Private Citizens: A Novel

by Tony Tulathimutte

  As soon as the phone dropped in its cradle, Cory eased down to her sore knees and elbows and, lacking knowledge of the particulars and in no tradition, petitioned to whatever had time for her. It was quiet and easy. She was sure it accomplished nothing and meant nothing. But if she could believe in anything it was her own doubt.

  Picking herself up, she wrote Roland a courteous three-line email thanking him for the opportunity, though she couldn’t accept it at the time for personal reasons, but she hoped that they’d have more opportunities to collaborate when the timing worked better on future projects. Then she deleted it and sent another one: NO. She sent another email to her employees, pronouncing Socialize dead. They had enough cash to make the last payroll and severance. If anyone wanted the directorship, she’d be glad to talk transition. Nobody replied. The concern was gone.

  AN EMAIL CAME in from Eve, sent at 6:20 A.M., which seemed dire until Linda remembered that’s just when parents woke up. Eve needed a favor, and asked to come over; Linda gave her Will’s address.

  Opting not to explain who Henrik was, Linda stepped out around noon to meet Eve under the backyard patio’s awning in a downpour that made the sidewalks fizz. Eve carried a large pastel go-bag and a foldaway crib, with Mercy flopped over her right shoulder, clutching Eve’s drenched coat collar.

  Eve was not a crier, more of a deep frowner—every part of her face was downturned as she brought Linda up to speed. Eve had locked Jared out after he came home late last night in full-fathom relapse. He kicked at the door, and when the cops came they found him passed out in the stairwell and tossed him in the drunk tank. Eve wouldn’t press charges and wasn’t worried he’d get violent. But she didn’t want Mercy around; worst case, he could run off with her, or Family and Children’s Services could get involved. “And my parents already hate Jared,” Eve said. “I just need someone to watch her while we make shit right. A week, max.”

  Linda nodded, relieved she could take the woman’s side here. “Sure.”

  “I wouldn’t ask if I weren’t desperate,” Eve said. “Offense sort of intended.”

  “None taken. You know, with Jared, I didn’t actually—”

  “Oh, Jared’s a straight-up bitch. He’d never.”

  “I feel bad, though.”

  “Girl, don’t. One of us should be happy. I wish we could both be you.”

  Eve turned away, and so did Linda, though she still overheard Eve muttering something to Mercy. You’re a part of me. Or You’re apart of me, par for me, pardon me.

  Returning with brimming eyes, Eve pecked Linda’s cheek. “I’ll drop off the rest of her shit after work. Yours too. Baptist sent it along.”

  “Nice of him,” Linda said.

  Eve handed off her child and went back out into the hard weather.

  FROM THE COUCH, Henrik glanced up from his book to see Linda bump through the studio entrance carrying an armload. Her hair dripped with the rain falling outside in thousands of cellophane crinkles. The storm clouds were green drab and inside, one table lamp was on. The thing in Linda’s arms had arms, and Henrik gawked at them, counting dates in his head to make sure it wasn’t his, even though it was plainly impossible—he would put nothing past Linda, not even having his black baby. Forgetting that he couldn’t speak, he spoke. “What is that?”

  “It’s a little baby. Mercy, say hi!” Linda waved Mercy’s arm at Henrik.

  “What are you doing with it?”

  “Only thing you can do. Keeping it alive.”

  Linda set the crib down and unfolded it, pinching her finger in the hinge. A crib was a cage. Wombs, cribs, rooms, tombs. She laid the bedding in, and the baby on top of it.

  “Don’t worry, it’s easy,” Linda said. She bunged the pacifier into the baby’s mouth and it was like she’d switched it off. “Diaper, bottle, binky, burp, sleep, hold. That’s all she needs.”

  Cars, clothes, skins, skulls. In physiology textbooks you saw red muscles, vascular cables of red and blue, off-white bones. But light didn’t reach that far into you. All day you were mostly night. You began there, in someone else’s darkness.

  “I thought you hated babies,” Henrik said. “You used to say they’re atavisms.”

  “That does sound like me. But I came around. They’re never condescending. You know they need you. And they’re never wrong. Don’t argue with a baby; you’ll lose.” The baby was belly-up, sucking her pacifier like it was full of sleep. “It’s weird that she won’t remember this. Her week with us. Though Lacan would say—”

  “Let’s not with the L-word.”

  “—that when she cries and we feed or change her diapers we’re reinforcing her connection between need and demand and sucking her into our symbolic discourse.” Linda tumbled onto the couch beside Henrik and zapped the TV on. “It helps her sleep.”

  They sat in benign existence, watching frantic chefs prepare meals against a timer, until the commercial break. “All right, can we talk?” Linda said. “As much as I love a good brood war, we can get through this quicker by talking.”

  Henrik turned his TV glaze toward her. Without front teeth and with her wet hair she looked desperate and hurt. “Since negatives come easiest to me,” Linda said, “I’ll say what I don’t want. I don’t want to promise you I’ll change so you’ll ‘take me back.’ Any shrink would tell you to set healthy boundaries and cut me off, but I don’t want that either. And I don’t want to be just friends, or friends with benefits, or least of all your ex.”

  “Doesn’t leave much.”

  “You’re right. If we go by what actually happened. We don’t have to—wait, hear me out. We had a pretty good relationship built on lies. I don’t see why we can’t do it again.”

  “Because relationships are based on intimacy and intimacy is based on trust and trust is based on honesty.”

  “You think every functioning couple knows themselves and expresses what they want and hears what the other is saying perfectly? That we’re not pumping everyone else full of prejudices and fantasies with no connection to reality? The only thing holding relationships together is intention. It’s not a matter of fact or reason. We get to say what happened because we’re the only ones who care. My problem isn’t that I lie but that I used the wrong lies. Selfish and romantic ones.”

  “Sheesh.”

  “Listen, couples omit and revise their histories all the time. Telling their parents they met at a barbecue instead of on a fetish website. Or saying some fleeting episode of infidelity didn’t count. Faked orgasms, coworker crushes. Or, better example, you not telling me about your bipolar while we were dating.”

  Henrik did not dispute this.

  “Usually they’re lies of convenience. But sometimes the poetic truth of a cover story suits their understanding better than what actually happened. Like how when we hear Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil, it doesn’t feel true but it feels right. This always gets framed as pathetic or delusional but at least reality never gets the best of you.”

  “Difference is I’m not asking you to lie to me.”

  “You could watch me try,” Linda said, turning the TV off. “Will you?”

  Henrik inhaled and exhaled. The medication wore down his protest.

  “Say we move to Sacramento after college,” Linda says. “I don’t want to live there but it’s the only place we both got decent job offers so we can stay together. And after two years and a slipped condom we end up with a situation.”

  “You never wanted a baby,” Henrik said. “You said that to raise a kid was to get PTSD after catering to some helpless idiot for eighteen years in the hope that he wouldn’t eventually blame you for his miserable life on some blog.”

  “Naturally my stance changes once it happens. What the hell, we’re married and insured. And we get the amnio and everything’s fine. So I quit drinking and smoking, we take gross photos of my belly each month until the kid pops out. Of course I resent the mundanity, that my biggest problem is basically: How can I write and be mysel
f when I’m always tired from working to pay student loans and pumping breast milk?

  “Then I trip in the shower and knock my front teeth out, and we get into a big fight about spending money on something cosmetic. Slowly we realize our relationship in college had a lot to do with circumstance and lack of experience, that we were all so intensely codependent that we had to exceed friendship. So I move back to SF because that’s where our friends are, and you move here because that’s where our baby is. While we’re looking for a new place and making new plans, we figure it’s cheapest to both stay with Will.

  “That’s it. It’s not an exciting story. But it got us here.”

  “It sounds like you just want to be let off the hook.”

  “There shouldn’t be a hook is what I’m saying,” Linda said.

  “What do I get out of it?”

  Linda thought about this one. “Me,” she concluded.

  “Why would I want to let you do this all over again? Give you all the power?”

  “Usually the power belongs to the one who wants the relationship less. That would be you.”

  Linda noticed Henrik tracking her hand with suspicion. She offered a dainty cat-paw for him to examine. On her middle finger was Will’s engagement ring. Its sapphire was deep, clear, and extremely real, and the band, a gray-and-gold braid speckled with diamonds, shone with its price. “You said you didn’t want me to forgive or forget,” Henrik said. “How is this not forgetting?”

  “It’s not. It’s a choice between options, one factual and the other truthful.”

  “Double think.”

  “The sign of a first-rate mind! But I knew you’d have this hang-up about facts, so I made this.” She reached under the cushion of the daybed and took out a notebook, handed it to him. Opening it, he found some ninety pages of tight script full of cross-outs, carets, footnotes. They meet late in a year of record lows.

  “Hang on to it,” she said. “But don’t show anyone. It’s pretty embarrassing.”

  He put the book aside. “So, we’re dating again. All of a sudden you’re hot for commitment.”

  “Let’s not call it anything. I just want to talk again.”

  “My feelings for you always have been unambiguously romantic. Keeping it vague lets you pull me back into the kind of relationship I don’t want.”

  “Oh, really? You don’t want someone to look after you right now? That’s a second-rate kind of affection. Listen, you can send me packing whenever you want. This time it’ll be your choice.”

  The sleeping baby gave the room a faint stink. He heard the water spattering outside with the distant shipwreck sound of thunder. The choice, he felt, was between it and this treacherous girl, who was trying so hard to seem like she cared for him, as if that in itself was enough, and possibly it was. Then again he could never tell if he was really thinking what he thought rather than what he was trying not to think.

  “If you’re making a vague offer then I’m giving you a vague acceptance.”

  “I accept your acceptance.”

  “So now what?” Henrik said. “Just continue? This doesn’t last without money.”

  She looked down at her damp clothes. Her skin was uncreased and lightly furred, all tattoos colorless in the dim light. She rested an ear on Henrik’s shoulder and flicked a lock of damp blond-tipped hair across her chin. Behind her back, she switched the ring to another finger. She could look after Will and Henrik until she got antsy and broke, gave in and pursued one of those higher degrees you didn’t earn so much as contract like a wasting disease: advanced, terminal. She’d have to take tests again, assemble little packets of talent to submit to strangers who would reject her, or admit her on promise. But that was all hypothetical and she would still need money. Words had been good for something, not everything: the question was whether they were enough. “Don’t worry about that. If I go broke I can sell the ring.”

  “No sense being impractical. It’ll appreciate.”

  III. The Unemployment

  On the last day at Socialize, Martina asked if Cory wanted to liquidate the office furniture. Cory looked out over the desks, chairs, scuff mats, cord caddies, modular bins, desk phones, computers, printers, cables—all that work. She scratched an itchless bump on her arm and yawned. “Just grab whatever you want and take off. I’ll handle the rest.”

  They struck the office in an afternoon. Cory claimed Taren’s record player, and from his desk she saved a packet of ballpoint pens gold-embossed with the Socialize logo. Martina and Pascal ro-sham-boed over the conference table and divided the office supplies. Cory helped load the copier into a Barr None van with John, and trashed the Gandhi quote and the wall calendar, whose anxious lists of errands leading up to Recreate now looked so angry. She took apart the modular storage and yanked the phone lines from the wall with a twang, half expecting blood to well from the outlets. She worked the door keys off her key ring and set them by the front door in little silver sardine rows for the landlord.

  Holding a shoebox full of tools, Cory felt nothing but pleasant light-headedness and cool air on her scalp as she watched the Barr None van crackle away down the alley. The slick patches of pavement from last night’s rain flashed with sunlight.

  She went inside and made a phone call, then cleaned through the rest of the daylight along to Leonard Cohen and Joan Baez records. After sundown there was a twist at the front doorknob and two loud knocks. Linda entered first, leading Will by the hand, and Will held the door for Henrik, who carried a rack of Tecate and a liter of Maker’s Mark. Will was guided to a desk chair.

  “How you feel, Will?” Cory asked.

  He adjusted his sunglasses. Cory looked at Linda. “Will isn’t talking,” Linda said. “He says he’s sick of expressing himself. He says no matter what he says people only hear what they see. But he’s going to get sick of the third person soon, isn’t he?” She pinched his cheeks until he swatted her arms away.

  Henrik rolled beer cans to Linda and Cory, and Linda cracked hers in one hand, dripping spittley foam. “Toast.”

  “To what? My company shutting down?”

  “To your event. To having some time off. To me. Who cares?”

  As Linda raised her can, Cory’s eyes widened at the ring on Linda’s hand. Well, that made sense. Linda reset the record and handed a loaded pipe to Cory, who examined it like it was a bullet casing she’d found in a sandwich. “Christ, it’s been forever.” She sucked in a magnificent hit that went to her temples instead of her lungs. Holding it, tasting and smelling the moments the weed transformed from green to orange to white, she watched Henrik pace around before taking a seat against the wall. And Will really was just sitting there. She couldn’t even remember what they would do together. Seeing them in her gutted workplace sent a current of mingled nostalgia streaming from her nostrils. They were lounging in the concreteness of her failure.

  “What are you doing for money?” Cory asked Linda, having little else to say.

  “Nothing. But Henrik and I came up with a plan,” Linda said. “Easy money.”

  “How?”

  “ART.”

  Across the room Henrik shook his head and laughed.

  “Shut up, I’ve done the research,” Linda said. “Whatever else I am, I’m white, twenty-two, educated, and I clean up nice.”

  Linda told her about ART. It had made big advances in the past few decades. Nobody could agree on a precise definition, and its long-term effects hadn’t been studied, but ART had low rates of morbidity and mortality. It could trigger early menopause and make her fat, she’d have to quit drinking, and her tattoos might hurt her market value, but ART paid: twelve to twenty grand. “Enough to cover my bills and keep off the student loan creeps for a minute.”

  “Huh,” Cory said, though by this point, knocking the ash out of her spent bowl onto the floor, she was distracted by remembering how much she loved weed. She felt herself get walleyed, expand and disrobe into a headless fume, all her identities pleasingly reshuffled like
a clever anagram of herself. No more hardlining, no tireless cause-and-effect along the same weary grooves of dread. She went to sit by Henrik. The large smooth warm stone in her chest felt like forgiving him for something. “So you and Linda worked it out,” she said. “I’m glad you’re back on.”

  “Um, not back on, exactly. We’re just staying together at Will’s.”

  “Good. That’s good. Together is good.” She gulped her beer. She kept forgetting and remembering that there was no work tomorrow, each time triggering bursts of panic and relief. “Can I ask you something?” she said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Why Roopa? How Roopa?”

  Henrik glanced over at Linda, just out of hearing range. “I don’t know if I should say.”

  “I really really want you to say.”

  Henrik sucked in and said on a sigh, “I responded to her ad online.”

  “Like, a dating ad?”

  “A one-hour date.”

  “You don’t mean—”

  “Uh, yeah.”

  Some inner tectonics made Cory’s lips warp and buckle until they let out berserk laughter. She slid down the wall, and now lay on the floor, squirming in mirth like an itchy dog.

  “There’s more to it than that,” Henrik said. “We didn’t—”

  “Nope, I don’t want to hear it,” Cory said between heaves. “What you said is perfect.”

  When she caught her breath the heat of her heart was on the skin on her face. She mouthed a few syllables, to establish that she could: luh, guh, buh. She dragged her hands down her cheeks. “Linda. What. The hell. Was in that weed?”

  “I really don’t know,” Linda said, attempting a headstand. Her dress fell down over her head so she was all bare belly and legs. “Definitely something!”

  “So if you’ve moved out of Iniquity,” Henrik said to Cory, “where are you staying tonight?”

  “Here,” Cory said.

  “Um, you can probably stay with us. Will?”

  Will shrugged.

  “No, I’m staying here,” Cory said.

  “Oh shit, are we sleeping over?” Linda said. “We’ll need more food and drugs. Someone give me their phone.”