The Regrets

by Amy Bonnaffons

  “Yeah,” I said. “I guess it is.”

  “Every place has its ghosts, you know?” said Zoe. “But not all of them are mine.” I sensed that this last sentence was meant more for herself than for me.

  She didn’t mention Rachel, or ask whether I’d passed along Dr. Moon’s business card. It was as though, with that creepy sixth sense of hers, she already knew what had happened—that that story had played itself out, that the cycle was complete. As for me, I was grateful not to talk about it.

  Zoe and I never slept together again—at least, we didn’t have sex. But the night before I moved out, she crawled into bed with me and we watched a movie on my laptop. She laid her head against my shoulder; I rested a hand lightly on her thigh. That was it, nothing more.

  It felt good to have Zoe’s warmth against me like that: just the everyday warmth of a human being, seeking comfort. It occurred to me for the first time that if we’d met under different circumstances—what circumstances, I couldn’t say—we might have been friends.

  Rachel

  * * *

  Someone told me once that getting over a relationship takes 50 percent of the relationship’s length. If you were together a year, it will take six months; five years will take two and a half, et cetera. I don’t remember where exactly I heard this, but I remember being surrounded by women, in some tea or brunch type of situation, possibly accompanied by small pastries and/or knitting, and I remember the other women all nodding when the one woman said this. This seemed accurate to them. They had all independently alighted upon this algorithm of the heart.

  I remember sitting there blankly, chewing on my scone or whatever, and feeling puzzled and separate. No man had ever taken me very long to recover from, unless you define “recovery” as “falling back with a vengeance on cherished private habits.” After my breakups I had gone for long periods without shaving my legs, or I developed new hobbies like crocheting or pickling, or once I actually read Proust, all of it, in the span of a few weeks. But none of this had ever felt that bad. In fact, it had often felt like a kind of gleeful abandonment, the freedom to once again be as singular and strange as I wanted to be.

  Now I thought again of the breakup algorithm, and wondered how the math might change if the ex-boyfriend in question had been a ghost. How many years might be added on? Would my grief pass in multiples of seven, like dog years? Or had his world taken such a bite out of me that I’d never be whole again?

  All I told Mark was that Thomas was gone. I didn’t say any more than that. The details wouldn’t make sense to him anyway. I left him to infer the rest: that he and I were done too, for the second and final time.

  Frankly, I was a bit embarrassed about the whole thing. Picking up my ex-boyfriend for comfort, like a nubby old blanket. Only women who were babies did things like that. I had always prided myself on not being a baby-woman. In fact, I wasn’t a baby even when I was an actual baby. My first full sentence, when I was eighteen months old, was “Don’t pick me up.” I have always been little and cute, my whole life; my whole life, people have wanted to pick me up and cradle me and treat me like an idiot.

  But something had happened to me, living with a ghost. The daydream had turned into a nightmare, and the nightmare had turned me into a child. So I had reached out for my sweet ex-boyfriend with the cowboy grandpa smile. I’m not proud of it. But I found myself in his bed, amid something that was not exactly the daydream, more like its toxic inverse; I pictured it as a sickly green light that surrounded us as we clutched at each other. Those four nights taught me something, something I had already known deep down but had not been able to confirm until then: that I still had a body, that this body wanted other bodies, that it could make contact with other bodies even through the noxious green haze of an angry ghost.

  I had been living in the daydream for so long that now I just wanted the most basic things: the warmth of human skin, the weight of another person next to me in bed.

  Thomas would never leave me. I would have to leave him. Only I could extinguish the dying embers of the daydream. To claim my own selfish, boring, pointless life as though it were my only treasure—because, in fact, it was.

  When I got home from Mark’s, the morning after that fourth night, I picked up the card that he had given me, the recommendation from his roommate, Zoe. It had been sitting on my kitchen table, calmly waiting for my attention.

  DR. B MOON

  METAPHYSICAL ACUPUNCTURE

  The name had sounded vaguely familiar before; only now did I remember that Dr. Moon was the name my doppelgänger had spoken in that dream I’d had one of the first nights Thomas slept over: “I believe these belong to Dr. Moon,” she’d said, holding out a pair of ears. “If you’d be so kind as to pass them along.”

  I called Dr. Moon’s office and made an appointment. I was told that he happened to have an opening the next day, that usually his schedule was backed up for months.

  “You are so lucky,” purred the woman over the phone.

  “I don’t know if that’s the word I would use,” I said. She just laughed, and told me to be there by two.

  On the subway ride to Dr. Moon’s office, I speculated about what “metaphysical acupuncture” might be. Probably some kind of mistranslation. (I assumed from the name, and from racist stereotypes about his line of work, that Dr. Moon would be Chinese or Korean. For some reason I also pictured him with a goatee.)

  The office was inside a tall, ugly building near Penn Station, with a grimy urine-smelling lobby and a roster of fake-sounding business names: Apex Consolidated Products, North Star LLC, Synergy Works. Dr. Moon’s name wasn’t listed anywhere. I rechecked the card and confirmed that I had the address right, then took the creaky old elevator up to the eighth floor, knocked on the unmarked door of room 802, and gently pushed it open.

  Stepping into this room was like stepping into a different world, a tiny clean oasis. It was painted a crisp, almost blinding white; a spongy moss-green carpet covered the floor. Two Danish modern chairs were placed next to a stand of bamboo. The walls were unadorned, except for a framed photo of a single pine tree. A slender, black-haired receptionist sat reading a book behind a blond-wood reception desk. Nothing was on the desk, not even a phone.

  “Rachel?” she said, looking up from her book with a smile.

  “That’s me.”

  “Have a seat,” she said. “Dr. Moon will be with you soon; he’s journeying at the moment.”

  “Journeying where?”

  She laughed lightly, as if I’d made a joke. Then she went back to her book. We sat there, she reading her book, me hovering nervously in the hard chair, for a full thirty minutes.

  “Um?” I said, finally.

  “Yes?”

  “My appointment was for two. It’s two thirty.”

  “Oh.” She smiled again. “Well, Dr. Moon doesn’t subscribe to the illusion of time.”

  “Then why did you tell me to come at two?”

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “All is unfolding exactly as it’s supposed to.”

  I spent the next fifteen minutes fuming, debating whether or not to leave. But when Dr. Moon finally emerged, at two forty-five, I sensed right away that he was the kind of person it’s pointless to get mad at. He exuded an evenness, a palpable neutrality, as if he existed in a world different from but contiguous to our own. Getting mad at him would be like throwing rocks at a building protected by an invisible fence. They would just bounce right back in your face.

  “Hello, Rachel,” he said, extending a hand. It turned out he was tall and blond and clean-shaven, handsome and sexless as a Ken doll. The only strange thing about him: his tiny ears, which were perfect and rosy, like soft little conch shells. Or like the ears of a little girl, soldered to a grown man’s head. I had the feeling that his generically perfect body was somehow not “real,” that it was a costume of some sort. I can’t explain exactly what I mean by that; it’s just a feeling I had.

  I shook Dr. Moon’s hand, the
n followed him into his office. As I walked past the receptionist’s desk, I cast a quick glance at the pages of her book. They were completely blank. She looked up and gave a little wave as I passed.

  Dr. Moon and I sat in his office, opposite each other, on two sturdy blond-wood chairs. He looked at me while I looked around the room. It seemed mostly normal: the standard cushioned table covered in butcher paper, the standard wooden desk, the standard framed degree. Except that his degree came from the School of Metaphysical Adjustment Science in Arlesdorff, Switzerland.

  I turned back to him, registered his perfect face and his tiny ears. He said nothing. He seemed to want me to speak first, but somehow I didn’t feel ready. So we just sat there for a few minutes; he blinked his blond eyelashes and emanated a deep Alpine patience.

  Finally, I cleared my throat. “So,” I said. “I’m here because—well, it’s hard to explain.”

  “I’ll do my best to follow,” said Dr. Moon.

  “I suppose I’m…being haunted?” I sighed. “Well, to be more precise, I’m in a relationship. With a dead guy. And I don’t want to be in it anymore.”

  “I see,” said Dr. Moon. “Was he dead at the time of your first meeting?”

  “Yes.”

  “How dead?”

  “Not entirely.”

  “So on a scale of one to ten?”

  “Maybe a three to begin with? And now an eight or nine.”

  “I see. And the two of you have had sexual intercourse in this state?”

  “Many times.”

  I told him the whole story, beginning at the very beginning: the bus stop and the daydream. Dr. Moon just listened with a perfectly neutral expression. He occasionally nodded, as if confirming an expectation.

  When I’d finished, he said, “Is he…with us, at the moment?”

  I nodded.

  “May I feel your pulse?”

  “Okay.”

  He wrapped two perfect fingers around my wrist, and closed his eyes, and furrowed his brow in a look of deep concentration. I could feel Thomas hovering around me, not touching me exactly but nearby. I could tell that he was nervous, more nervous than angry. I was certain Dr. Moon could feel him too—but he didn’t say so. He just felt my pulse, concentrating on it as though it contained the entire story, the history of my body and its longings and their consequences.

  Finally he opened his eyes, gave another slight nod, and said, “I know exactly what is going on.”

  “You do?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can you help?”

  “I can,” he said. “Here’s the problem. You are incredibly porous. Before this happened, you had exactly one hole in your aura. Think of it as an Achilles’ heel. That hole is where this man entered.”

  “Okay…”

  “Over the length of your relationship, he has eroded your aura to the point where it almost doesn’t exist. It’s no wonder you are suffering. You are less like an adult person than like a premature baby. You have no defenses. We need to get you into an incubator. Metaphorically speaking.”

  “Okay.” It made a weird sort of sense.

  “So here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to seal up your aura. And meanwhile I’m going to work with your boyfriend.”

  “Work with him?”

  He nodded, curtly.

  “How?”

  “I am going to help him reverse his regrets.”

  “His what?”

  “It’s all a bit complicated. It’s probably better if I don’t explain.” He gestured toward the cushioned table.

  I looked from him to the table. I decided that I trusted him, though I wasn’t sure why. Plus, I had no other options at this point. I walked over and lay down on the butcher paper.

  Dr. Moon put a few small needles into my fingers and toes and temples. Then he switched on some ambient reed-flute music and left.

  I lay there for a long time—how long exactly, I couldn’t say. I may have fallen asleep; I’m not sure. In any case, I entered a sleeplike state of relaxation, a state of consciousness that was gray and calm and absolute. It was as if I’d been sealed inside a bullet. I couldn’t feel Thomas at all. I assumed he had left the room with Dr. Moon.

  Slowly and gradually, a bright pain spread across the surface of my body, like a sunburn. It was a kind of pleasurable pain, like when you finally let pee out after holding it for a long time, or like pressing the edge of your nail into the center of an itchy bug bite. It hurt, but it was a relief. I wondered if this was the feeling of my body sealing itself up.

  Time passed—how much, I’m not sure. The pain sharpened, then subsided. Finally, through a blank haze, a sound came: Dr. Moon turning the doorknob. He walked over to the table and began removing the needles from my body, one by one.

  “How do you feel?” he asked.

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “Good, I think.”

  He removed the last needle. “Do you think you can sit up?”

  Slowly I raised myself to a sitting position. I felt…not dizzy exactly, but dazed, as though I’d just emerged from a drugged sleep.

  “Where’s Thomas?” I asked.

  “He’s gone,” said Dr. Moon.

  I opened my mouth to ask where, but then thought better of it. I probably wouldn’t understand, and I didn’t really want to know. I felt a certain deep numbness that I needed to preserve; this numbness felt necessary for my survival.

  Dr. Moon helped me off the table. “Get lots of sleep in the next few weeks, and drink lots of fluids,” he said. “You may need to come back and see me again. If so, just give my assistant a call. You have our number.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  And just like that, it was over. I left Dr. Moon’s office and rode the subway home accompanied only by the strangers on the train and the noises of the city, surrounded on all sides by the normal air of the regular world. My ghost was gone. I was free.

  * * *

  In the months that followed I didn’t cry, not once. I couldn’t. Instead I carried a small knot between my stomach and chest that, I understood, could not be undone—like that story about the woman with a green ribbon around her neck, and her head falls off when her husband unties it. I didn’t know what would happen if I cried, but I knew it would result in just as disastrous an undoing. This knot seemed like a small price to pay for what I’d been through. I had given myself to a dead man; I would have to take life back on its own terms.

  To keep myself occupied, I started walking. I walked to the library in the morning instead of taking the bus. When I got off work, I kept walking. I walked all over Brooklyn. Sometimes I even walked to Manhattan or Queens, pulling my coat around me as I crossed the windy bridges, half-heartedly hoping that no muggers lurked, waiting in the shadows, but not really caring much either way. I didn’t care much about anything. I barely had a thought.

  One day, on one of my walks, I found myself in Samira’s neighborhood. I hadn’t seen her in months—not since the day I’d run away from her in Brooklyn Provisions. Without giving myself time to second-guess the decision, I walked up to her door and pressed the buzzer.

  “Hello?” came her voice through the crackly intercom.

  “It’s me,” I said. “Rachel.”

  There was a brief pause—I imagined her tilting her head to the side, thinking, Rachel who?—and then the buzzer buzzed me in.

  When I got to the top of the stairs, Samira was already standing there, in the open doorway of her apartment, practically vibrating with agitation.

  Her hair was longer now—not quite its pre-fire length, but almost to her shoulders. “Bitch, where have you been?” she cried. Then she embraced me.

  I tried to hug her back. I seemed to have forgotten how. Mechanically, I raised my arms and placed them around her shoulders. I realized she was the first person I’d touched since Thomas left. (I’d texted with Jimmy, minimally, but hadn’t yet seen him in person—our relationship had been strained since he’d entered the throes of thro
upledom, since I’d gotten involved with Thomas. He seemed to think I disapproved of his relationship, which I did, but of course that was the least important part of the story; desperate for an excuse, I’d let him believe what he wanted.)

  Samira was just so…warm. It was almost uncomfortable, her warmth—like looking directly at the sun. Too intense for my current equipment. But I breathed through the hug, tried to receive it. You are less like an adult person than like a premature baby. You have no defenses. I’d have to teach myself how to be an adult person again. To respond to normal human decibels of affection, without flinching.

  Finally Samira pulled away, held me at arm’s length. “What happened?” she said.

  “A lot happened,” I said. “I’m not even sure how to describe it.”

  “Flor said that Jimmy said that you were dating some super fucked-up guy.”

  “That’s true,” I said.

  “I got mad at you for disappearing,” she said. “Then I got worried about you. Then I just got sad.”

  “I know. But it had nothing to do with you.” I shifted from one leg to the other, as though I had to pee. Then I realized I did have to pee. “I’m sorry. Can I come in?”

  “Of course.”

  I hadn’t been in her apartment since the night of the fire. There was a blackened spot above the stove that hadn’t been there before, and the floorboards in the kitchen were warped. “They haven’t fixed this yet?” I asked, incredulous. “What was that, a year ago?”

  She shrugged. “Nah. Like, four months? It was my birthday, remember? In August.”

  It felt like forever ago, a whole lifetime ago. “Still, though,” I said. “Your landlord sucks. This is really shitty-looking.”