My Year Zero

by Rachel Gold

  “I picked up the Chinese food,” Dustin announced loud enough to be heard in the living room. “Do you want it in the dining room?”

  “Sure,” Sierra said.

  “Put it in the kitchen,” I called to them. “The art’s on the table out here.”

  Sierra stepped through the kitchen doorway and gave me an annoyed look. “So pick it up,” she told me.

  I folded the art back into the portfolio and closed it, set it against the wall, out of the way. Was she angry at me because I’d been weird about her and Dustin? Was I being insecure and disappointing her?

  Less than an hour ago, I’d been in bed with her feeling like the ruler of the universe. Now it was all slipping away. I wanted to run out of the house and drive back to Duluth and sit in my room until this made sense.

  I leaned in the doorway between the rooms and watched Bear draw. Blake and Kordell arrived through the kitchen. I heard them talking to Dustin and the clatter of plates. When they came into the living room, I went to get my plate.

  Cyd had moved from her spot on the couch and Sierra was in the middle again with an empty space next to her that she patted, looking at me. This time when everyone settled around the living room, it felt claustrophobic. I shoved the chicken around and ate the cashews. Dustin sat on the other side of Sierra from me. They weren’t touching but I felt like they were.

  I got off the couch. “I need to move around,” I said. “I’m going to take a walk.”

  Kordell pointed toward the dining room and kitchen. “If you go that way about six blocks there’s a decent park, if you like parks.”

  “Thanks,” I told him.

  Sierra didn’t say anything at all.

  I went out through the kitchen door and got my shoulder bag from my car in the alley. I’d left it because I’d been so eager to see Sierra.

  Slamming the car door, I stalked up the alley toward the street. Running boots sounded behind me, but I didn’t turn around. If it wasn’t Sierra, I didn’t want to know.

  Blake caught up to me. She was in black hipslung trousers and one black tank top over another. The bottom one had been through the wash too often and its cherry undertone was showing. We reached the mouth of the alley and turned toward the park.

  “She’s still sleeping with Dustin,” I said, and then, “Not sleeping. You know what I mean. Is that a thing here in the Cities? Does everyone casually fuck each other?”

  Blake said, “You should get what you want. It doesn’t matter what everyone’s doing.”

  “But you and Kordell…”

  “We’re not you and Sierra. If you need her to only be with you, why don’t you tell her?”

  “It’s not that easy.”

  We walked a block in silence.

  I didn’t want to talk about me and Sierra, so I said, “She told me about you one of the first times we chatted, that you’re bipolar. I didn’t know if that was okay or not, that I know.”

  “I have bipolar disorder,” she said and laughed a little. “What a silly word that is. Disorder. It implies I had order to begin with. I don’t mind that she told you. I’m glad you know.”

  We continued on and she added, “They’re thinking about changing my medication again to see if they can get my brain to settle down. I hope they get it right this time.”

  “What’s it like?” I asked. “Is it okay to ask that?”

  “I think we covered the ‘say anything’ nature of our friendship last visit,” she told me.

  After another long pause she said, “Sometimes it’s like just having enough energy to lie in bed and think about death and cheery things like that. And then sometimes gravity can’t touch me. I fly and everything makes sense. It fits together so beautifully and I try to write it all down. Oh and there’s the anger. One time, I was seeing this therapist and he was going on about how I should ‘act out my anger’ and I kept trying to tell him the only way I could do that would be to hit him with the chair because he was the object of my anger.”

  “Did he stop asking you to act out your anger?”

  “After I picked up the chair and held it over my head, he did.”

  I stopped, turned, stared at her.

  Her smile was faint and lopsided, quirked up on the left. Eyes narrow and wary, but also crinkled at the edges and warm.

  I could picture it: Blake, compact and intense, eyes blazing, holding one of those plastic, institutional-style chairs over her head by its metal legs. Raven hair wild, black shirt askew, mouth twisted in anger.

  I was afraid of her and I wanted to put my arms around her. Standing next to her I wondered—if I felt a fraction of what she felt—how did she move around in the world without yelling and throwing chairs all the time?

  “What happened?” I asked.

  She started walking again. I moved to keep up with her, easy with longer legs.

  “I decided it wasn’t a good idea to injure him,” she said. “So I dropped the chair and ran into the hall. He followed and I think we freaked out the clinic staff and most of the other patients.”

  “You didn’t want to hurt him.”

  “No, of course not. I was just so angry. I ended up getting another therapist.”

  A million questions jostled in my brain but wouldn’t settle into words. I’d seen her laughing and intense, joking and thoughtful, serious and annoyed, but never angry. What would it be like to feel that angry and be able to show it? I could never.

  I said, “I think normal is overrated. It’s what your parents always wanted you to be and other than that it doesn’t exist.”

  “What does your dad want you to be?” she asked.

  “An architect or some kind of corporate robot,” I told her. “A good daughter, whatever that is. And someone who never feels things.”

  We’d reached the park. It was a block square, half fenced off for dogs. We sat on a bench. I watched a bunch of dogs running in a frantic, playful circle after a scruffy black-and-white mutt with a bright orange ball in its mouth.

  “I can’t imagine that,” Blake said. “To be without feeling everything. Maybe I could do without the dark, but not if I had to give up the infinities. Sometimes with the medication I get so foggy, not thinking, not feeling, and that’s almost worse than thinking about death all the time.”

  “How do you feel what you feel? I mean, literally. What is it like?”

  She turned toward me and asked, “Can I touch you?”

  “Um, sure.” Weird question coming from someone who’d kissed me.

  She put her fingertips on my chest, in the middle, under the line of my bra.

  “You’re not breathing very much,” she said. “I heard in a group once that if you close off your breathing, it makes your brain freak out because it’s not getting enough oxygen. Then your brain has to focus on that and not whatever you’re feeling.”

  She lifted her hand away and tapped her own belly, down low, over where her belt was. “Breathe into here,” she said.

  I tried. It felt like when I’d sat for hours and stretched too suddenly. Muscles on the edge of cramping, wanting to curl in on themselves.

  “I don’t think I like that,” I said.

  “You have to practice.”

  “Do you?”

  She grinned. “Needing to feel more of what I’m feeling isn’t a thing for me. I pay attention to my moods, to stuff that clusters together. Like when I’m angrier is that the same as when I have a lot of ideas? Stuff like that.”

  The idea of having to track more than one feeling at a time was overwhelming. “But how do you deal with all that?”

  “How do you not? We’re all having feelings all the time, it’s what humans do. Do you really not feel things?”

  I watched the dogs running joyfully. One body-checked another and it snapped back with a growl. The first dog backed off. If only it was that easy.

  “I guess,” I said. “I just go to school and do my work and draw. Most of the time I don’t need to feel anything. It’s better
if I don’t.”

  “How do you know what to draw?” she asked. “When I’m foggy, I can’t write poetry like I can any other time. I have to follow my feelings to know what to write.”

  I pulled my sketchbook out of my bag and handed it to her. She flipped through it, images of Sierra’s face, my attempts to draw the Queen and Zeno. She reached the blank pages.

  The middle was blank but in the back there was another set of drawings, nothing like the ones in the front. I put my fingers under the blank pages and turned to the back section and the other illustrations I was working on.

  With one finger Blake traced the image of jagged skin on an arm where a blunt blade had torn through to the muscle. She turned the page slowly. Here a woman had run through a thicket of thorns, bloody lines curving around her torso and legs. She’d run until pain and exhaustion overwhelmed her. She was huddled under the jagged thorns, slumped on her side.

  “This is amazing,” Blake said. “It feels frightening, but I love looking at it. There’s so much pain in it but also here, the way her leg is tensed, the strength, like she won’t give up. It’s beautiful.”

  “You know there’s something seriously wrong with us, right?” I asked.

  She laughed, her full head-back, open-mouthed laugh and put her hand on my shoulder.

  “Will you draw me one of Cypher torn apart?” she asked.

  “Eaten by birds?” I suggested.

  “Sure.”

  “I was kidding.”

  But I could see it in my mind already and there was a crushing, awful wonder to the idea. I felt it in my gut, the way I felt all of these drawings, like they crawled out from inside me.

  “I’m not,” she told me. “But do whatever you want. This doesn’t trouble me. I get this. And it doesn’t mean you’re crazy.”

  I didn’t want to say it out loud, but that’s exactly what it meant. Sitting next to the girl with the official diagnosis, having her say she got me, that didn’t help with not feeling like a crazy person.

  A woman in a saffron shirt called to the fast dog with the ball. It dashed across the park to drop the ball at her feet. She leashed the dog, picked up the ball, and they walked together out of the park.

  We started back.

  “What do I do about Sierra and Dustin?” I asked.

  “Tell her you’re angry and upset.”

  “I am?”

  “You tell me,” she said.

  We walked most of the way back to the house. I tried breathing like Blake had showed me but it hurt all the way down my ribs. I stopped at the mouth of the alley.

  “I am upset,” I said in a whisper. “And fucking pissed off.”

  Blake put her hand on my arm near the elbow and squeezed.

  “And draw more,” she told me. “Anything you want. Anything at all.”

  When we went into the house, they were talking about Solar holding Cypher captive and when the torture scenes needed to end. It was like we hadn’t been gone at all.

  Blake dropped into her spot on the couch and said, “I think I’d like her to be eaten by birds.”

  “Like Prometheus?” Dustin asked. “He had an eagle eat his liver every day.”

  “Sure, whatever. Now, let’s talk about Cypher’s daring escape.”

  I went into the kitchen for a drink. Sierra met me in there, leaning against the door frame, curvy and sexy and troubled.

  “I’m kind of upset about the Dustin thing, if that’s okay,” I said.

  She crossed the room and put her arms around me. “Baby, I’m sorry. Let’s go out to dinner tomorrow night, you and me. We’ll go someplace nice.”

  “Okay, sure. Thanks.”

  She kissed me and breezed back out of the room. She hadn’t said she’d stop having sex with him, but she apologized and that meant something, right? I could ask her about the sex part later. A hundred electric currents of hot and cold, sharp and buzzing, were mixing in my chest.

  How did Blake live with all of this?

  Chapter Eighteen

  Sierra was in the mood for seafood, so we went to Joe’s Crab Shack and got giant pots of clams, mussels, crab and lobster claws. It made me miss the full summers I’d spent with Mom on the East Coast, before her travel schedule got too heavy.

  Sierra told stories about her co-workers, especially the OCD one who couldn’t stop fixing displays the minute a customer walked away. She admitted she sometimes messed up the displays right before that co-worker’s shift.

  Then home to fall into bed together. In the morning Sierra made eggs and toast. We ate sitting in bed.

  “Are you here through next weekend?” Sierra asked. “There’s a party at Bear’s parents’ place that’s going to be great.”

  “Yeah, I can stay. Is that cool?”

  “Of course it is.”

  It was time to say it, so I asked, “Are you going to keep sleeping with Dustin while I’m gone?”

  “Not if it upsets you that much,” she said. “He’s just a friend. He knows that. He said that he thinks we’re good together: you and me.”

  “He did? You talked to him about us?”

  “To tell him that we were together. Don’t get paranoid, baby. I only talk about you to brag about how lucky I am.”

  “You do?”

  “All the time. The other students in my writing class got sick of hearing about you.”

  I beamed down at the sunny yolks of my eggs. “You should probably talk about something else.”

  “I don’t want to,” she said and wriggled closer to me. She wrapped one of my curls around her finger. “But I miss you so much and it’s not the same with Dustin. You don’t have to be jealous of him. We’re used to each other and it’s easy. I thought you were the kind of person who could understand that?”

  “What kind of person is that?” I asked.

  “Advanced,” she said. “You don’t buy into things having to appear a certain way.”

  I hated when my father said we had to look right or do things a specific way because that’s what people expected. Was I doing to her what he did to me?

  “I don’t,” I said quickly.

  “And you understand that sometimes it’s nice to have someone around, even if I don’t care about him like I do about you.”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  “But if it upsets you that much.” She shrugged, wiping egg yolk off her plate with a half-eaten piece of toast.

  “I guess I was upset because I thought it meant something,” I said. I wanted to feel better, but I didn’t.

  “It means I missed you.”

  She put her empty plate on the nightstand and took mine out of my hands, setting it on top of hers. Then she started kissing me. Sex with her was still great. Not like we were huge sex freaks, but once we got started, she went along in whatever direction I wanted to go. (Nothing too out there. Mostly some oral in addition to every which way we could fit two bodies together.) I loved how her curvy body looked in the sheets, especially when she was responding to me, arching her back up or grabbing handfuls of blanket.

  In the middle of sex that morning, I realized that I was breathing fully into my belly, like Blake had said, and I laughed a little. Sierra was too absorbed in the patterns I was tracing with my tongue to notice.

  So I could feel one thing very clearly: lust. Or love. Maybe both. Two emotions. The two best ones. I wasn’t sure I needed any others.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Had I told Sierra she could go on having sex with Dustin? I kept replaying the conversation. I hadn’t said “yes” exactly, but I hadn’t said “no” either.

  I didn’t want to be the jerk who imposed external rules on our relationship based on what people would think. I worried that was the real reason I’d been upset.

  But then I would feel something else that I couldn’t name, a thickly moving emotion like a whale trapped in an oil slick, powerful and helpless. I couldn’t figure it out and I couldn’t figure out how to figure it out. I wanted Blake and Korde
ll to come over and play cards so I could ask her a thousand questions about emotions and life and everything.

  I texted Blake: Are you guys coming over this week?

  She wrote back: Kordi’s doing a family thing today. What’s up?

  I don’t know, I just wanted to talk. I don’t know how you do this whole emotions thing. I can’t figure it out.

  Talk to me, she wrote.

  It’s the stupid thing with Sierra and Dustin again. I still feel weird about it and I don’t know why. Like maybe…I’m worried I’m being an ass about it. But I also feel gross inside. Does gross count as an emotion?

  Of course, she said.

  But why? Sierra’s been great all week but I feel empty. I mean, gross and empty. Is that a thing?

  What kind of empty? Bleak? Tired? Numb? Lost?

  I put my phone down and wandered around the house. I didn’t know there was more than one kind of empty, let alone so many kinds that Blake could rattle off options like that.

  I went to get more Pepsi and figured while I was in the kitchen I’d tidy it up. That turned into me taking everything out of the fridge (not that there was very much in it) and wiping down all the shelves. While I worked I’d try breathing a little and feel awkward and give it up and then try again. All I felt was a very present nothing. Like Novocain at the dentist.

  I went back to my phone and texted Blake: Mostly numb.

  What’s under that? she asked.

  I tried to peer under the feeling. First came the gross feeling, and then a big piece of granite that was the numbness. When I shoved that aside I got a flash of lava-hot rage and a black hole feeling edged with pain.

  Blake was wrong; I was crazy.

  I put my phone down and went to finish the fridge project. After a while Cyd showed up. She took me over to walk around the Macalester campus and have coffee with her sister. Cyd’s sister looked exactly like you’d expect the lesbian version of Cyd to look: lean, angular, elegant and vaguely butch. I loved getting the inside scoop on queer college parties from her, but seriously, I could not handle one more tall girl with killer cheekbones and nonfrizzy hair.