by Sarah Hall
After their walk, they stood in a cloud of charred smoke behind the restaurant. The ocean broke and swished somewhere over a dune. Trish arched her back and yawned.
‘All of this death,’ she said.
‘Horn-y,’ George shouted. He wasn’t, but still. Maybe if they stopped talking for a while they’d break this mood.
Trish tried not to laugh.
‘No, uh, funny you should say that. I was just thinking, it makes me want to . . .’ She smiled.
How George wished that this was the beginning of a suicide pact, after a pleasant dinner at the beach with your dead father’s mistress. Just walk out together into the waves. But something told him that he knew what was coming instead.
‘I’m going to comfort myself tonight, with or without you,’ Trish said. ‘Do you feel like scrubbing in?’
George looked away. The time was, he would sleep with anyone, of any physical style. Any make, any model. Pretty much any year. If only he could do away with the transactional phase, when the barter chips came out, when the language of seduction was suddenly spoken, rather than sung, in such non-melodious tones. It was often a deal breaker. Often. Not always.
After they’d had sex, which required one of them to leave the room to focus on the project alone, they washed up and had a drink. It felt good to sip some skank-ass, legacy whiskey from his father’s Pueblo coffee mugs. Now that they’d stared into each other’s cold depravity, they could relax.
Trish circled around to the inevitable.
‘So what’s up with Pattern?’
Here we go.
‘What’s she like? Are you guys in touch? Your father never would speak of her.’
Probably due to the non-disclosure agreement she must have had him sign, George figured.
‘You know,’ he said, pausing, as if his answer was more than ordinarily true, ‘she’s really nice, really kind. I think she’s misunderstood.’
‘Did I misunderstand it when her company, in eighteen months, caused more erosion to the Great Barrier Reef than had been recorded in all of history?’
‘She apologised for that.’
‘I thought you were going to say she didn’t do it. Or that it didn’t happen that way.’
‘No, she did do it, with great intention, I think. I bet at low tide she would have stood on the reef herself and smashed that fucking thing into crumbs for whatever fungal fuel they were mining. But, you know, she apologised. In a way, that’s much better than never having done it. She has authority now. Gravity. She’s human.’
‘What was she before?’
Before? George thought. Before that she was his sister. She babysat for him. He once saw her get beaten up by another girl. She went to a special smart-people high school that had classes on Saturdays. Before that she was just this older person in his home. She had her own friends. She kept her door closed. Someone should have told him she was going to disappear. He would have tried to get to know her.
In the morning Trish recited the narrative she had concocted for them. Their closeness honoured a legacy. Nothing was betrayed by their physical intimacy. They’d both lost someone. It was now their job to make fire in the shape of – here George lost track of her theory – George’s dad.
Trish looked like she wanted to be challenged. Instead George nodded and agreed and tried to hold her. He said he thought that a fire like that would be a fine idea. Even though they’d treated each other like specimens the night before, two lab technicians straining to achieve a result, their hug was oddly platonic today. He pictured the two of them out in the snow, pouring a gasoline silhouette of his dead father. Igniting it. Effigy or burn pile?
‘We didn’t know each other before,’ said Trish. ‘Now we do. We’re in each other’s lives. This is real. And it’s good. You’re not just going to go home and forget me. It won’t be possible.’
George would sign off on pretty much any press release about what had happened last night, and what they now meant to each other, so long as it featured him catching his plane at 9.30 am and never seeing her again.
As he was leaving, Trish grabbed him.
‘I would say “one for the road”, but I don’t really believe in that. Just that whole way of thinking and speaking. It sounds sorrowful and final and I don’t want that to be our thing. That’s not us. I don’t like the word “road” and I definitely don’t like the word “one”. Two is much better. Two is where it’s at.’
She held up two fingers and tried to get George to kiss them.
George smiled at her, pleaded exhaustion. It was sweet of her to offer, he said, and normally he would, but.
‘You know, research shows,’ Trish said, not giving up, ‘that really it’s a great energy boost, to love and be loved. To climax. To cause to climax. To cuddle and talk and to listen and speak. You’re here! You’re standing right here with me now!’
‘I’m sorry,’ said George. ‘I guess it’s all just starting to hit me. Dad. Being gone. I don’t think I’d bring the right spirit right now. You would deserve better.’
It didn’t feel good or right to play this card, but as he said it he found it was more true than he’d intended.
Trish was beautiful, but given the growing privacy of his sexual practice, such factors no longer seemed to matter. He would probably love to have sex with her, if she could somehow find a way of vanishing, and if the two of them could also find a way to forget that they had tried that already, last night, and the experience had been deeply medical and isolating. It was just too soon to hope for a sufficiently powerful denial to erase all that and let them, once again, look at each other like strangers, full of lust and hope.
‘Is that a bad thing?’ George asked his therapist, after returning home and telling her the basics.
‘And please don’t ask me what I think,’ he continued. ‘The reason people ask a question is because they would like an answer. Reflecting my question back to me, I swear, is going to make me hurl myself out of the window.’
Together they looked at the small, dirty window. There were bars on it. The office was on the ground floor.
‘I’d hate to be a cause of your death,’ said the therapist, unblinking.
‘Well I just wonder what you think.’
‘Okay, but I don’t think you need to lecture me in order to get me to answer a question. You seem to think I need to be educated about how to respond to you. There are also many other reasons people ask questions, aside from wanting answers. You’re an imbecile if you think otherwise.’
‘Okay, you’re right, I’m sorry.’
‘Well, then, I think it must be lonely. I do. To find yourself attracted to a woman who also seems, as you say, attracted to you – if that’s true – and to think you’d be more content to fantasise about her than to experience her physically. So it sounds lonely to me. But we should also notice that this is a loneliness you’ve chosen, based on your sexual desires. Your sexuality seems to thrive on loneliness. And I can’t help but sense that some part of you is proud of that. Your story seems vaguely boastful.’
‘Plus her being my father’s widow.’
Dr Graco frowned.
‘What was that?’ she asked.
‘You know, her also having been involved with my father, before he died. I guess I left that part out.’
Dr Graco took a moment to write in her notebook. She wrote quickly, and with a kind of disdain, as if she didn’t like to have to make contact with the page. A fear of contaminants, maybe. A disgust with language.
It had sometimes occurred to him that therapists used this quiet writing time, after you’ve said something striking, or, more likely, boring, to make notes to themselves about other matters. Grocery lists, plans. One never got to see what was written down, and there was simply no possible way that all of it was strictly relevant. How much of it was sheer stalling, running out the clock? How much of it just got the narcissist in the chair across from you to shut up for a while?
She wrote throu
gh one page and had turned to another before looking up.
‘I am sorry to hear about your father.’
‘I should have told you. I apologise.’
‘He died . . . recently?’
‘Two weeks ago. That’s why I was away. My missed appointment. Which I paid for, but. I was gone. I’m not sure if you.’
‘I see. Do you mean it when you say you should have told me?’
‘Well, I found the prospect of telling you exhausting, I guess. I was annoyed that I had to do it. To be honest, I wished you could just, through osmosis, have the information, in the same way you can see what I’m wearing and we don’t need to discuss it. It’s just a self-evident fact. You could just look at me and know that my father is dead.’
She resumed writing, but he did not want to wait for her.
‘That’s not a criticism of you, by the way. I don’t think you were supposed to guess. I mean I don’t think I think that. Maybe. You know, to just be sensitive and perceptive enough to know. I am sometimes disappointed about your powers, I guess. That’s true, I should admit that. I just wish I had, like, a helper, who could run ahead of me to deliver the facts, freeing me up from supplying all of this context when I talk to people. Otherwise I’m just suddenly this guy who’s like, my father died, blah blah. I’m just that guy.’
‘But you weren’t. Because you didn’t tell me. You were not that guy.’
‘Right, I guess.’
‘So then who were you?’
‘What?’
‘You didn’t want to be the guy who told me your father had died, so by not telling me, what guy did you end up being instead?’
For some reason, George saw himself and Pattern, as kids, waiting on a beach for their lunch to digest, so they could go swimming. Pattern was dutifully counting down from two thousand. It was a useless memory, irrelevant here. He remembered when he shopped and cooked for his mother, when she wasn’t feeling well, and then really wasn’t feeling well. He cleaned and took care of her. His father had already planted his flag in California. He was that guy, but for such a short time. Two weeks? He’d been very many people since then. Who was he when he didn’t tell Dr Graco that his father died? Nobody. No one remarkable. He’d been someone too scared or too bored, he didn’t know which, to discuss something important.
‘That just made me think of something,’ he said finally. ‘The word “guy”. I don’t know. Have you heard of Guy Fox?’
‘I assume you don’t mean the historic figure Guy Fawkes?’
‘No. F-o-x. Porn star, but that’s not really a good label for what he does. It’s not clear you can even call it porn any more. It’s so sort of remote and kind of random, and definitely not obviously sexual. Or even at all. I mean almost, just, boredom. Anyway, it’s a new sort of thing. He provides eye contact. People pay a lot. He’ll just watch you, on video. You can stream him to your TV, and he’ll watch you. People pay him to watch while they have sex, of course, or masturbate, but now supposedly people just hire him to watch them while they hang out alone in their houses. Whenever they look up, he’s looking at them. They are paying to have eye contact whenever they want. They want someone out there seeing them. And he’s just amazing. Apparently there’s nothing quite like getting seen by him. It’s an addiction.’
‘Ah, I see. Well I’m afraid we have to stop.’
Afraid, afraid, afraid. Don’t be afraid, George thought. Embrace it.
For once he wished she’d say, ‘I’m delighted our session is over, George, now get the fuck out of my office, you monster.’
Bowing to a certain protocol of the bereaved, George acquired a baby dog: hairless, pink and frightening. His therapist had put him onto it after he kept insisting he was fine. She explained that people who lose a parent, especially one they weren’t close to, tend to grieve their lack of grief. Like they want to really feel something, and don’t, and so they grieve that. That absence. She said that one solution to this circular, masturbatory grief is apparently to take care of something. To be responsible for another living creature.
Except George and the animal had turned out to be a poor match. That’s how he put it to the dog catcher, or whatever the man was called, when he sent the wet thing back, and then hired cleaners to sanitise his home. The animal was more like a quiet young child, waiting for a ride, determined not to exploit any hospitality whatsoever in George’s home. It rarely sprawled out, never seemed to relax. It sat upright in the corner, sometimes trotting to the window, where it glanced up and down the street, patiently confirming that it had been abandoned. Would it recognise rescue when it came? Sometimes you just had to wait this life out, it seemed to be thinking, and get a better deal next time. God knows where the fucking thing slept. Or if.
Did the animal not get tired? Did it not require something? George would occasionally hose off the curry from the unmolested meat in his takeout container, and scrape it into the dog bowl, only to clean it up, untouched, days later. The animal viewed these meals with calm detachment. How alienating it was, to live with a creature so ungoverned by appetites. This thing could go hungry. It had a long game. What kind of level playing field was that? George felt entirely outmatched.
One night George tried to force the issue. He wanted more from it, and it wanted absolutely nothing from George, so perhaps, as the superior species, with broader perspective in the field, George needed to step up and trigger change. Be a leader. Rule by example. Maybe he had been playing things too passive? He pulled the thing onto his lap. He stroked its wet, stubbled skin, put on one of those TV shows that pets are supposed to like. No guns, just soft people swallowing each other.
The dog survived the affection. It trembled under George’s hands. Some love is strictly clinical. Maybe this was like one of those deep tissue massages that release difficult feelings? George forced his hand along the dog’s awful back, wondering why anyone would willingly touch another living thing. What a disaster of feelings it stirred up, feelings that seemed to have no purpose other than to suffocate him. Finally the dog turned in George’s lap, as if standing on ice, and carefully licked its master’s face. Just once, and briefly. A studied, scientific lick, using the tongue to gain important information. Then it bounced down to its corner again, where it sat and waited.
Months after his father’s death there was still no word from Pattern. After he’d returned from California, and cleansed himself in the flat, grey atmosphere of New York, George had sent her another email, along the lines of, ‘Hey Pat, I’m back. I’ve got Dad’s dust. Let me know if you want to come say goodbye to it. There are still some slots free. Visiting hours are whenever you fucking want. – G.’
He never heard back, and figured he wasn’t going to – on the internet now Pattern was referred to as a fugitive wanted by Europol, for crimes against the environment – but one night, getting into bed, his phone made an odd sound. Not its typical ring. It took him a minute to track the noise to his phone, and at first he thought it must be broken, making some death noise before it finally shut down.
He picked it up and heard a long, administrative pause.
‘Please hold for Pattern,’ a voice said.
He waited and listened. Finally a woman said hello.
‘Hello?’ said George. ‘Pattern?’
‘Who’s this?’ It wasn’t Pattern. This person sounded like a bitchy tween, entitled and shrill.
‘You called me,’ explained George.
‘Who’s on the line,’ said the teenager, ‘or I’m hanging up.’
George was baffled. Did a conversation with his sister really require such a cloak-and-dagger ground game? He hung up the phone.
The phone rang again an hour later, and it was Pattern herself.
‘Jesus, George, what the fuck? You hung up on my staff?’
‘First of all, hello,’ he said. ‘Secondly, let’s take a look at the transcript and I’ll show you exactly what happened. Your team could use some human behaviour training. But forget all th
at. What on earth is new, big sister?’
She wanted to see him, she said, and she’d found a way for that to be possible. They had things to discuss.
‘No shit,’ said George. He couldn’t believe he was actually talking to her.
‘Wait, so where are you?’ she asked. ‘I don’t have my thing with me.’
‘What thing?’
‘I mean I don’t know where you are.’
‘And your thing would have told you? Have you been tracking me?’
‘Oh c’mon, you asshole.’
‘I’m in New York.’
She laughed.
‘What?’
‘No, it’s just funny. I mean it’s funny that you still call it that.’
‘What would I call it?’
‘No, nothing, forget it. I’m sorry. I’m just on a different, it’s, I’m thinking of something else. Forget it.’
‘O-kay. You are so fucking weird and awkward. I’m not really sure I even want to see you.’
‘Georgie!’
‘Kidding, you freak. Can you like send a jet for me? Or a pod? Or what the fuck is it you guys even make now? Can you break my face into dust and make it reappear somewhere?’
‘Ha ha. I’ll send a car for you. Tomorrow night. Seven o’clock.’
George met Pattern in the sky bar of a strange building, which somehow you could not see from the street. Everyone had thought the developers had purchased the air rights and then very tastefully decided not to use them. Strike a blow for restraint. The elevator said otherwise. This thing was a fucking tower. How had they done that? The optics for such effects, Pattern explained to him, had been around for fifteen years or more. Brutally old-fashioned technology. Practically cave man. She thought it looked cheesy at this point.
‘A stealth scraper,’ said George, wanting to sound appreciative.
‘Hardly. It’s literally smoke and mirrors,’ Pattern said. ‘I am not fucking kidding. And it’s kind of gross. But whatever. I love this bar. These cocktails are fucking violent. There’s a frozen pane of pork in this one. Ridiculously thin. They call it pork glass.’
