by Nino Cipri
Jesus, this world, this world. I feel so heartsick. I cannot even retch.
And I dream of that awful board, piled with tokens moving each other by their own secret rules. A game of alien powers but those powers escape the game to move among us. They roam the world cow-eyed and compassionate and offer hands with fingers like fishhooks. We live in a paddock, a fattening pen, and we cannot leave it, because when we try to go the hooks say, Think of who you’ll hurt.
So much hurt to try to heal. And the healing hurts too much.
* * *
The hangover sings an afterimage song. Like the drunkenness was ripped out of me and it left a negative space, the opposite of contentment. It vibrates in my bones.
I get up, brushing at an itch on my back, and drink straight from the bathroom faucet. When I come back to my mattress it’s speckled, speckled white. Something’s dripping on it from the air vent—oh, oh, they’re maggots, slim white maggots. My air vent is dripping maggots. They’re all over the covers, white and searching.
I call my landlord. I pin plastic sheeting up over the vent. I clean my bedroom twice, once for the maggots, once again after I throw up. Then I go to work.
Everything I touch feels infested. Inhabited.
Mary’s got an egg sandwich for me but she looks like shit, weary, dry-skinned, her face flaking. “Hi,” she says. “I’m sorry, I have the worst migraine.”
“Oh, hon. Take it easy.” The headaches started when she transitioned, an estrogen thing. She’s quiet about them, and strong. I’m happy she tells me.
“Hey, you too. Which, uh—actually.” She gives me the sandwich and makes a brave face, like she’s afraid that someone’s going to snap at someone, like she doesn’t want to snap first. “I signed you up for a stress screening. They want you in the little conference room in half an hour.”
I’m not angry. I just feel dirty and rotten and useless: now I’m even letting Mary down. “Oh,” I say. “Jesus, I’m sorry. I didn’t realize I’d … was it the epi? Was I too slow on the epi last week?”
“You didn’t do anything wrong.” She rubs her temples. “I’m just worried about you.”
I want to give her a hug and thank her for caring but she’s so obviously in pain. And the thought of the maggots keeps me away.
They’re waiting for me in the narrow conference room: a man in a baggy blue suit, a woman in surgical scrubs with an inexplicable black stain like tar. “Dominga Roldan?” she says.
“That’s me.”
The man shakes my hand enthusiastically. “We just wanted to chat. See how you were. After your rescue swim.”
The woman beckons: sit. “Think of this as a chance to relax.”
“We’re worried about you, Dominga,” the man says. I can’t get over how badly his suit fits. “I remember some days in the force I felt like the world didn’t give a fuck about us. Just made me want to give up. You ever feel that way?”
I want to say what Nico would say: actually, sir, that’s not the problem at all, the problem is caring too much, caring so much you can’t ask for help because everyone else is already in so much pain.
Nico wouldn’t say that, though. He’d find a really clever way to not say it.
“Sure,” I say. “But that’s the job.”
“Did you know the victim?” the woman asks. The man winces at her bluntness. I blink at her and she purses her lips and tilts her head, to Yes, I know how it sounds, but please.say: “The suicide you rescued. Did you know him?”
“No.” Of course not. What?
The man opens his mouth and she cuts him off. “But did you feel that you did, at any point? After he coded, maybe?”
I stare at her. My hangover turns my stomach and drums on the inside of my skull. It’s not that I don’t get it: it’s that I feel I do, that something has been gestating in the last few days, in the missing connections between unrelated events.
The man sighs and unlatches his briefcase. I just can’t shake the sense that his suit used to fit, not so long ago. “Let her be,” he says. “Dominga, I just gotta tell you, I admire the hell out of people like you. Me, I think the only good in this world is the good we bring to it. Good people, people like you, you make this place worth living in.”
“So we need to take care of people like you.” The woman in scrubs has a funny accent—not quite Boston, still definitely a Masshole. “Burnout’s very common. You know the stages?”
“Sure.” First exhaustion, then shame, then callous cynicism. Then collapse. But I’m not there yet, I’m not past cynicism. I still want to help.
The man lifts a tiny glass cylinder from his briefcase, a cylinder full of a green fleshy mass—a caterpillar, a fat warty caterpillar, pickled in cloudy fluid and starting to peel apart. He looks at me apologetically, as if this is an awkward necessity, just his morning caterpillar in brine.
“Sometimes this job becomes overwhelming.” The woman’s completely unmoved by the caterpillar. Her eyes have a kind of look-away quality, like those awful xenon headlights assholes use, unsafe to meet head-on. “Sometimes you need to stop taking on responsibilities and look after yourself. It’s very important that you have resources to draw on.”
Baggy Suit holds his cylinder gingerly, a thumb on one end and two fingers on the other, and stares at it. Is there writing on it? The woman says, “Do you have a safe space at home? Somewhere to relax?”
“Well—no, I guess not, there’s a bug problem…”
The woman frowns in sympathy but her eyes don’t frown, God, not at all—they smile. I don’t know why. The man rolls his dead caterpillar tube and suddenly I grasp that the writing’s on the inside, facing the dead bug.
“You’ve got to take care of yourself.” He sounds petulant; he looks at the woman in scrubs with quiet resentment. “We need good people out there. Fighting the good fight.”
“But if you feel you can’t go on … If you’re absolutely overwhelmed, and you can’t see a way forward…” The woman leans across the table to take my hands. She’s colder than the river where the man went to die. “I want to give you a number, okay? A place you can call for help.”
She reads it off to me and I get hammered with déjà vu: I know it already, I’m sure. Or maybe that’s not quite right, I don’t know it exactly. It’s just that it feels like it fits inside me, as if a space has been hollowed out for it, made ready to contain its charge.
“Please take care of yourself,” the man tells me, on the way out. “If you don’t, the world will just eat you up.” And he lifts the caterpillar in salute.
I leave work early. I desperately don’t want to go home, where the maggots will be puddled in the plastic up on my ceiling, writhing, eyeless, bulging, probably eating each other.
Mary walks me out. “You going to take any time off? See anybody?”
“I just saw Jacob and Elise yesterday.”
“How was that?”
“A really bad decision.” I shake my head and that, too, is a bad decision. “How’s the migraine?”
“I’m okay. I’ll live.” It strikes me that when Mary says that, I believe it—and maybe she sees me frown, follows my thoughts, because she asks, “What about Nico? Are you still seeing him?”
“Yeah. Sort of.”
“And?” Her impish well-did-you? grin.
“I’m worried about him.” And furious, too, but if I said that I’d have to explain, and then Mary would be concerned about me, and I’d feel guilty because surely Mary has real problems, bigger problems than mine. “He’s really depressed.”
“Oh. That’s all you need. Look—” She stops me just short of the doors. “Dominga, you’re a great partner. I hope I didn’t step on your toes today. But I really want you to get some room, okay? Do something for yourself.”
I give her a long, long hug, and I forget about the maggots, just for the length of it.
There’s a skywriter above the hospital, buzzing around in sharp curves. The sky’s clean and blue and infinite, d
izzyingly deep. Evening sun glints on the plane so it looks like a sliver poking up through God’s skin.
I watch it draw signs in falling red vapor and when the wind shears them apart I think of the Lighthouse, where the circle of tables was ruptured by the passage of an illusory force.
I want to act. I want to help. I want to ease someone’s pain. I don’t want to do something for myself, because —
You’re only burnt out once you stop wanting to help.
I call Nico. “Hey,” he says. “Didn’t expect to hear from you so soon.”
“Want to get a drink?” I say, and then, my throat raw, my tongue acid, a hangover trick, words squirming out of me with wet expanding pressure, “I learned something you should know. A place to go, if you need help. If that’s what you want. If the world really is too much.”
Sometimes you say a thing and then you realize it’s true.
He laughs. “I can’t believe you’re making fun of me about that. You’re such an asshole. Do you want to go to Kosmos?”
* * *
“So,” Nico says, “are we dating?”
Kosmos used to be a warehouse. Now the ceiling is an electric star field, a map of alien constellations. We sit together directly beneath a pair of twin red stars.
“Oh,” I say, startled. “I was worried. After yesterday, I mean, I just…” Was furious, was hurt, didn’t know why: because you were having fun, because I wasn’t, because I thought you needed help, because you pretended you didn’t. One of those. All of them.
Maybe he doesn’t like what he sees in my eyes. He gets up. “Be right back.” The house music samples someone talking about the expansion of the universe. Nico touches my shoulder on the way to the bathroom and I watch him recede, savoring the fading charge of his hand, thinking about space carrying us apart, and how safe that would be.
I have a choice to offer him. Maybe we’ll leave together.
Nico comes back with drinks – wine, of all things, as if we’re celebrating. “I thought that game was charmingly optimistic, you know.”
“Jacob’s game?” He’s been tagging me in Facebook pictures of the stupid thing. I should block Jacob, so it’d stop hurting, which is why I don’t.
“Right. I was reading about it.”
The wine’s dry and sweet. It tastes like tomorrow’s hangover, like coming awake on a strange couch under a ceiling with no maggots. I take three swallows. “I thought it was about unknowable gods and the futility of all human life.”
“Sure.” That stupid cocky grin of his hits hard because I know what’s behind it. “But in the game there’s something out there, something bigger than us. Which—I mean, compared to what we’ve got, at least it’s interesting.” He points to the electric universe above us, all its empty dazzling artifice. “How’s work?”
“I’m taking a break. Don’t worry about it.” I have a plan here, a purpose. I am an agent, although which meaning of that word fits I don’t know. “Why’d you really dump Yelena?”
“I told you.” He resorts to the wine, to buy himself a moment. “Really, I was honest. I thought she could do a lot better than me. I wanted her to be happy.”
“But what about you? She made you happy.”
“Yeah, yeah, she did. But I don’t want to be the kind of person who—” He stops here and takes another slow drink. “I don’t want to be someone like Jacob.”
“Jacob’s very happy,” I say, which is his point, of course.
“And look how he left you.”
“What if I thought you made me happy?” Somewhere, somehow, Mary’s cheering me on: that gets me through the sentence. “Would this be a date? Or are we both too … tired?”
Tired of doing hurt, and tired of taking it. Tired of the great cartographic project. Isn’t it a little like cartography? Meeting lovely people, mapping them, racing to find their hurts before they can find yours—getting use from them, squeezing them dry, and then striking first, unilaterally and with awful effect, because the alternative is waiting for them to do the same to you. These are the rules, you didn’t make them, they’re not your fault. So you might as well play to win.
Nico looks at me with dark guarded eyes. I would bet my life here, at last, that he’s wearing one of his good jackets.
“Dominga,” he says, and makes a little motion like he’s going to take my hand, but can’t quite commit, “Dominga, I’m sorry, but … God, I must sound like such an asshole, but I meant what I said. I’m done hurting people.”
And I know exactly what he’s saying. I remember it, I feel it—it’s like when you get drunk with a guy and everything’s just magical, you feel connected, you feel okay. But you know, even then, even in that moment, that tomorrow you will regret this: that the hole you opened up to him will admit the cold, or the knife. There will be a text from him, or the absence of a text, or—worse, much worse—the sight of him with someone new, months later, after the breakup, the sight of him doing that secret thing he does to say, I’m thinking of you, except it’s not secret any more, and it’s not you he’s thinking of now.
And you just want to be done. You want a warmer world.
So here it is: my purpose, my plan. “Nico, what if I could give you a way out?”
He sets down his wine glass and turns it by the stem. It makes a faint, high shriek against the blackened steel tabletop, and he winces, and says, “What do you mean?”
“Just imagine a hypothetical. Imagine you’re right about everything—the universe is a hard place. To live you have to risk a lot of hurt.” You’re going to wonder how I came up with the rest of this, and all I can offer is fatigue, terror, maggots in my air vents, the memory of broken skulls on sidewalks: a kind of stress psychosis. Or the other explanation, of course. “Imagine that our last chance to be really good is revoked at the instant of our conception.”
He follows along with good humor and a kind of adorable narcissism that I’m so engaged with his cosmic bullshit and (under it all) an awakening sense that something’s off, askew. “Okay…”
The twin red suns multiply our shadows around us. I drift a little ways above myself on the wine, and it makes it easier to go on, to imagine or transmit this: “What if something out there knew a secret—”
A secret! Such a secret, a secret you might hear in the wind that passes between the libraries of jade teeth that wait in an empty city burnt stark by a high blue star that never leaves the zenith, a secret that tumbles down on you like a fall of maggots from a white place behind everything, where a pale immensity circles on the silent wind.
”What if there were a way out? Like a phone number you could call, a person you could talk to, kind of a hotline, and you’d say, oh, I’m a smart, depressed, compassionate person, I’m tired of the great lie that it’s possible to do more good than harm, I’m tired of my Twitter feed telling me the world’s basically a car full of kindergartners crumpling up in a trash compactor. I don’t want to be complicit any more. I want out. Not suicide, no, that’d just hurt people. I want something better. And they’d say, sure, man, we have your mercy here, we can do that. We can make it so you never were.”
He looks at me with an expression of the most terrible unguarded longing. He tries to cover it up, he tries to go flirty or sarcastic, but he can’t.
I take my phone out, my embarrassing old flip phone, and put it on the table between us. I don’t have to use the contacts to remember. The number keys make soft chiming noises as I type the secret in.
“So,” I say, “my question is: who goes first?”
Something deep beneath me exalts, as if this is what it wants: and I cannot say if that thing is separate from me.
He reaches for the phone. “Not you, I hope,” he says, with a really brave play-smile: he knows this is all a game, an exercise of imagination. He knows it’s real. “The world needs people like you, Dominga. So what am I going to get? Is it a sex line?”
“If you go first,” I say, “do you think that’d change the world en
ough that I wouldn’t want to go second?”
I have this stupid compassion in me, and it cries out for the hurts of others. Nico’s face, just then—God, have you ever known this kind of beauty? This desperate, awful hope that the answer was yes, that he might, by his absence, save me?
His finger hovers a little way above the call button.
“I think you’d have to go first,” he says. He puts his head back, all the way back, as if to blow smoke: but I think he’s looking up at the facsimile stars. “That’d be important.”
“Why?”
“Because,” he says, all husky nonchalance, “if you weren’t here, I would absolutely go; whereas if I weren’t here, I don’t know if you’d go. And if this method were real, this, uh, operation of mercy, then the universe is lost, the whole operation’s fucked, and it’s vital that you get out.”
His finger keeps station a perilous few millimeters from the call. I watch this space breathlessly. “Tell me why,” I say, to keep him talking, and then I realize: oh, Nico, you’d think this out, wouldn’t you? You’d consider the new rules. You’d understand the design. And I’m afraid that what he’ll say will be right —
He lays it out there: “Well, who’d use it?”
“Good people,” I say. That’s how burnout operates. You burn out because you care. “Compassionate people.”
“That’s right.” He gets a little melancholy here, a little singsong, in a way that feels like the rhythm of my stranger thoughts. I wonder if he’s had an uncanny couple days too, and whether I’ll ever get a chance to ask him. “The universe sucks, man, but it sucks a lot more if you care, if you feel the hurt around you. So if there were a way out—a certain kind of people would use it, right? And those people would go extinct.”
Oh. Right.
There might have been a billion good people, ten billion, a hundred, before us: and one by one they chose to go, to be unmade, a trickle at first, just the kindest, the ones most given to shoulder their neighbors’ burdens and ask nothing in exchange—but the world would get harder for the loss of each of them, and there’d be more reason then, more hurt to go around, so the rattle would become an avalanche.
