Nobody, Somebody, Anybody

by Kelly McClorey

  “It wasn’t too much.”

  “You’re going to make a dynamite EMT, that’s for sure. And we’re lucky to have you on board till then. Most of the servers can hardly string two words together, they’re so used to staring at their phones twenty-four seven.” He dropped the paper inside a drawer and knocked it shut with his knee. “Anyway, I better get going, or I’ll never hear the end of it. But thanks, Amy. I appreciate this.”

  I traipsed home with mixed feelings—he had been receptive, but not quite as animated as I’d hoped. He’d always been impressed by my knowledge and he liked me, though perhaps only in the sense of “I get a kick out of her.” Sometimes I got the feeling people actually wanted you to be as passive as Roula. My list of recommended changes might sit in that drawer forever. When I got to 8 Magnolia Street, the owners were outside laying mulch in the garden, so I had to bypass the raspberry bushes. “Sorry,” I whispered to their hopeful ruby faces. “I’ll be back tomorrow.”

  I found my landlord out on his porch, fumbling with a package from Effortless Epicurean. As usual I waved from a polite distance and continued toward the stairs to my apartment, but I could sense his presence behind me, lingering there. He called out, “Hey. Uh, Amy?” My heart sped up.

  He waited for me to retrace my steps, but I’d lost the instinct for walking and had to focus on bending my knees at the right time.

  “This might seem kind of out of the blue,” he said. “But . . . any chance you’d be interested in a meal?” He gestured to the package in his arm. “See, I’m trying to test out my cooking skills before my fiancée gets here. She’s moving halfway across the world for me. So I could really use a second opinion, if you’re up for it.”

  I must have managed to nod my head because he held the door open and said, “You can just hang out, put the TV on if you want. It should only take twenty minutes.”

  I paced in a circle around his living room as if in a trance. Twenty minutes passed, then thirty, then forty, while he banged around in the kitchen. For almost three years we’d lived under the same roof without ever sharing more than a few words, and now this? Any moment now, I might wake up from a dream or find myself detained by local police, under investigation for tampering with the mail. Before my fiancée gets here. So Irina was coming after all! And I was here to help with preparations for her arrival, which meant that everything might work out even better than I’d imagined.

  His belongings were close enough to touch—a plush armchair with a dent in the middle, a giant television, a desk with a laptop and printer, three leaning stacks of video games. I refrained from inspecting them too closely; I didn’t want this to feel like just another guest’s room at the clubhouse. Circling the room put me in an almost meditative state, and listening to the turmoil in the kitchen, the clanking and muttering, somehow lulled me as well. Here, I was the guest, and a welcome one. I had received an invitation, without even having to press for it or devise some convoluted scheme.

  “Sorry, sorry,” he said, panting. He transported napkins and two sets of silverware to the coffee table. “I don’t know how they get away with calling these twenty-minute meals. Please, have a seat.”

  I sat on the sofa beside a black gadget, some kind of headset. The coffee table was low and pushed close so that even after shifting a few times, I still couldn’t find a satisfying position for my knees.

  He paused, surveying the room. “Do you think she’ll like it okay here—my fiancée? I haven’t had company in a while, if I’m honest. She’s all the way in Ukraine. She wants to decorate, you know, make it her own, but that will take time. I want it to at least feel comfortable when she gets here.”

  “I’m sure she’ll like it.” I squirmed, trying to rearrange my knees again. “Though you might think about getting a dining table.”

  “Never had the need before!” He seemed agreeable and kept looking around, as if to say, What else?

  I eyed the three leaning stacks of video games, wondering whether Irina would be a fan of them. He followed my gaze and poked one of the stacks with his toe. He was wearing socks; I was in his home, and he was wearing socks. “It can be a nice way to kill the time,” he said softly. “But I guess I won’t have to worry about that anymore.”

  I picked up the gadget next to me. “What’s this do, by the way?”

  “VR. Virtual reality.”

  “Oh, right. I’ve seen that on TV.”

  He took it from me and turned it over in his hands. “It’s actually pretty cool. You can basically go anywhere you want without ever having to leave your house. I used to love going to the movies. But with this, I can watch any movie like I’m in my own private theater. And you don’t have to worry about anyone making noise or blocking your view. The technology’s come a long way. The old ones, you got a lot of space between pixels, the screen-door effect. This one has double the field of view and lower latency, so there’s less motion sickness. They sent it for free to anyone who donated to help fund development. It’s not even on the market yet.”

  “Wow. That’s like a foreign language to me.”

  “Yeah. It might seem weird. But in a few years, everybody’s going to have one.” He set it on his desk and returned with two teetering plates. “Chicken piccata with angel hair and chives.”

  “Looks delicious.”

  “I’ll bet you could balance all this on one hand.”

  “What? Oh. Actually, I’m a chambermaid, not a waitress. At the same place, just, that was the only position still available.”

  “I didn’t realize.” He pulled the table out, and it stammered over the carpet. Now my knees were free, but the gulf between sofa and table was too wide, and I struggled to reach my plate without lifting my butt. “I don’t know Tripp all that well,” he said. “I knew him when we were kids.”

  “Tripp?”

  “I mean Doug. I guess he doesn’t go by Tripp anymore.”

  “Was that because he was clumsy?”

  “It stands for the third. Douglas something Yarusso the Third. Makes him sound like some kind of king, doesn’t it? Probably acts like one too, if he’s anything like he was in high school.”

  “He’s not too bad. Anyway, it was no big deal. Pretty soon I’ll have my EMT certification, so I’ll be getting a new job anyway.”

  He reclined and rested his plate on the mound of his stomach—it was as large as Doug’s but looser, more blubbery. I followed his lead, balancing my plate on my jittery thighs. “You’re not eating,” he said. “Does it taste okay? Be honest—don’t worry about hurting my feelings.”

  I had zero appetite, but I scarfed some down while he watched. “It tastes good,” I said. He hadn’t brought cups or offered any beverage.

  “My fiancée, she was concerned, because cooking isn’t really her thing. So I may have exaggerated my skills a little. But I figure it can’t be that hard to learn the basics. And they say cooking is one of the most romantic things you can do for someone. Not if it doesn’t taste good, of course.”

  “Well, this definitely tastes good.” I chewed and nodded vigorously. “Although it’s not like I’m an expert or anything. I don’t cook much myself.”

  “That’s okay. I don’t need an expert, just someone with taste buds. I’ve gotten pretty used to heating up frozen meals.”

  He watched me eat as though searching for any clue that would expose my true opinion. I needed to offer something valuable so he wouldn’t regret inviting me in. I invoked Florence Nightingale, who wrote about the importance of a patient’s diet and the idea of intelligent cravings. “The truth is, every stomach is like its own chemist, guided by its own principles. So you should pay close attention to her likes and dislikes—observation is key.”

  I could hear him chewing slowly, swallowing hard. “Observation is key,” he said, considering the words. “That’s good advice.”

  It sounded genuine. We ate a few bites in silence. I saw us sitting there with Irina, playing cards or watching a movie, each with our own
headset so that we were in our own private theater where no one else could bother us, and then he gets up and goes into the kitchen to microwave popcorn and meanwhile Irina and I huddle close together, whispering about this or that, and he rushes back in, tossing the hot bag from one hand to the other, because he doesn’t want to miss out on a single moment. Then again, it wouldn’t work that way, because if we each had our own headset, we would all be in separate theaters, divided from the others, and that wouldn’t do. I hoped my landlord was wrong about the future; I hoped they would discover that the headset caused brain damage and he’d have to throw it away.

  “So how does it feel to be engaged?” I asked.

  “It’s weird being so far away. I just can’t wait for her to actually get here. She’s perfect, like you wouldn’t even believe. She could be in movies.” He’d nearly cleared his plate, and I scrambled to keep pace, wishing I had some water to wash it down. “Anyway, thanks for being my guinea pig,” he said. “I’m hoping to be a decent chef by the time she gets here.”

  “When will that be?”

  “Ding ding, that’s the million-dollar question! You wouldn’t believe what a process it is just to get her visa. First you have to file all this documentation to prove your relationship is real, which is demeaning enough in itself. These government people going through all your personal stuff. They want to see your photos and receipts, even your phone records. Basically everything short of sleeping in bed between the two of you.”

  “That sounds terrible.”

  “And that’s just step one. Once it’s approved, you’ve got to wait a month just for it to get to Kiev, as if this isn’t the twenty-first century. Then there’s more paperwork plus an interview—oh and the fees. There’s a fee for everything. A medical exam fee, a processing fee, a fee for processing the processing fee. And none of that includes the plane ticket, of course.”

  “Jeez. Well, at least you know Irina is worth it.”

  “I-ri-na,” he repeated, drawing it out slowly.

  He hadn’t told me her name! I froze. My fork quivered in midair, one noodle hooked and trembling. I stared at the noodle. I pictured falling out of my chair, faking cardiac arrest. But by some miracle he seemed to distract himself, forget to pursue the line of thought. “I love to hear her name,” he said to the ceiling. “Isn’t it beautiful?” He nodded. “You’re right. A hundred percent worth it.”

  “If you want,” I said, feeling gutsy again—why should I be on edge when I’d been invited here? In fact I was the one doing him the favor—“I could come back, to test out another dish.”

  “Actually, that’d be great. Maybe we could make it a regular thing, a few nights a week or something, until she gets here. You get a free meal, and all I ask in return is your honest opinion.”

  “Sounds like a plan.”

  * * *

  There was a time when I ate all my meals in a dining hall across from Nnenna Okafor—who also came from overseas, not Ukraine, but Nigeria, by way of France—though it feels like a lifetime ago now. Nnenna lived across the hall sophomore year. She was the type to avoid doing things on her own, due not to self-consciousness but to a genuine preference for company, and she never altered her personality, no matter who the company included. We began to meet for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, sometimes joined by other people, sometimes just the two of us. I was the better student, so I took her to the library and helped her make study guides, and though she was more often invited to parties, she preferred to have me by her side, mostly so we could rehash everything that happened over breakfast the next morning. She would ask for my take on everyone we’d met and then relay some juicy tidbit about them, always prefacing it with “I know you couldn’t care less about gossip, but . . .” Though I did start to care, because she cared.

  When it came time to choose housing for junior year, it was a given that we’d room together; we didn’t even need to discuss it. And those first few weeks living with her were among the best of my life, our only obstacle being her new boyfriend, Nick, who wasn’t a student there, or anywhere—he lived with his parents and didn’t seem to have any plan for the future, meaning he was always available and eager to stay over. Nnenna and I agreed that our dorm walls looked sad and prison-like, so I suggested we buy a roll of massive paper and paint pictures to fill the space, almost like our own wallpaper. Nnenna came up with the idea of eating pot brownies first, which turned out to be crucial. We spent an entire Saturday convulsing with laughter and covering the walls with inexplicable portrayals of each other and the people we knew, whimsical creatures, jungle and desert and underwater scenes. The walls became our kind of trademark, with random people stopping by to check them out for themselves.

  When I had to leave school, and Nnenna, and everyone else I knew there, my father and brother pleaded with me to move back home. But the more they did, the more impossible it became. To think I could walk around that house like I was one of them, look them in the eye, allow them to waste even one more drop of their grace and kindness on me. They were the only two people in the world who would welcome me in and the only two I couldn’t allow to, at least not until I’d done something to deserve it, even marginally. So I was alone, but I figured that would be temporary. I moved into a tiny studio apartment in a large building on a busy, urban block full of people to meet. I employed every conceivable tactic: offering a hand with groceries, attending events advertised on telephone poles, memorizing questions and anecdotes, positioning and repositioning myself near the front door, in the stairwell, by the dumpsters before trash day. But I didn’t understand that the state of friendlessness has more inertia than any other, which is why it’s also the most dangerous. Over time, you forget what it was like to exist before it, you begin to doubt there ever was a before. My confusion grew so intense, it would make me physically ill. Sometimes it turned into rage, and I would slide my mattress up the wall and pummel it with my fists. I became so helpless that I’d turn off the lights in my apartment on Friday and Saturday nights, as though I owed it to my neighbors to pretend I was out living a life. Then I’d lurk at the window and try to study their comings and goings, what they said, how they moved, in the hope that if I could learn to imitate them, they might mistake me for one of their own. Now I can see that it didn’t matter what I did or didn’t do. The inertia can only be overcome by a powerful external force, initiated at just the right moment by an independent party, such as a person standing on a porch with a package, asking if you’d be interested in a meal. It can take years for a force like that to come along; indeed, it had.

  * * *

  After we’d finalized our dinner plans, I went up to my apartment and lay in bed, though I had no intention of sleeping. He was no longer just my landlord, he was Gary—and that couldn’t be easily undone. For a few minutes I allowed my imagination to run free, and it constructed all kinds of scenarios, activities Irina, Gary, and I would do, trips we’d take, sights we’d see. I would help with arrangements for their wedding, maybe even participate in the ceremony; what with her family being so far away, I could be the one to calm her nerves and zip her dress. Then I cut my imagination off and sobered up, tried to scrub those fantasies from my head before they went and wrecked everything. But after a while my imagination wrestled free again. So I let it go for another few minutes, then cut it off once more and sobered up again—it went back and forth like that all night.

  Four

  I got out of bed at dawn, a clawing in my large intestine. I sat on the toilet with my exam book spread across my thighs. The condition of my bathroom—sour laundry, mildew, stray hairs, a smell like a dirty fish tank—didn’t help the nausea. But who could be expected to spend their days washing and tidying, just to come home and do the same? I wondered whether it was the weight of the world’s dust or Gary’s chicken piccata that had clogged me up and left me so constipated. Gary’s chicken piccata. It was still digesting inside me, proof that I hadn’t concocted it all in my mind.

  Soon all t
hat dust would be Roula’s burden again, and I would be an EMT—a dynamite EMT, even Doug could see that. Gary and Irina would appreciate having a friend who was a medical professional, who they could call to dress a burn or examine an insect bite.

  I gazed down at the page of multiple-choice questions: 0.66 mg; open-book pelvic fracture; all of the above; administer oxygen by non-rebreather mask; prepare for rapid transport. I knew it all, without even having to think. So then why was it so hard to pass the exam? I’d easily passed the practical part on the first try, but this cognitive one was entirely different. You had to sit alone in a stall across from a cold screen, the only noise coming from your own brain. The instant the silence had settled in the room, my heart tremored and my mouth went dry. I would see the answers in the distance, their distinct edges and shapes, and chase after them as fast as I could, but they kept shrinking smaller and smaller until they dissolved completely. In their place came a storm of unwelcome voices and images, memories I couldn’t control or ignore; it only inflamed them when I tried. Then my brain went dark so I could barely read one word after another. The second time, my nose began to bleed.

  I’d never had this issue with tests until the point in junior year when I lost it, whatever it was. That first time when I signed into the student portal and saw the grade by my name, I wanted to believe it was a typo, the numbers had gotten reversed. I’d hunted down the professor—he went by his first name, Peter—in the hall and rambled about how there had to be a mistake, I’d studied nonstop and memorized all the material, inside and out, front and back. Even though he was on his way out, wearing gym shorts and hugging a basketball, he listened thoughtfully. “How about you try this next time,” he said. “When you first get the test, stop and take a few deep breaths. Breathe in, breathe out. When you notice a negative thought crop up, turn it into a banana, and stack them up one by one, until you have a big pile. Then imagine a monkey comes along, and he hasn’t eaten in a week.” Peter bounced the ball a few times, right there in the hallway. “It might sound silly, but that kind of visualization can work. It doesn’t have to be bananas. You’ve got to have some fun, some perspective, that’s what I’m saying. Relax a little.” On the way back to my dorm, I repeated to myself, “Turn them into bananas, then a monkey comes along; turn them into bananas, then a monkey comes along.”