U UP?

by Catie Disabato

  I swiveled as she walked away from me, watched her fast transform back into the placid leader of a meditative sound bath, asking everyone to lay on their back in the most soothing of voices. That bitch thought she’d won, but I’d show her.

  I stomped back to my rug and flopped hard onto my back, nestled in next to Lydia.

  “What was that?” she whispered.

  “Colleen and I don’t see eye-to-eye on matters of the spiritual realm,” I said. “I’ll show that bitch.”

  Lydia rolled her eyes, “Meditation isn’t supposed to have anger as a driving factor.”

  “Revenge, not anger. Let me find my motivation wherever,” I said.

  “Let’s turn our third eyes inward,” Colleen said loudly, “And close the other two.”

  Lydia schooled herself into a good student’s perfect posture, but when I felt Colleen turn away, I squinted my eyes open. I saw her pick up a large, caramel-colored alchemy bowl and run a short wand along the inside. The bowl rang, a pleasant drone, and Colleen sang a chant in a language I didn’t understand. All the ladies settled down to meditate; Colleen turned her eyes on me again, sharply, noticing my squint. I smirked, closed my eyes, gratuitously tensed all the muscles in my body, then dramatically relaxed. I pantomimed serious devotion to a meditative ritual.

  At first I was as twitchy as I always was in meditation. Both sides of my nose itched and I suffered as I tried not to scratch, suffered as I tried not to shift my body from side to side to find the exact right positions for my arched back, my squished ass, my hard heels, my whole foot. I tried to listen to the chimes, to focus on the fire that made me want to prove Colleen super fucking wrong about me.

  In the lavender-scented air, soothed despite myself by the echoey chimes, my mind wandered into my body; for a while, for maybe as long as ten minutes, my thoughts leveled into something pleasant and pristine. For whole moments, I didn’t miss Miggy or worry about Ezra’s whereabouts and motivations. That was nice, but as always when I attempted to meditate, my mind eventually turned to daydreams about sex. Not exactly the sex act, not the various forms of licking or penetration that characterized most of my sexual encounters, but the shapes of bodies that I liked. I like the outer curves of hips, the way knuckles curve and bump like a mountain range, the look of tufty pubic hair when a woman takes off her underwear in front of you for the first time.

  Though I rarely fuck them anymore, I do also appreciate a really sexy guy. Miggy always looked really good to me, showing off his well-shaped but lean biceps in his endless collection of pastel and sky-colored tank tops; his well-manicured moustache that made him look like the guy who got the most ass in San Francisco in 1976; his one crooked canine that he would lick at, like a husky; his long, long torso. All of this was dead, now, but I had my memories. Like that time he was housesitting for his boss in the Hollywood Hills. It was a hot afternoon, and we swam and ate dinner, then decided to moon bathe and night swim. We decided to skinny-dip because we could, because it was just our small core group, just Miggy, Ezra, Nozlee, and me. That was the first time I saw Noz naked. I was trying not to watch her even though I’m hungry to see any naked body I’ve never seen before, so I was glancing around a lot, looking at Migs more than I normally did maybe, and accidentally turned my head at just the right moment to see Noz take off her underwear. Her breasts were out already, tan-lined, nipples taut, and as she peeled away her blue underwear she revealed neatly groomed, dark hair on her pussy, the color the hair on her head had been before she’d started bleaching it out. She saw me looking, wiggled her eyebrows at me, and laughed.

  “You doing this?” she’d said.

  I pulled my stretchy bra over my head and tossed it at her like a bride throwing a bouquet. Had Ezra and Miggy seen us flirting? Had they seen us fall into a pattern of female homosexuality that’s designed to appeal to a heterosexual male gaze? Had Ezra saved his memories of our public flirtation for the next time he’d jerked off? I’m not sure. I remember only Nozlee, that she’d laughed and told me my little tits were better than her big ones, and we’d been bathed in the blue neon lights from the swimming pool, and that soon we were in, and swimming.

  I held onto the image of the blue glow of the lights, clenching and unclenching my thigh muscles because I needed to move in some way and I was trying to appear still; I was as deep into the meditation as I was going to get. Then unbidden, I slipped into a different memory, from sometime last year, Nozlee, Ezra, Miggy, and I walking down Sunset Blvd in Silver Lake as the sun set; our footsteps in synchronicity. In that moment, I’d felt like part of one big feeling of love that we all had for each other, radiating from one body to the next. But now the memory was one of love and closeness lost, Miggy leaving me and Nozlee blowing up the small pocket of love I had left. The meditation had sunk me so deep into my own feelings I could feel sadness knot itself into fear and the fear burn into anger. The anger didn’t transform, it just turned my body to fire.

  Witch Colleen had taught all of her students who were “post-cognitives” (her very nineties-era term for people who see ghosts) to find the point of origin inside their body for their “sixth sense” (another truly lol turn of phrase that she’d been using from way before the movie came out, but that I could never dissociate from a prepubescent Haley Joel Osment whispering I see dead people). We were to discover or decide the “location of emanation” of our ghost-seeing, as a way to manage and control it. Like probably 99 percent of our class “discovered” or, more likely, decided that their location of emanation was in their Third Eye. Typical. Nozlee and I considered ourselves a cut above the rest, so our places in the body had to be unique. She choose the swell of her bottom lip. I chose the palms of my hands.

  Slowly, so I wouldn’t attract attention from the other meditators, I turned my arms over so my hands faced upwards, and I sought a ghost. The meditation space was still serenely free of ghostly energy, so I pushed myself in a way I normally tried to avoid; I searched the sidewalk outside the crystal store. I searched the street. I stretched, and it ached, like taking a really deep yoga pose that you have to hold for a very long time. Lingering half formed on a corner, I found a young woman, who was reaching out too. I didn’t know what she was thirsting for, but I would give her something wet to eat.

  Come on, I coaxed it. Come find me.

  The half-ghost sparked, started to re-form, drifted down the street, towards the crystal shop, with barely any coaxing. The ghost drifted all the way to the entrance of the crystal shop, then stalled, its body coalescing and then fading out over and over again, like a heartbeat.

  Please, please, I begged it. Please come here.

  It couldn’t get in I realized. Something that rude meditator had done to the space was keeping it clear of ghosts; unfortunately for her, I was both more powerful and pissed. I psychically felt around for the corners of the witch’s spell, and when I found one, I peeled it away with my mind’s fingernails, like peeling packing tape off a box from Amazon. I picked and picked, while the woman ghost scraped on the other side. My attention was making her strong, her face was formed enough that I could make out her features; she was looking more and more familiar.

  Finally the hole in the protection spell was big enough for the ghost to somersault through. She pulsed and her body came into focus; it was the ghost from my walk on Silver Lake Blvd this morning, the one who had waved at me.

  I sat up onto my forearms and thought in her direction, Are you following me?

  “So what if I was?” she said, drifting closer to me, her eyes white and wide.

  The rest of the room was still, the women on their backs, Colleen softly playing her sound bowl with her eyes closed, the sound waves making the ghost vibrate like waves on the surface of a pond.

  Leave me alone, dead bitch.

  “Please, please. Please come here!” she said, her voice mimicking my unspoken pleas from a few minutes before.


  I didn’t know who I was calling.

  “You should be more careful, witch,” she said. She hovered right above me and her teeth grew sharp.

  I didn’t flinch, Why are you following me?

  “Somebody asked me to follow you,” she said. She reached out with one pointer finger and her fingernail grew long so she could scrape it along my cheek.

  Who told you to follow me?

  “Wouldn’t you like to know?” she mocked.

  TELL ME WHO WAS—

  “Sit up,” a voice said, panicked. The woman who owned the studio. Her eyes were wide, but searching. She could feel the ghost but not see it. And then I couldn’t see her either, she let her body fade into nothing. I felt her, lingering, but receding from me. The whole room stirred, women doing what their leader had told them to do. Lydia swiveled her neck to get out the kinks. Colleen glared at me, knowing what I had done.

  “I think that was a little shorter than normal,” Lydia whispered to me conspiratorially.

  “Please, everyone, sit up,” the store owner said, still sounding like someone had set her house on fire. She wasn’t sure what to do.

  “It’s not a big deal,” I said, not loudly, but I knew Colleen was hearing me. “It’s just a small disturbance.”

  “It’s a big deal to me, I paid forty dollars,” Lydia said.

  Above me, I heard the ghost cackling. Maybe the store owner could hear it too.

  I looked at Colleen, and she was looking at me. Her face was stricken. Her unbothered students were starting to stretch and chat softly to each other about how good they felt, post-meditation. Colleen looked only at me.

  “Let’s get out of here,” I said to Lydia. “I need a drink.”

  Friday, 9:09 p.m.

  We arrived at the party already a little tipsy, ready to be friendly to everyone. A Chairlift song I liked was playing off an iPhone plugged into the speaker, and my friends were spread throughout the familiar living room, the narrow kitchen, and the porch where everyone’s discarded couches provided ample, if weather damaged, spots to sit and smoke. The group was slightly smaller and friendlier than it had often been over the past year; when she and I were still together, Bea had always invited a small pack of her scary cool dyke friends to my group’s parties, and everyone had fun flirting with each other, but sometimes they had been cold and distant and mean. I squeezed Lydia’s shoulder to signal that I was splitting off from her and she responded by pulling me into a sideways hug and whispering in my ear that she loved me, to make sure that any rough edges from our tiff at dinner were smoothed to softness. I told her I loved her too and then she was able to leave my side; she pushed into the crowd at the kitchen doorway, saying hello to everyone, and I ducked into the corner with the iPhone; I added three trap songs to the Spotify queue.

  While I’d always been closest with Ezra, Miggy, Lydia, Georgie, and even Bea, every person around me sparked warm and complicated memories, all the pleasures and sufferings of my adult life spread around me, contained in the bodies of my friends. All of them looked hot to me. I’d driven with Leslie to her twenty-seventh birthday in Palm Springs, my hatchback trunk filled with beers and pool floaties, Miggy napping in the backseat; I’d hiked with Barbara through a previously unknown part of Elysian Park while she recounted her mother’s quick death from adult leukemia, when she was in high school; shopping trips to the Americana with Natalie, stoned and buying socks from H&M; Courtney and I screaming at each other in the alley next to Cha Cha Lounge, after she made jokes about me that I thought were mean and she thought were gentle teasing; the first time I ever met Dorothy, unfamiliar but sitting next to each other in the movies, not awkward with each other, because she spent the entire movie whispering the funniest shit in my ear—I can’t remember what movie it was, I can’t remember what she said, but Dorothy remembers because she remembers everything; Sam and I doing our usual karaoke duet on “Forgot About Dre,” me doing the Eminem part; drunk and twenty-three, fighting with Andrew about the TV show Lost, which somehow turned into a real fight, and I cried in the bathroom, and apologized and apologized and apologized; dancing on the beach in Mexico with Nancy, the Kanye West song “Fade” playing on her portable speakers, and later when she changed the music to Broken Social Scene and we lay on our backs in the sun and talked about everything until the sun started setting, and when we got up, we brushed the sand off each other’s backs and went back into the Airbnb where the rest of our friends were waiting, shouting happily at our return, and we all did shots of tequila and someone wrapped their arm around me and I felt the smell of their armpit and the warmth of their body.

  I longed to see Miggy in the crowd, effortlessly sexy with the sleeves on his shirt rolled, an unlit cigarette in his hand as he searched for someone to smoke with, so he wouldn’t have to stand outside alone. Miggy hated being alone. He always had roommates, traveled in groups; he could barely go buy groceries alone, when he ran errands he’d listen to podcasts. I think he was scared of what his brain would produce when it was left alone.

  PM Miggy

  i’ll volunteer when i’m dead

  How about when I’m dead?

  Today 9:15 PM

  missing ya at a party rn

  wish you had a body so we could smoke together rn

  Weed or cigarette?

  Not like it matters

  whichever, anything

  Are you being maudlin in public right now?

  I decided not to answer him.

  Georgie

  Today 10:53 AM

  woman, you were ful of a smoky scotch whiskey and spouting inanities, are you feeling filthy & disgusting this a.m.?

  Today 9:11 PM

  Did u just go to dinner with Lydia?

  I’m in Chelsea’s bedroom, I need to talk to you.

  i’ll make my way back there

  I hugged everyone who was nearby and asked about how their weeks had been, got caught up on the small moments in all my friends’ lives. I felt a hand wrap around my wrist and turned towards the new person; it was Tommy, who lived in the house with their girlfriend Chelsea. They squeezed my arm in manic little pulses, which meant they had coke and had done some already.

  “Hiya babe,” I said, turning to wrap them in a hug. They made a druggy sort of purring noise in my ear. I’d fucked Tommy once, when I’d first moved to LA, we were maybe twenty-two, but no attraction remained, at least on my end. There was little attraction to begin with, truly; even before Tommy’s gender presentation had shifted from futch to masculine-of-center, they’d had markedly masculine energy. They were lanky and beautiful with their Doc Martens and rolled t-shirt sleeves, and though I understood them to be widely desired all over the LA scene, pheromonally I didn’t respond to them.

  “How are you?” Tommy shouted over the music.

  “Pretty okay,” I shouted. “Have you heard from Ezra today?”

  “Yeah!” they shouted. I must’ve looked at them with some kind of bug eyes, and they looked startled in response.

  “What did he say?” I shouted.

  “He texted me and Chelsea together, to say he couldn’t make it.”

  “When?”

  “Like an hour ago?”

  So, after I’d locked his phone. And to text he would’ve had to unlock his phone, and see the message I’d left him to get in touch with me. But, no, he could’ve been texting on his computer. As much as it felt like Ezra was letting me stress, there was a chance that he just didn’t know I was looking for him. I wanted to believe that if he knew how hard I was looking for him, no matter what, he’d hit me back. If I could see his texts to Tommy and Chelsea, I could maybe tell if he’d sent them from his phone or his computer based on whether some words had been automatically capitalized. Maybe he’d dropped his phone in the toilet at the Drawing Room.

  �
��Can I see? Did he say why?”

  Tommy shrugged, “Come to the back room! I think Chels texted with him more!”

  Tommy grabbed me by the wrist again and pulled me through the singing crowd to their back bedroom, pictures of cacti and surfers on the wall, all taken by our friend Gabe, who was in the living room singing somewhere.

  “I was going to ask you to come back here anyway,” Tommy said. The song from the living room, something by Frank Ocean, sounded tinny and tiny in the bedroom with the door closed. Chelsea was sprawled on the bed, wearing a gauzy birthday dress; Georgie was curled up in the chair, her knees up, pissed-off body language. The mirrored end table was cleared off except for several long lines of coke and an uncurling one-dollar bill.

  “Eve!” Chelsea squealed.

  “Chelseeeeee,” I squealed, and sloppily pressed my body into hers for a hug.

  “Here you go honey,” I said, pulling a sealed envelope out of my bag and handing it to her. Like a raccoon, she scrambled with her little hands to get it open. She opened the card and watched her present drift out: a personal check, for one million dollars, cut in half.

  “If it was your full birthday, you’d get the whole check,” I said.

  Chelsea cackled.

  “Don’t try to cash it,” I said. “It’ll bounce.”

  I sat next to Georgie, then gestured at the coke on the table, “Do you mind?”