How to Find a Flock

by Chris Vola

The doctor tells you to put your clothes on. They’ll have to wait for the blood work results, but all of your vitals seem well within the healthy range for someone your age, with the exception of your blood pressure, which he’ll chalk up to a natural aversion to clinical settings. No need for a prescription.

  “On a one-to-ten, how confident are you?” you ask. “I mean, I’ve read that misdiagnosis rates can be as high as forty-seven percent in a preliminary examination like this.”

  The doctor sighs, stares at the phone you’ve taken out of your pocket. “This is the golden age of hypochondria,” he says. “You should get back into a more consistent workout routine and maybe find a couple hobbies that will keep you off WebMD. Make an appointment with a rectal surgeon to get that hemorrhoid removed. Otherwise, keep doing what you’re doing.”

  You leave the office as you entered it, trailed by a rotting, skeletal version of your dead grandmother’s face mouthing the word fucked on constant repeat. Three days later, sleeplessly camping on the couch amidst untouched plates of disintegrating drunken noodles, you get the call.

  The bird-pitched, Mouseketeer twang belongs to someone who introduces herself as Holly from Clinical Imaging & Diagnostics who sounds like she’s barely qualified to read lottery numbers, but at least she’s bubbly. That might be the point. Syphilis with a smile!

  “So, um, I’m going to read you the blood work results from your recent visit with Dr. E—? Please let me finish before you ask any questions, but honestly honey you’re not going to freak. All the blood cell counts are great! Liver, thyroid, and kidney function are good…”

  She reads off every result and she’s right. You know because you’ve already checked what the numbers should be. She’s “super jealous of your cholesterol?” and your STD panel is “totally negatory!”

  You hang up, scoop solidified chunks of MSG into the garbage, and go into your room to find your cross trainers.

  The next day you call your boss and tell him you won’t be coming to the restaurant that night, or ever. You’re going to look for a job where you can utilize your philosophy degree: arts conservatories, historical organizations, cultural think tanks. You run a little every morning because it feels good to be outside and moving. When you get tired you stop. You shave every day and dabble in some of the facial products that had been lying dormant on your dresser since before your thesis defense. You buy groceries at a store that doesn’t sell kombucha or wild broccoli and supplement your non-organic vegetables with ground beef or boneless pork chops or whatever you feel like cooking. Your phone resides in closet purgatory when the retro flip model you purchased on Amazon arrives in the mail.

  Whether everything is one big moment whose meaning shines perpetually or a collection of seconds adding to nothing, you don’t care.

  You’re not fucked.

  You’re alive.

  One afternoon you’re getting ready for happy hour drinks with an environmental lawyer whose pictures are all taken from questionable angles and no full-body shots but who comes across in her profile as “relaxed” and “balanced.” The phone rings, unknown number, but you’re expecting a follow-up from the interview you had the day before for an archivist position at an online Nietzschean database. Or it might be the lawyer, XOXO-Jennie88, calling because she has to work late or something.

  “Hello, is this J—?”

  Monotone, rehearsed.

  Telemarketer scum.

  “Mm-hm?” Your thumb slides along your well-moisturized cheek toward the hang-up icon.

  “J— this is Holly from Clinical Imaging & Diagnostics. I’m calling again in regards to some blood work you recently had done.”

  The twang is gone. The harmless questioning cadence replaced by stoic certainty, the weight of bad news.

  Your thumb slides back, gripping.

  You hear your grandmother’s chalk-scraped cackling. You feel the soft gray place spiraling farther away into the bowels of a basket you’ll never grasp.

  “I’m glad I was able to reach you. I’ve been trying to get in touch for the past week but your inbox is full.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Well, I’d like to apologize for the inconvenience but there was a mix-up in the lab regarding the samples we received. An obviously undesirable administrative error. These things are rare but they do happen, and we make it our primary responsibility to notify those affected as quickly as possible. There’s probably no need to be super concerned just yet – your cholesterol is still excellent – but there were minor incongruities in a few of the readings and we’d like you to make another appointment to draw more samples and to discuss with your primary care doctor the possibility of –”

  “I have surprisingly good credit for someone my age and it increases with every punctual student loan payment I make.”

  “I’m sorry but that doesn’t have anything to do with –”

  “In the event of a natural disaster, my apartment is ideally situated along a major evacuation route.”

  “Um, congratulations?”

  “I have three point five times as many Twitter followers as the global average. The footwear emporium on West Broadway is finally having its annual end-of-summer clearance next week and the mid-cut suede boots that match most of my collared shirts and a fair number of my jeans will be sixty to seventy percent lower than their current value. My cholesterol is still excellent…”

  Either Way We’re All Getting Eaten

  “There’s hardly any avocado in this and I asked for extra.”

  Jordan crossed his pseudo-stoned eyes, squinted between the half-chomped layers of the foot-long Subway Club sandwich he’d bought when they’d stopped to fuel up at the New England border.

  “Aren’t I supposed to have it my way? ‘Have it your way.’ That’s what well-proportioned celebrity/athletes say on the commercials, right?”

  “Probably most of the avocado is on your shirt,” Ashley said, turning onto another nameless pastoral byway. “And I think it’s ‘Eat fresh.’”

  Jordan giggled in the passenger seat. “Eat fresh,” he repeated before taking another bite of his fit-for-human-consumption lunch. He turned his eyes down and started to pick at the green sludge that had congregated at the confluence of his salmon-colored button-down and khaki shorts. He looked like a decade-older version of the generically suburban kid from one of the more Adderall-progressive prep schools Ashley had met in Boston tailgating the concert of a band that billed themselves as purveyors of psychedelic bluegrass meets jazz fusion, whose obnoxious friends had called him “Jordie” and who’d made a weak attempt to sell her a sheet of acid that was clearly a strip of candy buttons. The only thing missing today was the hemp necklace containing a specific number of quartz healing crystals.

  Jordan balanced the sandwich remains on the dashboard and started feeling around his gut. When he found the last avocado glob he grunted in victory and wiped it off on his seatbelt.

  At some point he’d changed the Pandora to the Jam Bands Radio station. The antiquated grooves fell out of their windows and joined the rusty wind that had pursued them since they’d left the city, into a sky unshackled of buildings, leering in its vacancy.

  She tried to focus on the farm-worried road and not Jordan’s ash-kneed legs, which looked especially sallow against the black vinyl seats of the Kia she’d picked up from the carsharing service that morning. She’d picked the car up because today was her idea, orchestrated after she’d seen a subway ad for the service featuring a photo of a young couple embracing against the hood of a convertible, smiling amidst a pixilated sunset, the overlaid text reading, “No booty call shall go unanswered.” In the two years since they’d randomly reconnected at a charity bartending event thrown by a mutual friend, something about a pop-up animal shelter, she and Jordan had been hanging out, at first casually and then tri-weekly, and it was cool. A show here and there, the subway ride with no transfers between their similar warehouse-to-loft neighborhoods: it was comfortable. Booty calls sel
dom went unanswered.

  But they’d never ridden in a car together that wasn’t a cab, she’d realized, never played bocce even though both of them claimed proficiency, never been to a beach that wasn’t home to an overabundance of seedy Russians or the world’s biggest hot dog eating contest. A day trip through sort-of-shared, once-recognizable locales might be a nice exhaling of the summer stink that had begun to permeate the city. There was some serious stuff to talk about later, but as far as Jordan was concerned, they would be zipping around, ironic-tourist-style, through rolling hills and second homes, en route to her ex-hippie aunt’s cabin in a village named after slaughtered Native Americans for an early, locally sourced dinner.

  Jordan had shrugged his consent to the excursion without even one smart-ass crack about cow-tipping, which was odd. When he’d jogged out of his apartment that morning minus the black denim he always favored, with the gung-ho of a too-old Homecoming drunk, shit had officially gotten weird. It wasn’t just the clothes. His enthusiasm had stayed at a constant plateau the entire morning as he meticulously assumed DJ duties, chain-smoked joints on the parkway like they were going to a festival instead of toward retirees and mass dairy production, insisted on rest-stop fast food because “we must revert to a primitive state”—an energy she’d found annoying, then impossible. She had to focus on the drive.

  Focus.

  The road sloped down a lazy, gradual hill, ending at the first stoplight they’d seen in miles. Ahead stretched the major avenue of another small town neither of them knew the name of (Jordan had forbidden the use of GPS), but where she vaguely remembered years ago taking a shaky bike ride on her aunt’s two-seater to purchase Nutella. They crawled past paint-chipped Victorians converted into chiropractors’ offices, seasonal accounting firms, an L-shaped shopping center touting antiques, supplements, used Christian textbooks. A dandelion-laced green where a handful of sunscreened villagers—none between the ages of ten and fifty—lounged about on folding chairs or the grass. A trout-lipped shell of a former Stepford Wife was reading something on a tablet to a dazed boy in her lap. She laughed, flicked her finger across the screen.

  The boy’s jaw dangled, mannequin-slack.

  Jordan put his arm out into the rush of air, undulating his open palm in slow waves. A pot-bellied dwarf with a caterpillar mustache operating a small produce stand waved back as they passed. His shirt was the same color as Jordan’s.

  “I could chill here,” Jordan said. He dropped the empty Subway Club wrapper between his legs, licked his fingers.

  Focus.

  A pair of leash-less dogs sniffed and pawed at the gravel that constituted the parking lot of a roadside café. For a second she hoped one or both of them would wander close to the street, creating the opportunity for a collision that wouldn’t be fatal but might serve as a means to rouse their tea-swilling owner from her crochet project.

  But there would be no vehicular battery. She couldn’t stomach the thought of adding one more stupid action to what had become an entire day of mistakes. The sluggish cruise through lawns of the semi-living, the dinner with a relative who, in the 1960s, had lost a dangerous amount of bone marrow from starving in solidarity with imprisoned farmers union organizers, who would probably get off on the farm-to-table app on Jordan’s phone more than anything else, the misplaced expectation that removing themselves from their respective apartments might reinforce what she vaguely remembered from something someone had posted as a “shared ideal.” The unassuming but meaningful way she was planning to mention the check-up last month that had led to the recommended appointment that had led to the pap smear that had led to the pelvic ultrasound that might lead to a series of significant and uncomfortable conversations in the immediate future and maybe for a long time.

  She couldn’t focus.

  A live version of the Talking Heads’ “Naïve Melody” came on, not by chance. She knew Jordan was mouthing as he hand-surfed to the beat. This must be the place.

  “Could you change the music to the radio?” she asked. “Maybe NPR?”

  Jordan pulled his arm in and fiddled around for a second, not changing the song, then ran his phone-free hand along the bareness of her leg, halting a short distance from the inseam of her cut-offs.

  He told her to ease up on the pedal and that he’d just decided he wanted to get a dog, “like a burly-ass rescue mutt, you know, where it might be less than ideal to confine him to leash-walking and beating up on all the pug-rats at the dog park, but we could always rent a car and take him up here to run around for an afternoon, you know?”

  “Have it your way,” she said to the air in front of her lips.

  It was June and that air reeked of lilies and bovine-produced shit.

  She rolled up all the windows, jacked up the AC. She didn’t glance over for Jordan’s reaction. At the next intersection, she turned onto a wider road flanked by signs that looked like they might point to a real highway—the choke of fuel, the stomach-lurch of architecture, a digestive race through hard organs toward an afterlife with a face as blank as a smooth turd. She started singing along with the Talking Heads.

  Porn with Condoms

  At almost three in the afternoon, the subway platform beneath West 66th Street was slathered in the mid-spring drizzle that had been dumping on the city at an incessant clip for days, painting everything in shades of slop-brown and gray. That’s how I imagine it: Marnie sitting on a doodle-scarred wooden bench, waiting for the 1 train to take her home, not paying attention to the rain-slick plastic containers leaking genetically modified dregs and mold dangerously close to her quasi-military boots – this was when she was still going for an “activism with an edge” look – the vinegar-mouthed MTA employee holding a mop and not doing anything with it and staring at her, the ubiquitous tired-ass old folks milling and slouching and wondering. She would re-read the text I’d sent her, try to suppress the start of what would become a full-blown smile, drop her phone in her tote bag and watch it land alongside her flats and the intentionally chosen manila folder that she’d brought to the interview, a receptacle as bland as the résumés and CVs contained within it, the doctored truths she hoped she would no longer have to rely on, at least for a little while.

  Maybe she thought about tossing the folder across the tracks, letting the papers drift, precipitate, get crushed by the trains or chewed and shaped and used for structural support in one of Manhattan’s abundant underground rat kingdoms, but she remembered the color-coded recycling bins in her building’s lobby. She pulled the hood of her raincoat over her frizz-damp hair, closed her eyes and waited for the rumble and hiss of transit that now sounded like the start of a real transition.

  I wouldn’t see her in person until a few weeks later at the apartment of a girl who I’d met through one of the usual convoluted conduits of school/work/bars/someone-who-knows-someone-who-said-you-weren’t-a-total-creeper and who had grown up with Marnie, who’d introduced the two of us when we’d moved to the city at around the same time a year earlier. Peggy, the girl, must have figured that living alongside two million people on a grid the size of an Alaskan’s backyard, it might be hard to make friends. From the texts we’d exchanged and the dozen or so times we’d gotten drunk together with mutual acquaintances, Marnie seemed legit, a little hard-shelled and wary at first, but ultimately crackable if you were the right kind of person with the wrong intentions.

  And you liked marine mammals.

  I brought Frank to Peggy’s party. It started like every apartment party since the beginning of apartment parties: isolated islands of acquaintances slouched and close-talking, boozing and blunting away awkward vibes, trying to expand territory along the walls of the tiny white-walled living room and kitchen nook. Marnie was standing well beyond the coffee table demarcation line, talking to our host and sipping a microbrew. As she talked, she unconsciously tugged on a bare lobe that had been stripped of studs since she’d accepted the office gig at the nonprofit, her secondary choice of employment.

&n
bsp; “Ayo, that hip little fee-male who keeps touching her ear and looking at us?” Frank observed, astutely, which meant they were going to fuck. This was before he moved in with me, when he was still commuting from his mom’s basement on Long Island, when he was still, even though he belonged to the same vanilla-inducing career diaspora as most of us, dressing like a latter-day Fred Durst – Yankees fitted cap, dual earrings, XXL tee shirts featuring obscure skater-ish logos. But it was his thing and he owned it, slept on foreign beds far more than his own seminal-crusted twin mattress. Maybe he had an overabundance of the right pheromones, a huge schlong, or an inordinate percentage of the girls who had grown up on Total Request Live were still openly amenable to crude, pudgy appropriators of urban vernacular.

  “Oh shit,” he said, “here comes the baroness. You didn’t tell me she’d be here. Led me into a goddamn trap, son. I’m going to find the bathroom. Good luck.”

  The baroness had arms that were covered in delicate translucent fluff, not unlike a malnourished Yeti pup. Her great uncle was the CEO of a regional commuter railroad in Southeastern Pennsylvania, which I guess was cool if you were into limiting carbon footprints or the inherent fellowship of shared transport. Frank had given her the nickname because, around the time of their initial penetrative liaison, he’d been reading Wikipedia articles about nineteenth-century oligarchs and had convinced himself that her family’s position within their chosen industry put her on par with the white-gloved progeny of an ancient American steel magnate. This imagined nobility also functioned as justification for occasionally waking up bare-assed in her condo after an in-case-of-emergency ending to an otherwise browned-out evening.

  After all, one needed to keep his prospective dowry at a base level of contentment.

  Before speaking to someone, the baroness would do this thing where she would trace the outline of her lips with her pointer finger and thumb and pinch them together at the bottom of her chin, like an old kung fu sage contemplatively stroking an invisible beard. On this occasion, even though it was past Memorial Day, the skin encasing her fingers (and the rest of her) remained untouched by the carnage of ultraviolet radiation, a virginal shade of cream. Which Frank might have found pleasantly appropriate given his flawed understanding of modern class structure, if he hadn’t already taken up residence across the room where he was close-talking Marnie into something that resembled consent, opening a fresh beer for her with his keychain bottle opener that looked like a silver grenade.