Private Citizens: A Novel

by Tony Tulathimutte

  Having submitted the lie, the deed itself is simple rectification. Not adultery; adult isn’t the word. Closer to its root, advoutry, committed first in the heart. To conceive the end is to reach it, and much mischief followeth thereof.

  At a Chi Theta Chi party she drinks by herself until some fancy haircut approaches to sniff and mount, a philosophy grad who’s writing a monograph on Merleau-Ponty. He smells tangy and muscular, and the fact that he’s Persian counts for something. Yeah, all right. They repair to his room for some low-stakes cardio. She’s vexed to find that she’s too timid to ask him to use a condom; his bush is an outrageous loofah and he sort of cuffs her neck to pretend-choke her. He tilts her to his advantage and pummels her with upthrusts until she feels like a paddleball. When she moans he tells her to stop. But whatever, it doesn’t matter—at least he doesn’t propose to her. This is it. Sex should be fun, it should be fucking, not some gloomy I-and-thou shit.

  When she sneaks out in the morning, puffy-eyed, her mouth tastes like a crypt and a heel is missing. On her barefoot odyssey home, she wonders if it’s reasonable to regret sex that you sought, initiated, consented to, and heartily enjoyed, and whether this regret stems from using sex as a means to an end, to the end . . . nah, that’s just Jesus talking. She enjoys the lightness of her whoredom. She is a balloon, a bubble: floating, festive, roundly full of nothing.

  The next time Henrik approaches the coffee cart, she’s ready to turn up the house lights. But he says he’s checked out The Ethical Slut and Love Without Limits, and dilates at painful length on “negotiating boundaries” and “communication games” and “primary partnership.” Oh, this is impossible. Boundless niceness is impossible. At last he has proven himself an Overbearing Creep, the currency of his attention rendered worthless by inflation. Who the fuck wants unconditional love? She abandons the cart. Literally sprints.

  They’ve come to this quivering fulcrum of resentment and contempt and all it needs is a push, one tiny plot point—but, staying true to her aesthetics, she opts for decadent overkill. A time-honored, irrevocable gesture, with a genre and everything: a tidy inversion of the melodrama where the rapacious harlot contrives a pregnancy to snare a nobleman into wedlock. The sociopathic girl prodigy will contrive an abortion. It is important that it’s a fait accompli, something to enrage him inalterably and send her beyond the pale of being loved, a goal she’s been moving toward for a long time without quite knowing it was her goal. In hindsight it’s also very Catholic of her to immaculately conceive someone just to sacrifice him for absolution.

  Of course every objection must be anticipated. If he insists it’s some other guy’s, since they used condoms and the pill, she’ll tell him she hadn’t started fucking around until a month ago, so it had to have been his. She comes up with an exact time and date, even picks out the clinic and mocks up a false invoice. Her finger is braced on a big red button labeled MY RIGHT TO CHOOSE. Tying up the final loophole, she tells herself that if he believes her, it only proves he doesn’t get her.

  A week from graduation, she arranges a meeting in a semipublic corner of the coffeehouse. With her expression brave, her ponytail correctly dire, she serves her enormous overworked lie in a tremolo of repentance and defiance. “Last week,” she says.

  “Credit card,” she explains.

  “Twilight,” she specifies.

  “I’m fine,” she reassures.

  Try me, she thinks.

  But she is not prepared for acceptance. No demands for proof. Does not balk at raising a kid, even someone else’s. The fact that he’s sad it can’t happen makes her sad it didn’t. He gives her only her own lie to live with. He turns away. After two years of talk he’s gone back to silence. She wishes he’d say something, give her something to shred, but she doesn’t try to make him.

  Everything has run against her understanding: ridiculous to sublime, farce to tragedy. A lurch from the tar pit of irony into the honey trap of sincerity. The joke has become an exception. At the time, mastering the terms of her narrative was more important than succumbing to a love she had no control over, love in spite of her best hopes. But love is exceptional. Only when there’s some unfair bargain accepted or perversity tolerated, some cherished scruple suspended under emergency conditions, does love ever qualify. Not passion, duty, or amiability; certainly nothing like what you think you deserve. And boy does it tie your hands.

  Love is a form of spite—for her, at least. The wretch who needs something sterner and sturdier than hope. All the clichés come clear: You fall in love because it’s a trap. The line between love and hate is thin because spite governs both. It comes when you’re not looking for it because no sane person seeks it in the morass of shit where it dwells. Purely a fabrication maintained by each’s desire to believe, each’s willingness to give in. And when the need for delusion outweighs the desire for truth, it gets real.

  Leaving the coffeehouse, she has the impression of crossing some vast bitch Rubicon. The matter remains between the two of them, concluded.

  Until he comes back to her, under circumstances that feel like fate, are technically coincidence, but add up to something intermediate. Plot? Providence? An ordered network of consequences? What’s wrong with calling it a poor kind of love?

  Sincerely—

  Editta Linda Troland

  CHAPTER 12

  The Plan to Quit

  Hatred is a partisan, but love is even more so.

  —Goethe

  I. Afterimage

  A tense visor of discomfort constricted Will’s head; it felt like two eggs, freshly boiled and shelled, were crammed in his eye sockets, held in by two gauze pads and five front-wet layers of bandage. The rainy sound of typing was nearby, and as he moved to feel his bandages, it stopped. “Baby, don’t touch it. Drink some water,” Vanya said.

  “What time,” Will gurgled.

  “It’s eleven in the evening. How do you feel?”

  “Ducky.”

  Linda’s high, hoarse voice: “Does he want more pills?”

  “He’s already had two. He’ll be fine.”

  “Let him sleep,” said Henrik.

  Thanking Henrik telepathically, Will slept and woke again. “What time.”

  “Nine in the morning. How you feel, buddy?” said Linda.

  Will was too exhausted to gag on the smells of ointment and his own breath. It was hard to feel awake when you couldn’t open your eyes. He wanted to dash his bandages off and blink furiously, and his stomach turned a horrid suplex when he imagined the sound it would make.

  “Where’s Vanya?” Will asked. He heard a gravelly scuffling; an ice pack lowered onto his face. He cooled his cheeks with the sharp corners and planes of the cubes through cotton, and with squints he urged the cold to leach up to his eyes.

  “She’s doing her show. She asked if I could take a shift. I haven’t heard from her and she’s not picking up her phone.”

  “Email is better for her,” Will said.

  “Here’s some aspirin. I’m out of Vicodin.”

  Will chased two tablets with apple juice from a straw and chilled his face. It felt like a curtain rod was pushing through his temples, soon accompanied by come-and-go twinges of vascular microtear, like maggots chewing slow zigzags around his eye sockets, which he mistook for the itch of recovery. The doctors would later surmise that the aspirin had aggravated his intraorbital bleeding, worsening with each clogged sneeze and noseblow triggered by the spring pollen, each pang of reactive hyperemia opening the door a little wider to the pseudomonal panophthalmitis that would barrel over his immune system.

  Linda lit his cigarettes and cashed the butts into a beer bottle. As the itch crawled deeper and became entwined with pain, he had Linda dial the oculoplastic office, where a scheduling nurse told him that the surgeon was out of town for the weekend. So Will was in slow agony until Monday, grating the skin around his bandages with the sides of his fingers.

  Tuesday came, and Will and Linda took an eighty-dollar ca
b ride to the oculoplastic surgeon’s office, with Linda steering him by the elbow. Will joggled his legs on the padded exam table, envisioning the spree of blinking and scratching he would enjoy when the bandages were off. The layers became stickier and wetter as each was unwound. “Hast seen the white Will?” Linda sang as the last was peeled off.

  Something wasn’t right. He saw as if through greased goggles; the hand mirror showed only a blur of fruity reds and purples. The surgeon flicked the light switch and shone a penlight into Will’s eyes that Will could sense more than see. He instructed Will not to touch his face, excused himself, and made a phone call in the next room.

  An ambulance drove them to an office at Marin General, where another doctor examined him, left, and returned to deliver a diagnosis with a straight-sounding face. Orbital cellulitis had broken out in both eyes; the inflammation was strangling the optic nerves, and his vitreous humors were turbid with pus. They put him on oral antibiotics and held him for monitoring.

  “When is this coming off,” Will said, while they mummified his face in fresh gauze.

  “There’s no timetable,” the surgeon said. “We’ll monitor how you respond to the antibiotics and wait for the Gram stain. But the infection is advancing rapidly, and in the worst case, enucleation could be necessary.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Removing the eyes.”

  Linda gripped Will’s shoulder. “Both of them?”

  “If the infection spreads, it could go back through the optic foramen and into the brain. Even without enucleation, some vision loss is possible. It’s a last resort, but—”

  BY EIGHT THE vendors had left. The performing stage was empty. All warmth had faded with the sun and the crowd. The grass was cicatriced and shiny from the day’s trample. Pascal and Martina were returning the kegs and helium tanks. Cory was repeating her errand of twelve hours earlier—before her now was the exact volume of garbage cans she’d underestimated by, the scattered blue Solo cups, balled-up burrito foils, waffle cone sleeves, fairy trails of glitter, moon-colored condoms, four cell phones, a crack stem with a blackened bulb. She goaded herself on by lying to herself: only five more minutes, five more, five more. The only one helping her was a homeless man, with his shopping cart full of tight clear bags of empties. Tight clear bag of empty: that, in the least Zen way possible, was how she felt. She was glad she could at least provide someone a livelihood with her refuse.

  After sundown, Cory dizzily rested on a playground swing with her pulse throbbing in every toe before pedaling home on her still-seatless bike—not to her office, but to Iniquity, in a fatigue that hardened around her brain like cooling glass. She let her bike fall to the ground as she stepped indoors and yanked the banister up to her room. She fell on her pillow and wrestled off her clothes. The bed felt unoccupied even as she lay in it. A balloon was inflating in her chest, struggling but unable to pop. All she wanted was sleep, something only she could give herself and at last denied herself. Instead a deep shiver budded between her lungs, and a sickle-moon of migraine cleft her skull, smearing her vision. She pulled her hair into her mouth; when her fingers snagged, she pulled harder and moaned in formless schwas, hoping to discharge the pain as sound.

  She woke the next morning to find her pillow pithed from its case. She was sore in her thickest muscles and her scalp itched. Turned to see a mass of hair on the bed, like a bird’s nest that someone had given a good kick. Reached up to feel much of it missing. Some of the uprooted clumps were still tangled to the hair on her head. She fled to the bathroom with her heart clapping at her throat, and twenty minutes later she left naked and bald, with her deadlocks coiled inside the wastebasket looking like a head had fallen there from the guillotine. She levitated to the kitchen and mindlessly washed a mug, turning it around under a shaft of cold water that stiffened her hands, then wandered to the fridge and opened it, looking for nothing, letting the frosted air move down the front of her bare chest, stomach, legs.

  Behind her, clogs clapped on the concrete floor; it was Roopa, topless and startled, maybe because she was surprised to see Cory at home, bareheaded and smiling madly—

  “Hey, Roopa, good to see you! So, I’ve been thinking about stuff, and I realized you’re right. You’ve been a hundred percent completely right all along. I’m really sorry for all the trouble I’ve given you! I’ll be moving out soon, but don’t worry, I’ll come up with the rest of the month’s rent. Sorry again!”

  —though Cory liked to think, as she left the kitchen, that Roopa was dumbstruck by the scourge of Cory’s perfected ugliness, given nothing to oppose.

  DURING HIS HOSPITAL stay after the operation, Will told the nurses to refuse visits from Vanya. In the name of sparing himself more explanation, he didn’t call his parents, but he kept his phone on his lap, and when it rang he skated his fingers across its featureless surface until it picked up. (He’d have to buy a new phone—no, an old phone.) If it was Vanya he hung up; if it was Linda he put in a dinner order.

  It took him five minutes to get bored of touching stuff in his room, and a day to become bored of sleep. He spent the rest of his time inventorying his unhappiness. Not seeing, no longer having. The sterile, silent, painless way it was achieved. All his life he had light and then he woke up and didn’t. He clutched at his sternum when he felt its bolts tighten, and his nubbly blanket stiffened the more he wiped his face with it. He understood that he’d mistakenly prized loneliness above other miseries, when it was just a species in the genus of neurosis, family of suffering, class of comprehension, phylum of thought, kingdom of consciousness, domain of being—being being the basic option of life.

  Blindness was not some fantastic peephole to the eternal, just plain darkness that felt closer to him than his own face, with the occasional fleeting sunburst or serpent undulating across numb space. He could envision Vanya’s bangs, the doorknob on his parents’ house, his driver’s license photo, and generic ideals—clock, breast, moon. What the mind beheld directly. But he couldn’t see anything he’d never seen before.

  After six days he was discharged into Linda’s care wearing a double eye patch. As they entered his house, Linda’s guiding hand gave Will’s a startled squeeze. “Vanya’s here,” Linda whispered. She led Will to his recliner and excused herself downstairs.

  “I’m going to help you through this,” Vanya said. Her voice was bled of its principal timbre of optimism. She must have gotten in with the hidden key in the back stairwell, which had no stairlift. She must have dragged herself up. “Who knows more about overcoming disability than me? I’m plugged into every vision impairment resource there is. You can still work for the company, obviously. You can inspire people with your story—a recently vision-impaired man relearns the ropes.”

  “No.”

  “No what?”

  “No show. No relearning.”

  “That’s silly. You’ve invested so much in your tech training,” Vanya said. “Once you transition with some occupational therapy and get familiar with voice-command and screen-reading software, you’ll be able to work like before.”

  “I hate work.”

  “And bionic eyes will be robust in a few years—you could end up with superhuman vision, who knows. But first we’re going to sue the sardines out of this quack. He should have been available the instant you reported discomfort.”

  “I’m not suing anybody.”

  Vanya slapped her lap. “What are you going to do, then?”

  “Nothing,” Will said.

  “Baby, if I’d done nothing but sit around and feel sorry for myself after my accident, what kind of person would I be today?”

  Will tilted his head up. “I don’t know! Paralyzed?”

  “It’s normal that you’re responding out of pain right now,” Vanya said. “But to rise above this, you need to have things to look forward to. You can’t give up. If you believe you’ll fail, you’re right.”

  “Well, at least I’m right.”

  “Okay, I’m get
ting to the point. I found the ring in your jacket.” Vanya put Will’s hand around her finger; she was wearing it. “I know you wanted to propose. I’m here. Ask me.”

  “What? Fuck no.”

  After many silences, Vanya said, “Elaborate.”

  “Has there ever been any actual love? Like, really? No. Just a bunch of organizing.”

  “Baby,” Vanya said, “I totally understand why you’re lashing out. Things are bad. But if you keep saying things you don’t mean, you’ll regret it.”

  “I already regret everything. I can take more.”

  “So that’s your plan. Self-pity. How will you support yourself?”

  “With my money.”

  “So you’re just going to waste your talents? Do nothing?”

  “No, I’m doing something: I’m quitting. And you were fine with that when it was convenient.”

  “All right, baby,” Vanya said in grave tones. “I’m giving you one chance to admit you’re being ridiculous.”

  He slid the ring off her finger and flicked it away. It landed soundlessly wherever. “Yeah, well.”

  Vanya drew back, lowered herself to the floor, and he heard her crawling away one hand after another, her body swishing behind her. The stairwell door clumsily opened, and after a moment, when Will was tempted to hear a hiccup of true hurt, it closed.

  Will sat there, quitting for as long as that would take.

  II. Lares and Penates

  With Recreate finished, Cory found that she could be highly productive when she wasn’t working. She canceled her cell phone plan. Enough hair had grown back to restyle into a pixie cut. At the free clinic she learned that she was malnourished, anemic, hyponatremic, and had minor but literal cases of scurvy, telogen effluvium, and iodine deficiency, which her doctor had never seen before in America; he administered an electrolyte solution and a multivitamin. Later that afternoon her women’s center OB/GYN diagnosed her with vulvovaginal lichen planus, likely stress-induced, not sexually transmitted.