by Elvia Wilk
“Yeah, you haven’t been the same.”
“Since when?” The eyes popped open.
“You’re going to make me say it?” He looked up at her impassively. “Fine. You haven’t been the same since Pat died.”
It was exhilarating—it was insane! This was the fatal move, she saw it in his face, the eyes that squinted up at her. She felt it in her stomach muscles as they cramped and pulled her fully into the alternate reality, which she now recognized as her reality. Since Pat died. With the words, she had closed the window so that she could never sneak back into their house. She knew suddenly that she had been planning to say this all along—it had only been a matter of how long she could hold it in. She’d succumbed to the whole experience of Oval with him just to push herself to this point, the breaking point.
“Everything is different,” she said, the force of the pent-up words propelling themselves out with spittle. Ugly words on oily froth from her uncontrollable mouth. “You’re a different person, and you won’t admit it.”
He gazed up at her still, contempt drawn across his face. “Of course I’m different,” he said, as if she had just said the stupidest thing imaginable. “My fucking mom died. What did you expect?”
Her voice was squished almost beyond recognition, lips wet but tongue dried out. She was in fact coming down from drugs, she remembered distantly. There was a chemical thing going on in her brain and body that was making her thoughts not 100 percent pure. Whatever a pure thought was. “I can’t handle this anymore,” she said, pinched, struggling. “You’re making me feel insane.”
He gave her a look of concern. “You know, I’m observing your comedown reactions, and I think we’re definitely going to have to make some tweaks in the chemistry.”
18
WORDS WERE PHYSICAL REFLEXES; HER BODY HAD DONE THEM to her. They had punched her in the gut and spat themselves on Louis’s face. Then, as soon as she’d left his studio, the words had gone missing entirely.
Finster was never going to sell Laura and Dam’s apartment building to her; this was painfully obvious in the light of day. She could throw as much money at it as she wanted, but there was no way. It was laughable.
All the same, she felt she had to follow through, at least to ask the question. At least find out how much it would cost. She owed it to herself. To Laura and Dam. To the memory of herself on O.
Howard would know. She asked to drop by his place, without thinking too much about what she would say to him when she got there. She would let her words continue to do the talking. It was better to take a back seat. Thinking she had been in control in the first place had been the problem.
Back in his narrow kitchen, she devoted ten minutes to reassuring Howard she hadn’t breached the NDA. He pestered her about it in a half-assed way. Form for form’s sake. He had no evidence that she’d broken the contract (though of course she had), but the burden of proof was on him. That was the absurd thing about NDAs, and the reason they proliferated so wildly: they were flimsy unless someone really had it out for you. Most of the time, all it took to not breach an NDA was to insist that no, you had not disclosed. There: you didn’t do it.
Satisfied or bored, he gave up and inspected her, stirring his tea. “You were wearing that shirt the last time I saw you.”
“I don’t exactly have access to my clothes right now.”
“Everyone who showed up at the Best Western was given a budget for incidentals. You could outfit yourself if you just moved in with the tribe.”
“You don’t think I look good in this?” She smoothed her hands over her stomach, which was verging on concave. Taut and certain of itself. The allure of the restricted body.
“Of course you do. Near-death suits you.”
The antagonism was thicker than it had ever been between them, and closer to sexual. She was repulsed by herself, almost to the point of being drawn to him, and he could feel it. It was hard to imagine closing the space between them, but what was stopping it from happening now? The desecration of a memory? And what memory—all she could pull from her memory about sex on O with Louis over the weekend were a few cropped images—hand on thigh, mouth opened in a round shape—hardly enough to feel nostalgic about, hardly enough to compare favorably with the potential of unsatisfactory sex with anyone else.
She knew sleeping with Howard would only exacerbate the lack. The lack was so big that she couldn’t see it anymore, she could only feel it rising up around her.
The lack contained in it thousands of other images, which swarmed her as she sat across from Howard. Phantoms: she and Louis viewed from above, paired this way and that, seeking an impossible symmetry. The legs that were both hers and his; the mole on her stomach that was an impression of the mole on his stomach. Her body an indentation, his an exception to the rule. Believing in him had been believing in the existence of nonbanality. There was no reason to aspire any longer.
She looked up at Howard. The images of the two of them that she could conjure were pockmarked with shame.
Howard tried another approach. “How’s Louis’s project going?” Her ears pricked up. “I heard you came up with the official street name.”
She stiffened and withdrew her hands from the table’s edge. “Who hasn’t heard by now? I thought it was still supposed to be under wraps.”
He shrugged. “I’ve been consulting at Basquiatt, you know. A few marketing strategies Louis wanted to run by me.”
“You helped?”
“He was delusional if he thought he’d push this through without professional help. Consultants like him will always need consultants like me.”
“What’s in it for you?”
“Just the good of mankind.” If he’d been writing an email, he’d have tacked a smiley on right there. “And a favor for you, actually. I figured you’d appreciate the gesture, but maybe I misjudged the situation. Again.”
She realized she hadn’t discussed any of the practical side of things with Louis over the weekend. All she knew was what he’d told her while they sat by the canal and waited for it to take hold. She’d asked him how Basquiatt had received the plan, and he’d grinned, saying no other project of his had met with approval so quickly. No mention that it had been thanks to Howard.
She had the feeling again that things were moving around her that she couldn’t see, detritus from the flow only occasionally materializing and coming into focus. She could only try to guess where the shards had come from by the velocity and angle of their approach.
Howard sent another shard her way. “I just heard that you were in on the beta test too. I haven’t tried my sample yet—any tips?”
It was happening. Oval was entering orbit, touching down.
“Sure,” she said. “Don’t take it.”
He laughed. “You hooked already?”
“Not exactly. I think the beta still needs a few ‘tweaks,’ as Louis put it. He didn’t like my comedown reaction so much. Neither did I.”
“Oh?”
“It’s fucking fake, Howard. None of it’s real. None of it lasts.”
“It doesn’t have to be real to make a difference.” He cocked his head to the side, watching her carefully.
“No—it doesn’t solve any problems. It only makes you blind to the structures behind them. It’s just an empty ego-high—it’s white-savior complex in pill form.”
He forced another laugh, registering that she wasn’t in the mood to ease the tension. There was nothing accommodating to her speech; she was saying what she meant. Not playfully combative—she was, maybe, ready for real combat.
“Sounds like you’re upset with Louis more than anything else,” he said.
“Can you not reduce my political disagreement to a lovers’ quarrel?”
“I’m just saying, cut him some slack. It’s a work in progress.”
“Cut him some slack? Since when are you on his side?”
She knew as she said this that she was invalidating herself. That’s how it was: boys
got to believe their private lives were extricable from their politics—I read feminist theory so it’s irrelevant that my girlfriend’s career is subordinate to my own; it has nothing to do with our genders—and yet they never believed your politics were anything but feeling-based. She would never be allowed to have ideas about the world that were not traceable back to a feminine insecurity. You only wrote a bad review of my book because I wouldn’t sleep with you. You voted for him because you think he’s hot.
In a world where her structural critiques were cast as personal insecurities, no one would ever believe that she was politically opposed to O; they’d only believe that she was having problems with her boyfriend.
Howard leaned forward. “Since when are you guys on different sides?”
She shook her head. “He’s the one who made sides,” she said.
She left without asking him the question she had come to ask.
white fog on cats paws / highs of 40º
Her muscles were underfed, unwilling to push the pedals of her bike, so she left the thing hitched to a lamppost outside Howard’s. Little chance it would be there tomorrow.
She hadn’t taken the subway in a while, and once she was on the train she realized she’d forgotten to buy a ticket, which usually would have made her paranoid, but she found herself pocketing the worry easily. Any quotidian discomfort paled in comparison to prolonged heartbreak. Like stubbing your toe while already doubled over in pain from cramps.
She connected her headphones to her ears and scrolled, searching for a podcast she hadn’t heard. She should really be listening to the news, but what was the point? She would never know as much as Laura. No use pretending to be interested. Her finger alighted on an episode from RANDI’s science series. “Newly Observed Behaviors in Genetically Modified Insects.” It was news, of a sort.
A pleasant voice described the colorless wings of a particular kind of beetle bred to be resistant to diseases that affect edible crops. The modification of its immune system had also resulted in some unexpected phenotypic changes, such as losing the bright pattern on its wings, which had previously been an attractor for mates. In the absence of the ostentatious wing color it had previously possessed, the beetle species had invented a new mating ritual based on chirping.
She let her vision unfocus and her thoughts drift. Was she pathologizing Louis in the same way Howard, and countless males, pathologized her? She had mentally reduced Louis’s desire to change the world to a desperate reaction to grief. But maybe his desire was pure. Maybe it wasn’t a cause-and-effect reaction. Maybe its coinciding with the hinge of the death event was superfluous. Who was she to act as arbiter when it came to motive anyway? Was there such a thing as a purely positive motive? And did it matter why a person did something? Motive was not necessarily traceable in worldly effects. It couldn’t be—it just wasn’t possible for a person to exert that much control. Reactions, collisions. Hadn’t every major technological innovation in history been appropriated for uses beyond the inventor’s intention?
She knew the story. Intellectuals hunch deep down in academia somewhere, throwing molecules against one another until they finally release energy—these molecular reactions are later weaponized to kill millions. A military task force invents a portable blood-infusion device for use on the battlefield—it becomes a lifesaver in civilian hospitals around the world. Beetles are modified so as not to be vectors for disease—and look, now they have a new wing color. Now they mate differently.
Oval, she told herself, was just another emergent technology like all the rest, and one invented by an artist in an NGO—not the most damning of possible contexts. Whether the artist was aware of why he was doing it, this was superfluous. The pill was simply a kernel; the change would proceed, autonomous, from the source.
It was lunch hour and the train car had quickly become overcrowded, standing room only. Her back was pressed up against someone’s front. The person was a heavy breather and she could feel his chest moving as the air rattled in and out. The train lurched and he jostled too close to her, making a full plane of contact against her body, and she felt her bag move against her side, a sure feeling that someone was fumbling in it, but when she reached down to check it no hand was there.
A man whose nose was full of heavy metal rings—three, four piercings in one nostril—squeezed himself in through the doors at the next stop. A pair of Turkish men in tracksuits muttered something in his direction. Anja scrolled numbly on her phone, holding it tilted up and close to her body, and focused on the voice in her headphones. The man had started shouting; she averted her eyes. But the words felt somehow directed. She glanced up. It occurred to her that he was shouting at her—the girl absorbed in her phone—and he was very close, only separated by the width of one person, an elderly woman cowering against the pole in the center of the car. Anja couldn’t move; her back was still wedged against the breather, and to her left and right others pressed against her.
Yes, the words were directional. The man was accusing her, just her, in words that were garbled but intelligible. Everyone is obsessed with their phones, that was the gist. But then he was saying something about a fur coat. She willed herself to glance at him. Yes, he was wearing what looked like an expensive coat made of rabbit fur. “Erinnerst du dich nicht?” he insisted. You must remember me. Something had passed between them over the weekend, but she couldn’t remember what it was anymore. Were they now acquaintances? What more did he want from her?
The male beetle has learned to vibrate its wings fast enough to produce a high-pitched sound only the other sex can hear. The man was daring her to respond to him and panic burst in her chest. She felt the eyes of everyone in the car flicker in her direction.
On O, she would have smiled at the ranter, tossed her phone aside, started chatting, given him whatever she had. She tried to conjure the feeling of common humanity, and the feeling of joy she supposed she had experienced over the weekend—but the illusion could not hold when confronted, sober on the subway, with this everyday horror. If she’d really talked to this raving man over the weekend, exchanged more than material goods with him. The urge to spend money induced by O would have to extend to other urges: to spend time, to spend care. Maybe the urges were linked in a way she didn’t want to admit.
The man’s voice was now hoarse from yelling; he was smacking his own forehead. Here she had a choice, to prove that taking O wasn’t necessary in order to act like a compassionate human. She could try, but the prospect froze her. Engaging a lunatic as a token of respect would in no way diminish his pain. She felt his pain—everyone in the subway car was in some kind of pain—but there wasn’t anything to do about it. She was shy, shy, shy. And she was afraid of doing the wrong thing, much less the right one.
Anja gave in and checked her feed. She had been avoiding the icon on her phone for days, thumb hovering above it like it was a hot pimple that needed popping. When she finally pressed on it she quickly found what she was looking for. She searched for Sara’s profile and there it was: third post from the top. In the fenced-in, grass-trampled backyard of the Baron, sun rising. Louis leaning on Prinz to support Sara’s weight on his shoulders. Sara’s thighs around Prinz’s neck. Sara’s hand in the air, ecstatic. Sascha’s face on his other side, level with Louis’s, the molecules of their cheeks making contact. The four of them in perfect formation. United by O. No filter.
Laura came charging into the living room in her underwear. “I just saw something so fucking weird.”
Anja dropped her phone on the floor next to her, snapping out of stalker mode. “Down there?” she asked, gesturing toward Laura’s crotch.
Laura rolled her eyes. “Outside. I was smoking a cigarette out the window—”
“I thought you quit smoking.”
“I did. As I was saying. I was looking out the window and I saw this lady jogging by, listening to her headphones. She was wearing one of those armband phone-holder things.”
“The thing that looks like a b
lood-pressure cuff?”
“Yeah. Maybe it does that, too. So the lady was jogging by and she passed this homeless guy, who was passed out on a pile of cardboard boxes. When she saw him, she stopped all of a sudden and reversed herself back to him—she didn’t turn around, she just jogged backward—and then she sort of poked him awake with her foot, and then he started rolling around confused, and she ripped out her headphone jack, took her phone out of the armband, and bent down and gave the phone to him.”
Anja had a sinking feeling. “That’s all?”
“No—then she leaned down and kissed his face. He seemed like he was trying to talk to her, but then she just stood up and started jogging again. She was still holding her headphones, which was kind of weird. I guess she thought he didn’t need those . . .”
“What did the girl look like?”
“I don’t know. Blond.”
“Did she look like she’d been out partying?”
“No, she looked like a jogger. What do you—oh my god, you don’t think . . .” Anja stared at her blankly. “Jesus.”
Laura sank onto the sofa and Anja pulled her legs up to make room, scrunching up the blankets around her. She had been awake for what felt like hours already.
“Where’s Dam?” asked Anja. “He hasn’t sent any weather blasts in a few days. Actually, I haven’t seen him in ages.”
Laura sighed. “He’s in Barcelona. Looking at places.”
“Shit.” Anja rubbed her eyes, which felt like they were stuck open. Secondhand grief was pickling her into a smooth, shiny vegetable. At least her rash was less fervent today. “I can’t believe you’re serious about this move.”
“Looks like it. Not sure how to go backward on this one. You know,” Laura gestured toward her bedroom, “the jogging backward is what really gets me about that whole interaction. Like she had a switch go off in her brain and then—ee-yoo-ee-yoo . . .” She made the noise of truck reversing, moving her forearms up and down as if directing it where to park. “She just, like, reversed herself when she saw him.”
