Sensation

by Nick Mamatas

  Julia wrote all these thoughts and whimsies down in a private blog that only she, and we, could read. She occasionally dated a man of indeterminate ethnicity, us. We accessed her computer as she slept and, as we gathered from her subvocalizations, dreamed of murder.

  She came out to us after seven months of casual dating. Dinner at her place, the first time she tried to cook. “I never cook,” she said. “I took a picture of the rice because it came out okay.”

  “We’re sure it’ll be great,” we said. She smiled at us; Julia liked it when we used what she called the editorial we. It seemed European to her. And we remembered not to do it too often.

  “Listen,” she said. She poured us some wine, and then twice as much for herself. “I really never cook. I mean, I was at the supermarket today and rolled my cart past the frozen food section to the meats. I was confused when I saw the chicken. You know, wrapped in plastic and yellow foam.”

  “Confused?”

  “It’s not white. It’s pinkish when it’s raw. I didn’t even realize that, can you believe it? I thought there was something wrong with the chicken.”

  We took her cue and cut ourselves a piece of chicken and put it into the mouth. There was something wrong with it. Too dry, hardly seasoned at all. She must have just set the oven to an arbitrary temperature and put the chicken breasts, pink and all, in there and let them cook until we came to the door with our flowers and See’s Candies, which we had ordered from all the way in San Francisco.

  “Then I tried to call my mother on my cell phone. She cooks.” Julia shoveled up a forkful of yellow rice, avoiding her own chicken. “She was a pretty good cook. Well, we went out a lot too, when I was a kid.”

  “What did your mother say?”

  “She wasn’t home. The phone just rang and rang. No answering machine, no voice mail. She doesn’t have a cell either.” Julia laughed. “We all grew up that way, but it’s hard to imagine now.”

  “Don’t know what you’ve got till it’s been taken from you,” we said, knowing that Julia would correct us in that condescending way she enjoyed: Till it’s gone, Bob. It would also keep her from finishing her thought. “I haven’t been able to call my mother and actually get her on the phone for more than a year. She calls me, but I never call her, not and actually get through. It’s so strange …”

  “So, how did you solve the mystery of the pink chicken?”

  “An old lady helped me. I guess she saw the look on my face. She asked me what was wrong and I told her I thought all the chicken was bad. She laughed at first, but then she told me that it was all right. And to wash the chicken first, and my hands, to avoid salmonella.”

  “Good advice and a good meal,” we said, raising our glass. We, Julia too, clinked.

  Later that night, after a second dinner of braised ribs ordered from a nearby soul food restaurant and a dessert of red velvet cake and port, we engaged in the act of physical love, with Julia straddling us and rocking her hips harshly, her hands grasping and pulling on her nipples. The low ceiling of her apartment always made us a bit fearful that Julia, who enjoyed this sexual position more than any other, would give herself a concussion, and that she might end up in a hospital and be identified. Though morbid, such a line of contemplation helped us blunt the physiological responses of the body in which we rode, extending the act so that Julia could achieve a climax. Frequent non-masturbatory orgasms help the transition into the Simulacrum. Julia was a fairly quiet woman, a whimperer rather than a moaner, but there were other signals of imminence and climax: her tongue cold against our lips, the nail of her fingers digging into our pectoral muscles, a wink and a snarl of her lips as if she’d just closed a kitchen drawer onto her thumb. Then a quick leap off us and to the glass of water she kept at bedside.

  “Tell me about your childhood,” Julia whispered into our ear, the ear into which we were nestled. The body of indeterminate ethnicity twitched hard, and Julia jerked away from our shoulder.

  “Sleep spasm, sorry,” we said. “What did you ask?”

  Julia yawned. “Never mind,” she murmured. “The past is so strange. Everything is. Did you ever think of someone, like an ex-husband or a cousin or an old co-worker and think, ‘Wow, was I really ever the person who was with that person, who had those conversations?’’’

  “Oh yes,” we said. “Everyone does, surely. All men contain multitudes of men, no? Women as well, of course.” We kissed her.

  “Sometimes I stare at the mirror and don’t even recognize myself. I read in a magazine once that it’s because the mirror reverses everything, so you don’t really understand what you look like.”

  “If that’s the case,” we said, “doesn’t that imply that you’ve actually somehow seen yourself, your face, I mean, as it really is. That would necessarily be from someone else’s point of view, wouldn’t it?”

  One of us was in the corner of the room, resting in a web, peering down at the two slabs of meat and sweat atop the swirl of sheets in the bed. And that is how we could see our man as how he really was, and why we couldn’t ever quite understand Julia and the tiny crises she worked herself into.

  “I guess it doesn’t matter,” she sad flatly, and she rolled over, didn’t respond to our hand on her buttock, and didn’t sleep either. An hour later we said, “You should try to be happy. So few people do. It’s no wonder that so few of you succeed.”

  RAYMOND was attempting to be happy, but the only thing that could make him happy was Julia. He said it several times a day.

  Raymond cut his finger with a can opener and said, to himself, “Fuck, I should just kill myself. Julia. Cunt.”

  Raymond tried to read a journal, but his eyes kept falling from the page. Even the book reviews were too much for him.

  Raymond left the house one day, meaning to take the train to Brooklyn and eat at Junior’s like he used to as a child, but once on the A train he decided to go north instead and eat at the Junior’s Annex in Grand Central Station because the trip was shorter.

  Raymond moved the TV into the bedroom so he could watch various court shows from bed. He liked to try to nap during the actual presentation of the case, and force himself to wake up in time to hear the verdict.

  Raymond showered, his clothes waiting for him on the seat of the commode. He stepped out and dried himself off, then put on his socks because his feet felt cold. He stepped off the rug and into a puddle, wetting his sock. He slapped his towel over the shower rod and twisted the ends around, reminiscent of the stem of a noose. Then he put on his pants.

  Raymond ordered a sandwich from the fancy Cuban sandwich place he liked, though he’d never been inside and didn’t even know if the place had a storefront—maybe it was a kitchen with a long table and a dozen machete-wielding chefs with great slabs of beef and fine cheese hanging from hooks, and a fennel-shooting device holstered on every shoulder—and it came with the wrong cheese, and tomatoes too. Raymond picked out the tomatoes, flung them one at a time against the white door of his refrigerator, and lost his appetite.

  Raymond went on a date with a graduate student in psychology, Liz was her name. She was a bigger girl, an Australian with a light accent that slipped down one social stratum after two drinks—not really Raymond’s type—but she had a very large smile and he was good at making her laugh. He mostly wanted to see her breasts, which were large, and the date was an experiment. Would a woman still want to kiss him? Were his scars so obvious? Liz was a behaviorist, not a relational psychologist, but Raymond was sure that if he could get her shirt off it would prove he was all right. He muttered this to himself while masturbating in the shower. They would eat at Cucina Di Pesce, his “go-to” first-date restaurant from back in his single days. Bars were nearby for drinks harder than wine, and all the useful subway stops were to the west, en route to his apartment. With sufficient conversation and decent weather he could corral a woman to walk right past the N and the R, the 1,2,3 and sometimes even the A, C, and E trains to join him in his apartment.


  Raymond leaned forward and puckered his lips. Raymond had ordered linguini, which he knew never to do as long pastas were prone to looking ridiculous hanging from one’s mouth, but he wanted to suck. Liz was friendly but turned her full cheek to his mouth at the end of the night. She did text message Raymond as he lay in bed though. Good Night … The use of ellipses is always provocative, Raymond knew.

  The next week, Raymond mistimed a payment to his credit card. After calling the credit card company, his bank, and the credit card company again, he threw the phone across the four rooms of his railroad apartment. It hit the wall and cracked the plaster, then dropped behind a pile of Julia’s clothes Raymond had collected, to bring to the Goodwill. But the pile smelled too much like Julia. Then the phone began to ring, playing the Green Hornet theme song. Raymond’s pulse nearly kept time.

  “Maybe it’s Julia.” He jogged across the apartment and began to dig. The song ended. The screen on the phone’s clamshell cover read 1 MISSED CALL. It wasn’t Julia. Just an 888-number, the cellular service provider itself. Raymond sighed and let the phone drop onto a pair of Julia’s old slacks. He closed his eyes and inhaled deeply, trying to relax. Then the phone beeped rudely. Raymond still had 1 MISSED CALL. Raymond pressed exit, then decided to text Liz. Liz was right under Julia in his phone.

  HELLO …

  She texted back: Hey! How ru??

  Raymond didn’t understand. RUSSIA? he texted back.

  The Green Hornet blared in his hand. The screen read LIZ.

  “Hello?”

  “Ukraine.”

  They met at Veselka at midnight, over black buckwheat pancakes and pirogues. They talked about the weather. It had been raining earlier that evening and Raymond said that the streets shone black like velveteen, which he had read in a book that Liz had never heard of. Liz appreciated the line and the sentiment.

  “Not a lot of sentiment in your field, hmm?” asked Raymond.

  Liz smiled wide, an angry smile. “Jealous much?”

  “Sorry.”

  “They say that behavioral psychologists have physics envy. I’ve found that other social scientists, especially ol’ softies like anthros, have behavioral psychology envy.”

  “Yeah. Why would I want to travel the world, explore the edges of the human experience, and get paid for it, when I can hang out with pigeons all day?” said Raymond.

  “We’re not all B. F. Skinner, you know. I believe in the mind and mental disorders like anyone else.”

  “Oh?” Raymond said. “That reminds, me, I have a question.”

  “Shoot.”

  “Therapists are themselves in therapy, are they not?”

  “Quite so. Certainly when in training to get their PsyD or PhD at the very least. Of course, most of them fully embrace a psychotherapeutic mindset so it is no surprise that they would attempt to deal with their personalities or problems in that way, is it?” Liz said. “You might as a well ask if priests go to church. They’re right there, aren’t they?”

  “Well, what about behaviorists?”

  Liz leaned in close, conspiratorially, and said, “Giant pigeon.”

  Raymond laughed. “What?”

  “We all go a see a giant pigeon, twice a week.” Liz sat back and held her arms out wide. “He’s huge, I tell you. Monstrous. Imagine an ostrich on steroids. And you know what he does?”

  “Pecks at your heads?”

  Liz clapped once. “Yes. Just so!” And she laughed her wild laugh, which overwhelmed the clatter of forks against plates, and even the whoosh of spring air and jangling bells of the traffic by the front door. “Twice a week, for a fifty-minute hour, whether we need it or not. Perhaps one day it shall even change my behavior.” She laughed again.

  “You let it all hang out. You’re cute when you smile.”

  “So, r u,” she said, enunciating the words like individual letters.

  “I am,” he said. “Happy.”

  “How funny you don’t get that. Half the students in my lab actually hand in journals and assignments with that lingo. B4. U2. It’s horrid, utterly,” Liz said.

  “I don’t have too many large courses; I just do one undergrad a semester, or did. The worst I have got on a paper was from a student who wrote something along the lines of ‘And I go, “Whatever.”‘ I had no idea what it meant, but the paper was on existentialist anthropology and the struggle between competing imperatives within a cultural group, so I gave her a B-plus.”

  “Right,” Liz said. “Was the paper about the, you know …” she held up her right arm and waved her hand around, the universal symbol for the nameless movement that had continued, at a simmer, since we had moved Julia to the Simulacrum. Students at MIT had just that afternoon used gelatin to create islands in the Charles River, and there they reenacted the many interventions of Caribbean nations by the Great Powers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Four drowned rather than submit to arrest.

  “No, this was before.” Raymond zipped himself up with a great inhalation, as if he had the choice never to breathe again.

  “What do you think happened to her?” Liz asked. Then she lifted her cup and took a sip. “You’ll have to excuse me. I don’t believe in small talk or beating around the bush. It’s a terrible Americanism, I think. This expectation that everyone is nice to one another, and smiles—even the service personnel in restaurants smile as if they are deliriously happy to receive an order of McNuggets—but nobody gets close to one another. It’s intimacy, laminated for your protection.”

  “I think she committed suicide,” Raymond says.

  “Really?”

  “No.” A busboy appeared with a plastic tub and with a nod and mutter collected Raymond’s plates and the small jars of maple syrup and jelly. Raymond smiled at him in thanks, then turned back to Liz who was mimicking his smile with her wide mouth. He slumped his shoulders, defeated.

  “Oh, buck up,” she said. “Listen, do you want a sexual partner?” He stared. “Oh, you’re a man. Of course you want a sexual partner. Look, it doesn’t matter.” She waved again, not symbolizing the moment per se, but Raymond could not help but react as if it were a tell of a bad poker player. She reached into her large purse and pulled out a manila envelope, crinkled and bent.

  “Here. I admit I’ve been very curious about Julia Hernandez.” She put the envelope on the table between them, and then dipped into the bag again to remove a stuffed wallet and extract a twenty-dollar bill. “Curious about you as well, I must say, though not in that way. As far as suicide, I doubt it. Watch yourself, though. Text me anytime. And fill out the form, you may find it handy.” She stood up, tapped the envelope, and rather inexplicably to Raymond said, “Oh Em Gee.” Raymond lifted a hand to wave and Liz, at the door, waved back, but neither said a thing.

  Raymond ordered another cup of coffee and opened the envelope. There was a small pencil in it, and a form of several pages. He took up the pencil and began to write.

  Raymond: Call what we just did consultee-centered consultation, call it a date, call it whatever, call me whenever. Fill it out, you can save me the trouble ha-ha!

  Content Description and Analysis

  Setting: The restaurant I used to like before gentrification ruined it and all the old waitresses died and were replaced by mail-order brides.

  Participants: Me, Liz

  Subject of consultation Me Julia

  Development Description and Analysis Relationship building

  I think I could be Liz’s sexual partner. Maybe we could get high together first. She’s a loud woman, busty. Haven’t been with many like that. A little KB could take the edge off. It would be like college again; the flipside of the semester, like we were the students again and our professors were distant and doughy old farts we had to appease just once a month with a paper or a test.

  Establishing or maintaining rapport

  I guess I should text her.

  Problem definition

  Julia Julia Julia Julia. I’m writing her name over a
nd over like I was a high school girl srcribbling down the name of a pop star—or my own name and appending the pop star’s surname. I wonder which is more common—potential paper down the line? No, intellectualizing my problems. But what problem?

  Gathering data on what has already transpired or reviewing previous actions

  Who generates idea?

  Julia

  When are consultant ideas offered?

  Who knows? On our second date?

  How is consultee anxiety reduced?

  Good fucking question.

  2.4.4. Are pitfalls avoided?

  None have been yet.

  Sharing information

  I don’t even know anything about Liz. I wonder what her cup size is. 36 something, definitely.

  Generating Interventions

  Do I want a sexual partner? Yes, I do.

  Supporting Interventions

  I should text her when I get home. Not now. She’ll come running back and want to see this form.

  Follow-up and disengagement—assumption of responsibility for outcome

  When I thought “she’ll come running back” I pictured Julia and looked up and hoped for a moment that she’d be walking by the windows of the restaurant, but nobody was there. At all. Strange for the city.

  Process Description

  Was this session helpful?

  Oh God …

  What is the current reality for this consultee regarding this problem?

  What an interesting turn of phrase. “Current reality.”

  What is my ignorance/bias regarding this problem/situation?

  Julia Julia Julia Julia Julia Julia

  What “intervention” occurred?

  Fuck it, let her see everything; my thoughts and my crossing out. I should stand naked before someone again, somehow.