literature. Ninth Edition, W.W.

Norton & Company, 2012.

Mansfield, Katherine. “Prelude.” Katherine Mansfield’s Selected Stories, A Norton

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Prologue

I dreamed of Ophelia again last night. She was sad, and I watched as she sat in a rocking chair on the rooftop ledge of a tall building, rocking harder and harder, until she tipped back over the ledge. The last thing I saw was her feet, and I screamed.

My hotel room is dark, but I pull aside the curtains to eye-blistering light. I hate

Arizona. My mouth still tastes like hotel room coffee, burned in a pot with a permanent ochre stain.

Outside, my bones turn to dust in the sun. It’s not even noon yet. Graceful flecks of ash churn and settle on my hair and shoulders. My shirt sticks between my back and the leather seat of my old Datsun, still barely running after all these years. I’m missing third gear so I hold my breath as I lunge up the freeway onramp.

The sky is red and smoke cloaks the mountains behind me. I play that trick on myself that I often do, where I pretend the world is ending. It’s easy to do this time with no trees in sight before me and flames surging over the mountains in my rear-view mirror. Ahead, the clouds look like someone raked a comb through them. All this terrible summer, fires have burned the West Coast. Every update on the news counts the staggering number of acres that are scorched and bald and all I can think about is time, and how many decades of it have to go by before the forest can be called a forest again.

I think about calling her and pick up my phone, but there is no service. It is for the best; she won’t pick up anyway. She hasn’t answered in days, but even if she does, I can’t tell her where I am or where I am going. It’s a picture I am driving towards, a feeling, more than a place. A map would only get me lost. The fear is always there, like the flames in my rear-view mirror. I can’t seem to drive away fast enough; even after the mountains are gone and only dust and cactus break the horizon, my vision is tinged with fire.

Why not let it settle in? said Ophelia. She wanted me to be afraid. She was morbid like that. Her eyes were always focused in the middle distance; you couldn’t tell if they were dead or dreamy. We stayed up until dawn some nights talking about what comes next.

I hate sleeping, she told me. There was always something she was afraid of missing. I never wanted the sun to rise though, I could have stayed there talking forever, but she would always put her hand over my mouth to try and catch the exact, precise moment when light first spilled over the horizon.

I tried to live her way, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t bear to think about it, but I also couldn’t bear to not think about it.

There has to be an answer, I kept saying.

She would shake her head sadly. Why do you have to name everything? She said.

That’s part of the problem. You think you know something or someone, but tomorrow everything could be different.

Was all this just to prove her point?

I pull over to the side of the road. My engine light is blinking and I think it’s overheated. I prop up the hood of the truck and wait. There isn’t enough water to throw over it. I think about pissing on it, but I don’t know enough about cars and I worry about batteries and electric currents. I imagine the headlines, then I imagine Ophelia laughing at my assumption that anyone would even notice or bother.

What a waste to leave this all behind, I told her.

What does it matter? It’s all garbage. You want to be remembered by your Top

Gun poster and video games? Do you measure your self-worth on the diagonal like your television screen?

These were all fair points, but everything she mentioned brought me joy. It was still hard to leave. The poster was signed by Tom Cruise. Didn’t that count for anything?

Didn’t it matter that my things meant something to me? We had delicious existential fights over what to pack, but in the end, there wasn’t enough room.

Her eyes were dry when the orders finally came. I hated her then, when she stood with her arms folded, watching while I locked the door. Why bother? The greatest pleasures in life leave no trace, she said, as we left the driveway. But I raged. All those things, all that money, everything I worked for. Here I was, there I am. She touched my leg.

You never know which moments you will ache for. I would give anything to stand next to her and hate her again. Instead, I roast on the roadside in this boiling air, smothering in smoke and dust. What do I matter to the dust, I mutter to the engine. I drop the hood at last to answer my own question. I turn the key in the ignition, but it chokes. I

25 want to believe that it hears me, that it wants to find Ophelia as much as I do. I will it to cooperate, as I have so many times, even though I know it is full of dust.

We were fighting at the gas station. The last thing she said to me was that it doesn’t matter what comes next. We will never know so we will always be afraid. We barely know what just happened, she screamed at me, slamming the door. We’re all fools and we might as well face it.

Get back in, I said. I’m sorry.

You think that’s what is going to happen next? That you can tell me to get in the truck and I will, just like that?

I hope so.

She walked away from me, towards a man filling his truck a few pumps over. The wind caught her dress and I saw that soft place on the back of her thigh. I saw her tilt her head. I saw the man smile. I saw her get in the passenger seat. The man never looked at me. I never shouted or waved. I sat there like a fool while they drove off.

The truck starts miraculously. I pull over at the next motel. Better to drive in the cool of night and sleep during the day. But I’m afraid of rocking chair dreams so instead,

I make bitter coffee and wrap a threadbare bath towel around the ironing board and tuck it into bed next to me. I huddle against it and I long for the callouses on her feet scuffing my shins in the night.

I love my old man feet, she said. I want to look like life has left its mark on me. I don’t feel nearer to death every time I see a new wrinkle. It means I am more full of life.

She embraced aging vigorously while I watched my hairline recede and my energy ebb

26 with it. My waistline grew and so did my denial. Towards the end, I could only ever see the back of her head. She was always facing away.

At dusk I part the curtains. The pavement shimmers with the trapped heat, but the air is finally starting to cool. Beyond the neon sign of the motel, I just catch the sun slipping under the horizon. I will drive east until I see it come up again. That’s when

Ophelia will answer my call. I only want to tell her that I’m finally afraid. I’m scared and

I always will be. That’s all there is to say about me. I drive without a map, I dream of rocking chairs, and I drink whatever coffee I can get.

Strange Cities

The first time I saw her was in Los Angeles; it was one of those dingy bathrooms where everyone writes graffiti on the wall. When I walked in, she was writing “Everything dies,” in black marker. Alarmed at first, I thought I’d walked into the wrong bathroom, but there was the urinal. She looked over her shoulder at me and gave me the one-over before she turned back to the wall. It was a basement bar, I figured the signs on the door were more of a formality, so I shrugged and went into a stall. After I came out, she was gone.

I had a daughter her age, in grad school back home in Boston. And an ex-wife, though I almost never thought of her. I was only happy when I was riding in the back of a taxi between the airport and my hotel. Tires singing and rumbling on the freeway, the soothing stroke of city lights passing over my face. Most of my time was spent on airplanes, flying between cities, with the window shade down. Sometimes I made clicking sounds on my laptop. That was my job—to be on a laptop, fingers curled over the buttons, sending emails and clacking numbers onto spreadsheets. Part of my job was also to be on a cellphone—to murmur into the mouthpiece, or hold it near a window to

28 try and get a better signal. Every once in a while I shook hands with other people and we sat around a polished table to look at charts.

I saw her again in Beijing. Smog had blotted out the sun and it felt safe to go out, which was unusual for me. I walked from my hotel to the Forbidden City, bought a ticket, and went inside. I stood under the Gate of Supreme Harmony, staring up at the paint peeling off the columns and the bird shit on the roof tiles. When I came out, there was a man just outside the gate. Half his body was missing, the arm and leg and then some on his right side; the left half was badly burnt. He propped himself up on a skateboard, begging for money and pulling himself along the filthy cobblestones. His grotesque stumps resembled puckered, half-eaten sausages, his mottled red skin was stretched and draped over the crumbled scaffolding of bones. His lips had burned away and a few jagged, yellow teeth crackled in his jaw. I covered my mouth with my hand and walked back to my hotel as quickly as I could. She was waiting for me in the bar.

I ordered a whiskey and sat down next to her. She smiled maliciously at me and grabbed a salt shaker. We said nothing to each other, but I watched as she unscrewed the top of the salt shaker and slowly poured a small amount onto the bar top. With her index finger she flattened and shaped it into a disk, then a swirl. Then she used the sides of her hands to scrape it into a line. She bent over it; I expected her to snort it, but instead she looked at me, stuck out her tongue, and pressed just the tip of it into the salt. A taste was apparently all she wanted, and she went back to making shapes with her hands again.

“What exactly are you doing?” I asked her, not sure if I was more horrified or turned on. She was lovely, with black hair and eyes. Her skin radiated as though she were

29 sitting under a red lamp. She wore an elegant but simple black dress, and the way she sat stooped on the bar stool made her seem vulnerable. Until she smiled; then you could feel dark clouds settling in your chest. She was smiling at me now while I waited for her to answer.

“I’m just creeping in,” she said finally.

The bartender brought me my whiskey with a glare at the mess on the bar. He shook his head and walked away.

She laughed beside me and blew salt into my drink.

After Beijing I did not see her for a few weeks. I found myself looking for her in every city I went to. But it was December, the holidays were coming up and it was end of quarter, so I was busy on my laptop and cellphone. I was a human tumble weed, rolling from one city to another. I ended up spending Christmas in Lima. It was a horrifically sunny day and I was barricaded in my hotel room, cursing at the erratic Wi-Fi and trying to Skype my daughter in Boston. It would connect for a moment before the video gave way to surges and stops, freezing and glitching with stutters of audio, halting fragments of her voice: “Where—I can’t—it’s—Dad? Hell—so—ann—why can’t you just—I can’t—there!—you’re gone—done,” and the call ended. I would write her an email instead, and send her a sweater made from aplaca wool. Back to the comforting glow of a spreadsheet.

Another Skype call buzzed in, “Unknown Number”. I assumed it was my daughter, trying from her mother’s computer or phone. The chat window opened across my screen and it was her, the sharp smile and black sand glare. I jumped and lurched

30 back in my chair halfway across the room. She knew she had caught me; her laugh crackled through the tinny speakers. I stood up and slammed the laptop shut with short, harsh curses, pulled my hair and cried like a small child.

I knew that she would have loved to see me cry, to see what she could reduce me to, but I refused to allow it. I thought about her every day, and I no longer dared to venture outside my hotels in the daylight. I bathed in the glow of screens and street lamps. When

I had to go to Las Vegas I worried about the sun, but I scheduled a night flight and once I was safe on The Strip, I didn’t need to leave the hotel. This city was made for me; an air- conditioned, tightly monitored complex with darkness to its core. I could wander or sit, watch and be watched, inhale the nicotine while the security cameras throbbed all around me.

One night I wandered the casino, picking up discarded slot vouchers and hooking my fingers through coin trays. Scraps. I thought of the maimed man in Beijing and wondered why I couldn’t see him everywhere I went instead of her. And yet, I missed her. Would she be here? I roamed the whole floor, looking. I tried the bathrooms, the bars, saw her in a thousand black dresses, but they were imposters. The closest I came to her was a clump of black hair on the floor near the roulette tables. I picked it up and put it in my pocket then retreated to my room, relieved and disappointed.

When I crawled into bed, I stretched out one foot behind me, hoping to feel her cold legs in the bed beside me, but there was only rough sheet.

Tokyo is one of my favorite cities. It is a place where you can go and, without speaking to anyone, order meals, drinks, and any vice you can imagine. Of course, there is the illusion of propriety and restraint, but if you have the money you can get whatever you want. I visited often enough to know where to go and what to ask for. People used to wonder how I handled traveling so much. “Isn’t it hard?” they asked. “The different languages, the customs?” Pointing is my language. Credit cards are my customs. It is simple.

It was late one night after one of my vice sessions that I saw her again. I hailed a taxi and pointed to the address of my hotel that I’d pulled up on my phone screen. The driver nodded and we streamed through the city. I had been looking out the window, and felt her hand on my thigh. I knew it was her without looking, but I looked anyway. The lights of the city passed over her face as we drove, squares of red and blue, yellow and white, green and purple. I wanted to trace them all with my hands and reached for her.

The corners of her mouth turned down; she bared her teeth and snapped at me like a cat.

My hand settled back on my thigh, next to hers, just millimeters away. Static curdled between us.

I paid the driver, got out of the taxi and looked at her. She stayed in the car and shut the door. After a moment she rolled down the window.

“I’m here to stay,” she said. The taxi drove off, but she gave me a wave.

I was terrified.

After that, I could hardly think of anything else except for her. I never knew when she would turn up, and it started to make me crazy. Sometimes when I stepped out of the

32 shower and wiped the steam off the mirror she would appear behind me. Every time, I jumped, and she would laugh, rubbing my bald spot or poking and pulling at my soft, slack belly, telling me that I drank too much.

“Do you know why I drink?” I asked. That made her double over, howling.

“Can you hear yourself?” she said.

She crept into my hotel room at night, and would lie next to me on the bed an arm’s length away, never letting me touch her, gently pounding the center of my chest with her fist. Whenever I was about to fall asleep she would hold a pillow over my face until I gasped for breath. Sometimes she would let me sleep for a few hours only to wake me up with a kick in the gut. Just when I thought I couldn’t take any more, and the sun would be rising, she would curl up behind me, cradling my body with hers. My feet would touch her cold legs and we would lie there, and I would let the laptop and the cellphone stay on the desk across the room.

Once I asked her softly, “Don’t you have a name?”

“I do,” she answered in the dark.

“What is it?”

“You know it already.”

I did know but I was too afraid to say it.

When she started to show up at the polished tables I knew I was in trouble. I was in

Dubai, where there was no escaping the sun, though I had managed to prepare my charts on my laptop with the curtains drawn in my hotel room. But when I started shaking hands with the others I saw her walk into the room and take a seat at the far end of the table.

She didn’t say anything and I thought it best to try and ignore her. I started pointing at the charts.

“Ha!” she cried.

I tried to continue, still convinced that ignoring her was the only way forward. I went on with my presentation but she was distracting, her eyes like crow’s wings, and I caught myself glancing at her. She knew it. It was over. The laughter poured out of her and she pounded her fists on the table.

“What did I tell you?” she laughed. “I’m here to stay!”

I finished my presentation over her scene, but when I was done the room was unbearable. I bolted out at the earliest opportunity. When I got back to my hotel I expected her to be there, but she wasn’t. She didn’t return that night and I left Dubai the next morning, looking for her around every corner. I wasn’t sure if I was more afraid to find her or to lose her.

In March, I took a short leave of absence and flew to Boston for a week. I had not been home for more than two days at a time in years. The first thing I did was call my daughter. We met for lunch at our favorite deli near her campus. When I saw her, I ached.

I thought about her often while I traveled, but I was never the sort of person to miss others—I kept myself much too distant for that. But when she hugged me that day I felt tears come to my eyes and I pretended to have a coughing fit to hide it.

She was reserved and nervous, as though we were on a date. As much as I missed her I found myself feeling uncomfortable, agitated, scrambling to fill the silences. When our food came, she picked up the salt and before I could stop myself, I lost it.

“Don’t do that!” I snapped, and knocked the salt shaker out of her hand.

It clattered to her plate and she froze, her hands hovered above the table, eyes wide as though I’d struck her. I began to shake.

“I’m sorry,” I said, a rush of guilt and humiliation. “I don’t know why I did that.”

My daughter recoiled and looked at me, disgust pulling her inward. I was unable to move or speak. I felt the tears returning. We tried to finish our meals in the silence, but I only tasted salt.

My boss called me into the office just before summer. I flew in from Sao Paulo, where she’d crashed another one of my meetings, causing me to shake so badly I spilled an entire urn of coffee over the table. I didn’t sleep for two days after that, she kicked me and smothered me with glee. I slunk into the office, rumpled and weary.

“You know what I’m going to say?” my boss asked. He was squinting at me, like

I was a friend from so long ago he could barely see the past in my face.

“It’s because of her.”

“She’s ruined you.”

“I know.”

“Why don’t you get rid of her?” As if I hadn’t thought of that.

“It’s not that simple.” I was whispering. I felt her in the room now.

“You can’t get rid of me,” I heard her voice. Was it coming from my lips? I couldn’t tell anymore. “I’m here to stay.”

That night I drove home and sat in my car in the garage for a long time. She was in the passenger seat next to me.

“Should we leave a note?” she asked. I didn’t answer.

“What are you waiting for?”

“I was just wondering who would find us, and how long it would take.” I couldn’t look at her. I stared ahead into my dark garage. There was a canoe mounted on the wall.

My daughter and I used to take it out on the lake by our cabin in New Hampshire. My ex- wife got the cabin in the divorce. I had not been out there since then and the canoe was full of cobwebs.

“Could be weeks. Months. Who knows? I can’t think of anyone who would miss you. Do you even have friends anymore?” She took my hand in hers and together we turned the key in the ignition. Kicking her bare feet up on the dashboard, she tucked her elbows behind her head and sighed, as though she were relaxing by the poolside. She breathed deeply.

“Smell that fresh air,” she said, pulling at the tiny evergreen dangling from the rear-view mirror. I tried to inhale but coughed violently.

“I don’t think I can do this,” I choked.

“Focus. Can’t you even die like a man?” she laughed cruelly.

The garage filled with exhaust. I grew lightheaded and delirious; in a panic I turned off the ignition and stumbled into the house. She followed me to the couch, where

I flopped face down so she couldn’t smother me.

“You’re the reason Van Gogh chopped his ear off, aren’t you?” I said into the cushions. She did not reply.

The next morning, I woke up on the couch. I ran out to the garage and flung open the car door. There were two muddy footprints on the dashboard.

For the next week I paced the floors and drank. I stayed up and called into late night radio programs. I wasn’t sure what to do with my hands—they felt cold without the heat of lithium batteries warming them. I had all those urges you hear about in men my age. Sell the house, buy a condo in Cabo, sleep with divorcees and drunken college students on

Spring Break. Would she come with me? She’d been gone all week. I tore the house apart looking for her, but after I’d pulled out every drawer, emptied all the closets, there was nothing but a ringing in my ears. She couldn’t abandon me now, when I had nothing more to lose.

But there was one more thing. I called my daughter.

We had not seen each other since the deli encounter a few months ago. I knew she would see my number flashing on her cell phone, would deliberate before answering, resentment fighting guilt, and guilt would win. She picked up on the last ring. I asked if she wanted to meet for lunch tomorrow.

“Promise me she isn’t with you,” she said.

“She isn’t with me,” I replied.

“Promise me you won’t bring her with you,” her voice all cement.

“I promise,” I bit my cheek as I said it, tasting salty blood as I hung up the phone.

I arrived early at the deli the next afternoon, hoping it would be the last time I would ever have to see the daylight. I wondered who would arrive first. It was my daughter. She didn’t hug me, and was silent for a while, looking me over from across the table.

“You look terrible,” she said.

“Getting over a cold,” I replied. I wondered at my protective lie. She would find out the truth soon enough, why bother? Even though I’d prepared for this, when I looked at my daughter I trembled. I thought of the canoe and the lake house, remembered her as a small girl and realized I would have to remember her that way forever, that I couldn’t bear to remember the way she looked at me now, and that I would never see her again.

“What’s the matter?” asked my daughter. The tears came, unmanly hot tears of shame and regret. One trickled into the corner of my mouth. Salt. I felt her behind me.

“She’s here, isn’t she? You promised you wouldn’t bring her!” my daughter was crying now, too. People were beginning to stare.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“You have to choose. Now. Me, or her?”

“I choose her,” I said, so quietly she could barely hear. But she didn’t need to. She left; I watched her go.

I sat at the table, burning hot all over while everyone stared and whispered. I felt her arm around me, her breath on my neck as she leaned in closer and bit my ear.

“I’ll never leave you,” she said.

It’s a Good Life for Night Taking

I find the flyer posted in the alley by the dumpster. I take down three months’ worth of trash: empty prescription bottles, toilet paper rolls, overdue bill notices, a stack of generic sympathy cards, moldy loaves of bread, dead flowers. Why post a flyer here? I think.

Why not on the telephone poles or at least on a wall that faces the street? In small font, it reads:

Help wanted:

Discreet individual. Night shift.

Call number below, ask for Dario.

There are tear-off tabs with a phone number. I take one and let it set on the kitchen counter for a few weeks. White-coat comfort pacifies me in the daytime. I have a profound appreciation for the way I can swallow a pill, invite it in on my own terms and let it mellow, and just like that I can forget the sides of their eyes, their jaw muscle twitches, their hollow condolences and uncomfortable steps of retreat whenever I try to tell anyone about my grief. Or the frantic scratches of the therapists’ notepad and the endless silence.

I count the black hand prints on the walls until dawn. I live this way, at the opposite end of the clock, walking on the under-side of the ground. I sit on the fire escape outside my window until morning, when at last, my bones heavy and sharp underneath my muscles, I wring myself into bed and sleep. But there is nothing for the self- remonstrating, like being grated back and forth over a sharp mandolin, peeled away layer by layer, why-why-why-why-why. I try to conjure up their faces but all I see now is a watercolor version, blurry and diluted.

Finally, one yawning night, I step back from the fire escape and pick up the phone. There is an answer before the end of the first ring.

“Yes?” It’s a deep voice, with crisp and confident diction and a precise answer.

I’m in the right mood; it’s just what I need.

“I am a discreet individual,” I say, without missing a beat. “Are you Dario?”

“I am.” Impossible to tell if Dario is a man or a woman; the voice is husky. “Can you come in for an interview, tomorrow at nine o’clock?”

“That’s early for me,” I say.

“Nine o’clock in the evening.”

“Oh. That will be fine.”

I scribble down an address and thank Dario, who hangs up with no response except for a click in my ear as the sun comes up.

The next evening, I arrive early and stand outside the building. I expect it to be a boarded-up hovel or a side-alley door. But it is a modern and attractive office with tall glass windows, though there is only the address on the sign, no company name. I walk into the lobby. Minimalist-chic: poured concrete floors, nondescript art, mostly white

40 canvas. On the reception desk is an orchid in a glass vase and a bell, which I ring. A security guard emerges from around the corner.

“I’m here to see Dario,” I say. I am motioned past the guard down a dark hallway to an elevator bank.

“Basement level three,” says the guard, pushing the button for me as the doors close. The elevator sinks. When the doors open I step out into a small, cold, brightly lit room. It looks like a kitchen, with a fridge, counters, and cabinets. But there are tools and parts everywhere—computers torn apart, wires, ribbons, hard drives. A hardware hospital. Or graveyard. A man sits on a stool at an island counter in the center of the room. He does not look up at me; he is holding some delicate looking parts and wires together.

“You are the discreet individual?”

He finishes what he is doing and looks up, smiles. Involuntarily, I smile back. My bottom lip splits. Dario makes innocuous small talk about the late hours, the cluttered state of his “lab”, evidence of his need for an assistant, while I suck on my lip and taste blood. He asks me to take a seat across the counter from him, pushing aside clutter.

Somehow the interview begins, though I am not aware of it. He asks if I’ve heard of his product, Nightvision. I say I have not. People are suffering, he says. Insomnia, pain, nightmares, loud neighbors, screaming babies. He can use this to treat trauma and exhaustion. Nightvision will help you sleep and it keeps whatever happens at night from becoming memory. You wake up refreshed. No regrets, no exhaustion, no dreams. Just a blank space between the hours of sunset and sunrise. Sweet obliviousness. It will change lives, the world even. A grandiose speech, but his voice is passionless, precise and

41 careful. The fluorescent lights overhead gleam off his watch. He talks and works, then gets up and fetches a paper bag from the fridge.

“Dinner,” he says, “I hope you don’t mind. I forget the time down here and now

I’m starving.”

He eats mung beans and kimchi from a plastic container. I watch him eat and answer his questions, but it is several moments before I notice that one of his chopsticks is a Bic pen. Does he realize this? Do I say something?

“Nightvision is carefully crafted and programmed by myself,” he explains. He holds up a pair of what looks like old-fashioned aviator goggles, but sleeker, lighter.

They look expensive and chic. I give him silent credit for design. “They only work in certain hours and levels of light,” he continues. “To explain it precisely, Nightvision uses electroencephalography to simultaneously monitor neural oscillations and emit a frequency that disrupts the gamma band, preventing synaptic consolidation of the dreams or experiences. The data is transmitted to the computer here, which translates them to video files. These new ones transmit the files wirelessly. I need someone who can be trusted to transfer their data to our server.”

“Whose data?” I ask, the only question I can think of, having understood only the last two sentences.

“Our clients. They can’t have access; they might be tempted to look. Or they could fall into the wrong hands. We take privacy very seriously.”

“Access to what?” I say; silently I wonder, who is we?

“They can never be seen by anyone else.”

“What can’t be seen?”

“Memories, dreams, somnambulism. They surrender everything, all of it, to

Nightvision. But the videos are untrustworthy and if you watch too often, you start to lose your identity, your memories and dreams mingle with theirs, and soon you can’t remember what is yours and what is someone else’s.”

“It steals your memories?”

Dario sighs heavily. “Are you trustworthy?” he asks.

I say that I am. Which is a lie, perhaps the greatest lie I’ve ever told.

No. The second biggest.

“Are you sure you’re not too tired?” my husband asks.

“I’m sure,” I say. I take the keys.

Liar. Murderer.

I’ve never been trustworthy. I nearly don’t graduate high school because I miss so much class. I tell my teachers that my mother has cancer, and my father left us so she needs me to take her to chemo. The truth is exactly what you would expect: the older boyfriend and drugs. I’m not even an original failure. My father opens the letter from the school. I have been forging report cards for a year, so he calls, thinks it is a simple administrative error. When I get home that night, he and my mother are waiting for me. I am not allowed to leave the house except for school.

You see what I mean? That is how much they love me. I have no excuse for how I am. I am incorrigible. They did everything right, they were upstanding and patient and gave me all the opportunities. But I am the dead-beat daughter, the crazy ex-girlfriend, the friend who can’t get her shit together. Then there are two miracles.

One, I meet S.

Two, we have J.

I never expected to get married. I never wanted to be a mother. I know who I am.

But S believes in me.

S does not support me like you might think. He never props me up or holds my hand. Instead, he stands back and lets me collapse. Only then, he helps me scrape myself back together without saying a word. It makes me want to be better, to be worthy. I have always been mystified at his choice of me, but it gives me something to strive for. I keep a job, I grow fat, and though not quite happy, at least I am not torn down every day like before. I feel steady, like I am building a more solid version of myself underneath all the flimsy scaffolding.

When I get pregnant, I can’t even admit it until I am nearly five months along; I am in denial. I dismiss the first nausea, then my splaying hips. I gain weight all over, and

S notices that I am rounder and softer but I blame the takeout I am always ravenously craving. I believe it all, everything I tell myself and him. Then I feel a kick. I have felt flutterings for a while, but convince myself it’s heartburn. But this kick from within makes me jump off the couch. I grab my belly with both hands and start to cry.

“What? What is it?” S is all panic.

I’m pregnant.

Dario crosses his arms and sways back and forth when he talks, rocking from one foot to another. He puts his hand on his chin and squints at the ground as though he is choosing every word from a book, articulate but agitated as he tries to explain the complexities of

44 the technology to me. Nightvision is the hardware: it monitors brainwaves, turns those measurements into data, then transmits the data to his office where they are converted into video files using his proprietary software. The goggles also emit a signal that interrupts the process in the brain that turns experiences and dreams into long-term memory. I do not comprehend how it works, but I nod. My job is not to worry about the technology, my job is just to make sure the files convert and transfer them to the servers.

He takes me through a door next to the fridge into a dark closet. Lights flicker on automatically. There are three computer monitors on a desk that takes up nearly the whole space. I am uncomfortable while he hovers over my shoulder, explaining how to receive the files and upload them to the servers, then rename them and sort by date and time. It’s simple, mindless work. But it must be done as soon as the files are received, this is urgent, his voice wrings the consonants out of every word to make sure I understand. I nod emphatically.

“I understand.”

He has me sign some forms: W4, non-disclosure agreement, the usual hiring paperwork. It all seems formal and official, though I am still not certain exactly what types of technology I’m working with. But the files come into the queue in a flood of pings and he wants me to start immediately. There is a backlog, and it’s taking up all the time he wants to spend on the technology.

It is numbing work, but I tell myself that it is exactly what I need. Anything to pass the hours. But I start to think about what Dario says. Insomnia, trauma, nightmares, all evaporated into binary code and stored on a server. Hours fall away, I am alone in the room. Dario has not disturbed me. My shift is over at seven. I have three hours to go, and

45 as dawn approaches, the queue slows down. Instead of constant pings, they come every few minutes. In between, my curiosity grows. I tell myself the worst that can happen already has, and I open a file. A window spreads over the screen. It is a video. This could be interesting, I think. I press play.

The video is grainy and dark. The cry of an infant crackles out of the speakers, I turn down the volume. I can make out the silver crook of an arm in the moonlight, cradling a small, soft head, nuzzled against a breast. The crying stops and a woman hums softly. For several moments, I try to make out the lullaby before I realize she is not humming, but crying. The baby feeds for a while, then goes back to screaming.

“Please, please, be quiet,” the mother says.

We are driving back to the city late one summer night after a day at the shore. Our noses are burnt but we have that deep-breath feeling of having spent all day outside. I am tired, but exuberant, and I want to give S a break from driving. He hates it, all the traffic in the city, but we live there because I love it. After a few miles, he slumps against the window.

J is silent in his car seat in the back. Both of them are asleep and the rumble of tires on the freeway aligns itself with my heartbeat, the pulse of painted white lines. I am content to think about our day, how I will lay J down into his crib when we got home, then slide into bed next to S.

When I wake up, I am upside down. The road is in the sky and flickering red and blue lights strobe the underside of trees. I can’t move my neck, but I say my husband’s name, then my son’s. No answer.

“Please, please, say something,” I cry.

“Why not just delete the files?” I ask.

Dario sighs without looking up at me. After a week on the job, I am beginning to realize these sighs come from weariness rather than frustration.

“Legal issues,” he says, waving a hand. “We have to keep them, in case something happens during the night.”

“Like, if they murder someone?” Murderer. I dig my nails into my arm.

“Or someone murders them. They sign a form, it says they relinquish all the rights to their memories or dreams, we keep them secure in case something happens.” The way he says it is jarring. Relinquish all rights to their memories or dreams. But I am tempted.

Is that what I want? I’ve been thinking about asking him if I can try Nightvision, but I work every night. And there is another reason. Maybe two reasons.

One, I have been watching the videos. Not all of them; there isn’t time for that.

But towards dawn they always slow to a trickle, and when my own memories swell up I need the distraction. Sometimes it’s a memory, sometimes it’s a dream. The dreams are bizarre, as you would expect. Like watching a live-action cartoon with terrible actors.

And sometimes the memories are just boring. Someone staring out a window or into the fridge or at the ceiling for hours.

But there are some moments. Sometimes after a bad dream someone will wake up and reach an arm out, wrap it around a person in bed with them, and bury their face into their back. There is lovemaking and fighting, intense conversations, desperate phone calls. Some people write or paint, or I can read along in a book with someone for a while.

Another reason is that I can’t decide what to do with my own memories. They lurk and lunge, always scarce when I need them or flooding my blood when I don’t. The shame is always there, but that is what I want. It is what I deserve. After the funerals, S’s mother writes me a letter, she says she cannot decide if I deserve to die, or if I deserve to live forever with my guilt for killing her son and grandchild. I keep it on my fridge because it is more honest than all the sympathy cards and flowers.

When J is born, my parents visit me in the hospital. S is sleeping on a cot, J sleeps in his bassinette near the bed. Unlike the other new mothers, I have no flowers or cards or balloons. No one thinks it is a good idea for me to be a mother, and I don’t blame them.

When the doctors first hand me J, I do not have that dam-burst of love everyone talks about. I feel only numbing fear.

“How long can you stay?” I beg my mother. “I don’t know how to do this.”

My father is upset. He whisper-shouts, so as not to wake anyone, that they had to take out a second mortgage on the house to pay off my legal feels and hospital bills and counseling from my catastrophic younger days.

“The damage you’ve done,” he says, trailing off. He has a point there. And it had gone on for so long. It wasn’t a phase. To them, I am irredeemable and it is only a matter of time. As it turns out, they are right, and after the accident and the funerals, they stop returning my calls.

“You don’t seem like the kind of person who would work the night shift,” Dario says to me one night.

“What did you expect?” I ask.

“Someone threatening, maybe. I’m not sure.” He shrugs. Murderer.

We fall into an easy routine and business grows steadily. There is a name on a sign outside the building now. Marketing and customer service are all upstairs in the fancy offices; it is just the two of us down here doing the tech work in the basement, where our servers are cool and secure. I still don’t know how it really works or how much it costs. But those details are irrelevant to me. I care about the memories.

I start to recognize some of the “regulars”. People don’t wear Nightvision every night, new clients start and old ones stop, so it’s not always consistent. But after a few weeks I figure out that as each file comes in, it shows an IP address and I can start keeping track of a few, and then I get to know them. Dario’s warnings are forgotten as I scroll through the dreams and memories, choosing my favorites and lining them up to binge watch. It’s better than reality TV. It is real. Dario said they were untrustworthy, but what could be more real than a memory?

I think about them even when I’m not at work, I worry about them when their dreams and memories don’t show up in my queue for a while. I have fallen for them.

There is the artist-insomniac. His paintings aren’t particularly good, but it is mesmerizing to watch him paint. I think he has chronic pain that keeps him up all night, though I’m not sure if it’s the physical or the metaphysical kind. His pictures are dark red and blue.

There is the sleep-screamer, who has grotesque, fascinating nightmares and wakes up shouting. To get back to sleep, he reads lurid romance novels. But my favorite is the mother with her sleepless baby.

Dario never interrupts me, but I keep the volume low, anyway. When I bring up her memory videos, I close my eyes. The mother makes soft “shh” sounds, muffled pleas, she hums and sings. I hear suckling and soft grunts as the baby feeds. Mostly it is crying, shrieking for stretches so long I find myself waiting on its next breath. But I keep listening, because one time I hear a laugh. When I open my eyes, the baby’s face is on the screen, a toothless, milk-drunk smile. The mother laughs back, and for several moments one laughs and then the other, back and forth, until the crying resumes.

I wait for the moment that I will suddenly feel like a mother. It isn’t until J laughs for the first time that I feel like I know him, that he belongs to me. When I first bring him home

I’m already so scared of ruining everything; instead of his whole life ahead I can see only death, everything that can go wrong, already. S can only take a few days off, and the hours I spend alone with the new baby are exhausting. Even when he is asleep, I am awake, making sure he is still breathing. My body readjusts, slack skin shrinking back not quite to where it was before, everything somehow looser and softer. I look like a mother,

I think when I look in the mirror, but I still don’t feel like one. Then he laughs.

But there are sleepless nights where he cries inconsolably. Or. Wait. Does he cry?

No. He is so quiet. I am worried, I have to put my hand on his chest to make sure he is breathing. Whose sleepless nights are these? I fall out of a memory and find myself at work. I have to grip the edge of the desk for a moment while I try to decide what is real.

Is it my own memory? Is it from a video? My head is full of grainy, misty grayness. J is quiet. He sleeps and sleeps. He does not breathe.

During the day, I sleep restlessly or lie awake with the curtains pulled. Usually it is something in-between, like a lucid dream. I see red and blue paint on canvas, then strobing red and blue lights; I see a baby who lies deadly still and cries. It is all refracted though, disparate moments, like I’m looking into a shattered mirror and in every glass shard is a blurry, stabbing memory. Or it a dream? Is it mine or someone else’s? I can never be sure.

I walk around the apartment, touching dirty handprints. Sometimes I close all the doors in the hall—the closet, the bathroom, the bedrooms, and go back to open them, and when I look in a room I see them. There is S rocking J in the corner. Then I blink and the room is empty again. I lose them a hundred times a day. And then I go to work.

I watch the mother and her child all night. I catch a moment where she nuzzles her face into the baby’s neck, I replay it over and over. My fingernails leave purple, crescent-shaped bruises up and down my forearms. I can’t stop thinking about my baby.

One night Dario goes around the corner to get us some takeout. In the five minutes he is gone, my shaking fingers find the client files on his open laptop. I open his email, send them to myself as an attachment, delete the sent message from his outbox, close the windows. When he returns, I am waiting patiently, but my hands are shaking so bad I have to use a fork instead of chopsticks for our fried rice.

After a few hours of combing the files I find her. Ruth Killingsworth. I look up her address, way across town. I find it: a narrow, salmon-colored building. There is a secured entrance, but it took me three trains to get here so I wait across the street. It starts to get dark and I call Dario, tell him that I’m sick and I can’t make it in tonight. He is

51 indifferent. I have been working there three months now and never missed a day or been late; I have convinced him I am trustworthy. Liar. I hang up just as I see a woman opening up the drapes in a third-floor window.

The night is chilly and I wish I brought my coat. I pull my arms into my sweater and hug my ribs. My legs ache from standing but I cannot look away. Hours fall away and I don’t see much until just around midnight. The light is dim in the room, but she comes to the window again. Her Nightvision is on, blocking half her face. She holds the baby on her shoulder and sways side to side. All at once she stops, and I think she is looking at me.

The next evening at work, I scour her memory videos, and sure enough, I find myself. I watch her on the screen, watching me out the window, watching her from the street, for several moments, until she closes the drapes.

I tell myself it will only be the one time but I can’t stop. I linger out front and I wander the neighborhood, hoping to find them somewhere. I rationalize it. It’s better than spending the time in my own apartment, trying to sift my own memories from the others I am beginning to hoard. After six weeks, it happens. I walk up the street, and from twenty yards off I see her, struggling down the front steps of her building with a stroller and the baby, who is crying. I run to her.

“Let me help you,” I say. She is grateful, handing me the stroller while she carries her baby down the last few steps. I unfold it on the sidewalk while she watches me.

“He’s beautiful,” I say. My fingers are aching and trembling and I have to curl them into my palm to keep from reaching for her. “How old is he?”

“She. Eight months,” says Ruth.

They are the same age, I think. Should I ask to hold her? But I don’t need to; I get lucky. The baby kicks and screams, Ruth drops her bag, her wallet, cell phone, baby paraphernalia scatter all over the sidewalk.

“Here, I’ll tuck her in for you,” I say. Ruth apologizes and thanks me, handing off the baby as she scrambles to scrape everything back into her purse.

I have him at last. He is screaming but I cup the back of his head into my hand, and tuck his face into the crook of my neck. The touch, the smell. I close my eyes and hold him, inhaling deeply.

“What are you doing?” Ruth is looking at me. Her brows are drawn together.

Without a word, I put the baby into the stroller. I linger over the straps, I hold the tiny hand until Ruth pushes me aside.

“Thank you for your help,” she says, and hurries away.

I know I have done something wrong and dangerous as I watch them walk away.

S is a mechanic. Every night he comes home with black hands, smelling of gasoline and the garage. I detest the black hand prints he leaves on door frames and light switches, but

I love his smell. My parents think, paradoxically, that I have married beneath myself. I remind them that I am the one with the criminal record in our relationship. Besides, he makes good money. Enough for us, anyway. I work at the bakery downstairs. It is difficult to get out of a warm bed with S for the early morning shifts, but I enjoy the work. I love to sift my fingers through the flour, to push my fist into the warm, risen dough and clench it between my fingers as I knead it. My boss likes me; even after I quit

53 when J is born, he lets me have a couple of loaves a week and our apartment smells like fresh bread, gasoline, and newborn baby. It is heaven.

After they are gone, I bury my face into S’s work shirt and J’s blanket, convincing myself I can bring them to life this way, even long after the scent is gone. My old boss from the bakery knows what has happened and keeps bringing me loaves of bread out of pity. But I have no appetite, so they sit on the counter and sprout green mold.

I keep showing up late to work. Dario lets it slide a few times, but soon he cannot ignore it.

“I have to put you on notice.” I see his eyes dart back and forth, up and down when he looks at me. “You look terrible,” he says. His jaw clenches.

“I haven’t been sleeping much,” I admit.

“It’s not easy to adjust to this schedule,” he says. “Maybe go see a doctor.” He is trying to be kind. He doesn’t know anything.

Sometimes, between work and my wanderings, I go days without sleeping. I nod off at work and wake up at home; I lie on my bed and blink at the ceiling and next thing I know I am looking up at Ruth’s window. I hold J swaddled in a blanket. He won’t stop crying. One minute I see red and blue lights and he is in the back seat, too quiet. Then he is back in my arms again, screaming. I prefer this to the quietness, though I do worry.

Has he always cried this much, or is something wrong? I can’t remember anything, but I know what I want to believe. There is only the here and now and it is useless to go back again.

One evening, I walk into work and she is in the lobby, pleading with the security guard, crying. He shakes his head, tells her he can’t let her in without a security badge. He lifts a hand towards her shoulder, but does not quite touch it, and lets it drop to his side again.

“Please, please let me speak with them,” she says.

I hold my breath and stand just inside the doorway. Will she recognize me? I risk it.

“Can I help?”

Ruth sees my Nightvision badge and looks into my face, and I know instantly that she will not recognize me. Those purple rings around her eyes, that wild, distant look, that hair that hasn’t been washed in days, those lines already etching themselves into the corners of her mouth. I recognize my face in hers.

“I have to get my memories back,” she says. “They are all I have left of her.”

I do not know what to say or do. I can’t let her know who I am, or that I have seen her memories, that I know where she lives and have held her daughter. I cannot cry, even if it is for a different baby. I have to lie, again. Fortunately, I excel at it. I offer to take her to Dario. He is not pleased.

“I can’t give you the files,” he says. “You signed an agreement. This is your signature.”

She grabs it and tears it in half.

“I have copies,” says Dario. “And lawyers. If you want them, you’ll have to get a lawyer too.”

“They’re my memories.” She beats her chest with every syllable. They go back and forth, but Dario is firm. Eventually she leaves, but I can still hear the thump of her hollow chest.

“Dario,” I say, “we have to give them to her. This can’t be good for anyone.” But he is not hearing it, he has the paperwork and the upper hand.

“We can’t give them to her,” he says. “She is under investigation. Her baby is missing. I’ve sent the files to the police.”

Missing, I think, relieved. Harrowing, to be sure; she must be in a torment. But it is still better than the certainty of death and memory. I will take uncertainty and confusion over dead silence any day. But all night at work I feel as though someone scraped the inside of my ribs with the claw side of a hammer.

Dario says he had no idea that Ruth would go to the press. There is a gauntlet of reporters outside our building, and we have to fight our way in. I tried to tell you, I want to say, but

I keep my tongue behind my teeth.

Nightvision is the top story. They call us the Night Stealers. Dario is secretly pleased about the nickname, I can tell, and glad for the exposure.

“Business as usual,” he says. “This will blow over.”

But it doesn’t. We hire bodyguards. I have strangers following me down the streets, threatening me. I get letters from people who say they want to kill my whole family. Ruth holds a press conference, the anxious mother pleading into microphones, flashbulbs illuminate her wet cheeks. It plays in the repeat news cycle, spliced with

56 footage of Dario and I making our way through churning crowds. Will Ruth recognize me? Will someone else recognize me? Will word get out that I am a liar? A murderer?

I wonder what happened to her baby. I watch all of her memory videos again and again, the last few in particular. Ruth holds her baby, tries hopelessly to calm her, feeds her, looks out the window down into the street. She focuses on the tree where I often wait and watch, hidden. Always, near dawn, the baby is finally exhausted and falls into a deep sleep. Ruth lays her gently into the crib, quiet at last, and lets out a slow exhale of relief.

What could have happened? I know what I must do.

The files are too big to send in an email. I sneak a USB drive into work one night.

The next morning, the bodyguards hold off the reporters and protesters while I run down the block, darting through alleys and down into the subway. Three trains and a short walk later I am outside Ruth’s apartment. I press the buzzer. How many times have I been here before, I wonder. I always dream of running up these steps, catching the door before it closes behind someone, the smell of old wood and dryer sheets, walking through her unlocked door. I imagine that her apartment smells like lavender and baby oil. No one answers the buzzer and I press it again, and again, until a man’s voice, it must be her husband, shouts angrily out of the speaker.

“What do you want?”

“I’m here for Ruth,” I say. “I have her memories.”

The door buzzes open, I walk in and up to the third floor. It is just like I imagine.

Ruth opens the door a crack, I see a glimpse of a violet-rimmed eye and she waves me inside. The room smells of lavender, but instead of baby oil there is the stale smell of

57 unwashed bodies and coffee. She is calmer than she was at the office. Or more exhausted.

Her husband stands in the living room in a bathrobe, running his hands through his hair.

His jaw is gray with stubble, and there are matching rings around his eyes. They are haggard, I think. But they have each other. Do they realize how much they have to be grateful for? I stifle a swell of anger and pull the USB out of my pocket.

“What finally made you grow a conscience?” Ruth says. Her voice is frayed with hostility; the soft murmurs from the videos are gone. She snatches the drive from my hand and turns to the computer at a desk behind her.

“Ruth. Are you sure this is a good time?” her husband asks. “Are you prepared…”

He reaches for her, puts a hand on her shoulder. She slaps him away. “I’m not doing this,” he says, and walks out of the room and down the hall. A door slams. I hover in the dark entryway while she clicks around. After a few minutes, she is frustrated.

“Here, let me help.” I come up behind her. She recoils as I lean over her shoulder.

I can smell her, the long nights of grief and hollow days with no shower. I know that smell. I open the files for her and pull up the first movie. “Are you ready?”

A hand rests on her chest. She nods. I press play.

I know these sounds, that cry and her voice. I don’t even need to watch. I wonder if she still has any blankets or clothes to smell. I close my eyes for a long time, and when

I open them Ruth’s fingers are touching the screen.

“These are all I have left,” she says.

“Me too,” I echo.

She turns. I have seen her expression before, the brows.

“What does that mean?” she asks.

“I know what it is like to lose a baby,” I say. “And my husband. At least you have each other. You are lucky.” I want this to soften her face, I want her forehead to smooth and the creases around her mouth to melt. Instead, she stands up.

“Lucky. You think I am lucky? You have no idea what I’ve been through,” she says. Her glare disarms me. If what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, she should be able to crack spines with a glance. We both should. Does she remember me?

“I do know what you’ve been through,” I say. “I lost my son. And I watch your videos; they comfort me.”

Ruth draws the corners of her mouth down in disgust. I must be saying the wrong things. I am trying to offer comfort, some solace, to let her know that she is not alone.

“You spied on us?” She grabs the back of the chair. Then she realizes. I see the very moment of recognition, her eyes and mouth open wide. “You came here. You came to our house. It was you.” Her voice rises; I hear the door down the hall open.

“I didn’t want to hurt her,” I say. I raise both my hands and step backwards. What have I said wrong? What have I done? “I just came here to give you your memories.”

I hear the husband’s steps down the hall, but I run out the door, down the stairs and into the street. I turn to look up at the window, but the curtains are drawn.

Of course, Ruth tells the reporters what she learned about me and it is a sensation. I stalked her, they say. Dario finds out that I returned her memories and I am fired.

“You’re lucky I don’t sue you,” he says as I get on the elevator to leave the office.

“What did you expect from a person who works the night shift?” I reply.

Before long the media uncovers the rest of my past. The accident, the hospitals and rehab, the drugs, everything. I can hear them in the alley outside my apartment, yelling at me to come out on the fire escape. When I step outside, the crowd throbs and the cameras flash. “I swear my intentions were good,” I shout. The police call me in for questioning. I tell them I know nothing, I remember nothing. My head is full of the wrong memories. It is the truth, but they are suspicious. They want to come by, they say.

Just to look. I tell them to get a warrant and then they will be welcome.

Later that night, I watch myself on the news. They don’t even bother with Dario or waiting outside his office anymore, it is just me they want. The Night Stealer. What else did she steal? They know everything about my past, about J and S. Murderer. It is better this way. This is what I want, it is what I deserve.

I can’t stop thinking about Ruth. I don’t know what I expected from her. I thought

I knew her, and her daughter. I watched over them at night. I fell into the memories. But to her I am just a stranger. Perhaps I stole their nights, after all. I feel sorry for her though. She is alone with her memories, but I left the certainty of memory and the comfort of truth behind. I sit in front of the television, rocking J. He won’t stop crying, but I hold him anyway, keeping him away from the windows and the noise outside. The news shows me crying on the fire escape.

Once, I read a story about a woman who was afraid to love. She slept and dreamed of an eagle who carried her away, tore her heart out with his talon, replacing it with his own. After that, I was afraid I would never be loved. Instead of eagles, I dream of butter melting slowly in a pan. My hands are cold; I clasp them every night and wait for my eagle dreams. No one ever tells me that I am the eagle.

The Hanged Man

The moment Andrew took his first breath was the same moment his father took his last.

His mother had a Hollywood labor, all screams and curses, her husband scurrying for ice chips and bleating encouragement, but really just being a nuisance. There had been forceps and scissors and vacuums and unspeakable fluids everywhere. When Andrew was finally wrenched out, an eggplant on a vine, his father fainted, hitting his head first on a tray of bloody instruments and then the floor, striking his skull with speed and precision, causing a massive cerebral hemorrhage. Because of all the commotion with Andrew and his mother it was a few moments before anyone in the room looked down to notice the lifeless father and the pool of blood around his head.

Andrew’s mother had never forgiven him. Every year on his birthday she drank gin and cried. The rest of the year she ignored him, playing solitaire or reading sordid romance novels. She took him to church every Sunday, where the priest was fond of saying, “Everything happens for a reason.” He grew up believing himself to be unlucky, a bringer of misfortune, a curse. At first, he hoped it was something he would outgrow, that when he left home he could leave the bad luck behind him in his old bedroom with his tattered comic books and faded Star Wars posters. But when he was in high school he watched the Challenger shuttle explode on television with his history teacher on board.

He was in love with her, had dreamed about the explosion the night before, and he understood that disaster would follow him wherever he went.

The day after he graduated high school, his mother spent her disability check on a red satin dress. She put it on that evening, drew herself a warm bath, and climbed into the tub, dress and all, with a razor. Andrew found her the next morning, her red dress in the red water. At her funeral, the priest said, “Remember, everything happens for a reason.”

Andrew did not go to college. Although he was very smart and his mother had insisted on it, he did not see the point any longer. Instead, he moved to New York City and got a job as a claims adjustor for a health insurance company, denying payments and taking away coverage from sick patients. He was quickly promoted, not because of any talent, but because he didn’t quit after a few months like almost everyone else did. Within five years he was the head of his department, within ten he was the head of the entire East Coast division, and spent most of his time traveling to various offices. It was he who approved the lease on a posh new office at the World Trade Center. I may be successful after all, he thought.

On his thirtieth birthday, he sat in a packed bar at the airport in Miami. Rain poured through a leak in the roof into a bucket on the ground behind him. A crowd was gasping and pointing at a television; they watched a tower burning, screamed as a second plane hit the towers, watched both towers burning, screamed as one tower collapsed and then the other. Andrew took his laptop and dumped it in the bucket of rainwater. There was no hope of flying, the rental cars were gone, so he grabbed his suitcase and started walking northward from Miami.

Somewhere in South Carolina an old school bus pulled over to offer him a ride, and he climbed on board. The bus was full of men and women dressed in white terrycloth robes who had seen the news and said the end of the world was coming. They offered him a place to stay for the night. After a month of sleeping at truck stops and the occasional freeway motel, he was in no position to be selective. They took him to their compound on a farm and he followed them as they filed silently into a small building that resembled a big wooden igloo.

The room was hot and humid like a sauna, and everyone took a seat around a pit in the center of the room where a fire blazed. Immediately drenched in sweat, Andrew could not remember ever being more uncomfortable, but he did not know how to leave. A few people came around with trays of small cups, which were eagerly consumed. Andrew took one. It looked like tea. He sniffed it and nearly gagged—it smelled bitter and somehow sweet, like decay. A gong sounded, and everyone stood up and began chanting with their arms in the air, eyes closed, reaching palms towards the fire. Then they began to dance, or more accurately, gyrate, almost in unison. By now it was stifling, almost unbearable, and water was streaming from their bodies. Some people began to collapse.

Andrew looked out to the crowd, their white robes in the light of the fire, writhing on the floor like maggots. No one was looking at him, they were chanting in tongues. Andrew looked up at the ceiling and realized it was on fire.

“Fire!” he cried, stepping over the undulating bodies, towards the exit. No one was paying attention. He grabbed a man by the shoulders and shook him, trying to wake him from the trance, but the man just swooned and fell to the ground. Andrew yelled,

63 trying to make someone hear him, but his voice was drowned out. He coughed and ran outside, screaming for help, but there was no one, no buildings. He ran down the road into the darkness. Even if the whole world was ending, he would somehow be left behind.

When he finally returned to his apartment in New York, he had walked more than a thousand miles. It took him two months. He’d grown a beard, his clothes were tattered, he had not showered in that whole time and was as unrecognizable as the city he came home to. It was the freest he had ever felt; he was happy and glad to be home. He thought to see how long he could keep going without showering or grooming. But the first time he tried to go grocery shopping, he was escorted out by a security guard.

“What did I do?” he asked. Men were glaring, a few women pushed their carts aside and looked away.

“Just keep it moving,” said the security guard.

Andrew went home and shaved and showered, a clump of hair in the tub drain the size of a prodigious rat.

Therapy seemed logical. It was what everyone did, the cure-all for any ailment from marriage to death. But when he was in the waiting room, thinking of what he would say, he realized that he had actually caused far more suffering than he had been exposed to.

This thought caused him great anxiety, so that when the therapist asked what brought him in, he blurted out, “I am the angel of death.”

The therapist did not look up from his notepad. He slurped tea with a puckered, rodent mouth. Cleared his throat. Adjusted his glasses and used the end of his pen to scratch his chest through his sweater vest. Sniffed. Andrew waited.

“It says here you’re single,” said the therapist at last. “When was your last relationship?”

“Never had a relationship,” Andrew replied. The therapist looked up, his eyebrows thrust towards the ceiling, his forehead a scaffolding of wrinkled concern.

“Never?”

“No.”

The therapist scribbled on his notepad.

“Haven’t you ever wanted a relationship?” he asked.

“Of course I have,” Andrew replied. “It’s just that, I’m afraid if I love a woman

I’ll kill her.” The therapist’s eyes grew wide with alarm.

“Not like, murder her—I mean, something awful might happen. I’m bad luck.”

Flurry of scratchings on the notepad covered pages as he recapitulated his life. “I tried to date in my twenties,” he said, “but never got very far. After a while I stopped trying.”

Andrew grimaced as he thought about his clumsy attempts, earnest and amorous. Each time he’d come close, he’d been too eager, could not restrain himself, and the women had left him to his shame.

“Have you tried online dating?” asked the therapist. “I hear it’s all the rage.”

Andrew thought about his laptop, probably still in a bucket of rainwater in Miami.

“I’ll give it a try,” he said.

Every afternoon for lunch, Andrew went to the same 1950s-style diner around the corner from his apartment. There were two hundred and thirty-four white and black tiles on the floor, twelve seats at the counter (he always sat on the sixth from the right, at the corner of the bar; if it was taken his day was utterly ruined), and twelve red vinyl booths. The special was always chili and grilled cheese, which he ordered without fail. It was predictable and safe. Sometimes he would make small talk with the woman behind the counter. He liked her because she was exactly the type of person you would expect to work there. Her name was Gladys, she called everyone “doll” or “hun”, she chewed gum with her mouth open. Sometimes she missed one of her hot rollers and came to work with it still clinging to her brassy hair. She might have been thirty, she might have been sixty.

“The usual?” she said to Andrew one afternoon, red lipstick on her teeth. Andrew smiled in reply. He watched her scrape crusted gunk off the grill before she made his grilled cheese. Suddenly the door flew open, and a man in a mask waved a gun and started yelling for everyone to get down. There were screams and someone was sobbing.

Andrew, crouched under a stool, could hear Gladys on the other side of the counter, reciting the Lord’s Prayer. He smelled his sandwich burning. No one tried anything heroic, and the masked man rifled through the cash register, stuffed the money into a bag, and ran off. When it was over, they all submitted to questioning from a bored policeman.

Gladys closed the restaurant for the rest of the day, but gave Andrew some chili in a to-go container. “On the house,” she said.

On his way home, he cried. It was the nicest thing anyone had ever done for him.

After the robbery, Andrew had a feeling that something has passed between him and

Gladys. They had survived a trauma together; it must have brought them closer, he reasoned. He began to iron his shirt before he left his apartment. It was his best effort— there was not much that could be done about his appearance. His red hair, though thinning, was untamable; his eyebrows only seemed to grow halfway across the brow ridge before they gave up. Each day he spoke a few more words, and soon they were having conversations.

Gladys claimed that she could predict the future. She had a knack especially for anticipating disasters; she had predicted 9/11, a number of plane crashes, murders, and disasters of the natural variety. Before something awful happened, a part of her body would act up depending on what the disaster would be. Hurricanes gave her migraines, bombings brought on hemorrhoids, mass shootings made her teeth loose. But her talent was unpredictable and needed to be honed. She was saving her money to start a fortune telling business. “In the meantime,” she said, “I’m refining my craft.”

One afternoon she tried to read tea leaves. She cut open a few Lipton tea bags and dumped the contents into a ceramic mug, pouring hot water over them and swirling them around, frowning into the cup.

“I don’t know about this,” she said, “looks like a bunch of wet grass clippings is all.”

“Maybe you’re supposed to use whole leaf tea?” Andrew offered. Gladys shrugged and filled the cup the rest of the way with hot water.

“Hate for it to go to waste,” she said, taking a sip. When she lowered the cup a muddy tea leaf mustache glistened across her upper lip.

Another day she brought in tarot cards. “I really like these,” she said to Andrew,

“Here, I’ll give you a reading.” She spread the cards out in a fan shape on the counter.

“Pick a card,” she said, “any card.”

“Is this how you’re supposed to do it?” he asked.

“Who gives,” said Gladys. “Just pick one.” Andrew obeyed and turned it over. It was a picture of a man, dangling upside down, one leg tied to a tree. The man looked very serene about the whole thing, dressed in dainty slippers, bright red tights, a blue tunic. His fiery red hair flowed towards the ground. Gladys put on her glasses and squinted as she read the caption on the card. “The Hanged Man,”

“What does it mean?”

Gladys retrieved the paper foldout from the box the deck came in. “Hanged Man.

Here we go. ‘The Hanged Man is a willing victim; making sacrifices and getting little in return. Your goals and dreams have been put on hold. As a result, you are unable to get out of your current situation. You may be suffering from internal issues as the energy is flowing out of your life. You are suspended in mid-air, the ultimate martyr.’ Well?”

Andrew slouched over his cup of chili and frowned. He poked at a bean with his spoon.

“Well?” asked Gladys again, “Was I right?”

“Spot on,” said Andrew, and finished his meal in silence. Gladys watched him for a few moments, then left him in peace. Instead of the check, she brought him a Styrofoam to-go container.

“Carrot cake,” she winked at him. “It’s good for you! Practically a vegetable.”

Andrew lived off that wink for a month.

Since September, Andrew had not worked. He never quit officially, and no one from the company had tried to contact him. His paychecks continued to come in every other week, direct deposited into his bank account, so he decided to do nothing. He thought he might try to find a hobby, but somehow the days slipped away. He woke up at noon and stared at the ceiling for an hour. Then he would walk to the diner to see Gladys. Sometimes he would go to the grocery store, or the pharmacy, or his therapist’s office. For dinner every night he ate tuna fish with a fork straight from the can. Then he would rinse the fork in the sink and go to bed, flecks of tuna rotting between his teeth. If it was sad or pathetic,

Andrew didn’t know. He wore the guilt of everyone who had suffered and died on his account around his neck like a lead anchor.

“Do you believe in parallel universes?” his therapist asked him during one session.

“I don’t know; I’ve never really thought about it,” said Andrew.

“Maybe,” said the therapist, “you’re living in the universe where everything bad happens to you, and in another universe, there is an Andrew who is happy and successful, married with a family.” The therapist smiled at him, hopeful, like his words were a revelation that would part the clouds.

“Maybe,” said Andrew.

That afternoon he checked the mail. There was a letter from his insurance company, the same company that he apparently still worked for. The letter was to notify him that his therapy claims had been denied and he owed his therapist $3,165.89 in fees.

He would be billed separately.

One afternoon he sat on the toilet with the door open so he could see the TV. When he was finished he stood up, his thighs sticking to the seat. He went to flush and heard a snap, then the handle hung limply from the side of the tank. He jiggled it urgently, panic rising. Nothing happened. Lethargically cursing, he removed the cover from the tank and stared at the web of mysterious parts: rubber, plastic, metal, each one more confounding than the last. He pulled on the chain that was connected to the limp handle, and the seal at the bottom of the tank lifted. To his relief, the toilet flushed.

For a few moments Andrew stood with his hands clasped behind his neck, shifting from leg to the other. He could call a plumber or the landlord. Have them come fix it. He imagined the conversation in his head. “Hi, yes, this is Andrew in apartment two-oh- three, my toilet won’t flush… I seem to have broken my toilet… my toilet appears to be malfunctioning…” but the more he imagined it, the more anxious he became. He considered his options. The toilet did flush, it just took an extra step now of removing the back cover and reaching into the murky water to pull the chain. Technically, it still worked. He decided to leave it as it was. What did it matter, anyway, if the toilet handle worked or not?

Things with Gladys were progressing slowly. Towards what, Andrew was not certain.

Every time he was on the verge of asking her to dinner, he broke out in hives on his chest. And while she was kind and talkative, he couldn’t tell if she was just being social because he was a customer or if she genuinely liked him.

“Do you remember the afternoon when we were robbed?” he asked her one day.

Gladys looked perplexed. “What afternoon?”

“What do you mean ‘what afternoon’? The robbery…I was sitting here and that masked man came in with a gun…?”

“Honey, we get robbed about once a month. Mostly on the night shift, not so often they come in during broad daylight anymore. Maybe just a few times a year for those. I can usually predict them though—just before every robbery my gallbladder goes haywire.” She refilled his water and moved down the counter to another customer.

Andrew wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting, but whatever it was, it had been foolish.

After a night of staring at the wall by his bed, Andrew rose with a revelation and a plan.

Nothing tethered him to this life at all, and he knew the longer he lived, the more people would die because of him. He should have done it long ago. At first, he was relieved, but as the day went on he grew wistful. There was no question how he would do it—the therapist had prescribed cabinets full of pills with yellow labels. He had no family, no friends, no one who would miss him. But he was sad, and a little bit afraid.

He went to the diner as usual that afternoon. Best not to do anything out of the ordinary, he thought. Gladys served him the special and they chatted about the new Ouija board she bought. Until now, he had never noticed that one of her breasts was prominently bigger than the other. As he was paying the check, he suddenly found himself overcome with emotion, and had to blink back tears when Gladys said she would see him tomorrow.

At home, Andrew sat on the couch. He never doubted his resolution, but he had not expected to feel sorry for himself. It was not an emotion he ever felt he could afford

71 to spend. He ate his can of tuna for dinner and stayed awake until dawn. When the sun started to rise, he swallowed fistfuls of pills with a glass of water, stretched out on his couch and waited.

So focused had he been on what came after death that he had not anticipated the profound and crippling pain of actually dying. Stupid, he thought, stupid, expecting to fall into a gentle slumber and never wake up. Now he was doubled over in the kitchen, throwing up into the recycling bin with his empty cans of tuna. Then the hallucinations started; he was on his back watching fish swim in and out of the walls. He couldn’t move, but felt life slipping away, imagined himself being flushed down a toilet.

First it was dark. Then there was a bright light. What a cliché, Andrew thought.

But he knew he was dead, so he waited as the light got closer; the anticipation built and built, he thought he was about to meet God. The light became blinding, unbearable to look at, but Andrew no longer had a body and there were no hands to shield him or eyelids to close, no eyes at all, which was wondrous to think about, or would have been, if he had a brain.

The light came into focus. Andrew was confused. God was a giant squid, glistening gray, slimy and smelling. The squid hovered in the air, its tentacles quivering.

A plate of fries appeared, and the squid produced a bottle of ketchup. It unscrewed the lid delicately with a tentacle, and turned the bottle upside down towards the plate and shook.

Nothing came out. It shook harder. Still nothing. It tapped on the bottom of the bottle with a tentacle, lightly at first, then harder until all the ketchup came out at once with a great red splat and the squid sighed heavily. “Everything happens for a reason,” it said.

Andrew woke up in his kitchen feeling like he’d been turned inside out and back again.

The clock on the stove read 8:38pm, but he did not know if it was the same day or a week later. He remembered taking the pills, the vomiting and wondered whether or not he was glad to be alive. He remembered his vision of “God”. Surely it meant something.

Everything meant something, he just had to figure out the symbolism. The room was still reverberating and he wondered whether or not he should go see the doctor, but he could barely drag himself to the couch.

After another sleepless night, he walked to his therapist. It was raining torrents and had been for days. As he waited at a crosswalk, he saw a rat swimming desperately against a gutter current before it was sucked into a sewer grate. Was there a reason for that, too? When he admitted what he’d done to his therapist, he felt like a child again, in the confession box, waiting for admonishment. Why was it that when he was bad, he had to atone, but when something awful happened to him, it was all just part of a grand plan?

His atonement this time was committing himself to a psychiatric hospital for three days.

When they checked him in, they insisted he list an emergency contact on the paperwork.

He wrote down Gladys and the name of the diner.

Three days turned into a week. The doctors in the ward did not seem to understand his reasoning at all. He didn’t want to die, he insisted. It was just that he was more afraid to live, afraid of what might happen to everyone around him because of his curse. They said he was being irrational, though they did agree that his life had been a series of unfortunate incidents. But those were coincidences, surely.

The hospital was not entirely a bad place to be, Andrew decided. It was clean, quiet, the staff was distant but polite and professional. He had his own room, and as long as he was safe in it, there was less of a chance of harm coming to the outside world. But on the seventh day, he was informed that his insurance would only cover a week of in- patient care. They suggested intensive out-patient, instead, and gave him his clothing back. He dressed and came out to the lobby, where he was surprised to see Gladys waiting in a chair.

“What are you doing here?” he asked. Immediately he began to sweat.

She wore a bright orange pea coat over her uniform and clutched a chartreuse bag in her hands. She stood up when she saw him.

“They called me,” she said. “But I already knew. My ears started ringing last week. Last time that happened, my Aunt Vera hanged herself.”

They shared a cab back to his apartment with a stop at the pharmacy. They didn’t speak the entire time, but the silence was comfortable. When they got out in front of his building, Gladys asked if he wanted her to come up. He thought of his broken toilet, the mess in the kitchen and politely declined. He said he felt much better. She made him promise to come by the diner. He said he would.

After he cleaned up the kitchen, he took his medication and climbed into his bed.

He relived the silent cab ride over and over. It wasn’t until he was almost asleep that he realized he had never said thank you.

He was in a pit of anxiety for the next few days. The morning after she had collected him from the hospital, he bought flowers and a box of chocolate from the bodega on the

74 corner and walked towards the diner, but turned around when he was a block away. She knew too much about him already, and on top of that he’d been thoughtless and ungrateful. He began to think he should just stay away. After all, his attention was likely to kill her. But he owed her at least a thank you, something, for collecting him. Every few hours he worked himself into a frenzy, summoned the courage, gathered the wilting flowers off his kitchen counter (he’d eaten the chocolates in a moment of particularly acute desperation) and would almost make it to the diner before he turned around and went home. After several days of this, he finally gave up, exhausted, and began to form a plan that involved hoarding food and not moving from his couch until he weighed enough to be a structural hazard for his apartment building.

A week went by. While Andrew could not muster up the fortitude to stay on the couch, he did not leave his apartment. He looked out the window towards the diner, paced his floor, slept sporadically. One morning a pounding on his door jolted him awake. He had fallen asleep face down on his living room carpet, and jumped up in confusion. Through the peephole he saw Gladys’ face. His apartment was a disaster; he wore grimy sweatpants and a gray tee shirt with sweat stains down the sides, which he was currently adding to. He opened the door.

“How did you get in the building?” he said, his voice gravelly from not speaking for a week.

“Can I come in?”

There had been a time when this would have been Andrew’s wildest dream come true. But everything was different now—he was a curse that needed to be locked away like a mummy in a tomb. He thought of his organs in jars arranged in neat little rows.

Was there a way? He stood with the door open, wondering how much a sarcophagus would cost. Gladys pushed past him. She smelled of coffee and stale French fries. He shut the door behind her and they stood awkwardly in the hallway.

“I brought you this,” Gladys held out a to-go container. “Carrot cake.”

“Practically a vegetable,” he mumbled, taking it from her. “Thanks.” She was breathing heavily as though she had been running. He observed her face while she looked around his apartment, her makeup settled on her skin like the film over tepid soup.

Suddenly her eyes snapped up to his. “Why’d you do it?” she asked.

It was a bold question; he thought vaguely that it should have shocked him. But the medications he took dulled his senses. He found himself wanting to tell her everything, about his father and mother, his high school teacher, his employees, probably the cult and who knows how many other unfortunate souls he’d crossed paths with. But the endless march of their faces had worn trenches in his brain, and he was tremendously weary of it all. Worn down to nothing.

“I’m just so tired,” he shrugged. As if to illustrate his point, he went and laid down on the couch, resting the box of carrot cake on his chest. Gladys followed him and took a seat in a chair next to him. He stared at the ceiling. They sat in silence for a while, then Gladys went into the kitchen. She came back with a fork and clumsily wedged her backside down next to him on the couch. It was the first time they had ever touched, and he jolted back, even in his stupor.

She opened the box of carrot cake and fed it to him, bite by bite, until it was gone.

He let it happen, entranced and confused. When it was gone she stood up and kissed him

76 on the forehead and sat back down on the chair. Where her lips had touched felt cool and wet. Andrew’s eyelids were heavy, his chin nodded down to his chest.

When he woke up, it was late afternoon, long shadows were creeping across the ceiling, and he felt the sense of loss that always accompanied a good dream. Was it a dream? He could still feel her gauzy lips on his forehead. He turned and there was

Gladys, asleep in the chair, crook-necked, mouth open. If he caused disasters, and she could predict them, was there nothing to be afraid of, or everything to be afraid of?

Six Days in April

The woman brushing peroxide onto Gladys’ hair was crying as she told the story.

“By the time the train arrived at the station,” she said, “there weren’t even bodies left. Just piles of clothing, shoes and hats.”

Gladys was uncomfortable. Not just because of the tears, but because she had not been listening to the story at all until the woman started to get emotional, so she missed key details, like: where was the train from? What station was it arriving in? What happened to the people, and why were their clothes spared? Gladys tried to shape her face into an expression of sympathy.

“How awful,” she murmured. The woman glared at her in the mirror, but kept crying and brushing the dye on. Everywhere Gladys went these days, people were crying.

The butcher on 52nd, her dry cleaner, too many of her customers at the diner to count, and now her hair dresser. Gladys, who never cried in public, but spent much of her time weeping in private, saw it as a weak indulgence akin to wearing sweatpants to the grocery store.

While her hair was in foils, she pretended to read a magazine. Her eyes glazed over the pages and darted up to the man who had come in for a trim. He was in his early twenties, spoke softly, with a polite deference, while the hairdresser retold the story about the train and cried some more. For the second time, Gladys missed most of the details,

78 while she gave the man a name, backstory, and personality in her head. Ricardo. Puerto

Rican. Arrived in Florida as a child, made his way to New York for college. Getting a degree in business to make his mother proud. On the swim team. Ricardo did not look at

Gladys even once as she marinated under the tinfoil.

Gladys’ hair started turning gray when she was twelve and was white by the time she was twenty, rendering her effectively invisible. She feared it, this invisibility, more than anything. When she went to bars, she watched pretty girls sidle up to the counter, cutting in front of men who, instead of complaining, bought them drinks. Gladys was the last one served. She knew she was not pretty, her skin was like cheesecloth and her bones stuck out in all the wrong places. She had come to terms with all of that, but the hair erased her entirely. She began to dye her hair blonde, though it took on a brassy tone that no purple shampoo could compensate for. She wore fuchsia, chartreuse, and magenta

(this was back in the 1980s) and modeled a jaunty walk, fists perched on enviably sharp iliac crests, elbows out, after Madonna.

All the lonely years of her twenties until now, well into her thirties, she had lived in the same old studio apartment where she rotated through men and houseplants. The north facing windows were cruel, and nothing green lasted longer than a month or two, not even the philodendron (the men had even shorter shelf lives). A chandelier made of doll’s heads hung from the ceiling, dozens of eyes staring down at her narrow bed that doubled as couch, dining table, and coat rack. Her nights lined up like a row of dominoes, tenuous and transient.

She watched Ricardo pay the hairdresser, whose story took longer to tell than

Ricardo’s hair did to cut. He waved a goodbye and walked past, glancing up at Gladys

79 briefly. She smiled, demurely as not to appear overeager, then he was gone. When the hairdresser put her under the sink and rinsed out the dye, she raked her hands violently through Gladys’ scalp. Retribution for her inattention earlier. Gladys clenched the arms of the chair but said nothing and left a large tip.

When she returned home that evening, she kicked off her shoes and climbed into bed, still in her work uniform. It was a Monday and normally she would have gone to

Slapjack’s, the bar around the corner, for speed-dating night, but she was too tired. Her nylon stockinged-feet made excruciating textured sounds on the sheets and the lights were on. She couldn’t bring herself to get up.

Next to her bed, she kept a list of her most shameful impulses:

Sweep everything off a tabletop w/ one smooth motion of arm Fire a Civil War-era cannon through my apartment ceiling into the floor of the neighbor upstairs, preferably hitting him right between the legs Drink the grease from the deep fryer at work Pull the fire alarm Yank the steering wheel of a taxi as it crosses the Brooklyn Bridge

It was an ongoing list. She never acted on these impulses, but tracked them nonetheless.

In an effort towards self-improvement she was trying to be more methodical. After a while of lying fully clothed in bed, she rolled over to the list and added:

Shave a clean line through the center of hair dresser’s scalp

Swinging her legs out of bed, she rolled down her stockings, slid on bare feet across the hardwood floors, feeling lint, brassy-gray hair, and grime gather under her cracked heels, flicked the light switch for the doll head chandelier, and slid back to bed. Traffic noises outside swelled and ebbed, lights swept across the wall and ceiling. Her urban aurora borealis. She sat up again and turned to the list:

Grab Ricardo by the belt loops and kiss him on the pectoral muscle

He would have been about that tall.

When Gladys woke up the next morning, fully dressed, her teeth hurt. They felt loose.

This worried her. Toothache usually meant disaster of some kind: man-made. Brushing them was impossible. Eating out of the question. She rubbed her jaw and took a shower.

The phone rang as she was leaving for work; she let it go to the answering machine.

Her boss, an obese man named Cyril, rode his bike everywhere in the city. His weight perched precariously, the front wheel was prone to bockety swerving from bike lane to gutter to traffic lane and back again, eliciting honks and gestures and violent tirades. She could hear him coming long before he parked his bike out front, red-faced and wheezing. He seemed liable to die at any moment, from heart attack or being run over or both. His instability made Gladys nervous; she was always staring into his gray face, the broken capillaries around his nose, chin, and cheeks, the yellow stains around his shirt collar and armpits. Any minute, she thought.

Cyril was an ill-tempered man, but kept his grumbling mostly to himself.

Together they ran the dysfunctional diner, tripping over each other in the tiny, open kitchen surrounded by a counter and booths lined up along one wall. Sometimes there was also a third person, a role that was filled and recast every few weeks. No one seemed able to cope with the disorder for long. Dishes overflowed from the sink and into the mop bucket. Steaks were likely to be forgotten on the grill. But Gladys and Cyril had worked together for so long that the chaos was, in a way, predictable.

“My teeth hurt today,” Gladys said as he walked in.

“Hmph,” Cyril responded, air in his lungs rustling like a rake through leaves.

“Last time they hurt this bad was the Oklahoma City bombing,” she said.

“You see a dentist?” Cyril asked.

“No dentist can fix this,” Gladys said. “I haven’t had the chance to read the paper.

What’s happening?”

“Read the paper on your own time,” Cyril huffed. “Chop those onions.”

Gladys returned to the cutting board, skillfully maneuvering the knife around her fingers and reducing a bag of onions to a mountain of pungent shavings while tears poured down her face. All the while, she talked to a regular at the counter who was reading the newspaper.

“What’s it say, hun?” she asked the man with the paper.

“Nothing in the morning paper,” he said, shoving it to one side. The front page spun new takes on old stories: Clinton and Lewinsky, Henderson and Shepherd, the stock market and The Matrix. “But haven’t you heard the news since then?”

“No,” said Gladys. “I’ve had a knife in my hand all day.”

“Some kids shot up a high school in Colorado a few hours ago. I just saw a news clip on the TV at the bodega around the corner. People running everywhere outside the school.” The man paused before he took a bite of his Reuben sandwich. Sauerkraut oozed from the corners of his mouth. Gladys’ knife hovered.

“How terrible,” said an old woman nearby who came in twice a day for coffee.

She took a wadded piece of tissue out of her sweater sleeve and dabbed at her eyes.

“What’s happening to the world today?”

When Gladys got home that night, she had one message. From her mother, as she expected, a simple and familiar remonstrance: “Haven’t heard from you in a while… just calling to check in.” She was apparently calling from the public phone in the rest home dining room in Queens. Stilted conversations of geriatrics and daytime television blared in the background. It was the same message she left Gladys almost every day, and as always Gladys dialed the number for her mother’s private phone. She picked up on the first ring.

“Didn’t think you’d call back so soon,” said her mother. No hello. Their conversations were normally polite but terse, and always the same.

“Where’s your father?”

“I don’t know, Ma. You divorced him when I was seven, remember?”

Long silence. Gladys could picture the panicked confusion on her mother’s face.

“Have they been taking care of you there, Ma? It was nice today, did you go for a walk?”

“Oh yes. Will your father be coming to visit today?”

“No. He’s not coming.”

Under it all, Gladys felt a hot wire of hate spring through her words.

The second-to-last time she saw her father was at the swim meet. Seven-year-old Gladys was a swarthy child, bulky and wide-shouldered. An excellent swimmer, but when she stood on the poolside in her bathing suit, her mother sighed. She was agitated and kept looking over her shoulder.

“Your father is late,” she said. Her eyes narrowed at Gladys’ mid-section. “We’re going to have to get you a bigger suit.” Gladys hunched slightly, pulling her shoulders in, looking down at the goosebumps on her pale thighs and the blue veins in her feet. She wanted to hide in the water.

At the sound of the whistle, Gladys went to the platform and put on her goggles.

She had the center lane. Leaning over, water dripping from her nose, she held out her hands and waited. From the corner of her eye she saw her father walk in. Her mother waved, he joined her.

One whistle to get ready. On the second she dove. She counted strokes, coming up for air after four. Whenever she took a breath, she looked over her shoulder at her parents. She preferred to stare at the bottom of the pool, hearing only the churning of the water and her pulse. They were not watching her. They sat high up in the stands, away from everyone else’s parents, who gathered, standing and cheering, as close to the deck as possible. Her mother was angry, a fist clenched between them, an index finger accusing. Her father looked gray and guilty.

Back down into the water. One, two, three, four strokes. The wall was closing in, she would need to turn soon. She did not know if she was in the lead or not.

A breath. She looked up. Her mother’s arm was reeled back behind her head. She let it go, full force, slapping her father across the face. The contact went unnoticed with the commotion, but Gladys imagined she heard it like a crack of lightning. She did not break stride.

In the water, she counted. One, two, three, four.

A breath. Her father held his face. Her mother was watching her now.

It was a short race. One side to the other, Gladys counted strokes and breaths.

When she touched the wall she looked at the timekeeper. Fourth place. Her mother was gripping the edge of her seat with both hands. Her father was clapping, but not looking at her.

She got out of the water. Her goggles fogged up and the spectators became a merciful blur. Exposed, hunched, she trotted along the pool deck, eager to get to the locker room. She remembered slipping—the panic of weightlessness above water, her feet parallel to her head, suspended for a minute, and the crack of her head on the cement.

Pain. Red. Black. When she woke up she was in an ambulance. She saw her mother’s face and asked for her father.

“He couldn’t make it,” she said.

The doctors insisted that Gladys stay in the hospital overnight for observation.

She had a serious concussion, and wasn’t allowed to fall sleep. Throughout the night she sat propped up, head bandaged, under the flickering yellow lights in a yellow room. One nurse shuffled around in bedpan shoes to try and amuse her, and she could eat all the ice cream and watch all the television she wanted. But she knew her life was irrevocably changed even before her mother picked her up the next morning, in the same clothes she was wearing from the previous day, reeking of cigarettes and coffee.

When they got home, Gladys noticed the television was gone and all the family photos were removed from the wall. She went upstairs, glancing across the hall from her room into her parents’. Her father’s dresser drawers were open and empty. Gladys said nothing until dinner that night. Her mother put two still partially frozen dinner trays on the table. A glass of wine for her, milk for Gladys.

“Where’s Dad?” she asked.

Her mother drew a deep breath through her nose and picked up the wine glass.

“Your father has done something unspeakable and unforgivable. He won’t be coming back. If he knows what’s good for him, he won’t try and see you. You need to forget him.” Just like that. She drank half the wine in one quaff, then clawed at the icy chunk of meatloaf with her fork.

Gladys knew better than to ask questions. Her mother’s slap to his face, the one she heard underwater, she had felt herself on more than one occasion. She waited until her mother had eaten around the frozen parts of the tray before asking to be excused, leaving her own plate untouched.

On Wednesday it was pouring rain after work. Gladys found a baby raccoon in a gutter on her way home. The size of a bloated loaf of bread, it wasn’t moving, and she had nearly stepped on it. She scooped it up and brought it up to her apartment. It was covered in motor oil, limp, but still breathing.

Grabbing an old towel, she moved a heft of dirty dishes to the oven to make room on the counter and in the sink. As she filled one side with dish soap suds and warm water, she thought of a time when she was young—perhaps no more than four, she had woken up deep in the night, vomiting, with unbearable pain in her ears. Her mother and father came into her room. Her father scooped her out of bed and pressed his mouth to Gladys’ tender ear with such fragileness and warmth, that despite the raging infection, it seemed to melt. Her mother carried her to the bathroom stripped off Gladys’ vomit-soaked

86 pajamas and wrapped her in a towel while she filled a warm bath and coaxed a spoonful of bitter medicine down her throat.

Gladys gingerly washed the oil out of the raccoon’s fur. It did not stir while she used the blow dryer to warm its damp fur, though it swallowed some red-tinged milk from a rinsed-out squeeze ketchup bottle (she could not find a syringe.) She found a flannel scarf and wrapped the raccoon up, snarling softly but still limp, with a hot water bottle and tucked it into bed with her. It woke her up in the middle of the night clawing her face.

At first, she tried to trap it in a bag, but it clawed through the paper. Next, she tried a hatbox, but it hurled its body so violently against the lid that she couldn’t hold it steady. Finally, she trapped it in her suitcase and carried it downstairs and outside. She had her hair in rollers and wore only a t-shirt and underwear, no shoes. The slash marks on her face were puckered and bleeding. The scene attracted the attention of two men who were on the corner, smoking under a streetlamp.

“Hey there sister,” slurred one man.

“Looking good tonight,” said the other, reaching his arm out.

Gladys held her suitcase out towards the men and sprung the latches open. The raccoon launched out with a warbling growl, sprang off one man’s arm before ricocheting off the other’s face, grunted to a landing on the sidewalk and charged into the night.

Before the men could say anything, she turned and walk back inside the building.

She was late for work the next morning, but when Cyril saw the bandages on her face, he said, “I don’t want to hear about it.”

After her concussion, Gladys noticed unaccountable aches and pains cropping up all over her body. As a child, she paid little attention to the news, so it took several years before she began to notice a correlation. But one year, a bomb went off at La Guardia airport, killing more than ten people. Gladys realized she’d had migraines all morning before that, and something made her wonder, superstitiously, if there was a connection. In South

America, an earthquake killed more than 20,000 people the same night she couldn’t stop throwing up. A plane crash sent her eczema into overdrive.

Around the time she started to suspect that she was an oracle of sorts, and subsequently wonder if she should tell someone or never speak of it to anybody, her father showed up at her school. She had finished lunch early and was scuffing around the empty basketball courts alone. Someone called her name; it was her father, standing in the street on the other side of the chain link fence. She ran to him.

“What are you doing here?” She looked around, afraid someone would see. Her mother had never told her what he’d done and refused to speak of him. With only years of silence and absence in which to wonder, Gladys had dreamed up wild tales, and had finally convinced herself that he was D.B. Cooper, the man who hijacked and parachuted out of a plane somewhere over Washington state with $200,000 cash and was never seen or heard from again.

“You’ve grown so much,” he said. Something in his voice made her stop a foot away from the fence.

“What’s the matter?” he asked. “Don’t you recognize me? Haven’t you missed me?”

Gladys didn’t know how to answer, so she didn’t.

“What time do you get out of school? I thought we could go grab some ice cream, or go see a movie. Whatever you want.”

“Mom said I was never allowed to see you again.” The bell rang. Her father grabbed the chain link fence and squinted at her, but said nothing. Much of his hair had fallen out in the years that had passed and he had tried to comb a few greasy strands over his glistening scalp. His nose was red. She was suddenly enormously sad when she looked at him. She thought of a string of Christmas lights, and how when one bulb went out, they all went dark.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I have to get back to class.”

When she told her mother that she had seen him, they moved from Newark to

Brooklyn.

Friday was Gladys’ day off, and she went to see her mother. Sunnyside Senior Center was two trains and a bus ride away, and she often wondered why she bothered.

Sometimes her mother didn’t even know who she was. By now her mind had coiled time into a slinky; sometimes it was compressed tightly and memories, years, entire periods of her life overlapped, or sometimes it was stretched out and doubling over itself down an endless flight of stairs, and she and Gladys would spend the entire day repeating the same two sentences:

“Where is your father?”

“I don’t know, Ma.”

On this particular Friday, a doctor met with Gladys. The doctor was an elderly woman, perhaps even older than her mother. But unlike her mother, this woman was

89 lucid, and kind; the folds that ran from her nose to her mouth so deeply etched she seemed to smile even when delivering tragic news.

“We have to start planning for end-of-life care,” said the doctor. “Your mother’s condition is rapidly deteriorating. She’s having incontinence issues, and her ‘good days’ are becoming fewer.”

Gladys flinched. Every time her mother’s disease got worse or revealed a new symptom, she was lashed with guilt. Always there was the feeling that she wasn’t doing enough, that she wasn’t being kind or patient enough when her mother asked her about her father for two hours at a time, when it should have been the other way around. But

Gladys always assented to the doctor’s suggestions, signed whatever papers were in front of her after pretending to read them.

“What happened to your face?” asked the doctor, staring at the bandages.

“Raccoon attack,” Gladys said absently, reading over a form that declared her mother would not be resuscitated in the event of cardiac or respiratory arrest.

“I hope you got a rabies shot.”

“Is that something you could do here?”

“Unfortunately, no.”

After the paperwork was signed, Gladys went to the dining hall where her mother sat with a paper cup full of coffee.

“They won’t let me have wine,” she said to Gladys. No hello. Never a hello.

Gladys wondered if she could smuggle some in. Would that make her a better daughter, or worse? What could it hurt, really? She added tasks to her mental list: rabies shot, contraband liquor for mother.

“How are you today, Ma?”

“I’ve been waiting for your father. Do you know where he is?”

“I’m sorry Ma, I don’t.” There was a long lull while her mother sipped her coffee and pursed her lips and fidgeted in her chair.

“Ma,” said Gladys, “do you remember the time when I was sick with an ear infection, and you came into my room and wrapped me up, and gave me a bath?”

Her mother squinted into the distance and put a hand to her mouth. Her eyes flickered as though she were watching a rapid, disordered slideshow. Gladys’ own memories, surfacing unbidden from some vast and chaotic reel, longed for resurrection and recognition in her mother. She held her breath.

“You were covered in sick,” said her mother slowly.

“Yes,” said Gladys, urgent. “You and dad came into my room, and you gave me a bath.”

“Yes,” echoed her mother. “Hmm.” She nodded slowly and fondled her paper cup.

Did she remember? Were they even memories for her anymore, or so interwoven into her thoughts that the past and the present were indiscernible?

“I’ve been waiting for your father. Do you know where he is?”

Saturday afternoon Gladys went to the urgent care clinic to get a rabies shot. For four hours, she sat in the waiting room, watching the plethora of entertainment that humanity had to offer. A child who had swallowed a handful of change sobbed and clutched a stuffed hippopotamus, a young man tried to explain to the triage nurse what

‘shotgunning’ a beer was and how he managed to swallow a shard of the aluminum can.

Another man sat shivering with his arms crossed and occasionally made retching sounds into a paper bag, a generous berth of empty chairs around him. All of them, Gladys realized, had someone there with them. She imagined their homes, their lives, bestowed upon each of them sweeping epics of conquest and heartbreak, tragedy and redemption.

She never factored into any of the stories herself, never fantasized. Instead she imagined herself as a deity, sometimes strict but mostly benevolent, imbuing them all with imaginary lives.

When they finally called her back, she sat on the crinkled paper of the exam table for a long while before the doctor finally knocked, a man in his sixties, bleary-eyed and exhausted. He did not even look up at Gladys as he rattled of a list of questions about her medical history, then asked about her family.

“My mother has Alzheimer’s,” said Gladys. “I don’t know about my father.”

The pencil scratched over the page, checking boxes, making notes. He left and came back, gave her a shot in the arm, told her to come back in a week, and sent her on her way.

Gladys did not feel like returning to her empty apartment. Even the word, apartment, sounded lonely. Apart from. For once, she wanted to be a part of. She found herself walking to the diner.

“I thought you were taking a sick day,” said Cyril.

“I’m fine,” she said. “Just had to get a shot.” Customers around the counter looked up nervously. She wasn’t in uniform, but tied on her apron and washed her hands, then picked up a knife and chopped onions until tears streamed down her face.

Seven Inches

Petra’s husband was waiting curbside at the airport when she arrived. International flights always came in at odd hours, and she was bleary-eyed. Bundled in a long coat over pajamas, just before the dim fracture of morning, she didn’t immediately notice anything unusual. Evan put his suitcase in the trunk, got in the car, leaned over to kiss her and said,

“Good to be home,” as he always did. On the twenty-minute drive home, she asked him how his trip to Thailand had been. Successful, he proclaimed. Contracts had been signed, hands had been shaken.

They got out of the car in the dark garage. He came in behind her with his suitcase. She hung her coat up and turned to him to say something. That’s when she noticed. She shook her head, let a broken syllable spill out of her mouth, stepped back, assessed him.

Evan looked confused. “What?” he said, looking at his shoulders, brushing his hands through his hair and over his face. “Did I spill something?”

Petra took another step back and gestured with open hands, up and down. When she finally could find words, she stammered. “You’re—you’re short!”

Evan was, in her preliminary estimation, seven inches shorter than when she had dropped him off at the airport a week ago. At least a half a foot shorter than he had always been. She had always been able to put her nose into the dip between his collarbones, but now, their noses were level.

“What are you talking about?” he said. His eyebrow furrow registered somewhere between offended and alarmed.

Petra grasped her forehead in her hands, looked at him, then covered her eyes and rubbed them vigorously. When she parted her hands and nothing had changed, she stepped forward so that their faces were even.

“Look,” she said, holding her hand horizontal above her head and extending it over his. Before, her hand would have sliced through his neck. Now it sailed cleanly over the top of his hair. “What the hell happened?” She stepped back again and searched. Was the spine shorter? Had his legs been cut off at the shin? She looked at his feet, half expecting stumps crammed into his loafers, but he seemed to be walking fine.

“I’m too tired for this,” Evan said. “I just want to try and get a few hours of sleep.” He stepped around her, pulling his suitcase behind him.

“Evan!” she said. “What the hell is going on?”

“You tell me,” he snapped. “I have no energy for games right now.”

“Game? You came home a half a foot shorter! What happened? Are you hurt?” A peculiar combination of anger and terror ratcheted the volume and the pitch of her voice.

“Really, Petra. I’m not in the mood.” Evan disappeared down the dark hallway, the suitcase wheels rumbling over the hardwood floors. Petra followed after him, grabbed him by the shoulders.

“Look! Look at me!” she cried. He stiffened. She made the horizontal motion with her hand again, trying to get him to see that they were the same height now. “See?” she said. “What happened?”

“I have no idea what you’re trying to do. Is this supposed to be a joke? It’s not funny. It’s annoying, actually. Let’s just stop talking and go to bed.”

“Evan.” But he ignored her pleas, carrying his suitcase up the stairs to the bedroom in silence, while she trailed after. He stripped off his clothes, down to his underwear, and climbed into bed. Petra, protesting through it all, whipped the covers off.

“Enough!” he shouted. “I want to sleep!” He pulled the covers back over himself.

He had never raised his voice to her before, or to anyone that she could remember. She shrank back from him. A vicious nausea overcame her, and she stumbled into the bathroom.

Grabbing the edge of the sink, she stared down the drain. Was she having a stroke? Somewhere she remembered having read that people who were having strokes smelled burnt toast, but all she could smell was the hand soap and a hint of toothpaste.

She placed a hand over her heart, tried to slow its thrashing. You’re tired, she told herself, exhausted. Half-dreaming even. You haven’t been getting enough sleep, or drinking enough water; you’ve been eating too much dairy and not getting exercise. It’s the caffeine, probably, or hormones. She plumbed a litany of reasonable explanations from her mind. After a while, she brushed her teeth and returned to the bedroom.

Evan’s gentle snoring from the bed was reassuring. Petra climbed in next to him, but stayed on her side, afraid to touch him. Is this even my husband? she wondered. Her throat ached. It’s a dream, she thought. All a dream.

She tumbled in and out of sleep, waking frequently with a spasm, dreaming alternately of a normal Evan and a disfigured Evan—the flesh of his face melted away and an impersonal skull remained. When the alarm clock went off late in the morning, he rose to get dressed in the gray winter light. She watched him from the bed, motionless and silent.

He pulled on slacks and buttoned up a shirt. They seemed to fit normally. It was a dream after all, she thought. I imagined everything.

“Are you going in to work?” she asked. “It’s Saturday.”

“I have a lot to do,” he said flatly. He adjusted the cuffs of his shirt without looking at her.

“Why don’t you come here first?” She patted the bed.

“I’ve got too much to do. I’ll see you tonight.” He left without kissing her.

All day the weight of dread mired her down. It was completely unlike Evan to go to the office on a weekend, even with the new promotion. Saturdays were for hiking, or going to the dollar theater, or reading on the couch all day. When she finally did manage to drag herself from bed, drink coffee (a terrible mistake, it fueled her anxiety, her hands shook, her stomach roiled) and choke down a piece of toast, it was after noon. She texted him:

What time will you be home tonight?

And she waited, stomach churning, for the three dots that meant everything. She waited for ten minutes, tapping the screen to keep it from locking.

She waited in the grim blue light of the television, the rest of the house dark. It had been a nightmare and she was exhausted. That’s all it was. It couldn’t be possible—it was preposterous. She would apologize when he came home, beg his forgiveness.

Near 7:30 she heard the garage door. The was relief unburdening. She jumped up; she would meet him at the door, fall and tuck her lips into the dip between his collarbones. Trailing light through the house, she turned on the hallway switch right as he came in from the garage. He jumped.

“You scared me,” he said, a knife-edge to the voice.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry for everything. You were right, I was foolish.”

This seemed to relax him. He hung up his coat. She watched him. He met her in the doorway, reaching for her.

Something was still wrong. She should have been able to tuck her head under his chin; instead, he kissed her, and they rested forehead to forehead. His eyes were closed but hers stayed open. He will have to realize it now, she thought.

“Look at me,” she said.

He opened his eyes. She saw her own terrified face reflected in the dark pits of his pupils.

“What now?” he said.

She couldn’t reply. Wouldn’t and couldn’t. He had to see it for himself.

He brushed past her. “Did you eat yet?” he asked, walking to the kitchen.

She followed. “No. We have a frozen pizza.”

“Sounds great,” he said. “I’m beat.” He went for the freezer. She sat at a barstool on the island and watched him preheat the oven, unwrap the pizza, slide it onto the rack.

All the while she tried to conjure the words.

There was a new fear with the one from yesterday. Yesterday she was afraid for him—that something had happened, an injury. There was still that, but also this new fear of him. Of what would happen if she brought it up again. She blinked, looked at the clock. Glanced at a magazine on the counter. Reassured that her eyes were working, she looked back at him. There could be no mistaking it, could there? Had she always been wrong? No. She couldn’t have imagined the way her nose aligned with that dip between his collarbones. She hadn’t dreamed that.

He talked as he sliced a cucumber for a salad. It was about his job, the proposal he spent all day writing, this time for Bogotá. Cost-efficient, space-efficient, energy-efficient housing; pristine glass skyscrapers towering over sprawling third-world cities. She heard him, listened to every word and nodded and interjected murmurs of approval to show she was proud and impressed, but comprehended nothing.

He went upstairs to change while the pizza cooked. While he was gone, she seized his wallet from the counter. His driver’s license couldn’t lie. She had it in her hand.

Five-foot-eight. It couldn’t be. That was her height exactly. But he had always been six-three. At least over six feet. But there was the official record before her, telling her everything she had known was wrong. She put it away as she heard him coming down the stairs.

“I think something is wrong with me,” she said when he walked into the kitchen.

“I think I might need to go to the hospital.”

“What, what’s the matter?”

“I must be having a stroke. Or dementia or something.”

“You seem fine to me. Do you smell burnt toast?”

“What? No. Just pizza.”

“I’ve heard that people having strokes smell burnt toast.”

“It’s not that. It’s you—”

There, before she could even say it, was the shade. The faintest signs, his brow creasing, the jaw muscles flinching, the glint of the eye, a folding in of the mouth. These things she could see, and she had to trust in what she saw. But could she, any longer?

After seeing his license? She couldn’t finish, but the accusation lingered between her words.

“You need to take me to the hospital.”

“Get your coat,” he said.

When they arrived at the emergency room, Petra did not know what to tell the triage nurse behind the check-in counter. Finally, she settled on, “I think I am having a nervous breakdown.”

The nurse looked at her askance. “What are your symptoms?” he asked.

“I don’t know what is real anymore,” she said, clutching her coat collar around her neck.

“Jesus,” muttered Evan under his breath beside her.

“I can’t eat, I can’t sleep, I feel as if…” she trailed off. “I’m having hallucinations, or something.” Whether or not I actually am crazy, she thought, these two certainly think I am.

“Have a seat,” said the nurse. “We’ll call your name.”

Petra slumped in a corner with her arms around herself. Evan sat next to her and picked up a magazine. She could have tried to lean her head on his shoulder, or he could have put a hand on her knee, or taken her hand in his. They did not speak.

“Shit,” Evan said all of a sudden, throwing the magazine down. “We’ve left the oven on with the pizza.” He stood, she looked up at him. Would he leave her here?

“I’m sorry,” he said, stooping to kiss her cheek. “We can’t have the house burn down. I’ll be right back—you know how these things go, you’ll probably still be waiting.” She watched him stride through the automatic doors and jog through the parking lot.

He would be at least half an hour gone, she thought, and tried to think of what she was going to tell the doctor when she finally saw him. Would they commit her? Laugh at her? Should she even mention the seven inches? Perhaps it was better that Evan was gone. She could not bring it up again with him in the room.

A thought occurred. She scrambled to pull out her phone. Why hadn’t she thought to check sooner? She pulled up Facebook, went to her photos, straight to their wedding album from six years ago. There it was. Her favorite photo: they were on a hill overlooking a vineyard in the golden light. His chin rested on her head and had his eyes closed. Hers were open, looking up at him. There it was. Photographic evidence. She

100 blinked at the screen, refreshed the page. There it was. She took a screenshot, just in case, saved it and texted it to herself.

After ten minutes, they called her name. She was ushered through more sliding doors, down a dimly lit corridor with curtained-off cubicles. Some had patients in them, the curtain offered only a modicum of privacy. Though the patients were out of sight, she heard cries of pain, moans, a heave and then a splash of retch into a stainless-steel bin. A child sobbed, then screamed over the crack of a broken bone being wrenched back into place. Petra was seated on a paper-topped table while a nurse took her blood pressure, pulse, temperature, and asked her a series of questions, all of which she typed into a computer in the corner.

“Do you know what year it is? Do you know who the president is? Do you have anxiety, has this happened before?”

“No, no… I’ve always been perfectly healthy.”

“Did something trigger your anxiety?”

“It’s my husband,” she said.

The nurse looked at her eagerly. “Is he… do you feel safe with him? Is he here?”

“No—I mean no, he’s not here, we left the oven on, he had to go take care of it.

He said he’d be back. But it’s not him. I mean, he…” She would say it now. “He returned from a trip and he’s seven inches shorter than when he left. He doesn’t know it. Or won’t admit it.”

The nurse folded her arms and nodded. “I see,” she said. She began to type rapidly. The monitor faced away from Petra.

101

“Look,” Petra said, “I know this sounds insane. And I even checked his driver’s license; it matches his height now. And his clothes fit.”

“Okay,” said the nurse. “I’m just going to go get the doctor now.” The nurse swiped the curtain open then closed it behind her.

Petra’s feet dangled off the table, seven inches from the floor. I know it’s true. I know what’s real, she told herself while she waited.

At last the doctor swung the curtain open and came in with the nurse. The space suddenly became very crowded. The doctor reached for her neck, and Petra balked.

“I’m just going to check your pulse and glands here,” he said, gently wrapping his fingers around her throat and palpating around the sides. To the nurse, he said,

“Guarding,” and the nurse typed into the computer. “Where’s your husband now?”

“He’s on his way. Look, before he gets here, I have to show you.” She pulled out her phone and brought up the photo. “Look.”

Both the nurse and the doctor stared at the screen. “What are we looking for?” the doctor said.

Petra looked at the phone. Wait. The photo was different. There was the vineyard, the golden light, her dress. The pose was almost the same, but now the picture showed them with foreheads pressed together, his eyes still closed, hers open.

“No. No, this isn’t right.” Her hands turned cold, then numb, and she dropped the phone. “Something isn’t right,” she began to cry.

“Let’s call your husband,” said the doctor. “Blood tests, EKG,” he said to the nurse.

102

It was past midnight when Evan drove Petra home. He was speaking to her gently, like she was a child he had to deliver bad news to. She had been heavily sedated, but the calm was suffocating. He helped her undress and into bed. She sank into the mattress, imagined she was sinking into a deep well, sinking and sinking while the ceiling fell away.

“What kinds of questions did they ask you?” she asked Evan from the bottom of her well.

“About your mental health,” he answered from another time.

“What did you tell them?”

“That lately you haven’t been yourself. That you’ve been… irrational.”

She laughed. I’m falling, he’s shrinking.

“Who do you think they believed?” she asked. “You or me?”

He didn’t answer. Soon the sides of her deep well folded in and she disappeared.

It was late Sunday morning when she woke up. Evan was not in the bed beside her. She sat up, trying to remember the night before. She grabbed her phone. Facebook. There!

The photo, it was how she remembered it again. His seven inches restored, his chin on her head. Her screen shot was also restored. There was the whole wedding album and more photos, years of photos of the two of them to swipe through and prove that she was not irrational. She jumped out of bed and ran downstairs where Evan was watching football on the couch.

“Look!” she said, thrusting the phone in his face. Her hair was wild and the edges of her eyes flickered.

103

“Petra, what are you doing.”

“Look!”

He took the phone and held it at arm’s length. “I don’t have my glasses on,” he said, “what am I looking at? This is a wedding photo.”

“Tell me what you see.” She loped to the kitchen and grabbed his glasses off the counter. An aroma of burnt pizza lingered. Back to the living room. “Here. Now look.”

Would he see what she saw?

Evan studied the screen for a long time. “You’re going to have to help me out here.”

She grabbed the phone from him. It wasn’t possible. But the photo had changed again—their foreheads pressed together, the same height. She swiped through them— they had all changed.

“This can’t be. Evan, you have to believe me. You know that you used to be taller. You know that this photo used to be of you resting your chin on my head.” She spoke slowly, carefully, willing the words to make sense, for him to understand.

“I don’t know what to tell you,” he said. He stood up, his eyes level with hers, and put an arm around her. “You’re scaring me. Let’s go to the kitchen, we’ll get your medicine.”

“Medicine?”

“I went and picked up your prescription this morning. For your panic attacks.”

“I’m not having a panic attack,” she said. I know what’s true. I know what’s real.

He shook some pills out into his hand and filled a glass of water. “Here.”

104

She began to cry. She wanted to stamp her foot like a child, to scream and fall to the floor. “I’m not crazy,” she said.

“Of course you’re not. You’re just… overwhelmed.”

She took the pills. What other choice do I have, she thought.

The rest of Sunday she spent in the well bottom, staring at the photo on her phone. He was taller. He had been taller, once. Who would believe her?

When Petra woke up on Monday morning, Evan was hovering over her.

“I’ve already called your office and explained everything,” he said. “They’re letting you take this week off.” Drawing the covers up to her throat, he tucked the corners deep under the mattress.

“That’s too tight,” she said.

“Sorry,” he said, but he did not loosen them. She squirmed and sat up. He left a mug of tea on the bedside table, kissed her on the forehead, and left. As soon as she heard the car disappear down the street, she called her mother. Her mother was a therapist; if anyone could understand, or believe her, it had to be her.

“I have to ask you something strange,” she said when her mother picked up. “And

I want you to just answer. How tall is Evan?”

“Exactly how tall? I’m not sure. I think, maybe six feet?”

“But he’s taller than me though, correct?”

“Oh, yes, by several inches. What’s this about?”

105

“Listen to me. I know this sounds insane. But he’s seven inches shorter.” She explained the driver’s license, the way the photo changed when she showed it to other people. “You know how tall he was. Am I losing my mind?”

There was a long silence on the line.

“I don’t know what to say. How could such a thing even be possible? I have heard of people doing strange things in Thailand, but how would they do that… why we would he even want that? You would think if anything—”

“What am I supposed to do? He called into my office and told them I had a mental breakdown, and has me on these medications. I don’t know what to do.”

“Well, maybe some time off is good. Treat yourself to a massage or something.

You do sound as though…”

She trailed off. “As though?”

“Well, what you’re saying just doesn’t make any sense, dear.”

“I know that! I know it sounds crazy mom but I’m telling you, I see it.”

“And you believe what you see?”

“What else am I supposed to do?”

“I don’t know what you are seeing… I can only hear what you are saying and even you admit that it sounds crazy and impossible. Maybe, just rest. Take the medication.”

“Will the medication help?”

“It will take time. And have Evan call me when he gets home.”

Petra did not tell Evan she had spoken to her mother.

106

All week she stared at the picture on her phone. She thought about calling or texting her friends, but she was afraid to talk to anyone. Evan worked and continued to treat her like a child, feeding her soup, tucking her in too tightly. By Thursday she had an idea. On

Friday morning, she rose early with Evan.

“I’m feeling much better today,” she said. “I think the medication is finally working.”

He smiled and wrapped his arms around her. She managed to repress a shudder as he pressed his cheek against hers.

When he returned home from work, she had cleaned the house and made dinner.

“We have dinner with Alec and Nia tomorrow night,” she reminded him. He had forgotten, she knew, or he would have called them to cancel. And who knows what reason he may have given.

“Are you sure you’re feeling up to it?”

“Absolutely. I feel much better.”

In the darkness of the bedroom that night, she stared at the picture. The phone illuminated her face with dim white light as she listened to him snore.

On Saturday night, their friends arrived with several bottles of wine. Petra watched their faces anxiously as Nia and Alec hugged her in the hall, then Evan. They said nothing.

Everything seemed almost normal. They drank one bottle of wine and opened another while Petra finished dinner and Evan set the table. They were on their third bottle by the time they started eating. Nia had just attended a wedding at a vineyard in France and brought back a case of wine.

107

“This stuff is $150 a bottle,” Nia said. She raved about the wedding, France, the vineyard. “I keep telling Alec we should move there.”

“That reminds me of our wedding,” Petra said. Evan cleared his throat and sawed at his steak with a knife.

“I remember,” said Nia. “A beautiful wedding. What has it been—five years?”

“Six! Six and a half now,” said Petra. She reached for her phone. Evan frowned at his steak.

“Remember this photo?” Petra showed it to Nia and waited.

Nia finished her glass of wine and leaned over to squint at it. She tilted her head.

Petra held her breath.

“How lovely! Spectacular lighting. I was so hungover after your wedding.”

Petra thought she caught the edge of a smirk from Evan, but he quickly raised his wine glass and drank. She watched him trying to cut his steak, his fingers fumbling over the silverware. Was he nervous? Drunk? She put her phone away and filled her own glass. If it’s going to be that kind of evening.

By the time dinner was over, they had finished six bottles between the four of them, though Alec, who was driving, had stopped after three glasses. They all helped clear the table, leaving the dishes in the sink, grabbed another bottle and moved towards the living room. But Evan caught Petra’s arm and pulled her back into the kitchen.

“Don’t you think you should take it easy?” his was breath hot on her face. She did not like the way he looked from this level. It was more than the seven inches, she thought. This wasn’t Evan at all anymore.

108

“I’ll be fine,” she said, but his grip tightened before he let go. She hurried after

Nia and Alec.

“I just don’t want it to interfere with your medication,” he called loudly as he followed her into the living room. Petra did not answer, sinking to the couch next to Nia.

“What medication?” asked Nia.

“Evan,” said Petra. “Enough.”

“Are you okay?”

“She’s had a rough week is all. Didn’t she tell you about her little episode last weekend?”

“I said enough.”

“What happened?”

“She had a complete meltdown.” The knife-edge again. It’s not him. “She was hysterical.”

“Hysterical? What is this, the 1890s?” said Nia.

Evan’s face flushed red. From the wine or the anger, Petra wasn’t sure. Both. She tucked her legs up on the couch. But he wasn’t finished.

“She thinks I’ve shrunk,” he said with contemptuous frost. “By seven inches.”

“Like…?” Nia raised her eyebrows and glanced up and down between his face and lap.

“No!” Evan’s face crimsoned an even deeper hue. “In height. She thinks I used to be six-foot-something. All of a sudden, she can’t handle that I’ve been brought down to her size. She keeps trying to show everyone our wedding photo, like it’s proof. When she

109 looks at it alone she says, I’m taller. And somehow it magically, conveniently, changes when anyone else looks at it.”

“This is weird,” said Alec.

“Evan, I think you should lay off the wine,” said Petra.

He took the bottle from the coffee table and poured his glass to the brim, then drank from the bottle.

“Save some for us,” said Nia.

“Tell them, Petra,” said Evan. “Tell them how the emergency room doctor had to hold you down to sedate you.” He was starting to slur his words.

Petra did not answer. She looked at her lap and listened to the silence. Nia shifted on the couch, Alec coughed.

“I think that’s enough for me,” said Petra at last. “Nia, can you help me in the kitchen?”

Nia swiped the bottle of wine off the coffee table. Petra heard Evan’s breathing over the sound of their footsteps on the hardwood floors as she passed him.

Petra turned on the sink and started doing the dishes. Nia leaned on the counter beside her, holding her glass and the bottle.

“What the hell is going on?” she asked. “What is his problem?”

“I don’t know,” said Petra. “Doesn’t he seem different to you?”

“He seems drunk. He seems like a total asshole right now.”

“Exactly. He’s never done anything like this before. Even when he’s drunk.”

Petra let the sink fill with water and watched the soap rise over the pile of dishes.

“He does seem different somehow.”

110

“Does he look different to you?” Petra was whispering. She knew Evan would be listening.

“I don’t know. I’ve never noticed his height. I can’t remember. Maybe. He is definitely being a total jerk tonight though.”

She needed Nia to believe. If one other person could believe her, she could find her balance again, and figure out what to do. I know the truth.

“What are we chatting about in here?” Evan lunged around the corner. Both women jumped; Nia dropped her glass and it shattered on the kitchen floor, splattering wine over them all.

“I’m so sorry,” said Nia. She grabbed a towel and tried to brush the mess into a pile.

“It’s fine, we’ll take care of it. Go clean yourself up in the bathroom,” said Petra.

Nia stepped sheepishly over the pieces of glass and red puddle.

As soon as she was gone, Evan grabbed Petra by the shoulders. He shook her twice, and when she yelped he clamped a hand over her mouth. She was still not used to seeing his eyes from this level. It isn’t him. There was someone else entirely assaulting her in the kitchen.

“I won’t have you making a fool of me, when you’re the one who’s crazy,” the heaviness of his breath made her dizzy, but she refused to back down.

“Nia believes me,” she mumbled into his hand. Would he hit her? No. Not with other people in the house. He had not sunk that low yet, surely. He let her go. Or did he push her away? She slipped in the wine, in any case, and the shards of glass. Roller skates on ice, she thought, in the fraction of a second it took for her to fall, hitting her head on

111 the counter with a crack, hitting her neck on the dishwasher door with a crunch. At the bottom of the well again, she couldn’t move. There was Nia’s face, and Evan and Alec.

They were all shouting but she couldn’t hear anything. Then the sides of the well folded in darkly.

When she first woke up, she couldn’t open her eyes or move at all. I’m dead. In the darkness she tried to scream, but no sound escaped. But she could hear voices, and she smelled rubbing alcohol. Finally, after several moments of terror and monumental effort, her eyes rolled open.

Blurry, bright room with forms and voices that seemed distant. Slowly her eyes focused, but she couldn’t move her arms or legs. She kept willing her head to turn, but then realized she was in a neck brace. There was an oxygen mask on her face. The hospital. Alive, at least she was alive. What happened? A rapid beeping nearby increased, and suddenly the voices came near.

“She’s awake,” someone said.

Four faces hovered over her, a doctor flashed a light into her eyes. She squinted.

“Pupils are normal.”

“Petra, you’re in the hospital,” said a voice, not Evan’s. “You had an accident.”

“I’m here, Petra.” That was Evan’s voice. She noticed he was holding her hand, but she couldn’t feel his touch. There were tubes coming out of her arm.

“You have a subdural hematoma, and two fractured cervical vertebrae. That’s bleeding in your brain, and a broken neck. That’s why you’re in a brace.”

112

I know what’s true, I know what’s real. She looked at Evan. I hate you. Seven inches, almost seven years; where had it gone? He pulled his hand away and took a step back from the bed.

“No response to external stimuli,” said a voice at the end of the bed. He was jabbing the bottom of her foot with a pen.

“Petra, we need you to try and move your feet. Can you wiggle a toe? Or your hands, can you lift your fingers?”

In her mind, she conjured epic battles and all the effort of conquests and invasion over centuries. But her body was still. Tears spilled from the corner of her eyes.

“Don’t panic yet. It may be swelling pressing on your spinal cord, or bruising, and it could heal. We just don’t know enough yet. Let’s try speaking, can you say your name?” He lifted the oxygen mask from her face.

Her mouth seemed to work. She could feel her chapped lips, but her tongue lolled.

Her brain willed her name, but only a moan came out.

“Aphasia. It’s okay, Petra, the bleeding on your brain is affecting the parts that control speech, and probably not helping your motor skills. We’re just getting baselines for now. Try to rest—your body is healing.”

The voices moved away, Evan with them. They murmured authoritatively and urgently. At last there was only Evan’s voice and his face, beside her again. You’re not my husband, she said with her eyes. You are an imposter and I know what you did.

Just as if he’d heard her, she saw his fear. His hands balled up in fists at his sides.

So, it was true. He had pushed her. What would he try next? Unplug her machines?

113

Smother her in the hospital bed? Quietly, determinedly, she willed her brain to heal. She would speak.

I know what’s true. I know what’s real.

114

The Lost Hour

I’ve already done this, Nia realized, as she was setting the clock on the stove ahead one hour. Just the week before, she had been in France, where daylight savings time came a week earlier. Unaware of this, in a strange bed (where she may or may not have slept with Dorian), she had relied on her wrist watch and the analog clock on the nightstand.

She did not know until she checked her phone that it was actually an hour later, and almost missed her flight. She lost two hours: one hour in France, and another hour back at home in Seattle, but come autumn she would only be setting the clock back one hour.

Unless she went back to Europe at the right time. Effectively, she had just lost an hour of her life, unwillingly abridged.

“That’s not really how time works,” said her husband when she told him about it over dinner that evening. They were eating spaghetti for the third time that week.

Yes, she could have said. I know that’s not how time works. I just thought it was interesting. But she did not say that. It would have been a waste of words. Alec had no patience for the abstract or philosophical talk. Nia listened to Alec chewing and breathing through his nose. It was a strange burden, this lost hour, and she wanted to share it with him. Instead, with one hand, she took the cork from the wine and filled her glass to the

115 brim. Alec watched her and raised an eyebrow blandly, then flicked the top of his Diet

Coke. The crash of his can opening made the walls tremble.

Cérène was getting married at her grandparents’ estate near Bordeaux. It had been in her family for centuries. Once a humble vineyard, now it was a quaint bed and breakfast and wedding venue with a three-year wait list. Of course, Cérène and her fiancé, Jean Roubo, had priority, and after the wedding they were moving there permanently to help run it.

Cérène had been Nia’s best friend since kindergarten. They grew up and went to college together in Seattle, but now Cérène was drawn to a simpler life in a French village.

“I know I grew up in the United States,” she told Nia over dinner the night she asked Nia to be her maid of honor. “So did Jean. And our parents will both stay here. But

I feel… more of a connection there, you know?” She gesticulated and reached for her wine, sniffing the glass and swirling it before she took a drink.

Nia did not know what she meant. She had grown up in Seattle, her parents and grandparents were all from small Midwestern towns, and she had no idea where their parents were from. There were no traditions, aside from the annual casserole recipe swap that took place over email, shortly before Christmas. There were no stories of immigration, of hardship and alienation, no ancestral homelands pined for. Not that she knew of—there must have been at some point, but they had all been forgotten in time.

Nia wondered how and where in history the stories stopped mattering. Which children were so tired of hearing them that they let them die with the parents? Or were they tragic stories, too painful to be told, even with time and repetition?

116

But even those seemed worth saving now, to her. She had always felt disconnected, but not because she yearned for another place. It was because she felt there was no place: nowhere she was from or going.

“Just to warn you,” Cérène said, pouring another glass, “Dorian will be there.”

“What? Why?” Nia felt the wine threatening to heave from within.

“He and Jacob are still close—he’s like part of the family.”

Nia knew this. Jacob was Cérène’s twin brother. Of course he would be there.

“It’ll be fine, right?” asked Cérène. “It’s been what, ten years? You’re married.”

“Is he married?”

Cérène glared over her wine glass. “No,” she said, after a long pause.

Nia shrugged. “Just curious.”

Alec would not come to France. He did not have his passport and had no wish to get one.

“It’s not safe to travel these days,” he said.

“Compared to when?” Nia asked. He didn’t answer her question, but rattled off questionable statistics and headlines he had absorbed from the news. Every year it was something else. Swine Flu, Ebola, Zika.

“Did you know the plague is still rampant in Africa?”

“But the wedding is in France.”

Once, Nia had liked how safe Alec was, how careful and orderly. He was quiet and gentle, honest, slow to speak, and, Nia often thought, slow to think—but not stupid.

Methodical, literal. Sarcasm was incomprehensible to him.

117

She would go without him. She renewed her passport and perused roundtrip airfare for one. Dorian will be there. Warmth bloomed in her stomach. Was it dreadful or pleasurable anticipation? With the ticket purchased, she searched online for a new dress and ordered one size down.

The rows of grapevines combed the hills, impossibly symmetrical.

“Nothing in nature is this perfect,” Dorian said.

“No?”

“No. Everything is just a little imperfect. The world isn’t perfectly round, it’s kind of oblong. We travel around the sun in an ellipsis”.

“Just because something isn’t round doesn’t mean it’s not perfect,” she said.

“That’s what I’m saying. This perfection though, the straight lines, is not perfect.”

Nia squinted and frowned. She couldn’t tell if this was an offhand comment, or if he was trying to be profound.

After the sun went down, they walked away from the crowds and the lights of the patio and into the perfect rows of dark vines. He was smoking a cigar. Nia carried an empty wine glass. Occasionally she forgot it was empty and would try to drink from it. She was glad for the darkness. She did not know how he felt; she could not see his face. He seemed too calm. Nia wrapped her shawl tighter around her shoulders, as if to keep her arms from reaching for him, as if to keep herself contained.

The noises from the reception faded behind them, but they kept walking until they couldn’t even see the lights anymore. Her eyes adjusted to the darkness and she could see

118 her bare feet shuffling through the grass. Dorian stopped and held his hand up, motioning her to be still. They stood five feet apart. “Listen,” he said. There were crickets, an owl.

Skittering in the grass and bushes. The grapevines shifted in the breeze, the trees shook their leaves. The breeze itself had a sound, empty air rushing against itself.

Here’s what may have happened in that lost hour: It may have been the end of some things. Whatever happened, she certainly wasn’t sorry about it. It was possible that everything would change, and had changed.

Here’s what may not have happened: It was not possible that she could have felt the way about Dorian that she once did, when they were eighteen. It was not possible that anything could be the same as it once had been.

Nia and Alec met online. A robot, some matrix, a mysterious logarithm had introduced them. Alec had messaged her first; an unobtrusive request to meet for a drink. She thought his profile picture was attractive: glasses with thick, black frames, a symmetrical face, a nice smile, full eyebrows. His profile indicated that he liked hiking, science, craft beer, the ocean, living in the Pacific Northwest. More importantly, what it did not indicate was the fear and loathing of women that so many online suitors displayed, subtly and overtly: the posturing photos, the bravado, the unsolicited photos of genitals, the sanctimonious rage at being turned down or ignored that overwhelmed her and made her sick whenever she checked her messages.

119

They agreed to a first date at a bar that was exactly midway between their two apartments. It was quiet enough for conversation, but not so quiet that their embarrassing first date banter would be overheard. There were candles on all the tables, and in the yellow light, his face glowed. Ice clinked pleasantly in their glasses.

He is a good person, she thought right away. He enjoyed his work, he said. He was a math teacher at an alternative school for boys with behavioral issues. He liked order, numbers, discipline, structure. He was so much more confident and calm than she was as they persevered through the painful but necessary small talk.

Nia was working in an office, in an administrative position that bored her to think about, and bored everyone to talk about. She had no savings account to speak of. She tended to ramble through tangential stories that had no point or ending, then laugh uncomfortably.

Even in low-stakes social situations, no matter how she planned or practiced or composed herself, she had the feeling that the rug was always being pulled from underneath her by the other person. Compared to Alec, who had his life and affairs in order and a five-year plan and self-confidence, she was ashamed to talk about herself, so she mostly listened.

“I’ve always known what I wanted to do,” he said, “I’m happy with where I am.”

He was saving to buy a house. They were both twenty-six. By the time they were twenty- eight, they were married. He was a good man—reliable, predictable, and earnest. Exactly what she thought she needed.

Since Cérène’s wedding, her dreams had been of Dorian, sometimes of what may have happened, sometimes of what may not have happened. The lost hour found its way back to her.

120

“What are you doing?” Alec asked her one afternoon. He had surprised her, hunched over her laptop at her desk in the spare bedroom. Normally he knocked, but if he had this time, she hadn’t heard him.

“Not much,” she answered, her finger hovering over the keyboard. “Just writing an email.” For three weeks now, she had had been crafting a response to Dorian, but had been unable to put her feelings into words. She had gotten as far as:

Dorian,

Great to see you as well. Made it home safe.

She couldn’t bring herself to write, “great to see you too,” or “would love to get drinks,” or anything further. Most of what she had to say were questions, and most of the questions she didn’t actually want answers to. Alec walked into the room and stood behind her, making no effort to hide that he was reading over her shoulder. She did not close the email.

“Who is Dorian?” asked Alec.

Nia swallowed. “An old friend.”

Silence.

“He’s close with Cérène’s family.”

“Ah,” he said. This seemed to satisfy him. To her disappointment. She realized, with feverish perversity, that she wanted him to be upset. She wanted him to be jealous of

Dorian, to demand to know who would ask his wife out for drinks, to ask her why she had been staying up until long after he’d gone to bed every night, creeping in when he was deep in sleep, and why she huddled as close to the edge of her side of the bed as she

121 could. She wanted him to ask her why she was making spaghetti three nights a week and downing a bottle of wine every night.

But he said nothing.

She caught his eye momentarily during the ceremony. As the maid of honor, she was the last one down the aisle before the bride. He was in the second row on the left-hand side, in a dark blue tailored suit. Just the side of her eye wavered towards him. She was conscious of lifting her jaw slightly, affecting serenity, stepping slowly. While Cérène and Jean exchanged vows, she held the bride’s bouquet, staring directly ahead towards the couple or out past them, into the rows of vines and countryside beyond. Although it was gray and chill, a sheen of sweat gathered at her lower back.

After the wedding there were photos, and then dinner. Nia was seated at a long table in the front, with the bride, groom, and other attendants. She felt as if she were on a stage, facing out to the audience. It was familiar—her wedding had been a similarly orchestrated and formal affair. There were the rituals: the procession down the aisle, the exchanging of vows, the kiss, the speeches, the photos. She and Alec had their first dance in the middle of the dining room. Her face burned red the entire time while she tried to focus on Alec’s face, but impossible to ignore the boring of the scores of eyes staring at her. Some were her family and friends, familiar, some were Alec’s: still strangers to her; would she ever feel close to some of them? She still stammered around her mother-in-law and had nothing to say to the father-in-law, their names were still awkward in her mouth.

But they were family now, somehow.

122

Nia wondered if Cérène felt the same sense of displacement. She didn’t appear to.

When her father gave a speech, when she danced with Jean, her face was serene and radiant. Hundreds of years of ritual, she thought. Some changes, yes. But the gathering and union of families; how long had that been going on? And yet, here she was, abominably clueless, out of place. Was no one else wretchedly distraught and unable to keep still while they watched, gathered and silent, as the couple danced for them? She longed for the return of formal dances: waltzes and reels—order and rules and dictation of norms. Your feet go here on this beat, he leads you by the waist and the hand. In this bizarre century, the music came from a computer and people writhed alone with glasses of alcohol in their hands.

Alec drove her to the airport and dropped her off. Pulling the suitcase out of the trunk, he kissed her on the forehead.

“Be good,” he said. It was an odd parting comment, not something he had said before. Nia stood, looking up at him, waiting. He smiled and got back in the car, sticking a hand out the window for a tepid wave as he pulled away.

She went through security and found a bar, paid an exorbitant amount of money for a double bloody Mary. The bar was full of lone travelers like her, all drinking and staring at their phones. Some were casual, dressed in sweatpants or leggings. Others were in suits, with immaculate black luggage. It was 7:30 in the morning. By the time her flight was boarding, she was on the edge of drunk—subdued just enough to endure the

123 long procession up the jet way, the airline crew’s indifference, the other passengers shuffling, finding seats, stowing, staving off the dread of the next ten hours.

Nia had bought a new book, but it remained unopened on her lap for the majority of the flight. She propped herself up against the window and nursed four more drinks before she fell asleep. She woke up parched and anxious, with a premonition of sorts.

Dorian will be there, she thought, the refrain a well-worn trench in her mind. He would be there, and she would see him again, and they would hold their tongues and be civil for

Cérène’s sake. All that had happened years ago anyway—was it a decade now? It had been high school—now they were thirty. More than ten years.

What happened, Nia thought, marveling. Would he even recognize her? She twirled her wedding ring with her thumb. At least there’s that, she thought. But the thought of her marriage was not a comfort or badge of pride like she had hoped it might be.

The last time she saw Dorian, they were nineteen. He had gone to college in Oregon, a seven-hour drive from Seattle. For the first two endless months, they swapped weekends.

And then came the deliverance.

“I think it would be better for both of us if we stopped doing this long distance thing,” he had said. They were seated on his bed. Her legs were still numb from the long drive.

At first she thought he had meant that he was switching schools, and coming back to Seattle. He said it all so casually. Then she realized he was breaking up with her. And

124 then she thought that was a joke. There had been no fights, no disagreements. This came from nowhere. But he sounded like he meant it. After several moments of silent incomprehension, the meaning of his words breached her consciousness, and she had to hold out a hand to prop herself up on the bed. He at least had the heart and the depravity to look her in the eyes.

“But I came all this way,” she said, as if that were the inconvenience.

He wanted to tell her in person, he said. Or something to that affect. She could not remember what he said, but she did remember standing up and screaming at him, “Do you even see me standing here in front of you?”

She wished she could say that she handled it better, that she had stood up, dignified, and walked out. But that was not what happened. After she left, a seven-hour manic drive back to Seattle that she barely remembered, there were vehement emails, incoherent voicemails, pleading 3:00 AM texts, all of which went unreturned, into that slanted void. Her grades slipped. She refused to get out of bed, she lost her job and finally lost her scholarship. Cérène, who had refused to be involved at first, had to call Nia’s parents. They had pulled her out of school for the rest of the year, sent her to therapy, put her on medication, got letters from specialists to show to the school and managed to get her scholarship reinstated. The next fall, she returned, a functional shroud of grief.

Nia thought about Alec on the plane home from France. She wondered whether or not she was excited to see him, or if he would be to see her. How would she act? Would she betray anything? Would he suspect anything? He is a good person; a saltine cracker of a

125 person, but good. I am the soup he dissolves in. She leaned against the plane fuselage, regarding the clouds over the Atlantic.

She had never been away without him before, and for some reason she expected him to be waiting at the arrivals gate. When she emerged from the security area she watched other families reuniting. An elderly man greeted his wife with a small bouquet of flowers. She teetered into his arms, dabbing her eyes with a tissue. Another woman smiled proudly while her two small children tackled their father. “Kiddos!” he exclaimed, kneeling and stretching his arms wide to catch them. Nia searched the faces. Alec was not among them.

On the escalator down to baggage claim she texted him. Where are you?

He had still not responded by the time her bag thumped down the chute and she had lugged it off the belt. She dragged it to a corner in the lobby and called him.

“’llo?” he said. He sounded half asleep. It was early afternoon.

“I’m at the airport, waiting. Where are you?”

“Oh. Was I supposed to pick you up? I figured you would grab an Uber.”

“I just assumed you would pick me up,” she said. “But I’ll call an Uber.”

“K. See you soon,” he said.

There was no point in expressing her disappointment. They had not discussed him picking her up. The way traffic was, and the expense of airport parking, it made more sense for her to take a taxi or an Uber. There was no reason, other than sentimental, for him to be waiting for her, and therefore he would never understand why she was upset.

126

She checked her email from the back of the Uber on the way home. All work related, except one from [email protected]. Her stomach lurched and she opened it without hesitating.

Great to see you this weekend J Hope you made it home safe. Drinks sometime?

Xx, D.

She closed it and deleted it quickly, letting the phone drop into her lap. Her face felt hot.

On the plane, she was calm. How did it all get so tangled back on the ground? She picked up the phone again and found the email in her trash folder. She read it again and felt sick.

Nia scheduled two days in Paris for herself before she took the train to Bordeaux for the wedding. She had never been to France before. Except for a trip to Canada when she was nineteen, she had never been outside of the United States.

She had booked herself a hotel towards the edge of the city in the 19th arrondissement to save money, although it had still seemed an extravagant splurge for her. It was early morning when she arrived at de Gaulle and paid for a taxi. Dread coiled in her stomach on the drive from the airport—the bland cement buildings, miles of freeway and haziness were not what she imagined Paris would be like. Her spirits lifted as they neared the city center, however. She pressed a hand to the window when the

Eiffel Tower came into sight. They crossed the Seine and she craned her neck to see

Notre Dame. By the time she reached the hotel, enchantment was edging out her exhaustion.

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She tried to use her guidebook French at the front desk, but the concierge spoke

Arabic. She signed a form and the concierge held up four fingers while he handed her an old-fashioned key attached to a block of wood with her room number on it. Fourth floor.

The elevator grinded to a halt between the second and third floors, where she was stuck for an hour and forty-five minutes until the onsite handyman could finish his coffee break and pry the door open, and Nia hoisted herself up, dragging the suitcase behind her. She took the stairs the rest of the way.

The room itself looked out onto an alleyway, but just in the distance she could make out a blurred edge of tip of the Eiffel Tower. To her surprise, there was no bathroom in the suite. It was down the hall, shared with the other five rooms on the floor.

Only for two days, she told herself. She had planned to shower and nap, but instead, decided to take a walk. When she unfolded the map she realized that the cab driver had driven more than ten miles out of the way, into the city center, and all the way back to the

19th arrondissement.

She walked to a metro stop, her heart pounding as she followed the surging crowd down the steps. How did it work? Did she need a card? Fortunately she found a ticket machine, which had an English option, and waited to the side, watching as commuters and tourists scanned their cards and pushed through the turnstile. She had studied the map, and when she was sure she was going in the right direction she went through to the train. There was an exhilarating rush as the train roared by, and she followed the crowds onto the car. All the seats were taken so she stood to the side, gripping a pole near the door. She got off at Châtelet, what appeared to be a busy station, and by the time she emerged into daylight there was a confidence in her step.

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She walked for miles, weaving across the Seine, down cobblestone alleyways too narrow for cars, passing cafes but too timid yet to actually stop in one. She bought a bottle of water when her calves started to twinge and sat down on the edge of a fountain.

Between the jet lag, her hunger and thirst, her head seemed to float far above her body.

Everything seemed hyperreal and distant at the same time. A couple of filthy pigeons edged close to her. They were fighting over an indiscernible piece of trash. She noticed one of them, clubbing over the damp, filthy cobblestones with no feet, only stumps for legs. Horrified, she watched as it hobbled around the periphery, trying to peck at the garbage when the others weren’t looking, but failing each time and retreating after a peck to the eye.

Of all her memories of Paris, this was the most vivid.

Six weeks before the wedding, Nia started going to the gym. She purchased an expensive package of personal training sessions, which included a nutritional consultation.

Afterwards, she went to the grocery store and came back with exotic sounding foods: kefir, goji berries, chia seeds, acai powder.

“Smoothies,” she said, pouring half from the blender into a glass for Alec. He sniffed it uncertainly. “Just try it,” she said.

He took a sip, then set the glass on the counter. “No thanks. I’ll stick to cereal.”

Nia shrugged. “More for me,” she said.

Her trainer was an intense woman, the drill sergeant-type who strapped Nia into giant rubber band contraptions and made her do squats between every set. After every

129 session she hobbled to the locker room, covered in sweat with quaking legs like a newborn giraffe. But it paid off—when the dress came in the mail, it fit.

Two days before the wedding, Cérène met her at the train station.

“He’s in the car,” she said. “Prepare yourself.”

“Dorian?”

Cérène nodded. “He insisted.”

Nia could feel her pulse in her throat and her hands shook. She followed Cérène to the curb, where Dorian sat at the wheel. Would he get out? Hug her? How to behave after an entire decade had gone by? After all of those humiliating emails and text messages and voicemails? He stayed in the car, letting her heave the heavy suitcase into the trunk on her own. Cérène took the front seat and Nia slid into the back, behind the passenger’s seat.

“Hey,” he said. He did not even look into the rearview mirror.

“Hi,” she said. She felt her face grow hot. Cérène caught her eye in the side mirror.

“Did you have a good trip?” he asked. Finally a glance in the mirror, just for a moment before he pulled out of the station.

“Yes,” she answered. “Easy flight. I spent the last couple of days in Paris—”

“That’s great,” he interrupted. “Which way?” he said to Cérène. For several minutes she guided him through the narrow, winding streets through the old village. They made a wrong turn and backtracked until finally they found the road out of town. Nia

130 waited to see if Dorian would resume their conversation, but he rolled down the window and turned up the radio, a French pop music station. In the side mirror, Cérène widened her eyes and gave a small shrug to Nia.

“So,” Nia yelled over the music, “is everything ready for tomorrow?”

“All good,” shouted Cérène. Dorian was not taking the hint. He had an arm dangled out the window and slapped his hand on the side of the car out of time with the music. Nia felt as though the seatbelt would strangle her. They rode on this way for fifteen more minutes, through the countryside, until Dorian turned off the paved road onto a gravel drive that wound through fields and grapevines, up the gentle swell of a hill until the house came into sight. They pulled up to an old stone farmhouse, as picturesque as Nia had imagined. Dorian turned off the car, jumped out, and ran inside.

“What the hell was that all about?” asked Nia, as soon as he was out of earshot.

“No idea,” shrugged Cérène, throwing her palms up. “I don’t want to be involved.” They pulled her suitcase out and Cérène showed her to a small suite.

“Bathroom is just down the hall,” she said. “I’ll let you get unpacked, do whatever you need to do. Everyone is downstairs when you’re ready.”

Nia looked around the room. It was not much bigger than a closet. A twin-sized bed was tucked into the corner, an impossibly narrow wardrobe wedged between the foot of the bed and the wall. A nightstand kept the door from opening more than halfway. It was tastefully decorated though; crisp white, actual linen on the beds. White lace curtains filtered dappled light onto the hardwood floor. A bright blue ceramic pitcher on the nightstand held fresh lavender. The window looked out onto the vineyards.

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She grabbed a hand towel from the end of the bed and her toiletries case and went down the hall to the bathroom. The door was locked. She knocked gently, and a voice called from within, “Just a minute.” It was Dorian. Nia held her breath and waited.

Minutes passed. There was a flush. Then another. And a third. Muffled cursing.

“Is everything okay?” she called.

“Fine!” the voice had a hostile edge. Nia could hear more cursing and sloshing water.

Should she wait? Find another bathroom? Certainly there must be one in the large old house. Finally she heard the sink running, an aerosol spritz, and the door opened. Nia stood to one side, her back against the wall.

“Sorry about that,” said Dorian. “Old plumbing.”

“Ha,” she said. “So it’s really good to see you here.” Where had that come from?

“You as well. Let’s catch up some time, yeah?” He hurried down the hall; she watched until she heard his steps retreating down the stairs. Then she held her breath and went into the bathroom.

In November, daylight savings time came around again. Fall back, she said, changing the clock on the stove. She set the clock back two hours. Even though she knew Alec would notice after a day or so and would change it to the correct time, she did it anyway. At least for a little while, she would have that hour back.