She grinned. “I know. Secretly, I kind of like it, though. Like, what if everything that happened in life left an obvious mark? I mean, everything important. Like, when you’re a kid, your parents mark your height on the wall. You can look back and be like, oh shit, I’ve grown this much this year. When you’re older, it’s harder. You can’t tell when you’re making progress. And everyone tries to hide what’s happened to them. It’s confusing. But when you think about it, isn’t all experience just experience? Shouldn’t we treat it all the same?” She fondly patted the black spot on the wall. “This spot says, something happened on my birthday this year.” She shrugged. “I know it’s silly.”
“No,” I said. “It’s not. I think I know exactly what you mean.” I realized, in that moment, how much I had missed her. “I’ve really missed you,” I said.
“I missed you too.” She reached out and squeezed my shoulder, then glanced down at her phone on the table, which had just glowed and begun to vibrate. “Oh shit,” she said. “I’m late! I forgot Flor’s thing was tonight. Her Christmas slash Hanukkah party. Are you going?”
“I wasn’t invited.”
“Yes you were!”
“I don’t think so.”
“It was an Evite.”
“Oh. I never open those. But still, I don’t think I got it.”
“It doesn’t matter. Come on, why don’t we go together? Flor will be so happy to see you.”
“I don’t know. She’s probably mad at me for being distant. I mean, I completely forgot her birthday. She’s not as forgiving as you.”
“Who cares?” said Samira, pulling on a scarf. “She’ll forgive you eventually. She’s your friend.”
I sighed. “I guess you’re right.”
“Come on,” she said. “We can talk about it on the train.”
And so I reluctantly, yet gratefully, submitted. I took Samira’s arm as we walked to the subway, allowed her to shepherd me back into my own life.
* * *
Over the next few months, through the bitter cold of winter and the aching thaw of spring, I continued my walks. Over time, they started to feel different—less like I was fighting through something and more like I was heading somewhere, though where that was I couldn’t know.
I started, slowly, to spend more time with other people. Even the friends who were skeptical and wounded at first, like Flor, began to show some sympathy when I apologized and told them some version of what I’d been through—about this handsome fucked-up man I’d fallen in love with, who had consumed my life and then suddenly “gone.” Slowly, I started getting invited to things again. I said yes to everything.
Conveniently, around daylight savings time, Jimmy’s throuple finally dissolved, once and for all—and so again we were single, together. Together we went to costume parties and barbecues and brunches. We attended concerts and poetry readings and bizarre performance art events. Sometimes we even joined the gatherings of strangers; we’d hear some clamor from an upstairs apartment, and we’d buzz to invite ourselves in, and nobody ever questioned our right to be there. We drank anything that anyone put into our hands.
And I slept with anyone who asked. Numbly, uncomplainingly, I took man after man into my bed. Sometimes the sex was good, and sometimes it was awkward. Sometimes I came and sometimes I didn’t. Sometimes they left in the middle of the night and sometimes they stuck around in the morning, wanting to cuddle or buy me pancakes.
I didn’t care. It was something to do. In some way I couldn’t quite explain, I had to do it. I felt as though I was finally getting somewhere. Every time someone touched me, every time I felt the friction of another person’s skin against mine, I seemed to move closer to something, though I couldn’t quite have said what, or why.
Still, often after the latest one-night lover had left, I felt crippled by waves of sadness. I felt as though my heart was a rock that had been thrown to the bottom of the ocean. The more alive I felt, the more I hurt. Sometimes the hurt was literal; sometimes I felt the pleasurable ache I’d had there in Dr. Moon’s office, as if my skin was on fire. I could just barely remember how Thomas’s touch, or nontouch, had felt. With every new lover I forgot a little bit more. Still, I never cried; the knot in my chest remained.
I never got in touch with Mark to apologize or explain. Perhaps this was cruel, and perhaps this was kind. I didn’t know; I still don’t. All I knew was that I needed the men I slept with now to be strangers.
* * *
Then, at a party one warm night in May, I shared a beer with a guy, and he insisted on walking me home. Some Josh or Jeremy. Josh.
This Josh was earnest and eager to prove his New Man credentials through a thorough, industrious demonstration of oral sex; he dotted his i’s and crossed his t’s and soon I ascended the slope of a medium-sized orgasm, predictably shaped as a sine wave.
And that’s when the strange thing happened. While Josh kept working away down there, a white light appeared behind my eyelids. It got bigger and bigger until it took up the whole darkness, like some kind of eclipse.
Was I dying? Was this the white light people talked about? It did not feel spiritual. It felt terrifying and hostile, like a punch in the eye sockets. Meanwhile, the knot in my chest grew larger and tighter, pushing upward, right up into my throat.
I tried to open my eyes, but they seemed to be stuck shut. I gave a little moan of alarm, which Josh of course took as encouragement. He moved faster and harder, and the light got whiter and more blinding and sort of vibrated, and I cried out in fear.
When I finally opened my eyes, Josh was sitting there grinning proudly, as if he’d won the National Sine Wave Graphing Bee of America. I opened my mouth to speak, but instead of speaking, I started to sob.
And sob and sob and sob. Like nothing you have seen or heard of. It was as if all the tears I hadn’t cried were suddenly released, all at once. My tears flooded and soaked the whole bed. I tried to stop the flow with my fingers, but that just made the pressure build up, and when I removed them, water flew out at a right angle. It was like The Exorcist. Alarmed, unsure whether this spoke well or poorly of his skills as a lover, Josh grabbed me a towel. I soaked through that too, in about one second.
The strange thing was, I didn’t feel sad. I didn’t feel anything. Except surprise, and maybe annoyance at the way Josh kept hovering around me with towels and saying, “Are you okay? Was it something I did?”
“Can you just go?” I heaved. Finally he got the hint and pulled on his tighty-whities and fled into the dry Brooklyn night.
Water was still pouring out of me, at an unbelievable rate. I soaked through all of my sheets, four towels, and a spare comforter before the tide finally slowed to a trickle. After changing my sheets I managed to sleep, but I woke the next morning on dampened pillows, still crying. I called in sick to work, and the tears continued all through the next day and the next.
On the third day, unsure what else to do, I dragged myself to the neighborhood clinic and saw a kind Estonian doctor, who pronounced me “fertile as a fiddle.” I was glad he got the expression wrong. It made me stop crying for a second. He told me to drink lots of fluids, and referred me to a psychiatrist.
I told the psychiatrist that I had recently been through a difficult breakup, but she did not consider this a sufficient explanation for my strange ailment. She seemed convinced that the breakup had triggered a reaction from some other repressed trauma, some hideous disfiguring incident from my childhood. But I remembered my childhood perfectly, and it was all just fine, a bit boring, even. I had no lecherous uncles or violin teachers, and I never even had the chance to meet a perverted priest since we were not Catholics but Unitarians, who always hang out in big cock-blocking groups. Nevertheless, she prescribed me some antidepressants.
“I don’t feel depressed, though,” I said. “I actually feel better than I have in a while. Except for the tears.”
“You’re probably just repressing it,” she said. “Your depression.”
<
br /> “Oh.”
“By the way, be careful with this medication. One of the possible side effects is suicidal ideation.”
“It is?”
“Only for some people.”
“Oh.”
“So if that happens, call me.”
“What if I kill myself first?”
She gave me a look that said This Is No Joking Matter, but I hadn’t been joking. I took the prescription home and used it as a bookmark.
Finally I did what I should have done in the first place and called Dr. Moon’s office. Once again, he had a “miraculously rare” opening, and was able to see me the next day.
* * *
“So,” I told Dr. Moon, sitting once again in his tiny bright office. I pointed at my face where I could feel watery rivulets carving paths down the slopes of my cheeks. “This is happening.”
Dr. Moon nodded. “For how long?”
“About a week.” I told him everything that had happened since I’d last seen him, including the orgasm and the blinding white light. He just nodded again. When I’d finished, he felt my pulse and asked me to lie down on the table. He put needles all over my body, in different places from the time before. I lay there for half an hour. The tears kept coming, blurring the ceiling’s rectangular panels into squiggly blobs. My ears filled with warm salty water.
But when Dr. Moon came back and removed the first needle, the flow instantly stopped. As he pulled out the rest of them, one by one, I touched my face all over, sweeping away the preexisting wetness. No new wetness came to replace it. I felt calm, like a landscape after rain.
I sat up slowly, still patting my newly dry face all over to see if I could trust it. “I don’t want to speak too soon,” I said, “but I think you stopped it.”
He shook his head. “I’m not stopping your tears. I’m redirecting them.”
“What, like irrigation?”
He thought for a second. “Yes. Exactly. The human body has an exquisite natural system of irrigation, but sometimes these blocks occur. Some parts of your body become overwatered, others too dry. So all that water builds up somewhere, and no one can use it.”
I thought of a tiny family living inside me somewhere, unable to drink or wash their dishes, their faucets dry and dusty.
“In this case,” he said, “it was partly due to a natural blockage—a blockage you’ve always had—and partly due to some side effects of my last treatment.”
“Side effects?”
“Last time, I sealed up your aura. It was necessary for your protection. But I sealed it up too well. Nothing could get out. Your tears were trapped, which created this eventual buildup and pressured release. Today I’ve restored the natural flow. Thankfully, your aura is in much better shape than it was a few months ago. I’m gratified to see how much you’ve healed.”
“I don’t feel healed,” I said, surprised at my petulant tone.
Dr. Moon frowned thoughtfully. “Well,” he said, “it’s a nonlinear process. But I’m not sure you’re aware of how much danger you were in when you came in last time.”
“What do you mean?”
“You were on the brink of turning inside out. Becoming your own inverse.”
“What?”
He shook his head tightly. “I don’t think I can explain in layman’s terms,” he said. “But there was a danger that…well, that some version of what happened to your boyfriend would happen to you too.”
“That I’d die?”
He looked thoughtful. “In a sense.”
I decided to let it go. There was something else I’d been wanting to ask, though I was afraid. “My ex-boyfriend,” I said. “Thomas. What did you—I mean, where did he go?”
Dr. Moon cocked his head to the side, thinking. I suppose he was trying to figure out how to put it into words. “Are you familiar with the concept of guardian angels?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Well, they don’t exist. But there is another kind of…angel, I suppose…assigned to each of us, somewhat randomly. Though personally, I don’t like the term ‘angel.’ It’s misleading. It makes people envision a certain shape or archetype that is just one of many forms this kind of being may take. But in any case, that term is probably the most understandable to people in your culture. So let’s call it an angel. I helped Thomas find his angel. Go back to his angel. They had some unfinished business. They were waiting for him.”
“Who was? The angel?”
“Among others.”
“So he’s…in heaven?”
“In a sense.”
“What I’m asking is—he’s okay?”
“Yes, he’s okay. You might even say that he’s found peace. The particular version of peace available to him.” He furrowed his brow slightly. “Though it may no longer make sense to use the word ‘he.’”
“So he’s not…mad at me?”
Dr. Moon smiled. I realized this was the first time I’d ever seen this. “No,” he said. “Certainly not. You have to realize—he was unwell. And now, whatever else we might say about him…he’s not unwell anymore. We might even speculate that in some form, he’s…grateful to you. Or something like it.”
“Well,” I said. “That’s a relief.” So Thomas was somewhere else, someplace where his existence made more sense. He was no longer a hungry lonely ghost roaming the streets. More importantly, or more selfishly: he would not come back seeking closure or revenge. I could finally let him go.
I let out a long sigh. “These angels,” I said. “Do I have one too?”
“Yes. Everyone does.”
“Will I ever see Thomas again?”
He paused, considered this for a long time, then said, “In a sense.”
I had the feeling I wouldn’t get more out of Dr. Moon than this. But somehow, it was enough. “I have one more question,” I said.
“Yes?”
“You said, before, that aside from the side effects of your treatment, I had a natural blockage in my body.”
“Right.”
“Am I cured?”
“It’s not a disease,” he said. “It’s just how you are.”
“So some part of me was not…getting enough water?”
“Correct. Some part of you had always been starved for moisture.”
“But you irrigated me?”
“For the time being.”
“What do I do now?”
“Nothing. Everything will unfold exactly as it’s supposed to.” That phrase again. He held open the door for me. Our session was over. I picked up my bag, smoothed down my hair, and stood up.
“Drink plenty of fluids,” he said as I walked out the door.
The phrase had practically lost all meaning by then. But it sounded different, coming from Dr. Moon. Coming from him, the words seemed to describe much more than drinking water. I repeated it in my mind, all the way home. Drink plenty of fluids. By the time I got home I didn’t know what it meant anymore. It seemed like the most profound and inscrutable directive I’d ever heard.
* * *
Back in my apartment, the first thing I did, of course, was pour myself a tall glass of water. I drank it in one gulp, standing up. Then I poured another glass and sat on the couch for a while, sipping steadily, continuing to hydrate.
My body felt light and alert, better than it had in recent memory. Still, something felt wrong, and I was having trouble putting my finger on what. Then it occurred to me: everything was so quiet. The air felt deathly still; it was as if my apartment had died. I hadn’t realized it, but over the past week the tears had provided a sort of soundtrack to my life, a background murmur, like the “Zen fountain” water feature in my parents’ overlandscaped backyard. The new tear-free silence felt both obvious and frightening, like a naked mannequin, or the truth.
I walked through all three of my apartment’s small rooms, humming to myself and rustling the edges of magazines to try and disperse this silence, but each time it just regrouped and stood its ground. Its occupa
tion was complete and hostile. This silence did not want to penetrate me; it wanted to obliterate me. In self-defense I stood in the middle of my living room and spoke my own name three times. My objects just stared back at me, pleading and mute.
This silence, I knew, was the strangled nonvoice of a certain kind of emptiness. Not the kind of emptiness I’d known with Thomas—a sexy emptiness, an emptiness that had fucked me and fought with me and filled me up. This emptiness was just a big old nothing, a simple absence of other living things, a completely dead deadness. I supposed it had been there long before I met Thomas, but it had never really bothered me before. Now it was frank, blinding, unavoidable.
I suddenly felt exhausted. I stretched myself out on the couch, pulled the threadbare afghan over my legs, and fell asleep.
I dreamed I was holding my heart in my hand. It bulged wetly, redly, out of my palm. It was still beating, though it wasn’t connected to anything. This was an ability I had gained: the ability to remove my own heart at will, to look at it for a while and then put it back.
I brought the heart up to my face, squinched one eye shut, and peered down into the left ventricle.
At the other end of the wet red tube was a plushly furnished room in the style of middle-upper-class America circa 1920. A large brass Victrola piped tinny music into the room. Somber, sepia-toned family portraits hung on the walls. The parents sat on an overstuffed pink velvet sofa, one of the children in a large blue armchair, the other perched atop the ottoman at the armchair’s feet. They all sat still, in attentive postures, listening to the music.
All of them were blindfolded and gagged.
I lowered the heart and watched it. It pounded faster and faster in my hand, in fear of what it now knew about itself.
Some part of you had always been starved for moisture. I knew exactly who these blindfolded people were: they were the family I had pictured earlier, living in my heart, suffering mutely through its seemingly endless drought. I pictured their dry dusty faucets, the hollow clink of their empty water glasses. I understood that I had not exactly been responsible for the drought itself—It’s just how you are—but that I was responsible for their silence: I myself had blindfolded and gagged them, because I had known that they were suffering, and I hadn’t wanted to hear them complain.
The Regrets Page 18