Note to Self: A Novel

by Alina Simone

  She decided to order breakfast in. Twenty minutes later, pancakes, home fries, sliced fruit, a reassuring mug of coffee arrived nicely arranged on a tray outside her door. She brought the tray in and settled into an uncomfortable Lucite chair. She took a sip of coffee, so hot that it burned her tongue. The metanarrative was already taking shape, the way in which this latest failure both informed and reflected her prior failures. It wasn’t too late to turn this trip into a vacation, Anna told herself, though in truth all she wanted was a vacation from herself. To crawl into the gap between bed and wall and assume the form of an orphaned sock or dull penny.

  An almost physical sense of pain flashed through her as she considered what Leslie would think if she could see her now, followed by the thought, Well, what would Leslie do? She wouldn’t just sit here wedged into this unholy chair, feeling sorry for herself. She would walk down to Simone’s gallery to confront Taj, sort out the tedious business of the money he owed her, and put herself on a plane back to New York. When she’d first lost her job, her mother had given her a book: Chicken Soup for the Unemployed Soul. And Leslie had quite memorably mocked it. “Fuck chicken soup, Anna,” she’d said. “What you need is Viagra for the Unemployed Soul. Stop wallowing and remember: the more decisions you make, the more your life is your own.”

  Anna finished eating and got dressed. Leslie was right. Even though much had been lost, she could still decide to salvage her dignity. Dignity. The word made Anna wince as she considered Taj’s untouched omelette in the minifridge, the pitiful arrangement of lubricants still sitting on the night table. She was out of the chair and out the door, propelling herself down the hall to the freight elevator, where an OUT OF SERVICE sign was posted. She wound her way through the hallways until she found a distant stairwell. The heavy fire door at the bottom of the stairs warned ALARM WILL SOUND IF OPENED, but what choice did she have? She had to find Taj and put an end to this, even though the thought of facing a single day without the promise of his calls and mysterious directives induced a buzzing panic. Bracing herself, she threw a shoulder against the metal bar and was instantly engulfed in sound. Not a fire alarm, but rather ear-searing indie rock and the roar of a crowd shouting to be heard above it. The place was so humid, it felt like stepping inside someone’s mouth.

  A woman with a half-shorn head suddenly appeared at Anna’s elbow.

  “Everyone gets a bunny!” she shouted, thrusting a bunny at her.

  “Gratis!” yelled another man with a handlebar mustache, shoving a flute of prosecco into her free hand.

  The bunny thrummed against Anna’s chest. Reluctantly, she began to move. The room seemed to be populated entirely by refugees from Brie’s kickball team. Girls who sold arm warmers made from kneesocks on Etsy, guys who developed apps that controlled toy keyboards remotely, amateur taxidermists with iceboxes full of freeze-dried pets. Everywhere she looked, beautiful people were holding drinks and clutching bunnies, conducting conversations in air quotes, all looking past one another as they talked, scanning the crowd for other people to talk to.

  What kind of gathering was this? And why were they all drinking at eleven on a Wednesday morning? Then she saw something that emptied her head of all these questions—across the room, glowing like the sword of Excalibur: the giant Apple monitor. Now she began making her way deliberately through the crowd, emptying her flute of prosecco without thinking, only to have another magically appear in her hand. A man to her right was shouting “Why vinyl?” while poking a similar-looking man in the chest. “Because vinyl gets you laid.” It was so crowded Anna felt as though she were running a marathon in warm Jell-O but kept moving, reassuring the bunny that it was going to be OK notwithstanding the Odd Future song pulsating the walls, the guy on the sofa holding a joystick not apparently connected to anything, the girl yelling “Eeeee!” and dumping an entire bottle of Ketel One into a punch bowl. These people, deep inside, they are normal, she told the bunny, just like you and me. They are only acting this way because … well, for example, the girl with the jewfro loudly discussing the recent placement of her IUD and its future implications for butt sex was not simply a tasteless and scary person. No! She was a person with diverse skills and personal attributes. Someone with pets and hobbies—then suddenly Anna’s way was blocked by a woman laughing, head thrown so far back it looked as though she were about to dip into camel pose. For a second Anna forgot all about Taj and her dignity; she couldn’t help wishing that she were that drunk and that happy.

  “Do you have any questions?” a woman with a clipboard was asking. It took Anna a moment to realize that she was talking to her.

  “Excuse me?” the woman repeated loudly, pen poised. “Any questions?”

  “Any question?” Anna repeated. The woman nodded. “OK, what’s my fatal flaw?” she yelled. The bunny’s nose was a wet exclamation mark against her neck. Her head was buzzing.

  “What?” said the woman, shaking her head.

  “My fatal flaw?” Anna yelled, louder this time. But the woman only laughed and disappeared into the crowd with her clipboard, leaving Anna no choice but to keep going. When she arrived at the other end of the room, she was relieved to find the computer carrel miraculously unoccupied. As she slid into place the room seemed to right itself, the clamor of the crowd retreating to some interior conch shell.

  “Silver Lake,” she typed, “Fucked Fest.”

  Immediately, up swam a top result for “F’d Fest.”

  As Anna waited for the flash intro to load, she reflexively opened two new tabs for Gmail and Facebook. Her hopes lifted as they always did when typing in her password, only to be crushed almost immediately by the poverty of her in-box, the paucity of shout-outs on Facebook. No irksome platitudes from Leslie? Not even a desultory weight-loss tip from her mother? She had already been gone for two days. Didn’t anyone even miss her? The bunny was wriggling assertively against Anna’s chest.

  She clicked back to the festival home page, and began to scan the schedule. Strangely she could find no mention of either Taj or Zero as she moused her way down through the list of panelists and participants. When she reached the bottom of the page, her eye drifted over to the “About Us” sidebar: “When Paul Gilman’s now legendary 3-minute masterpiece, Minority Queers, Majority Rears, failed to get into Sundance, he said to himself, ‘That’s fucked.’ Welcome, kids, to F’d Fest.”

  Then there was a hand on her shoulder and she flushed with sudden shame. Taj! He had caught her in the act, a bulimic bingeing at a digital buffet. But wait, why should she be the one to cower—she, of the custom omelette!—when he was the one who had run off with another woman, leaving her to sleep alone among a pharmacy’s worth of unopened lubricants?

  “Where’s Taj?” came a familiar voice. Anna looked up from the screen to find not Taj but Lauren, resplendent in a black Brooklyn Industries sweatshirt with her hair pulled back from her flawless face. Since that day at the carnival, Anna had carefully nurtured her dislike of Lauren, letting it flower into something more malevolent. All the while, she couldn’t help but acknowledge to herself that the only basis for this animus was Lauren’s perceived dislike of her. Turning to address her now, she found it hard to affect the proper hauteur while holding a bunny.

  “What are you doing here?” she managed.

  “He was supposed to be at my screening last night,” Lauren continued, ignoring her. “Where is he?”

  Only now did Anna remember; that day on the roof, Taj had mentioned that Lauren had a short in the festival, hadn’t he?

  “I called his phone yesterday and some woman answered.”

  “That was Simone—”

  “He’s with Simone?” Lauren said. Something in her face collapsed.

  “No,” Anna said, a hint of sedition in her voice. “He’s with me.”

  Lauren stared at her, clearly making some internal calculation. When she spoke again, it was in a clear and authoritative voice.

  “And he’s my husband,” Lauren said, “so w
hat the fuck is he doing with her?”

  For a second Anna could hear nothing save for a loud buzzing in her ears. Then the bungee cords around her heart loosened and she plunged.

  “Th-that’s not possible.”

  “We’re together. We’re married.”

  “He came here with me.”

  “I know that.”

  “We … we have a thing.”

  “There’s a name for that thing,” Lauren said coldly. “It’s called going for the Gugg.”

  Husband. Husband. Husband. The word was a taser to the brain. She had just gotten used to this idea of Simone, and now here was Lauren, Taj’s wife. Moreover, Lauren, Taj’s wife, somehow knew they were here together? Knew, or so it seemed, they had slept together? Anna had initially feared their tryst might have been a pity fuck. Now, if Lauren was to be believed, it was actually a Gugg fuck. But what did fucking her have to do with the Gugg? It’s not like they gave Guggs for that. At least not so far as Anna knew.

  “Where are they?” said Lauren.

  “I don’t know,” Anna admitted. “He went to meet her last night and never came back. When’s his screening?”

  “What screening?” Lauren snapped. “He isn’t screening.”

  “He told Simone he was showing at the festival.”

  “Not possible,” said Lauren, dismissive. “It’s Gilman’s fest.” Lauren spoke as though Taj’s whole history with Gilman was a threadbare doormat laid at the foot of the Internet.

  “He did, though,” Anna pressed. “He applied earlier but he didn’t get in. Then the other night he got a message from someone at the last minute saying his film had been accepted.”

  Anna watched the realizations crest upon Lauren’s face in waves.

  “What the fuck…” Lauren trailed off. Her eyes dropped to the monitor, where the F’d Fest website was still quivering. Suddenly she shunted Anna out of the way and began scrolling furiously. Anna could only sit there mute, feeling as though all her blood had just been replaced with antifreeze. The bunny tried to squirm out of her hands, but she was drunk and miserable and didn’t want to put the bunny down even though this was clearly what the bunny wanted.

  Lauren straightened up, her eyes zooming in on something. “Shit,” she said, rising. “It’s today and it’s starting soon.”

  Without waiting for a response, she headed for the door. Anna followed, doing her best to squeeze through the Lauren-size channel left in her wake. When they reached the front entrance, a man wearing a skirt plucked the bunny from her hands, placing it in a basket with all the other bunnies. Anna followed Lauren out to the curb in front of the hotel, where a cab was always waiting. She gave the cabbie an address, then turned toward the window and immediately began chewing all the flesh from her fingers. A signal, Anna assumed, that she did not want to talk. Anna turned toward her own window. She missed the bunny, the warm throb of life against her collarbone.

  The car began to move, streets and buildings sliding away from them. The sun was out today, glazing everything with an unnatural Technicolor glow. Palm trees hung over Sunset Boulevard like miniature explosions. Nothing seemed real anymore, least of all her own life. She remembered the man with the ruined paper flowers running down the street yesterday and wondered if maybe all of Echo Lake was just an elaborate stage set. Cardboard streetlamps and manhole covers and fire hydrants. Papier-mâché traffic signals swinging, piñata-like, from paper masts. All waiting for one big storm to wash them away. Was that why her shoes made no sound on the steps leading up to the theater? All of a sudden, a too-solid doorknob was in her hand.

  Whoever had been checking wristbands had evidently left their post. They passed easily through the double doors and into a chamber aromatic with designer soaps and spendy perfumes. These were the people from the bunny party, plus twenty years. A great mass of Urban Outfitterites who’d been herded into J. Crewian pastures. Anna remained glued to the doorframe, watching them move purposefully through the room—meeting, greeting, consolidating their positions on various grids of power. It’s them, Anna thought. The self-appointed gatekeepers. The jumped-up arrivistes. Visigoths who had sacked their fatal flaws like Rome, emerged flawless. You could stick a fork in them, they were done. At least, that’s how they looked to Anna. But what the hell did she know? These were obviously not her people.

  Anna watched Lauren dart forward into the crowd. A second later, Taj emerged from the other side of the room. Seeing Anna by the door, he threw an arm in her direction. He’d clearly just been talking with the man standing next to him, but they stopped talking as they watched Anna approach.

  “Anna! I was just telling Jaime about you,” Taj said. “Jaime works for New York magazine.” Jaime nodded to confirm this was true.

  “Taj,” Anna said, not giving a shit about Jaime, “you’re married.”

  “Yes, I know.” Taj’s laugh was directed first at Jaime, then at Anna. And he sounded so natural as he said this, so unguarded and free of guile, that Anna couldn’t help but doubt herself all over again. Had Taj already told her and she’d somehow managed to forget? Or was the fact of their ringless union so obvious to everyone that no one condescended to mention it to her? Taj placed a hand on the small of her back, guiding her forward. His touch sent an inadvertent current through her, and out of this regrettable wave of moisture tumbled a new thought: What if it’s all somehow OK? Her, Taj, Lauren, Simone. Theoretically, she knew such things existed. There were even websites. She’d heard of them: AffairsClub, MarriedDateLink, AdultFriendFinder, GetItOn.com. What if the massive misunderstanding had been on her end alone and the skull on Taj’s chest was some universal bat signal employed by swingers the world over? A signal she’d failed to recognize? She clung to the driftwood of this improbable notion as they floated down the aisle together. Every few seconds Taj would stop, accepting hellos and congratulations with a quick bow of the head, like garlands. The lights had begun to dim in stages. There was an anticipatory murmur throughout the room, a great holstering and unholstering of cell phones being set to vibrate. As they neared the front row, Taj leaned down, speaking quietly into her ear so that only Anna could hear.

  “I’ll explain everything,” he said.

  “But when?” There’s no time, Anna thought, and so many people.

  “Now.” Taj’s hand slipped from her back and Anna looked around to find that he was no longer behind her. She swayed woozily. The last of the lights winked off and she was alone in the aisle, the apparent loser in a spontaneous game of musical chairs. The screen went white. Around the room designer glasses glinted as everyone turned eagerly toward the front. A title card shimmied to the surface.

  The Society for Advancement of Poetry presents …

  There it was, Taj’s work-around. He’d used SAP as his Trojan horse, wrapped himself in the sad hopes of poets yearning to be tweeted. The words faded but the big, bright square remained. She felt uncomfortable spotlit here in the aisle, the white light gilding her upturned face, but stood rooted to the carpet, spellbound along with everyone else. Who would be the first to appear, she wondered. Mr. Leung and his implausible lottery win? Lamba and Tweety? Or some other dream-seeker that Anna hadn’t met? But anticipation quickly turned to dread as her own face—big, dumb, hopeful—filled the screen. She was nodding to a tinny voice proclaiming, “… anything could be a camera. You know, this could be a camera. Or this.” Cut to Anna with her glittering green glasses, pleasuring herself on Chat Roulette as a two-by-two-inch bald head looked on with malevolent lust. Anna dancing in slow motion in a Lynchian music video backed by the dissonant samba players, lurid in her red unisuit. Anna making out with Taj—a shadowy figure viewed only from the back—on the roof, under the Tilt-A-Whirl, in the ATM. How was it possible? Who had filmed this? How? She stood rooted to the red tongue of carpet, forgetting and then remembering where she was, what was happening, the motor of consciousness refusing to catch. Then a soundless image, blurred to the point of being Impressionistic, of Taj and Anna
bobbing across the pool together shot from below. Her voice dubbed in, saying, “Tiny bubbles of discontent surround me, because I’m as lonely as a shark in the ocean.” And she remembered, the tiny black box. That thing at the bottom of the pool.

  The vignettes were lashed together with silent interstitials: Anna wandering Frodo-like though the darkening carnival. Fruit dying in a bowl. The abandoned pool floatie. Kids falling off skateboards and getting up and falling off and getting up. The inner folds of the fortune-teller’s wrinkles. Footage Taj must have snagged, last-minute, from the memory card in her camera. Snippets of decontextualized conversations and bits of text triggered firecrackers of memory:

  “Where am I supposed to look?”

  Stranger: would like to have fun too?

  “Yeah, yeah, right there…”

  “I can tell you’re a good person, and it’s not a good time for you.”

  Stranger: you have a pretty smile

  “But it makes you so happy!”

  You: Thanks

  There was Anna staring out the window of the van, melancholy, as the trashy exurban landscape unspooled and loud eighties music played. Her AVCCAM trembling over the close-up of the John O’Brien quote: “Everyone is so proud of their own insignificant little boundaries. Scrupulously they vow, I would never do that!”

  Only she would, of course. She did. She had. Her dream had come true: real life had turned into Gmail. Only the whole world was blind cc’d on her message to Taj, the dream that started out so full of romance and promise. Now there was no undoing it. No command-Z. She could not shut it down and she could not turn away; she was on-screen, sitting on a chair and blinking at the camera. She was pulling her shirt off and telling herself she didn’t know what to say. Then Anna did something she didn’t remember—she took a paper bag and pulled it over her head. An homage, it seemed, to Age of Consent.

  As the full weight of what had happened—what continued to happen—came raining down on her, the deciders were already deciding, rising to their feet in a standing O. Somewhere in the front row, Taj rose, too, the skull on his chest shining hard. Anna tore her eyes away from the hideous doppelganger on-screen. She volte-faced, almost colliding with Jaime. He smiled an almost loving smile and raised his camera. The flash showered her like a bucket of bleach, scouring her eyes, her skin. She threw an arm up over her face, too late. The onlookers lining the aisle had turned to see what was happening. A wave of surprise and recognition rippled through the crowd. One by one, they raised their cell phones like flutes of champagne, looking not at her, but at their screens. At the hundreds of miniature Annas running away, up the aisle, out of the frame.