I rounded the corner at the end of my block, slowed to a lopsided trot and then a walk. Finally I stopped in front of my building and sat down on the stoop.
I supposed I was getting exactly what I’d asked for: I’d been consigned to the daydream, forced to see its terrible unfolding all the way through. Perhaps this was Fate: the thudding inevitability contained like a dark seed at the heart of our most private desires. It lay dormant until something coaxed it awake; once awoken it grew riotously, choking and overtaking all previous paths.
I tried to breathe deeply and stay in place. My heart was pounding—from the run or from the fear, I couldn’t be certain. I felt my phone buzz in my pocket. It had to be Samira, asking me what had happened, seeking to confirm my okayness. I let the phone go on buzzing, then die: I couldn’t confirm anything for anyone. Finally I let out a long exhale and made my way back up the stairs.
* * *
After that, of course, things could hardly get better. Thomas was permanently spooked, like a skittish horse: doom-nettled, frantic-eyed, haunted. I was hardly better myself, though I succeeded in maintaining a surface calm. We almost never left my apartment. Actually, he didn’t leave at all, worried that someone would see him in his disintegrating state. He never said so, but I knew. It was unclear which he feared more: the stares of human passersby or some otherworldly repercussion, one he lacked the language to explain.
Each day, his dissolution accelerated visibly; he grew porous as Swiss cheese; he was increasingly more absent than present. I left only to work or get provisions, racing back home as soon as I could, hoping to find him still there. Our every interaction was a game, a race against his body. When he had a stomach we stuffed ourselves with food. When he had a penis I sucked it into a rifle. When he had a tongue he kissed me so deep it was as if he was planting seeds inside of me, pushing them into the dark loam of my throat, hoping to burrow some part of himself into my living flesh.
But mostly we waited. Mostly he was too tired to do anything else. It took a lot of energy to hold himself together, even partially. At night we’d lie on our backs on the bed, a thin strip of space between us, like husband and wife mummies. He slept or half slept, conserving energy, trying to stay this side of nowhere. But I, I, I: I was a thin blade of somethingness, and I’d never wanted him worse. I lay next to him, aching and aflame, remembering the last times he’d touched me, fantasizing about when he’d touch me next, scheming my way out of the knowledge waiting for me like so much unopened mail.
On my days off I sat in bed with him, holding his hand, or whatever part of his body was available to me at that moment, and we watched movies or I read out loud to him or stroked his head in my lap while I listened to him fret: “What’s going to happen to me? What’s going to happen to you?”
It was already clear that in some way, by joining my body with this warm-fleshed ghost’s, I had at least placed my toe on the line between life and death. I might even have crossed it. Death had penetrated me. I had penetrated death. At night I continued having strange dreams—swimming through that river paved with black stones, or seeing myself walk blindfolded through a dark forest, or watching my earless double drip rivers of blood.
And those were just the visions that belonged to me. Now I had also begun to dream of his death, but imagelessly: just a deep darkness, then a scream like a gash through the air. When I woke up from these dreams and saw him sleeping there next to me, oblivious to the journey I’d just taken through his memory, I knew that even though he had in some way survived it, in other ways he was still trapped in that moment—even when he was walking or sleeping or eating or making love, he would always be flinching in response to that scream. If my body might occasionally muffle it, provide him insulation, give him the illusion of safety—well, that was purpose enough for me, for now.
And as for the rest of my life? I tried not to think about my friends, but sometimes I couldn’t help it. I’d sent vague, placating texts to Jimmy and Samira and Flor, but I knew I couldn’t hold them off much longer—eventually they would stage some sort of intervention, or desert me completely. The two possibilities were equally unthinkable. Just wait, I silently pleaded. Just wait until I get to the other side of this, whatever that looks like. Just wait until I see whether there’s anything left of me then. Please don’t give up on me yet.
* * *
One day, back at the library—in fact, I remember exactly what day it was; it was September twenty-ninth, my mother’s birthday—I was going through a stack of books to reshelve, organizing them by call number, when one of the numbers jumped out at me for some reason. The call number was 942.13.
I frowned: 942.13. Why did that number sound familiar? Then I remembered: this was the number that the strange man had cited in my dream about the hospital room and the bloody ears, the dream I’d had the second night Thomas stayed over.
I picked up the book. It was called Fjords of the World: A Compendium. I flipped briefly through it. It was an old book with a cloth cover, frayed and finger-oiled, falling apart at the edges. All of the illustrations of fjords were drawn in ink, in a careful, crabby hand. My eye alighted on a random phrase: Fjords can penetrate the earth very deeply. Norway’s Sognefjord extends more than four thousand feet below sea level.
“Have you ever been to Norway?” the man had asked me. At this point nothing really surprised me anymore. I didn’t know how or why it had found me, this book, but I knew—the way you just know things—that I had to get home, immediately.
I called out some excuse to Tanya and Jo-Ann and ran outside, flagging down a green taxi instead of waiting for the bus. When the car screeched to a halt in front of my building, I threw a twenty at the driver without checking the fare, slammed the door, and went inside.
I ran up the stairs to my apartment and then stopped short, breathless, on the fourth-floor landing. The silence was deafening. Something loosened and dropped inside of me, like an elevator cut from its cables. Frantic now, I pulled out my keys and fidgeted open the door.
I yelled Thomas’s name as I entered, but just as I’d feared: no response. I walked through the apartment looking for him, calling his name just in case, but of course there was no one there. No one in the bed, no one beneath it. No one on the couch or in the kitchen. No one on the toilet or under the sink. Just me, and my apartment, and the vacuum that had opened up in my life.
He was gone. Whatever world he’d come from had finished reclaiming him. And along with him, it had claimed some part of me.
I lay down on the bed and curled up. I’d been half expecting this moment to come, but I couldn’t accept that it had finally arrived. I couldn’t believe it had happened without me. When I’d allowed myself to think about it, I’d pictured this kind of tearful deathbed scene, his body lying on top of mine and fading away slowly, both of us crying while he pointillistically disintegrated. My body would be the last thing his body touched in this world. Just imagining it now, in his absence, I felt tears welling up; I shut my eyes hard, to hold them in.
But just when I felt them hot behind my eyeballs, just when I was about to open my mouth and let out a wail, I stopped. I sensed someone’s presence in the room.
I opened my eyes and looked around. No one was there. In the gray twilight, the bed was a moonscape of tangled sheets and emptiness. But then I felt him.
Well, not him exactly. That tingle, the one from the mailbox and the holes in his body? It was suddenly on top of me, covering my whole body, everywhere. The tingles moved tighter and faster over certain areas, and I intuitively understood that he—or his absence, his shadow—was touching me in those places. A man-shaped absence, equal to him, was straddling me, holding my arms, nuzzling my neck.
In case you’ve never made love with an invisible person before, and I’m guessing you haven’t, let me tell you what it’s like. It’s amazing. Obviously, he didn’t have any body parts, but I sensed where he was by the location and the pressure of his touch. In response, my hands moved
over and through him. Then he was inside me, his absence was making love to me. I was fucked by the void.
It was already so much better, now that he didn’t have a body. I could sense, in the ease with which he moved over me, that he felt joyful and free, that he wasn’t in pain anymore. He was no longer killable; he had no body left to kill. No one could find him because there was nothing left to find.
Plus, we had no secrets anymore. How can someone who does not have a mouth keep a secret? It’s an oxymoron. Or that’s the wrong word, but you know what I mean. By altering what honesty meant, we had made a new kind of honesty possible.
It turns out that an absence can penetrate you much more thoroughly than a presence. As he moved inside and on top of me, the tingles worked their way through me, so that I felt them not just in the places he was actually touching me but all through my body. My bloodstream was flecked with cold glitter. I was pricked open like a sieve.
He moved faster and faster on top of me, over me, inside me, and then there it was: he was bursting through me, and I was bursting through myself, and I thought that probably no two people had ever been more together, except for the tiny fact that one of them wasn’t there at all.
Mark
* * *
The other day, I watched a movie about an island in Spain that wasn’t really an island. It was a large piece of land floating on the surface of the Mediterranean, untethered to the seafloor. Its inhabitants went about their business as anybody would, fishing and cooking and sunning themselves on the beaches—but once in a while, a swell of current would rock the land from side to side, making them seasick. The film showed a diver exploring the island’s underside: a shelf of scaly rock, covered with algae and moss. It was like some kind of submerged lunar surface. Like the sea had swallowed the moon.
It was this image that snagged my attention as I was flipping through the channels before bed as a way of turning off my brain. Reality show, reality show, Everybody Loves Raymond rerun, infomercial, reality show—then suddenly this otherworldly underwater landscape. At first I thought I’d imagined it—as though somehow my subconscious had projected it into my visual field. That was how deep, how private, the image felt. I put the remote down and watched the film all the way through to the end.
When I finally turned it off and made my way to the bedroom, my girlfriend was lying on her half of the bed, turned toward the wall, pretending to sleep. I can always tell when she’s pretending, and she only pretends when she’s mad at me. After some coaxing, I learned why: apparently at one point she’d appeared in the doorway of the living room in her pajamas and asked me if I was coming to bed. I hadn’t responded; I hadn’t even looked in her direction, though she’d repeated her question two, then three times.
“Sometimes you frighten me,” she said. “You just…check out. It’s like nobody’s home, like you’ve gone somewhere else.”
I told her the truth—that I’d just been really interested in the movie—but this sounded dumb, even to me. I tried to explain that it hadn’t really been about the film itself. But what it was about, I couldn’t say; I only knew that those images had touched something in me and grazed it awake—some private, dark-tendriled thing I’d been trying to ignore.
After my girlfriend finally fell asleep—after I’d followed my feeble explanations with warm affirmations and tender, reassuring lovemaking—I lay awake thinking. Or not so much thinking as allowing the dark-tendriled thing to wave its fronds through my memory and brush old images to the surface. Images from those few months I lived with Zoe, when I got weirdly entangled—or re-entangled—with Rachel.
That time had been like suddenly finding yourself on the underside of the island, realizing that it had never been an island in the first place. All along you’d thought you were on solid ground, but really you were floating. Once you knew of this underside’s existence, it exerted a certain claim on you: sometimes you got sucked through to the other side, inaccessible to the sunny surface.
My girlfriend had been correct: I had disappeared for a moment. But I couldn’t tell her where I’d gone, because still, even after all this time, I didn’t know myself.
* * *
I never thought I would run into Rachel Starr again, not in real life. Certain people belong so completely to a particular time and place that they stay preserved in your mind there, as though trapped in a snow globe—you can nostalgically pick it up every now and then, give it a shake, feel something stir to the surface, but the scenes themselves don’t change.
Of course she had been living some kind of adult life since I’d seen her last, at the end of our sophomore year of college. I’d even looked her up once or twice, curious whether she was on social media (she wasn’t, which didn’t surprise me; she’d always seemed impervious to that kind of thing). That’s probably part of the reason I didn’t really notice her, at first, when I saw her there behind the circulation desk at the Greenpoint library.
But I suppose it makes sense to start a bit earlier, to tell you how I ended up in Greenpoint in the first place—on my own for the first time in years, loose and adrift, a walking ellipsis, fatally vulnerable to magic.
* * *
I first heard about Zoe through Dan, a co-worker at the zoo. Dan was our Snake Guy. “My cousin has a room open at her place in Greenpoint,” he’d said when I’d announced I was looking for a new apartment. “She’s a little”—he twirled a finger around his ear—“but not in a bad way.”
“What way are you defining as ‘bad’?” I’d asked. To even become a Snake Guy, you need a pretty high threshold for craziness.
He thought about this for a minute. “The reality TV way, I guess. I mean she won’t steal your shit or anything.”
“So what’s good crazy?”
“Fun crazy. Hippie crazy. You know—like, Burning Man.”
“Oh. So she’s into ‘nature’?” I made air quotes. “She’s high all the time?”
“No, I’m not sure she even gets high. She’s one of those people that sort of seems high when she isn’t.”
“Hmm.”
“I mean, like, she’s always reading tarot cards or making a sculpture out of bird bones or something. She’s pretty fun. She throws great parties.”
I thought she sounded exhausting. Still, I was desperate. “I don’t know, man,” I said. “I’ve been going through a rough time, and—”
“Look, Zoe’s cool with month by month, so why don’t you just crash there till you find something better? It’s only six hundred. You can save up. And she has a backyard.”
I couldn’t argue with this. Ana and I were still sharing the dingy junior one-bedroom in Murray Hill, the place where we’d come undone. It’s hard to get over your ex-fiancée when you’re still sleeping on the trundle bed beneath her, and every time she sneezes your mattress shakes.
The room in Zoe’s apartment had peeling walls, yellow water stains on the ceiling, and a distinct smell (dank, salty, vaguely vaginal). But it also came with a free full-sized bed and a circular stained-glass window, now beaming a rose-shaped pattern of red and yellow light onto the opposite wall.
“Do you believe in prophecies?” she asked, looking up at me.
“Not really,” I said.
“Well, I do,” she said. “And you’re going to live here.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yes,” she said. “The cards told me so.” She blinked her long lashes and smiled. She wasn’t what I’d call beautiful, not exactly, not in the narrowest sense of the word—but she had these big googly blue-green eyes the color of peacocks. You know in cartoons when a character gets hit on the head and their eyes turn into revolving spirals? Her eyes had that effect. They kind of gave you vertigo. You had to look away first.
The ancient floorboards creaked beneath me as I walked into the room. You could hear a floorboard creak here. That’s how quiet it was. The shouts and sirens of Manhattan felt oceans away.
I peeked into the small, cramped closet. “Not much
in the way of storage, huh?” I said.
“Do you have a lot of stuff?”
“No. I guess I don’t. My ex is keeping most of it.”
I turned around. Zoe stood directly in front of the stained-glass window. Red and yellow light fell across her pale skin, her blond hair, her white dress. She looked like a woman-shaped column of flame.
She grinned. “So,” she announced. “You love it.”
I didn’t, not exactly. But spoken aloud, her sentence seemed true, or as if it could be true—and how sweet, that declarative ring.
I believe in free will, not in fate. But will doesn’t operate in a vacuum. Sometimes other people’s are stronger than yours, and your will has no grounds for resistance. A feeling very much like fate enters your body and weakens it like a muscle relaxer; just like that, you find yourself living with a stranger in Brooklyn.
At least, that’s how I see it now. At the time, I thought I was simply making a rational decision. I granted Zoe the faintly amused tolerance allowed to the temporary. I could already imagine myself, years later, laughing while I told the story about that time, just before my real life started, when I lived in a tiny room in Greenpoint with a girl who believed in prophecies.
* * *
And so, on the first day of August, I left Ana and Murray Hill with only two suitcases, a guitar I could barely play, and a feeling of tentative optimism about my prospects for emerging from a bewildering years-long funk. Bewildering because, when you graduate magna cum laude from Brown and move to New York with a girl you know you’re going to marry, when the two of you snag twin research assistantships at twin elite hospitals, when you jointly purchase a couch and a blender and an engagement ring—when this is your life, a buoyant complacency sets in, easy to confuse with confidence. Your life stretches out before you like the colorful squares of a board game. You can hardly wait to pass go.
The Regrets Page 11