Someone walked past me, a body slumped on the sidewalk, and threw a few coins at my feet. I kept them.
* * *
As I entered my apartment, the landline was already ringing. It never did anymore, the debt collectors now satisfied and Chandra gone.
Is this Mary?
I hesitated before I said it was. I suppose I’m still not convinced.
This is Vivian. Chandra’s mother? Listen, I just heard from Julian and he mentioned you had been looking for her recently? On Facebook?
She was waiting on me to say something but all I could do was wait.
Listen, I remember you being a really nice girl, very trusting, but you might not know Chandra as well as you think you do. Things have, um, not been going so well with her and you probably shouldn’t try to be in touch.
But where … Why didn’t she tell me where she—
It’s just not that simple, Mary. She got wrapped up with this … group, but she left them, too, and it’s just—it’s all really too much to go into right now but I didn’t want you to be worried.
I was worried, I was still worried, but I couldn’t say so for some reason. Eventually I asked her if she would tell Chandra something for me, but when she said she would, no words would come. I tried to move my lips, but there were no thoughts.
I think it’s just best for you to let go of this, is what I’m saying. You’re a sweet girl—I remember you being sweet and I just—believe me, nothing good will come of it.
I thanked her and she thanked me, but neither of us seemed to know what for.
* * *
The next morning I opened the blinds to the grimy little window in my kitchen and saw Ashley squinting up at me from the sidewalk like an athlete letting her power build. I dropped my tea, the mug cracking into several pieces, hot liquid sloshing across my feet as I jumped back, landed on a shard, blood and chamomile mixing on the linoleum. Hobbling toward the bathroom, I could hear her shouting my name in the street. I tried to remain calm, not wanting to undo the work I’d done with Ed, but as I sat on the edge of my tub, rinsing my gashed and burned feet in cool water and applying one of Chandra’s gels to the wound—there was a knock. I froze, turned off the running water to listen.
Another knock, a pounding.
I did nothing. I didn’t have to answer the door just because someone was there. There was no rule about this. I did not move.
Mary?
She’d probably slipped in behind someone.
Mary, I just need to talk to you. Just—open the door. Come on.
I found a bandage for the cut, gauze left over from when I had all those lesions, reminding me how far I’d come. I tried to tally it up, all the good in my life: most of my symptoms were gone, I’d regained my appetite and put on weight, I’d gotten mostly out of debt. I had no stupid job, I had an income now for doing nothing. I could just stay inside my home, speak to no one, clean stuff, and stare. So what if a possibly dangerous woman was outside my door? So what? I could handle this, I thought, if this was all I had to handle.
I’m not going anywhere until you speak to me.
So I went nowhere and she went nowhere for some time. I sat in my living room and she pounded at the door every few minutes until I finally gave up and said, What?
Let me in.
I’m not letting you in.
Just tell me where he is.
Kurt?
She scoffed.
I don’t know where he is, I said.
Bullshit.
I don’t.
He was here. He was with you.
I don’t work for him anymore.
Me either, she said with some implied irony I didn’t understand.
So, I don’t know where he is. Please leave me alone.
I fell asleep that night without leaving my apartment, not wanting to open the door, unsure if she might still be out there.
* * *
All week I kept my blinds down and curtains drawn, peeking out only when I needed to leave the house, and if anyone had asked me how I was doing that week (no one did), I would have told them I was terrified, though there was some odd pleasure in it, too, in feeling so hunted.
But I’d also become so tired of adventures, of travel, of debt, of people, of conflict, of noise, of working, of everything. I tried to meditate as Ed had suggested and once I attempted to go to a yoga class at one of the places that Chandra had taken me to, but when a woman with pale pink hair at the front desk smiled in such a vacant way and said, Namaste, I turned around and walked out and didn’t even realize what I had done until I was nearly home. I ducked into a grocery store and as I considered canned sardines (another Chandra recommendation), I heard Ashley’s voice behind me.
I don’t hate you. You know that, right?
The other woman on the aisle didn’t even look up from the label she was reading, giving us that public privacy.
I don’t blame you for anything, Ashley continued. It’s just that he screwed us both over, so we have to stick together.
I didn’t know if she meant Matheson or Kurt and I mostly didn’t care, except to distantly wonder if the GX was still going on, if Ashley was in on it, if I should check my contract as Kurt had last suggested, that perhaps all this time they had still been studying me, had bugged my apartment, that perhaps I had signed my whole life over to them and didn’t know it. I didn’t say anything to her, walked off as if she were just some insane stranger.
They must have told you something, she insisted, trailing me.
No one did. I don’t know anything.
But they will—he will. You’ll be the first to know. Because you were in love, weren’t you? I saw the reports.
It was true I still sometimes wondered where he might be at that moment, wondered what he was doing, saying, feeling—I didn’t know if that counted as love. And if it was, I couldn’t tell if it was an unseen perk of the whole thing or a terrible, embittering tax.
I don’t know, I said, and kept walking. She followed me as I wandered in circles around my neighborhood. She started ranting, going on about a conspiracy, something they were doing with the surveillance tapes, something about the sensors and what they had done to all of us, that it was abuse, that they’d been controlling her mind, that she didn’t even know herself anymore, that she was mush, that she had been ripped apart.
I don’t know what I am, she said, I don’t know what feelings are mine anymore.
We were standing outside my building, and though I wanted to help, I didn’t have any help to give. I was out of everything.
I was afraid she would try to follow me in. She held her face in her hands and wept and I wanted to be good to her but it seemed she needed so much more than what I could give. Then she looked up and said, Why?
Why what?
But she didn’t say what. She just asked, Why? again, so gently, as if she were speaking in a church.
I left her on the sidewalk, making sure the door shut behind me. I fell asleep but woke an hour later, turned on all the lights, and looked for her. Half of me knew she couldn’t have gotten in, but the other half wondered if she could have slipped into the building, picked my lock, moved stealthily into my bedroom, taken a deep inhale of my hair as I slept, searching for a trace of him, searching for some sense to be made. I wondered if I’d find her waiting in the kitchen, cracking her knuckles, scalding her tongue on tea. I even went out and squinted down my building’s stairwell, waited to hear a step on the lobby tile, but there was nothing—no sound, no step—just still air resting on walls and floor. I almost whispered her name into the dark silence, but all I could do was inhale and hover at the edge of the A.
Six
When Ed called to say we needed one last session, immediately, that afternoon—No charge, he said—I wasn’t sure I wasn’t dreaming. In the week since I’d seen him I’d been sleeping so much my waking life had become hazy and my dreams had become sharper.
I woke up facedown on Ed’s table, his elbow pres
sed into the base of my spine as he pushed my right shoulder up.
He said, I saw it.
Unable to speak, I listened.
It was the strangest thing. Something told me to go for a walk last night before biking home and there was a line outside that movie theater two blocks from here and I can’t think of the last time I went to a movie, but I got in the line, saw a very interesting film … anyway, I’m sure you know where this is going.
Though I didn’t, I couldn’t or just didn’t want to correct him.
And then it all made sense—why we had to stop our work, all that psychic cording you didn’t realize and everything you told me last week. It all made sense.
I felt unsure of what he was implying but I mostly didn’t care. It felt so nice to be touched that I could have tolerated almost anything, and later when I was dressed and he was saying his final, final goodbye, I wanted to hug him or tell him something or ask him to clarify what he meant about the movie, but I felt I had to get out of there immediately. I had already mourned our work twice and there was no use in mourning it a third time. I left the building and went to that bench in that sooty little shred of a park by the street with too much traffic.
I’d been sitting there for a half hour or so when a woman, she must have been barely of drinking age, barely of any age at all, approached me with a wide smile and wild eyes.
Are you…?
I looked at her, waiting on something to add up.
I just—I’m so sorry to bother you, but I’m an acting student and I’ve just never—I can’t think of anyone who—your performance in The Walk was the most moving thing I’ve ever seen. It was so authentic, so … charged!
I said nothing and she kept talking.
I’d ask for your autograph but I don’t have a pen or anything—do you?
No.
Can I? Can we? She held her phone up, sort of shrugging at it. I couldn’t tell what she was asking but then she sat next to me and held the phone above us, our faces reflected, and just before the screen blinked I saw myself—brow bent and mouth straight.
Thank you, thank you so much. She rushed from me, as if any minute I might explode.
I went home quickly, making sure not to come close to anything like eye contact with anyone, taking the less peopled streets, weaving with intent through the crowds thronging Broadway and the avenues. When I got home, I found the GX phone, half hoping it wouldn’t turn on anymore, but it did—I suppose it still counted as one of my benefits—and I immediately looked up The Walk, the search bar knowing me better than I knew myself, adding Kurt Sky. The first thing that came up was a one-minute trailer, Kurt in profile as the lead image, and though I hesitated, I played it.
A long shot of Kurt walking through a field, one I remembered from his editing room. Kurt’s eyes, close-up, darting. Then there I was, sitting in his living room, then in bed, a shot of Kurt running, another shot of his eyes, then one of the more violent attacks from Ashley, me in the background, watching. More shots of Kurt in the field, running and panting, then a voice-over—We tried to keep all these secrets—me in the kitchen, looking up into the skylight—but we always knew—and cut back to Ashley, dripping in sweat, smiling—The Walk.
I set the phone down on the couch, went to the kitchen, and couldn’t remember what I had come in there for, went to the bathroom and thought the same thing, went to the bedroom, took off my clothes, and went back to the living room. I looked at the phone without touching it. I wanted to know more and I wanted to know less. I went to the kitchen, drank a glass of tap water, refilled the glass and drank again. I went back to the living room, lay on the couch beside the phone, and pressed it on, began searching The Walk Kurt Sky over and over, clicking deeper and deeper in, reading reviews, reports on ticket sales, reading essays about Kurt, reading essays about why most of the actresses were uncredited, reading theories about who we were. I read the ranting ends of comment threads attacking or defending what I looked like, the sound of my voice, my acting. It was the year’s best film according to some, or the century’s worst according to others. It had only been out a few days but it seemed a whole wing of the Internet was already devoted to it, as if there were little to no distance now between every living person’s opinion of something and the searchable catalog. It was groundbreaking, thrilling, boring, feminist, chauvinist, radical, predictable, avant-garde, pretentious, brilliant, tragic, highbrow, lowbrow film or movie or trash. Some said using amateur actors was a manipulative fad, that Sky was one of the greatest film artists we’d ever seen, that he was still arguably the best actor who had ever lived—by nightfall I knew everyone’s opinion. I had caught up on new theories on the #baglady, and the phone grew hot in my hands, but more came up: New Selfie of The Walk’s Anonymous Actress with Lucky Fan!
There I was beside a girl smiling as if in midlaugh, tilting her head at a studied angle, documenting her joy beside my whatever. Looking at it, I felt frightened in that way that large things are frightening—looking down from a great height or swimming in a part of the ocean with an unreachable floor. Being taken, having your photograph taken—I realized then that it was called this for a reason.
I nearly burned my eyes out as the battery wore down, reading and watching and listening to everything I could. Finally it died and I let it.
Seven
Days, I slept late. Nights, I wondered if I should go out somewhere, eat a meal in public, try to meet a person to put in my life, but I never did. I ate while standing over the sink. I reread my way through the bookcase. I ordered everything. Men arrived at my door with boxes and bags. Every week or so I would go out to the bank to get cash for delivery tips—my account reinflated with weekly deposits from Kurt—but I did almost everything else by telling my phone what I wanted and where I was. First it was just food and cleaning supplies—other than reading all I ever did was clean or jog dumbly up and down the short hall—but later I bought a small table and a rug and an air purifier and wads of sage. Soon everything in my home was beautiful and perfect. I cleaned so often and so deeply that no dust could settle before I had wiped it away. I didn’t even have a trash can, instead I made frequent trips to the garbage chute each time an object—a napkin, an apple core, a plastic bag—lost its use. When the weather was nice, I left my windows open and blinds down, the wind rattling them like a chime without the high notes. When the weather was perfect, I tied a scarf over my head, put on large sunglasses, and sat on the metal fire escape. Sometimes tourists would point up at me—That’s what they do here, live on their escapes.
Months went by like this, long enough for the weather to turn cold then warm again. At first I felt sure Chandra would stop by or call soon—I had these premonitions, I thought—and I didn’t want to miss her. Then winter made my solitude feel noble, that being still and waiting was the correct response to snow and darkness. Faintly, I worried I was turning into Merle, wicked and away and too certain, so every day I tried to make a list of what I believed for sure, immediately crossing out each line. On the good days I wrote nothing.
* * *
After some months Mikey, the bodega’s delivery guy, started showing me pictures of his baby daughter, making jokes, asking me if I heard about that explosion or the protests or something else. I’d never heard of anything since I didn’t read the Internet or newspapers, but talking to Mikey reminded me that even if I wanted nothing to do with the rest of the world, there might be some good in knowing what the world was doing. So I ordered a little black radio, let its voices and music become my sole companion. In the morning I said Good morning to it and each night I said Good night before putting us both to sleep. All day it told me everything, and its tone never changed. I relied upon it. I felt more and less alone.
I started asking Mikey if he’d heard about the state senate race or refugee crisis. Often he had not. He always listened patiently as I told him what I knew.
I loved the radio’s hourly news updates, especially when the same one repeated for a
second or third time and I could try to recite the words with it. For a while I said the announcers’ names, but eventually I inserted my own—From NPR news in Washington I’m Mary Parsons—until one day I said, without thinking, I’m Junia Stone. All afternoon I caught myself whispering, I’m Junia Stone, in odd corners of the house, into the couch, into the freezer, into a laundered bedsheet as I folded it.
I was listening to the radio and cleaning the tiny grooves in the hardwood with Q-tips when I heard the name Kurt Sky, something about an experiment, then his viscerally familiar voice—was I imagining this? I tried to listen but the words scattered around me, fell out of order, would not march through my mind______extremely cutting-edge full-body virtual reality suit, not just an audiovisual experience, but one that affects the user from the inside out, internally______cranial electrotherapy stimulation______the temporary but profound illusion that the user has become, briefly, an entirely different person______Identity Distance Therapy, a product from Kerensky Technologies.
I felt confused and strange, only coming to when I heard two of the morning announcers discussing how urgently my annual contribution was needed, how they were just nothing without me, how they would just fall apart, Please call, so I turned the radio off and went to find the phone, found and turned on the phone, typed a K that immediately filled in as Kurt Sky Technology Company. Somehow it just knew. I lay down on the floor though I wasn’t yet done cleaning it. KerenskyTechnologies.com was the first thing to appear, a sleek white-and-blue page, and soon a man in a white coat was smiling on the tiny screen, saying hello, introducing himself, thanking me for my interest in Identity Distance Therapy. The image was so clear and real I felt almost sure he was with me now, this man was here in my hand.
The Answers Page 23
