Look Alive Out There

by Sloane Crosley

  “So,” I asked, “you guys are swingers?”

  Is that a wind chime?

  “We just do pairs,” Savannah explained. “It’s hard around here. You get a lot of people who are either gross or married or people who have never done this before. I told Hank: Never again with the virgins. Never again.”

  “Like 9/11,” Alex mumbled, wiping his nose.

  “That’s ‘Never forget,’” I said, “but sure.”

  “Last week,” Savannah went on, “this chick freaked out halfway through and locked herself in the closet. I felt kind of bad fucking her boyfriend while Hank had to sit out in the living room.”

  I gave them a pinched look, as if I, too, hated it when that happened. I imagined Hank waiting patiently, listening to Savannah climax, flipping through worn copies of Mother Jones.

  “A lot of people don’t agree with our orientation,” Hank said.

  Was it a hobby or an orientation? I wasn’t sure it qualified as an orientation unless they couldn’t have sex without four people in the room.

  “She should help you guys look,” Alex said and lit a cigarette.

  Should she, though?

  He held it up by his ear, fingers flared. He saw right through me.

  “That’s a great idea!” exclaimed Savannah. “How’s your eye for labia? Can you smoke that outside please?”

  *

  I was equal parts relieved and insulted to be categorized as someone who could help hunt but not be hunted herself. I did not want to have sex with either of them. Or both of them. But everybody likes to be considered. Instead, I got to work, weeding out couples I suspected were lacking in genetics or experience. Hank diced tomatoes for the bruschetta while I jotted down my favorite pairings on a notepad.

  Laura and Craig. Her: 5′2″, 119 lbs, boobs. Him: 6′1″, 170 lbs, bald.

  Diana and Jay. Her: 5′7″, 130 lbs, flat. Him: height N/A. 140 lbs. Jockey?

  “Too little.” Savannah stood over my shoulder, licking a wooden spoon.

  “Which one?”

  “Him. The bald guy.”

  “Not the jockey?”

  “It says he’s a jockey?”

  “That’s just what I’m calling him.”

  “Well, your jockey has a ginormous cock. Look at him. He’s hung like a horse.”

  “How can you tell?” I asked. “It’s just his face.”

  “You get good at reading people,” she said, shrugging. “Everyone’s always trying to tell you something. It’s in their eyes. It’s not that hard.”

  “Man.” I kept scrolling. “You’re good.”

  *

  “I can’t.” Hank waved his hands back and forth. “I can’t with the pancake nipples.”

  We were eating dinner outside, breathing in the cool forest air and trolling the Internet for nipples of an acceptable diameter.

  “What would you go for?” Savannah asked. “If you were us.”

  “Me?”

  All I could think about were logistics. I wondered how long it took to get a response from the couples, if they all took each other out to dinner afterward, if they split the check four ways. The three of them were waiting for an answer. I tried to imagine what the newfangled Northern Californian version of myself would say. Days working alone, deep in thought, had left my mind uncluttered and unusually prepared to access thoughts on the subject.

  “I guess I’d go for something traditional,” I mused. “So a girl with a distinct figure and long hair and a tall guy with chest hair. Or I’d focus on diversity so there’s one of everything in the room. It leads to less whose-ass-is-that and so forth. Conversely, I could see hunting down a set of body doubles to make the transition more seamless. But if the whole idea is to go outside the relationship, then what’s the point of that?”

  Alex lit up another cigarette. The paper crackled.

  “Precisely,” Hank whispered.

  Was I a foursome savant? I’d never been so flattered in my life. A foursome is one of those activities that lives in the “would” section of my brain alongside “black tar heroin” and “petting a baby cobra.” Would I do these things? Sure, if the circumstances were perfect and consequence free and came with a bucket of antivenom.

  *

  After dinner, we marched into the woods, single file, because Savannah and Hank had a surprise for me. I felt out of my body, as if narrating my evening from the trees: Unbeknownst to her loved ones, a writer befriends her sexually liberated neighbors and allows herself to be escorted to a dilapidated garden shed. Her would-be assailants roll her a joint the circumference of a giraffe turd. So relieved is she not to list her current activity as “being stabbed” that she does not hesitate to take it. Inside the shed is a creaky staircase that leads to the center of the earth.

  The stairs opened up into a space more expansive than I had expected. I heard the dull buzzing of a generator. Hank flicked on a series of infrared lights. And there, underneath Hank and Savannah’s backyard, was a greenhouse hosting the tallest marijuana plants I’d ever seen. I am not a weed aficionado. I am not an anything aficionado. But I know what a normal-size pot plant looks like and they don’t crown at your armpit. This was what the dinosaurs smoked.

  Hank turned on a fan. The leaves shivered in the breeze. He guided his hand over them, as if calming them.

  “We do a couple hundred thousand dollars a year,” he boasted.

  “You want some?” Savannah asked, chewing on a dread. “We can send you some.”

  “Just a couple of ounces,” Hank clarified. “Margeaux will give us your address.”

  Margeaux probably would do such a thing. When she returned from San Diego I would tell her everything about my Bridges of Sonoma County weekend. I would tell her I was starving and wound up trolling through a catalogue of scrotums with the neighbors. She wouldn’t even flinch.

  “I don’t want to trouble you,” I said. “I can always sneak some in my luggage.”

  I had no intention of doing that either.

  “It’s no trouble,” said Hank. “I ship it all the time. I seal it in duct tape.”

  The truth is I am not a big weed person. I say this as someone who has given it more than its fair share of chances. In return, it often makes me paranoid, stupid, and prehuman. If weed and I were dating, it would be one of those on-and-off relationships that goes on for years, the kind that usually ends with one of us in a bathtub at 4 a.m., saying, “My feet hurt, let’s get nachos.”

  “Let’s go upstairs.” Savannah removed a bag from a temperature-controlled humidor. “Hank refuses to smoke in front of the plants.”

  She rolled her eyes.

  “Would you eat meat in front of a cow?” he asked me.

  I would not. But I had also never been to a restaurant that offered.

  *

  Alex had put his earrings back in. Savannah blew smoke through his lobes. I was instantly, embarrassingly, uncontrollably high, but in a more delightful way than expected. Delightful to me, at least. I took a corner of the blanket and rolled myself up in the style of a human croissant. I could feel a layer of myself separating from the rest of me like the sole of a worn shoe. Hank squinted at me in the dark.

  “What are you laughing at?”

  “I’m not laughing,” I said.

  “You are.”

  “I can see up all your noses,” I announced, lying on my back like an overturned bug. “You know what word you don’t hear enough of? Cilia.”

  “You’re coming with me,” Savannah said, steadying one of my ankles to keep it from hitting her in the face.

  *

  Never having owned a hot tub, I didn’t realize they could be locked. I assumed they just got covered in trash bags to prevent woodland creatures from falling in and that was that. Apparently, what one does is purchase a zippered cover, put a padlock on the zipper, crisscross the entire tub in wire, and tie the wire in a knot.

  “Are you sure your neighbors are okay with this?” I whispered.

&
nbsp; I took a sip from my wineglass, which I had brought with me, like a blankie.

  “Yeah,” Savannah said, waving me away. “I do it all the time.”

  She fiddled with the wire knot, bending down so that her tunic gaped open to reveal her braless chest. A motion-sensitive light turned on, attracting moths.

  “Hey,” I spoke to the ground, “when’s the last time you saw me with shoes?”

  She was growing frustrated.

  “I can’t get this thing open.”

  “Here,” I said, setting my drink down, “let me do it.”

  She stood upright with her hands on her hips, hovering above me while I leaned down and pretended to listen for clicks in the padlock wheel.

  “Do you know what you’re doing?”

  During college, I used to cram a dining hall pass into my door frame when I forgot my keys. This was the extent of my lock-picking expertise.

  “You’re blocking the light,” I said. “I can’t see.”

  “I thought you were listening.”

  “I’m doing both.”

  “Do you know what might help?” she whispered. “Pliers.”

  “Pliers,” I agreed, “or permission.”

  “I have permission,” she insisted. “I do this all the time.”

  Just then a popping sound ripped through the air. It whistled over our heads like a comet rustling through the braches. If wildlife scampered, I didn’t notice. Probably because I was distracted by the sound of someone trying to kill me. Savannah and I hit the deck just as an authoritative male voice called down from the porch.

  “Goddamnit, Savannah!”

  Was everyone handed a shotgun when they bought property around here? Savannah and I hid behind the wall of the tub, legs forward as if we had been wounded on the battlefield.

  “Are we gonna get murdered now?” I whispered, trying not to laugh.

  “Nah,” she said, “it’s too dark to get murdered.”

  My hazy mind instantly accepted this logic. Even if it hadn’t, I was in Savannah’s hands now, living by the rules of her territory. Which felt like my territory too, a hella magical place of weed and creativity and pancake nipples. It’s easy to be dismissive of people like Savannah from a distance, specifically the three thousand miles of gradating culture that separates New York from California. For New Yorkers, the assumption is that, given a Xanax and a hammock, we could survive in their world, but they could not survive in ours. But I have rarely known New Yorkers who are as up for anything as Hank and Savannah.

  “I know you’re out there!” cried the hot tub’s owner, firing another shot straight up into the air.

  “You do this all the time, huh?”

  “Some of the time,” she admitted. “Twice.”

  “Should we?” I mouthed, making my fingers run in the air.

  Savannah shook her head no. We listened to the crunch of her neighbor pacing back and forth on dry pine needles. It sounded like the marching of an entire army. At long last, he gave up and went inside the house. Savannah turned to whisper something soothing in my ear, but I will never know what it was because I was already gone. The second I heard that screen door slam, I bolted into the night, barefoot, back to Margeaux’s house, and locked the door behind me.

  *

  When the package arrived at my apartment three weeks later, there was no return address. Just a stamp, narrowing the origin to Russian River, California. I stood in my cramped entryway and leaned against the row of corroded mailboxes. I ripped the package open, sending my nose in first like a weed canary. Hank wasn’t kidding. It smelled like the inside of a padded envelope. At the bottom was a small bundle wrapped in layers of packing tape.

  Once inside my apartment, I turned the envelope upside down. I was excited at the prospect of a souvenir, a symbol that those days had really happened. Mostly, I just wanted to smell it. But the bundle made a surprising thud. As I tore it open, I heard the contents before I saw it: a miniature version of Margeaux’s wind chime along with a note from her that read, “A little something to remember the country by. Ps. Have you seen my cake pan?”

  I lifted the wind chime in front of my face, holding it by its tail like a dead mouse. Out of some sense of duty, I hung it from the fire escape, where it blathered away in the breeze, mocking my inability to ignore it. I tried to push through the sound as I wrote, rereading the same paragraph over and over again, attempting to will myself into a California state of mind. Hank and Savannah wouldn’t let themselves be perturbed by a wind chime. Then again, there were a lot of things that Hank and Savannah would do that I wouldn’t. I was not new me. I was parallel me. And parallel me lasted approximately thirty seconds before flinging open the window, ripping that thing down, and getting back to work.

  The Chupacabra

  Locals in Vermont have spotted an animal that they believe to be a chupacabra, a mythical South American creature said to feed on the blood of goats. Witnesses have seen it wandering through farms and graveyards, its skin blistered, its eyes possessed. While the chances of it being a rabid dog are good, no one is ruling anything out. So a magazine sends me up north to see if I can find it. I am a less-than-ideal candidate for the job. I don’t specialize in mythical-creature hunting or even run-of-the-mill hunting. But the unspoken point of the enterprise is not to find the chupacabra, but to find myself instead, to make a larger point about the power of the imagination, to discover a tick on my shin after traipsing through the woods. Won’t that be fun?

  I spend two unfruitful days stalking animals that turn out to be deer or, in one case, a rusted car. At the end of the second day, I return to my roadside motel and collapse onto my bed face-first. Having covered what feels like most of southern Vermont on foot, I limp over to a black binder on the coffee table. Inside is a series of laminated advertisements for pizzerias and diners, tourist attractions and kid-friendly activities. On the last page, there’s a small square. Printed in Comic Sans (is there any other kind?) inside the square is the word Relax! and a number for Fran, a “24-hour masseuse.” It’s hard to reconcile the childlike font with the adultlike “24-hour masseuse.” But I decide to give it a shot, reasoning that I can always leave if it turns out Fran and I are on different wavelengths. I call the number. She’s just had a cancellation and so I drive to the address listed in the ad. Which, as it turns out, is her house.

  A slight, cheerful woman in an apron answers the door. When I guess her name, she corrects me. She is Fran’s housekeeper, finishing up for the day. She escorts me to a paisley love seat in the living room where I can wait for Fran. The room is wood paneled, with wall-to-wall carpeting and shelves that sag with the weight of self-help books. A large flat-screen TV is showing a reality-television series I’m too old to recognize. A geriatric Maltese by the name of Chartreuse, according to her collar, pants at my feet. Chartreuse is afflicted with an excessively crooked neck, which the housekeeper informs me is the result of one too many seizures. The white fur around her eyes is stained with years of gook so that her eyes resemble quotation marks. Like she’s only sarcastically a dog. She moves back and forth across the room, an inquisitive puppet.

  After several commercial breaks, Fran emerges in pink slippers, a pink muumuu, and pink latex gloves.

  “How is your evening?” Fran asks, by way of a hello.

  She invites me to follow her so that we can select some invigorating oils together. The housekeeper takes my place on the sofa, intently watching a young woman on TV wearing a microphone bigger than her bikini ease into a hot tub. The woman announces that the hot tub is hot. I trail Fran down a hallway, to the massage room, quickly adding up all the people who know where I am.

  Fran instructs me to get undressed and shuts the door, leaving me alone. The room is lined with china figurines inspired by the major motion picture Misery. I lie down, pulling the sheet back, adjusting my head in the massage table’s head-doughnut. Fran enters the room, lowers the lights, and douses me with enough oil to alert the EPA. Then she g
ets to work. Within seconds, I know this will be the best massage I’ve ever had. Fran’s pressure is perfect, her fingers homing in on the muscles in need. She cleans the knots out from beneath my shoulder blade as if she were sweeping leaves from a gutter. I begin to drift off, thinking of the elusive chupacabra, thinking the solipsistic thought that there’s not much of a difference between no one finding it and it never existing.

  I am brought back to consciousness by the sound of heavy panting. I open my eyes to see that not only has Chartreuse meandered into the room, but she has settled herself into my field of vision. Fran must have left the door open a crack.

  “Hi,” I mouth.

  Chartreuse pants while I stare, unblinking, into her eyes. You’re not supposed to stare animals directly in the eye for a prolonged period of time, but what’s she going to do to me from all the way down there? She proceeds to have a full seizure as I look down, my cheeks crammed into the headrest. Her body shakes. Her ears go in different directions. I am unclear on the etiquette here. Fran says nothing as Chartreuse keels to her side and shakes, her limbs going stiff. It looks like she’s trying, and failing, to break-dance. Still, Fran stays mum. She moves methodically down my spine as if nothing is happening. Because, for her, nothing is. She sees this kind of thing all the time. But me, I don’t move a muscle, because I have never seen anything like it.

  Up the Down Volcano

  Apparently, Ecuador is graced with all four seasons in the course of a single day, and so I pack for none. Instead, I throw a random selection of clothing in a small duffel bag, stuffing a bikini and a fleece vest into the pocket of negative space that appears when I zip it. A sense of satisfaction washes over me as I force-feed nylon straps through plastic teeth. There’s no reason for me to feel satisfied. You need many more items than the ones I have chosen for a day at the beach or a circumnavigation of Greenland. But I have made a habit of underpacking, of escorting aspirational accessories around the globe as if they were children on a disastrous family trip.

  “You wanted to see Miami?” I put a straw hat on a glass coffee table where it will stay untouched until I repack it. “There, now you’ve seen it.”