We Want What We Want

by Alix Ohlin

  Stan was pale, reclined. Reddish-brown chest hair sprouted above his hospital gown. He acknowledged Lewis with a grave nod, like a dignitary. “I had no one else,” he said.

  Lewis would have liked to sit down, but there was nowhere to sit. The other men in the room were silent, eyes closed, medicated or comatose. “What happened?” he said.

  Stan said, “I took pills. Not the first time. This, you know, is why Vicky left me. She said bad for the kids. I agree with her.”

  Lewis had a hard time absorbing this information. Vicky hadn’t told him anything about it, nor had she ever mentioned it on her podcast. Stan’s tone was resigned and impartial, an observer to his own behavior. “I have some problems,” he said simply.

  “We all have problems,” Lewis said. Anger welled in him, thickened his voice. “You have children.”

  “True, true,” Stan said.

  Lewis had the urge to punch him. He looked around the room, as if searching for a weapon—there was nothing on the walls, the floor was dirty, it was not a good hospital, it was a hospital for people who couldn’t afford to be in the hospital and ought to do anything to avoid it.

  “You know my wife died,” he said to Stan.

  Stan nodded. “Vicky told me.”

  “She was on vacation with her sister, in the Bahamas. They got a deal on a vacation package. A cheap hotel without proper fire exits. Her sister was downstairs in the bar. She made it out. My wife didn’t.”

  “I am sorry,” Stan said.

  Lewis stepped closer to Stan. He could see large black pores on Stan’s nose, a streak of grey in his eyebrows. He didn’t talk about how he and Gabrielle had fought on the way to the airport, how he’d felt abandoned and she’d said he was controlling, how they’d made up on the phone later—this was why her sister was downstairs in the bar, giving them some privacy—as he told her how he missed her and her body, and her breath came ragged and heavy and beautiful in his ear, and how she said abruptly, “I should go, something’s going on here,” and he didn’t hear anything from her the rest of the night, only waking to the news the following morning, and he hated almost more than anything the fact that he had slept through the hours of her death. He said to Stan, “You are an asshole.”

  Stan nodded. “I am an asshole,” he agreed.

  There was no fighting with him. A nurse came and disconnected the IV. Stan signed some forms and was released. These seemingly simple actions took hours to accomplish and it was midnight by the time they pulled up to Stan’s apartment. Lewis’s drunkenness had dissipated, leaving behind a strangely giddy mood. Sometimes he felt this way, when especially sleep deprived. A sort of buoyancy would set in, an exigent positivity about the world. He followed Stan inside and drew out a chair for him, like a host. “You should have something to eat,” he said. Stan, meek and docile, agreed, and Lewis found a can of Campbell’s soup to microwave. On the yellowing refrigerator Stan’s kids smiled gamely in school photos, their hands positioned on weirdly staged props—a steering wheel, a tree branch. They had Stan’s reddish-brown hair but Vicky’s small upturned nose and round eyes. It must be weird, he thought, to see parts of yourself replicated in another person. Like catching a glimpse of your future, a ghost haunting you in advance.

  “I want to give you something,” Stan said behind him. “As thanks.” From a bookshelf in the living room he pulled a thin blue paperback. It was in Polish. On the back, there was an old black-and-white picture of Stan, reedy and windswept, standing on a bridge in a peacoat. His legs were crossed at the ankle and his crooked smile, half a grimace, was recognizably the same.

  “These are your poems? I wish I could read them.”

  “Just take,” Stan said. “Please. I think I will sleep now.” He staggered to the couch, where he evidently slept, and lay down with his hands beneath his cheek, like a child. Lewis found a blanket and laid it over him. Stan was already asleep, his breath deep and regular. Apparently like Vicky he was a good sleeper. Their marital nights must have been peaceful, Lewis thought. He found himself imagining them in bed, young and undisturbedly asleep, and the thought was pleasant to him. Picturesque. For a while he sat next to Stan and listened to him snore, and then he went home, thinking of Vicky crying at the bus stop, probably after a night like this one.

  His house was quiet and full of people. He turned on a lamp in the living room and opened his laptop. He tapped at the keyboard, putting Stan’s poems into an online translation program. The results were fractured and metaphysical. Something about a moon and a garbage truck. Something about love. Something about a woman in an apartment building, cooking, and he wondered if this was Stan’s mother, back when she was alive. A clown pulled on his shoes and danced. It wasn’t clear to Lewis whether this image was happy or sad, what it was supposed to mean. Maybe a clown dancing was an expression in Polish, like a fat lady singing. Lewis found he preferred not to know. He was not the slightest bit tired. He was awake and alive. He was going to stay up all night.

  FMK

  We’d been to this funeral home twice before—at least, I think we had? I guess it sounds heartless but they blend together, the signs calligraphed with the family name, the floral arrangements and folded programs, the standard chairs in the standard rows. Even the silence feels uniform in these places. They must all use the same soundproofing.

  I followed Cat inside, making intermittent eye contact with strangers and smiling a closemouthed half smile, the facial expression that is also uniform at funerals. Mr. Braverman’s service was standing room only, and we took positions at the back. It was nice to see an overflowing crowd; I hate the funerals with just a few souls huddled in their misery like animals outside in a storm. Here I saw little kids dressed up and fidgety in the second row. Some people don’t like children at a service but I think it helps everyone to remember the promise of youth in the world. I don’t know what it’s like for the kids. An elderly woman in pearls entered the room, and from the way heads swiveled in her direction I took her to be Mrs. Braverman. Her clothes, though elegant, looked at least a size too large, bought for a woman she used to be. Her eyes were hooded and vacant until they lit on Cat, who stepped forward, and they hugged for a long time.

  “Thank you for being here,” Mrs. Braverman said as they let go, and Cat said, “Of course.”

  The widow’s eyes grazed across me and Cat added, “This is my friend Sonia.”

  Mrs. Braverman bobbed her head and moved on. I didn’t bother to tell her I was sorry for her loss; my presence didn’t matter and neither would my words. We came for the hug between her and Cat, who had located Mr. Braverman’s most accommodating vein and rubbed his necrotic feet and emptied his catheter bag and washed his wasted body and left the imprint of Mrs. Braverman’s lipstick kiss on his cheek when he died. Cat was here for Mrs. Braverman. I was here for Cat.

  * * *

  —

  The first time I met Cat she was out with her work friends at the Red Sombrero and they were all drunk off their asses. I was with my work friends, too, but we were admin assistants too poverty-stricken and subservient to cause much of a ruckus—if one of us spilled beer on the table another would rush to wipe it up. I’d been at the job a month and wanted desperately to be promoted, if I didn’t die of boredom first. I’d spent my twenties playing in a band, with nothing to show for it, and now I wanted a steady income and benefits, I wanted to buy a condo and adopt a dog. Sleeping in a real bed night after night still seemed like a luxury to me, a dangling prize that could be snatched away at any time.

  Nonetheless I couldn’t help turning my head when I heard those women whooping and hollering on the other side of the bar. They were playing the most reckless and violent game of darts I’d ever seen. Darts bombed the wall below the target. One woman took a hit to the thigh, howling with pain, and the others only shrieked with laughter. When our waitress, with whom I’d been low-key flirting, brough
t our second round, I tried to offer her some sympathy.

  “Rough customers over there?”

  She glanced over, shrugged. “Every Friday they tear the place up. You can’t say anything to them, though.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because of where they work.” She jerked her head to the side. “Up the street. You know they have to cut loose.”

  I didn’t know what she meant—this wasn’t my neighborhood—but Molly, who sat in the cubicle three down from mine, was nodding vigorously. “Makes sense,” she said.

  “What makes sense?” I said.

  Molly dropped her voice. “Hospice.”

  A dart sailed across the bar and landed near my shoe. I picked it up and carried it over.

  “You have a license for this thing?” I said. The nurses were busy yelling at each other about what shitty throwers they were, and not one of them acknowledged me or took the dart back. I lingered there, like an idiot. Finally one of them turned and said, “Oh shit, sorry,” and grabbed it, but I held on. She was wearing dark blue scrubs with a long-sleeved white T-shirt underneath, and shiny white soccer shoes, and she had long straight black hair that was also shiny. In my memory all of her was gleaming. She tried to take the dart from me and I wouldn’t give it until she told me her name. When I let go, my palm was pricked with blood.

  We live together now in Cat’s condo with a dachshund named Murray who has hip dysplasia and a terrible personality and whose presence in our lives is my greatest regret. I know I’m lucky to have such a manageable regret. I’m lucky in a lot of ways.

  * * *

  —

  Mr. Braverman’s service was delayed. Some people up front were fiddling with a laptop, conferring in anxious whispers. In my opinion multimedia at a funeral is always a mistake. Cat was humming a low tuneless song. She can walk hand in hand with someone to their last breath on this earth but funerals give her so much anxiety she takes a shot of NyQuil and a Xanax before we leave home. One of the little kids started crying and complaining, there was a scuffle involving a folding chair and the harsh whisper of a mother simultaneously pissed off and embarrassed, and around us people shifted uneasily. The mom gathered the kicking kid in her arms and tried to exit the room, but they were on the far side, away from the door, and the kid wasn’t going easily, and he was too big and squirmy for her to carry, and he kicked an old lady’s chair and that was a thing—but then the strains of Barber’s Adagio for Strings issued into the room and people sat up straighter and quieted. The mom rounded the back, dragging the kid, who was trying to plant himself on the floor or something, and I could feel Cat trembling with discomfort, her hands fisted like grenades. No one was helping the mom, who continued scolding her child (“Jake, you are in serious trouble”) at escalating levels of shit-losing.

  I don’t know anything about kids, but I’ve hauled many a drunk douchebag out of a bar show. I grabbed the kid’s legs in one hand and his arms in the other and ferried him out to the hallway. He was so shocked by the rough treatment that he shut up. I kept going until we were all the way out of the building, then let him down on the sidewalk, where he stood frozen in grievance. Snot bubbled out of one nostril, and he just left it there.

  The mom came up behind us. “Sweetie, are you okay?”

  She kneeled down and hugged him like I’d tried to abduct him. No gratitude. I was about to head back inside when she met my eyes and abruptly stood up. She had gold highlights and a wavy blowout but still I knew her: the Fox.

  “Sonia, Jesus,” she said.

  I didn’t say anything. She looked herself but not herself, or in fact exactly herself, in a transformation I could never have predicted but now, on the sidewalk in front of the Dickinson-Donavalli Funeral Home, seemed inevitable. When we were together, years ago, the Fox wore muscle shirts and Doc Martens and shaved her head. I used to love to rest my palm on the soft stubble and tell her I was feeling her thoughts. We met at a show and were madly in love for six months. My friends called her the Fox as in crazy like a, though I told her it was because she was so sexy. Both were true. We were about to move in together when she announced she’d discovered herself to be the reincarnation of a Hindu priestess and was going to an ashram to worship a hugging guru. Also she changed her name to Alisha, which she said meant “protected by god.” I told her she was running away from reality, by which I meant me, and she said her reality wasn’t mine to dictate, and I told her she was desperate to be different, just not in the way she already was, and she never spoke to me again.

  “Alisha,” I said now, and she looked like she had no idea what I was talking about. She was wearing a black suit, very mom-as-executive, and a diamond on her finger the size of a Ring Pop. Her given name was Jennifer.

  “What are you doing at my grandfather’s funeral?” she said. “Is this some stalking thing?” The Fox was also a narcissist, by the way.

  “What? No. I didn’t know you’d be here,” I said. “My girlfriend—” I looked down at the kid, unsure how much to say about end-of-life care. The Fox put her arms around him protectively, although he was busy excavating the snot situation in his nasal cavities and wasn’t paying attention.

  “She’s a nurse,” I finished. “Cat.”

  The Fox nodded. “Oh, Cat. She was great. The best one.”

  Yes, I hear it now, a fox and a cat, and all I can say is that I’ve dated plenty of women without animal names. “Yeah,” I said.

  We paused for a moment, each gauging whether it was worth going into more of a catch-up and deciding it wasn’t.

  “We should head back in,” she said, still without thanking me for my help I might add, and I put my 50 percent smile on and nodded, and that would have been the end of it except that her kid said “No!” and sprinted away down the sidewalk, hell-bent for I don’t know where, and the Fox hissed at me with familiar anger, for all the world as if we were still a couple, “Help me, for God’s sake,” and I obeyed, and we followed him down the street together, while Cat was alone at Mr. Braverman’s service, probably wondering through her medicated haze where I was.

  * * *

  —

  I dated Cat for three months before she let me go out with her and her friends again. Since I’d already met them the first night, I didn’t understand the holdup. I didn’t think she was ashamed of me or us—she brought me around to her family, the lovely and rowdy Zhangs, early on—so it had to be something else. I worried she was dating other people, that she didn’t like me as much as I liked her. She said it wasn’t any of that.

  “I’m not sure you can handle it,” she said.

  “Handle a bunch of nurses?” I said. “You know I toured Norway with a metal band, right? I pumped a guy’s stomach with a homemade siphon?”

  She gave me the look “a bunch of nurses” deserved and rolled her eyes at the rest, which admittedly were stories I had a tendency to tell too often. “It’s not that,” she said. “I just want to wait a while.”

  “How long is a while?”

  She pulled out her phone, tapped, swiped. “Three months.”

  “You wrote it in your calendar?” I said, although I shouldn’t have been surprised. Cat, an exact person, measured her life in the appropriate units. She piled coffee grounds on a food scale before brewing; she used a bullet journal. There was no budging her from the preset conditions, which helped her tread the chaotic border between life and death. When the day I met the nurses arrived, she wasn’t nervous, because she’d planned for it; I on the other hand was sweaty-palmed and stuttery and immediately drank too much, although it didn’t matter because nobody cared about me or paid me any attention at all—they were already drunk and deep into a game of fuck, marry, kill. I didn’t recognize any of the names, and it took me a few minutes to realize that they were playing FMK with the patients, the dying ones at the hospice.

  Cat tipped a tequila s
hot down her throat and said she’d fuck Mary Delozio and marry Jefferson Johns. Her friend Jennie said she was crazy to fuck Mary Delozio, Mary Delozio was a clear kill and Ayelet Sabarsky was the only fuckable patient in the place. Someone high-fived her for that. They dissected the gymnastic possibilities of an adjustable hospital bed. They brainstormed how you’d use a bedpan in the weirdest of scenarios. It was the most profane conversation to which I’ve ever borne witness and I once rode a night bus to Croatia with a band promoter who bragged of operating a lucrative prostitution ring in Dalmatia and urged me to invest. Two hours later my shiny Cat was drooling and puking in the street, and I stroked her hair and put her to bed and that was the first night I told her I loved her; even though I know she doesn’t remember it, I still count it as our anniversary, in whatever private, messy version of a calendar I keep in my heart of hearts.

  * * *

  —

  Through some uncanny instinct the Fox’s kid located a playground in the neighborhood of the funeral home, and when we finally caught up to him, the Fox hobbling in her corporate heels, he was hiding inside a plastic house with window shutters just small enough to make it impossible for us to extricate him.

  “Jakie,” the Fox said, “you need to come out of there this instant.” It was an empty threat and Jakie knew it. I rattled the house a little, to see if I could lift it up around him, but it was bolted to the ground.

  “I can’t believe you’re making me miss Great-Grandpa’s funeral,” the Fox went on. “That is so selfish.”

  Jake sniffled but didn’t answer.

  She looked at me, evidently wanting me to contribute.

  “I think there’s going to be snacks after?” I offered. “I saw some brownies.”

  The Fox’s reaction was of barely controlled fury. “Jake has food sensitivities,” she hissed, as if I was supposed to know.