We Are Watching Eliza Bright

by A. E. Osworth

  Delphine comes home with Trader Joe’s paper bags full of vegetables she can’t get from the Greenmarket in the winter. By now, it is dark and Jean-Pascale hasn’t told her what happened. He wonders if his firing is being reported on the internet yet. Perhaps, he thinks, he’s already been made into a snappy headline and Delphine has read it. Or not, it is a Sunday, after all. If she doesn’t read the headline, if neither of them do, does the headline exist? We see it when it happens, weekend or not. It exists for us.

  He doesn’t sit up or shout for her to come in so he can tell her the bad news. He lets the dark darken while she cooks dinner; the smell of lemon and olive oil fills the apartment. He can hear her mouth snap on carrots while she clunks a wooden spoon against several pots. He hears the soft “hm” when she, he presumes, looks at her phone and realizes what time it is. Realizes he isn’t home yet, when he might normally be. Realizes dinner will soon be done.

  He is suddenly overwhelmed with the simultaneous desires to see and not see Eliza appear on Last Week Tonight. It feels like half of his body tries to tear away, to get up, while the other half becomes more stubborn, more leaden. He fights himself like that for a while.

  He hears Delphine make a noise in the back of her throat—her exasperation call. Despite himself, Jean-Pascale grins. Perhaps this is what it’s like to be finely attuned to a child’s cries, something he has never experienced before.

  His phone begins to ring, but not where Delphine expects it to be. It is in his pocket. “What the—?” Delphine says, as she comes into the bedroom with her phone pressed to her ear. Her forehead shows wrinkles—Jean-Pascale knows her confusion must be acute, for she normally tries not to move her face too much when she isn’t acting. She flicks on the light.

  “Honey, what’s wrong? Are you sick?” She sits down on the bed. Jean-Pascale gets angry, which he knows is ridiculous. But he can’t believe she assumed he was awake. What if he’d been sleeping? She would have woken him up.

  He manages to punch through the anger. Probably because what he says next makes him so sad—like throwing water on his internal fire and watching it sizzle out. “I’m not sick,” he says. “I’m fired.” He curls up and faces the wall with the windows. He doesn’t hear the things Delphine is saying over the buzz in his own head, over the white paint he fixes his eyes on. He is aware that she is rubbing his back, but it isn’t really at the forefront of his consciousness.

  “…that bitch…” she says at one point. “What are we…” he hears, a fragment cracking against the silence; “…don’t worry, I’m sure…” He isn’t even trying to hold on to her sentences. He doesn’t find them meaningful just now. And frankly we can’t be assed to make up the rest of them. If he isn’t interested, neither are we.

  He eventually sits up. “Can I eat?” he asks. She nods, aware that he hasn’t responded to anything she’s said. Jean-Pascale drags himself to the kitchen to serve himself carrot salad and homemade veggie burgers. He eats while having a staring contest with the remote. The remote wins.

  When he is finished, he checks his email. There are six messages from Lewis Fleishman. Jean-Pascale swipes all of them, one by one, into the trash while thinking how good it would feel to put them into a real garbage can instead of a digital one. The last new message is—

  “I got offered a job,” he says. His eyes are wide. He grabs his own curls with both hands like he used to do when he was little and loud noises startled him.

  “What?” Delphine starts laughing, smiling big. “That’s amazing. You haven’t even been on the market a whole day.”

  “‘I understand how things can get blown out of proportion,’” he reads aloud from his computer screen. “‘I don’t want your life to be ruined by some stupid prank and some overblown publicity stunt. Your work must be good—Fancy Dog wouldn’t have hired you otherwise. Consider yourself head hunted, my man. I’d be honored to have you down to the New York City branch of Phasix Studio as early as tomorrow morning so we can give each other a try.’” By the end of the sentence, Jean-Pascale’s lip is curled up of its own volition. He hasn’t processed the emotion entirely, and he doesn’t know where it’s coming from, but he can name it: disgust. Or he thinks perhaps the world he knows, loves, just isn’t built for him anymore and wonders if he should pick another career.

  Delphine interprets his thinking, his weighing, and says, “Okay, so it’s not quite a job offer. But hey, that’s a really solid interview or trial period or something! That’s a really solid something. Nothing to feel bad about there.”

  Instead of responding to either Delphine or the email, Jean-Pascale pushes himself away from the table, goes back to the bedroom and lies down again. He does not speak once before falling into restless sleep.

  Chapter Sixty-Five

  Preston can’t decide about watching Last Week Tonight. He’d never been on this show, but he liked the experience of going on The Daily Show as much as he could have at the time. He thinks perhaps he forgot to truly enjoy himself, to savor it. But he pushes that away. The idea that he is missing something he can’t get back scares him.

  In the end, he clicks on the interview just in time to hear John Oliver say, “…you know. It’s my job to make fun of the news, I’m a comedian. But—” He pauses in that signature John Oliver way, where we can sense him taking a big breath because he is about to race-shout through several sentences at once. His hands pushed against the top of his desk, his entire body pointing toward the camera. John Oliver lets out his string of words, like machine-gun fire or the speedy banter from old movies: “I can’t really make any of these threats into something funny—”

  He turns the television off before he knows what he’s doing, before John Oliver inevitably gets to the punch line, his awe and anger made somehow funnier by the posh British accent. Preston tries to will himself to push the little red button, to hear what Oliver will say next, how Eliza will respond. He can’t do it. He thinks he could’ve been on there with her; she could’ve been rehired, there could have been a redemption story here. Or: She was always going to use this to get her fifteen minutes, that worthless slut. Or: He is pining, he’s fucked, he’s cucked, he’s lost. Instead of watching, he walks in circles around his almost-empty living room. He thinks perhaps he’ll play Guilds, but then he is struck by the realization that he hasn’t played—really played, not just tested something—in months. That isn’t the most surprising part of his epiphany, though. For Preston, the strangest thing about it is the realization that he doesn’t want to.

  Chapter Sixty-Six

  They have a woman named Aisha on here too, this feminist game critic,” Mrs. Fleishman says as she shovels Cap’n Crunch into her mouth, sitting on the couch in front of the television. “God, he just keeps calling all these women out. They’re sitting on risers, there’s so many— Lewis, you can’t tell me this has happened to all of these people?”

  “Ma. I don’t want to talk about it.” Lewis stands in his living room. When he realizes his mother is home, he tries to change course to his bedroom, to email Jean-Pascale again, when he freezes, staring at the program his mother’s watching on his big screen.

  “I can’t really make any of these threats into something funny. I’m not talking about everyday internet abuse, of which I’m more than aware. I’m talking about the kind of direct threats that make people fear for their safety. And if you think that doesn’t sound like that big of an issue, congratulations on your white penis.” The audience roars as he continues his spiel, as tweets, Facebook posts and Reddit threads all begin to rapidly flash in that false floating box over his right shoulder. All the women in the audience scream with laughter; it’s so shrill. What a disappointment. “Because if you have one of those, you probably have a very different experience on the internet than our guests today.” The audience applauds. “Please welcome—”

  But we’re not paying attention to John Oliver. Instead, we imagine Lewis’s face, his mouth open like a Nutcracker. He doesn’t want to he
ar the rest of the broadcast but he can’t seem to make himself walk to his bedroom, shut the door. “Ma,” he says, wanting her to look away from the television. “I think you should turn it off, you don’t really like the technology stuff anyway.”

  Mrs. Fleishman’s hair is in rollers—she is a young mom, only at the tail end of her forties. She has an array of red lipsticks on the coffee table in front of her, to be decided on and applied when she’s finished her cereal. She wears a dress—a bright navy blue with repeating white anchors. It is too bright for winter and certainly too bright for New York City, but when Lewis pointed this out to her upon its purchase, she’d snorted and said, “Like I give a fuck.” Lewis always hates the classic New York–ness of the way she says “like.” It sounds like “loike.” He’s battled that pronunciation his entire life.

  Mrs. Fleishman’s red high heels are resting, upright and waiting, next to the couch. Lewis turns a little crimson—his mother is going on a date. Judging from the cereal, she isn’t quite certain about the restaurant choice. “Thai food,” she’s said sometime in the past, “I could take it or leave it.” Lewis blushes deeper at remembering that, in his mother’s pronunciation lexicon, “Thai” and “like” almost rhyme. He gets angry and swallows, scratching at his neck. As an adult, Lewis has tried to talk his mother out of dating on several occasions, each of which has been unsuccessful.

  Mrs. Fleishman lifts a well-tweezed eyebrow. “They’ve said your name on this show. You better believe I’m watching it.” The space above where Lewis thinks his stomach is starts burning. “Your friend Jean-Pascale,” she continues. “He was fired today.” She points at the screen with her dripping spoon. “I can’t say I don’t think he deserved it.”

  Lewis runs through several responses in his head: of course she thinks he deserved it—the mainstream media always makes white men the villains. Or, Jean-Pascale absolutely did not deserve to be fired and you know absolutely nothing about it, don’t fucking talk about shit you don’t know. Or, yes, he did deserve to be fired, but not for the reasons they’re saying here. He chooses instead to say nothing. He makes a mental note, as he does every day, to kick his mother out of his apartment, and he finally wrenches himself away from the television, from his mother, and closes the door to his bedroom. Puts headphones on.

  We should focus on Mrs. Fleishman for the thirty seconds after her son leaves the living room. She puts her bowl and spoon down because her hands begin shaking and she thinks perhaps she’ll drop them. She touches her own face, her own forehead, and she wonders what to do about her son; she’s wondered that many times in her life, some of us think. And she did not expect to have to wonder it in his adulthood. She wonders what she’s done wrong. Others of us, we think she’s cruel; she hasn’t thought about her son much at all. If she’d only done something before this, something for him, perhaps he wouldn’t do what he does. Lewis Fleishman, what becomes of him, is her fault.

  Chapter Sixty-Seven

  Preston finds himself standing outside Eliza’s building after the Last Week Tonight broadcast he didn’t watch, mere hours after firing Jean-Pascale. He is about to simply go up, tell the doorman, but within steps of the entrance he realizes how insane he’s being, not asking first yet again, and he ducks into a café, texts her.

  “Mind if I drop by?” he types out as he juggles between apps so he can pay with Apple Pay. Swipe, check, done. Receipt email. He now has coffee and a scone, slightly stale from the day. He checks his cup—no name to Instagram.

  “Sure,” pops up in a white bubble. “But I’m not home yet.” The messages are careful. They are spelled properly, punctuated. We can’t tell what that means. Trying to impress? Angry? Wary? Aware she’s being observed? Doesn’t actually want to see him? It grows later, darker. The city begins to shimmer with cold rain as only December can provide. The café doesn’t close. His coffee grows cold, but he doesn’t feel like making another purchase, so he nurses it nonetheless.

  He watches as she gets out of a black car—did they call her a car service?—and enters the building. She stumbles a bit. Of course, he would have gone out for dinner and drinks with the rest of them too, if he were in her place. It was probably a good interview. It probably required celebration. She probably didn’t want to watch the broadcast, and why would she? She’s living it.

  “How about now?” he types, after a safe amount of time.

  “Sure—I’ll be showered by the time you get here.”

  She expects him to be at work or at home, like a normal person. He sips his coffee. He doesn’t feel the need to tell her he’s across the street, that he saw her only moments ago, just as we saw her moments ago. He plays a game on his phone. He shuts the game. He flips his phone over. He wonders how long it usually takes him to get here. It feels like he’s been coming here forever, like the past few days have each contained within them an entire revolution around the sun. How long should he sit and pretend he is en route? His scone is aggressively mediocre; he chews it anyway, counting to one hundred and counting to one hundred again.

  Why is he here? We’re not sure he knows, exactly. Booty? To rehire her, try again? Jealousy at her television appearance? A need to be in proximity to her as she blazes, white hot, with the heat of our attention? The base need to try and save her from the many-headed monster that is us? That last is too mean for Preston; we are his people.

  Finally, he approaches the doorman, who buzzes him up. He is about to knock on the door when it opens. He almost knocks Eliza right in the face, right in the mouth. “I got a job,” she says, unfazed by the fist so close to the end of her nose. “Or at least”—she turns away and leads him in, toward her computer—“an interview? I have something.”

  She sits on her couch. Preston stands, not moving into her apartment any farther than he has to. He shuts the door behind him and he almost forgets to lock it (stupid!). Her smallness reminds him and he turns to click the deadbolt.

  “Here’s part of it,” she continues, not noticing he hasn’t stepped past the entrance, past the little square mat immediately beyond the threshold: “‘We saw you on Last Week Tonight and believe what happened to you at Fancy Dog was morally reprehensible. We’re impressed with the VR drop and know you were critical to that patch going through. We’d be honored to fly you out to sunny Santa Cruz to interview you’ blah blah blah self-contained project blah.” Her eyes skim down the page as she holds a wine glass up to her lips. “You know that project’s going to take more than ninety days,” she mutters. “Oh hey, ‘A little bit about us,’” she keeps reading to Preston. “‘Fifty percent of our four vice presidents are women, as is one of the co-founders, so nonsense like—’”

  “Okay, stop,” Preston says. How dare she! How brazen, how hurtful! He hops a tiny bit forward, like he wants to rush in and cover her mouth with his hand, but he doesn’t shout.

  “What, Preston, I’m only reading you what these people at”—Eliza squints—“See No Monkey Studios sent m—”

  “Oh great, ‘See No Monkey.’ What a stupid name.”

  “God, Preston, I—” But Eliza stops. She isn’t sure how she feels, or how she means to finish the sentence. We try a couple endings out for her:—was seeing if you believed I didn’t know See No Monkey is one of your biggest competitors?—was genuinely excited?—wanted to try to get you to leave and stop coming here? She isn’t sure which is the true sentence ending; we aren’t sure they all aren’t true at the same time. It is getting harder and harder to separate, to use ||, the “or” operator that we love so much. Perhaps that is the lesson we are supposed to be learning: people, even those we deem titans or villains or tragic heroes, are soup.

  Preston, however, knows much more about his feelings in this moment. “Did it occur to you that I wouldn’t want to hear this?” He lets the tension out of his face and sits next to her on the couch. “Look, my offer still stands. I still want to rehire you.”

  “Even after—?” Eliza’s question dies midthought.

 
; “Yes, even after—” Preston feels silly saying it and he feels silly not saying it. Or it’s not about sex at all (but it’s definitely about sex). “Look, we could figure that out.” His face is very close to hers again.

  Eliza is drunk, like last time. Her phone is still buzzing. She switches it off. “Could we though? Could we really?” She doesn’t move her face back.

  “I’m sure we could.” He kisses her. He is angry and he is kissing her. “We built a whole world, after all,” he says when he comes up for air.

  They do finish, this time. They down a bottle of wine while waiting the requisite amount of time, and finish again. He falls asleep, neither one talking about the job even though it is on the tip of Eliza’s tongue. Once again, she lies sleepless. Everything is cold and scary here; “Sunny Santa Cruz” doesn’t sound like a bad option. She wants to talk it all out with him, the thoughts that are bouncing around in her head like so many rubber balls. They give her a headache but still she doesn’t say anything; she doesn’t want to see his face tense up again. Or she wants to play her cards right, get the most money, the most advantageous position possible. Or Preston is on the couch, and none of this happened. Or she falls asleep. We can still use the || operator, after all.

  Chapter Sixty-Eight

  It is around six in the morning and she thinks she’s dreaming. A hollow pok pok pok echoes in the hallway. It sounds distant and she doesn’t want to wake up. It might not even be real, and she’s only sunk into sleep two hours prior. Eliza curls herself into Preston’s side; he takes up so much space in the bed, and her semi-sleeping brain can’t decide if she should shrink to fit or grow in protest. Or she spreads all her limbs out like a starfish, hogging the whole bed from no one because no one will ever fuck her. She falls back into unconsciousness.