The Insides

by Jeremy P. Bushnell

  “Let me see it,” she insists, reaching out for it.

  “Non!” says Guychardson, pulling it back. “See with your eyes, not with your hands.”

  The tilting plane of the blade sends a splinter of light into her eye. It catches there, dancing in her optical field.

  She frowns, blinks: one, two, three times. The glimmer doesn’t clear. If anything, it widens slightly.

  She looks down. Looks at the cow carcass rendered beneath her. This is your job, she thinks, as she looks at spread-open tissue. This is work. It’s normal. But the light wandering across the webbed mess makes it go weird. Abstracts it into pattern. The gleaming of meat takes on shape, each point of wet light gaining dimensionality, texture, like a set of radiolarians.

  “Jesus Christ,” she says, blinking fiercely. A fog of pain begins to coalesce around the edges of her perception. “What did you do?”

  “I didn’t—” she can hear Guychardson say, an uncharacteristic concern creeping into his voice, “—I didn’t do anything.”

  The meat surges in her vision, threatening to take on the status of landscape. She pulls away from it.

  “I need—” she says. “I need to sit down.”

  She stumbles away from the worktable, through the front kitchen, out to the floor, eventually coming to rest at the bar, mercifully dark, closed at this hour, although she half-wishes the bartender—Sophia or Tunde or whoever is on tonight—was on duty now to quickly pour her a shot of something, anything.

  The roaming bead of light, still not dispelled, settles into the edge of her field of vision and then quivers, once, violently, abruptly expanding, tearing a vertical band through her perception of the world. She grunts and clamps her left hand over her eye, but it doesn’t help: the light persists in the darkness, a twisting ribbon of magnesium flare.

  She sucks air through her nose: the world smells like ground-up batteries.

  I know what this is, she thinks.

  What she says is: “Fuck.”

  She doesn’t want to have a seizure at work. The floor in here is polished concrete: it’s going to hurt if she bounces her head off it. She considers lying down on the floor but before she gets a chance to do anything, the light gives way to an aperture, a view into something.

  She’s not inside this time; she’s outside. She’s standing in the center of the field where they grew cabbages, squash, and beans. The farmhouse is visible over the crest of the slope. She looks down, wondering if she’ll spot something that’s hers, something like the sketchbook, something that links her to this particular spot. A thing she left behind. And sure enough, half-embedded in the dirt is a cheap LED flashlight that she used to hook to her belt loop, unknowingly dropped here when its clip broke, must have been early last summer, in her final days at the farm. She remembers its orange plastic casing, a tangerine color she admired for its cheerfulness, gone dull now from the sequence of seasons that has passed over it, baked beyond pumpkin, down to a dead beige.

  Something troubles her about it. It’s wrong that it should be here. If Donald were tending the field properly he should have found it, removed it as part of the process of raking the soil. And the soil around it looks bad: dry and cracked, choked with weeds and stones. A feeling of dread opens in the depths of her gut.

  She looks around and the dread turns into a jab of anguish: things are worse than she thought. The entire field is dry, caked. There are a few stunted cabbages pushing up between the thistles, but their leaves are sallow, worm-ravaged. The PVC irrigation tubes that she installed appear to still be in place, but as she looks closer she notes that some have decoupled and some have splintered, suggesting that Donald didn’t take the steps, months ago, that would have been necessary to winterize the system.

  You don’t do this, she thinks. You don’t neglect a healthy field. You don’t let it die just because you’re a lazy fuck. It’s as if he let a dog starve to death in a locked room because he was too stupid or too stubborn to feed it.

  Her mood tilts for a moment, teeters towards guilt. It’s not Donald who’s to blame, she thinks. It’s you. You did this. You stepped away and everything broke.

  Except no. Fuck that. She’ll take the blame for stepping outside of the happy little circle of Ollie and Jesse and Donald. She will. But she won’t take the blame for this. Just because Donald was sad or depressed or whatever when she left him doesn’t give him license to let this die.

  This thought leads directly into the next: Jesse.

  How is Jesse?

  How bad is it, without her?

  She makes herself stop there, think about it differently. It’s not without her but rather with Donald. How much has her fuckup of a partner fucked up her son? How much exactly?

  Some cold and rational part of her recognizes that she’s engaged in a calculated maneuver here, avoiding feeling guilty by opting to feel angry. The more the guilt threatens to rise, the angrier she has to get.

  She recognizes this, but it doesn’t stop her from doing it. She lets the anger rise. She moves across the field like an avenging ghost; she floats over the ridge and descends toward the house, imagining flames streaming out of her hair.

  She passes into the house through a window. The ground floor of the house—what in this moment she still thinks of as her house—is a vile disorder, appalling. The dining room table is taken up with one of Donald’s bows, its string off, halfway through the process of being rewrapped. The kitchen floor is strewn with empty Amazon boxes and air-pillow packing bags. She’s almost grateful that it looks so shitty: every out-of-place item is fuel for the anger that she needs.

  She whirls into the living room. There’s Donald, sprawled on the couch, his hair even longer and more unkempt than the last time she saw him, his feet propped up on a pile of dirty laundry. A new-looking laptop rests on his belly: on the screen she can see some little man, whom Donald is steering through swarming lattices.

  She wants to slap the stupid thing across the room. She wants to shake him.

  Turn around, she thinks at the back of his head. You fuck. Turn around and look at me. But he doesn’t.

  She wants to tell him to step the fuck up. You don’t do this. You don’t let things go to shit. You have to nurture the things that have been left in your care.

  Finally she looks away, lets her attention spin around the room in a wild, dizzying circle. She’s still so angry that she feels her spiraling gaze ought to be knocking photos off the wall, cracking the windowpanes.

  Wait, she tells herself. Stop. Find Jesse. Where is Jesse?

  Upstairs. Effortlessly she floats up through the ceiling, rising, disorientingly, into Jesse’s bureau, where all she can see are wooden slats, clothes wadded in the darkness. She rises further, emerges through the top of the bureau. It’s littered with sticks, stones, a glass beaker, an empty rat cage.

  And then, at last, she sees him, sitting cross-legged on the bed, sheets tangled around his waist, his head bowed. He’s focused on working something in his hands, interlocked pieces of metal—a tavern puzzle?—so she can’t see his face, just the crown of his head.

  And what she sees is: he’s had a haircut. The long locks of his that she loved: gone. She’s surprised at how much it hurts, at how quickly it takes on the shape of a betrayal, seeing him shorn like this. She wonders whether Donald was the one who did it: it looks amateur, like it was cut at home by someone who didn’t entirely know what he was doing. She looks at her son’s hair: it’s patchy, uneven, close to the skull.

  Also, it’s green.

  Green-haired kid: there’s a way in which she thinks she could like the change, if only she could find a way through the blockage of hating it. Less metalhead, more punk: maybe not the choice she’d have made but she can see, if she’s being reasonable, that it doesn’t need to break her heart. It doesn’t.

  He looks up and looks directly at the spot where she is and her heart jolts. His face is chalky white. For a fraction of a second she thinks that he’s dead, tha
t she’s seeing his ghost somehow, and the sudden surge of grief that blasts through her eradicates whatever pleasure she might have taken from being able to look into his eyes again. A rending wail begins to form within her and it doesn’t fully subside even when she realizes he isn’t dead, isn’t a ghost, but has just, for some reason, chosen to cake his face with white greasepaint. A ring of red lipstick carelessly loops his mouth.

  He’s not going through a punk phase. He’s going through a—clown phase? Why the fuck does he look like that?

  He peers into the spot where she is and frowns, concentrating.

  She flinches.

  The makeup has a slightly rotten quality. Blame the August heat, maybe, but he looks diseased somehow. If he’s a clown, he’s the tiniest, sickest clown, a clown that the other clowns might taunt for sport. And why is he a clown anyway?

  She realizes that what he looks like, more than anything else, is the Joker. Batman’s Joker. The sickest clown of them all. Why the fuck does he look like that? she thinks again, helplessly.

  A hand drops onto her shoulder. A voice—she recognizes it distantly as Angel’s—says, “Hey. Hey, Ollie,” and the vision of Jesse splinters up and away, and she’s back in Carnage, disoriented and wrenched.

  The first thing she does is vomit. She just opens her mouth and her gut gives one solid heave and everything in her issues out directly onto the bar. Tears spring into her eyes, more purgation. As if her body thinks that it can flush out what she’s seen.

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” says Angel. He rests a hand between her shoulder blades for a quick second, and then seems to think better of it, moves around behind the bar instead. “Water,” he says, and he makes a glass of it happen, sets it down in front of her. She gulps it as he produces a pub towel and wipes down the spattered zinc.

  “Bourbon,” she says, once she’s gotten through about half of the water and ensured that it’s going to stay down. Angel flicks her a look like he’s maybe not sure that she’s sure what she’s asking. She gives him the flat look that she usually gives in response to guys giving her that kind of look, and he does what she asked. Neat, with a Coke back, the way she likes it. She finds herself a little surprised that he remembered that; she’s only drank with him twice before. She glugs the bourbon down without pausing to taste it. Then she sips the Coke and holds it in her mouth, letting it fizz there until it goes inert, and only then finally swallowing.

  “Are you OK?” Angel asks.

  “I don’t know,” she says, and immediately regrets it, because it breaks a rule that she set for herself when she started in this kitchen: Never look weak. “Yes. No. I don’t know. I should—I should get back to work.”

  “You should go home,” says Angel.

  Home. Her apartment’s in the South Bronx. The thought of sitting on the Pelham Line for half an hour makes her blanch a little, and it must be apparent, more apparent than she wants it to be, because Angel makes a sympathetic noise with his mouth.

  “I’ll tell you what,” he says. He has his key ring out and he’s fussing a key off of it. “My place. It’s only a couple of blocks from here. I can call the doorman, no problem. There’s a bottle of bourbon there if you, if you decide to, uh, stay on that path. No Coke, sorry. I’m pretty sure you can get Mexican Cokes in the bodega on the corner, though. You know? Real glass bottle?”

  He slides the key across the bar toward her. She hesitates. She knows what a man is thinking about, when he gives you a key to his house and invites you to let yourself in and pour yourself a glass of bourbon. She knows there’s been an invitation on the table for a while now, and she still hasn’t quite figured out what she wants to do about it, and she doesn’t want to figure it out right this second because what she wants to be doing right this second is worrying about her son, 150 miles away and looking like the Goddamn Joker. But she has to give some kind of answer.

  He lifts her hand and puts it on top of the key. He leaves his hand on top of hers when he’s done. It feels dry, and warm.

  “I don’t know,” she says, for the third time, cringing to hear the words come out of her mouth. “I’m feeling better. I should just—I could just jump back in there, get back to work.”

  “You can’t,” Angel says. “We have enough problems with Department of Health as it is, without someone in there, you know, actively throwing up.” He offers up a smile, which she doesn’t reciprocate. He looks at her unconvinced face. “Ollie. You can’t. This is me, your boss, telling you no.”

  At the word boss he takes his hand off hers. Oh right. ’Cause this isn’t just about whether she’s going to fuck Angel, some guy, this is about whether she’s going to fuck Angel, her boss. The biggest possible shit-where-you-eat she can fathom. Don’t, she tells herself. You just don’t. It’s not that hard.

  She straightens her spine and it cracks. “OK,” she says. “If I can’t go back to work I’d better just go home.”

  For just a second, she can see disappointment on his face, and it threatens to become one more Goddamn thing to feel guilty about. But screw it. She can live with his disappointment as an outcome. It’s kinda messed up, anyway, that he’d want to fuck her tonight, after having just watched her get sick on the bar. Who does that? What kind of guy takes someone else’s moment of weakness and molds it into an opportunity?

  The kind of guy, she answers herself, who imagines himself as a savior, who wants to have you perform the infamous swoon of gratitude, square into his arms. That’s the kind of guy you don’t need to feel too guilty about disappointing.

  But that look of his is already gone by the time she slides the key back across the counter; he’s returned to wearing his normal expression of scrupulous feline cool, all the appetites in it out of sight for the moment.

  “Feel better soon,” he says.

  She goes back into the kitchen, gathers her stuff. Guychardson draws close to her, hovering at the edge of her personal space, a strong whiff of nonverbal apology coming off him, as though he wants to reach out and touch her on the arm but can’t quite convince himself that it would be OK. Frankly she’s grateful for his restraint. She doesn’t want to talk to Guychardson right now. She doesn’t want to talk to him, she doesn’t want to look at him, and she sure as shit doesn’t want to be touched by him. Because he did something to her. With that knife. Maybe he regrets it, maybe it wasn’t on purpose, maybe maybe maybe. She’ll figure it out later. Not right now. She’s got enough on her mind to last her all Goddamn night.

  6

  PATHFINDING

  Maja sits in a tower in Boston’s financial district, where she speaks to a man in a suit with whom she does not shake hands.

  She puts a suitcase full of cash on the desk between them and he does not ask any questions about this, which she appreciates. He simply completes a set of transactions that transforms the cash into an array of numbers in a financial register. She clicks the end of a pen. She likes wealth better once it becomes numbers; there’s less sense of it ever having been anywhere, ever having been connected to real things in the world.

  Sitting on the desk in the office, in an acrylic box with a mahogany base, is a weathered baseball, an illegible signature across its surface. She can hardly stand to be in the same room with it; there’s some kind of meaningful incident radiating off it like heat. The man in the office with his son. The two of them together at a ball game. A flare of enduring happiness. Soon after, the boy is gone; she gets an image of the man in a hospital, wringing a piece of cloth in his hands. She can’t quite figure out what happened to the boy. Some disease, something wrong with his bones, the marrow—? It doesn’t matter, she tells herself, stop looking. She doesn’t need the story of what happened in the hospital; she already knows it. Every hospital is alike: they have different forms but serve the same function, and they’re all riddled with the passage of the same sad story, the story that she herself lived through when she was eighteen, holding her younger brother’s hand. In a way, every object is alike, too. If you l
ook closely enough, every object can always be connected, somehow, to someone’s suffering. You have to know when to stop looking.

  The man produces a plastic capsule of mints, offers her one. She declines. He taps one into his own hand, but before inserting it into his mouth he pauses and asks, “Can I help you with anything else?”

  He can’t. She rises to go. He gives her a business card which, the moment she’s outside of the tower, she flicks into a garbage can.

  With the money out of her hands she can at last let the jet lag catch up to her. She wanders the streets of downtown Boston for maybe a quarter of an hour, carrying the empty suitcase and the rolling garment bag. For a short while she follows a trail set into the pavement, two bricks wide, designed to lead people around this part of the city. She follows it to a cobblestone circle marking the spot where people died. Soldiers firing into a crowd. Almost 250 years ago but she can still feel it.

  Boston is interesting: it’s young compared to the European towns she’s accustomed to, but it’s deeply storied. It contains an amount of history that feels disproportionate to the amount of time it has existed. A certain mythic aspect coagulates in its streets. Given more time or less fatigue she could possibly figure out how to enjoy it.

  She enters a hotel, one chosen randomly from those available downtown. She books herself a room for a week. She doesn’t intend to use it for any longer than just tonight but she’s always known that when you deal with unsavory people it’s good practice to leave a data trail that points to the wrong place. A safeguard.

  A little gift shop adjoins the lobby and she browses in it for a few minutes, finally electing to use a bit of her walkaround cash to buy a book on Colonial Revolutionary Boston. She flips through its pages on the elevator and when she enters her room she tosses it onto her pillow. She turns the air conditioner way up and draws the curtain shut against the late afternoon sun. She takes a hot shower, finally scrubbing away the residue of intercontinental jet travel, and, upon returning to the chill dim room, she immediately burrows down into bed. She uses both fists to gather a hunk of the comforter up into her face; she inhales the familiar bleachy odor. She picks up a distant sense of the bodies—so many—that have been touched by this blanket before, but the strongest association that she always gets from hotel linens is nothing human at all but rather a soothing sense of being repeatedly tumbled and churned by enormous laundry machines, long rows of industrial tourbillions, producing a steady endless roar, like a sea. She’s asleep within a moment.