The Likely World

by Melanie Conroy-Goldman

  Home, I put a hot dog to heat in the microwave. I open a can of baked beans and roll some whitish baby carrots onto the high chair tray. I count to 506 while I feed her, her mouth opening obediently, her incomplete set of teeth gnawing through the bite-sized food. I wipe my daughter’s face clean and dump the tray in the sink and get her upstairs. I count to 216 while I balance her on the changing table. She’s good when I take off her diaper, and even though there’s already a touch of rash, she doesn’t complain when she feels the chilly wipes or the cold Desitin. I bundle her in her sleeper, and begin to count again as I rock her and rock her and rock her to sleep. Seven hundred eight. Nine hundred forty-two. Just past a thousand, my daughter’s eyes close and her breathing steadies and then, like a blessing, she is asleep.

  I descend into the adult sanctuary of after bedtime, famished. My phone complains in my pocket, message after urgent message, but I am beyond its reach now, concentrating on stepping lightly, on stirring as little as possible that might steer me from where I’m going.

  No one sells cloud by the spoon anymore—today, dealers package it between paper, like fruit rollups, only in small, stamp-sized squares. I am quiet, deliberate as I move through the house. My mouth waters. It is urgent that Juni not wake, that nothing be disturbed as I open the door that connects the garage to the house, stealthily unlock the door, and climb inside. Then it’s me, ass in the air, dome light on, combing the gritty floor mats for every scrap of paper that might yield me a high. I can call up the moment of the scraps’ falling like a crime scene. Some bits had descended weightily, shimmering with the gloss of dried cloud gel. Others had wafted benignly, disappointingly, to the seat. I collect every single one.

  How many are there? Fifteen? Some are clearly useless, have bits of writing on them, blue ink. But, actually, maybe. The dealers are always getting new ideas, shapes to press the cloud goo into, hearts and clovers and bitty Taj Mahals. Maybe this is some new branding scheme, jokes like in bubble gum, or fortunes from cookies.

  Your future will be as blank as cloud paper.

  I lift the first scrap to my lips and dab my tongue at it. It tastes of soggy cracker. There is no acidic charge of cloud. I spit it out and I squint in garage light. Always, this has been my refuge, the place of my squalid desperation. In this, I am like parents across America, stashing their Camels, their love letters, their secret vices between the coiled garden hose and the gasoline canister. Here, thirty days ago, I scoured each shelf, lifted watering can and power drill, until I was sure I had nothing left. And here I am again, scrounging my filthy car mat for secondhand cloud; licking someone’s sloppy spittle seconds, hoping for a high. I knew it wouldn’t last. I knew I couldn’t do it. I was stupid, an idiot, to even try. One by one, I place the pieces of paper in my mouth, and wait to be released.

  One after another, they yield nothing, wood pulp and watermark. Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuck.

  The final one has a promising sheen to it. I tongue it delicately; there’s something; a hint of detergent, a trace of citrus and then—

  —pop?

  I am seized again by my desire for the man in the car. The man had known me—Amelia—he had said my name, but he had said it wrong. I had recognized him, but I had not known him. I wanted to be right, for my side of the story to be right, but perhaps we both have parts that have to be puzzled together.

  I open my paperback. I take notes, have always done this, to fight against slippage and confusion, but also to find significance. Pages are glued together, things sunken into other things. The binding has been taped and retaped. Things fall out. As a record, it is haphazard and incomplete, but occasionally, a penciled word, an old photograph, has restored something to me after cloud has taken it away.

  CA Plates. Perhaps that had been the error. I draw a line beneath the CA and flip through the book until I find today’s notes. West Coast time. What if the confusion came from that? Perhaps us, we, our time of knowing each other tracks not here, to this place, but back to my later time in Los Angeles? In which case, my tour of Brookline would not have elicited any particular memories. My hand shakes but I struggle to keep rooted here, in myself. I left California two years ago, not entirely voluntarily. I had been sent, for a reason. What was it? In the interval, there were tall pines, by a lake shore, a red wall and then I was home again. It’s the middle that’s gone. Two years would make the man’s timeline and Juni’s coincide. I pick up my phone. The screen still shows a string of messages from the sitter, increasingly angry, and a handful from Emily, plus one from a burner phone with a string of question marks. I swipe them clear and then I open a browser and tap in the searchable terms.

  I try combinations. Bright Big Future: A marketing firm. Apollo Blue: Greek mythology. I scroll down.

  It’s shameful, humiliating to want something so bad on such slim evidence. But I do. And now I’ll admit what’s obvious, what in particular shames me. The solution I want, the thing I hope I can read in these faded pages, is the thing that will compensate for all my failings. I know I’m admitting something that obvious here. I wish my baby had a daddy.

  Apollo Blue. An industry pseudonym, for a film you don’t want to be credited on. I have the impression that everything is about to snap into place, link up, reveal itself. I just have to reach. The paper in my mouth tastes like nothing more than glue, than Elmer’s glue, a little milky stickiness. Any cloud has been licked clean. Or it was never cloud paper at all. I extract it from my tongue, and in the faint light, I see that this is one of the ones with marks. OD TO. A scrap of monogram, a tiny curling portion of a design, and below a couple of handwritten characters. 2f. It’s piece of something, a note to self, like one you’d pull from a duffel bag of your life, is the kind of note you’d write if you were afraid you’d forget where to go. You know how to find it.

  OD TO 2f OD TO.

  I cling to the syllables, waiting for the revelation.

  Now, my baby is coughing, inhumanly, cough after cough. She has been coughing for some time. I take note of headlights in the window, of a beat-up Ford observing me from the street, a person shape through the dusty glass of my garage door, banging to be let in. Emily. I stand, preparing my excuses, but we are way past that point. My sponsor has already seen the paper on my stuck-out junkie tongue, and now we turn, both of us.

  Through the open door between my living room and garage, I see my daughter. Juni is standing at the top of the stairs. Her face is going purple, her mouth open, but emitting no breath. The baby has escaped her crib. She gasps for air, reaching into the space of the stairs, and then she plummets. The leap is not in me, the saving leap.

  She falls into the empty place left by my tardy and inadequate love.

  Nine

  Brookline

  1988

  When we return from Andi’s, Judah stands in the hallway for a moment, fiddling with the lock. In the apartment, Nancy and Paul are cuddled on Judah’s sofa eating Entenmann’s and drinking General Foods International Coffee. On TV is Fantasy Island, one of the pop star episodes. I fall still in the doorway. Paul. His hairless cheek rests on Nancy’s shoulder, his long legs tucked up on the couch. I can read tracks on his cheeks, from tears or hysterics. Between Paul and Nancy, the naked doll rests like their child.

  Nancy looks up, red-eyed. “Do you like coffee?”

  Paul chimes in, “Do you like chocolate?”

  Together, they chant, “Then you’ll love mocha.”

  Paul gulps, laughing, in a way that sounds like a sob.

  My body twitches, galvanic, toward the square of sofa cushion between them, the space occupied by the doll. There is a kind of vapor from the two of them, comfort and secrets being exchanged like viruses.

  “Where have you been?” I say to Nancy.

  “Where have I been? I told you where I was.”

  “No,” I say. “You didn’t.”

  Now, Judah enters the apartment, and gently nudges me. I see Nancy’s gaze sharpen.

  “Elsewhere,”
I say. Because of cloud, my voice is perfection, arch but unhurt. Bitch, I think, cunt. Slut. I feel something akin to angry, but there’s cloud buffeting it, softening the landing.

  “Hey,” says Paul. “What’s up with your face?”

  I touch my cheeks, expecting some rash, or eruption.

  Nancy stands unsteadily, pulling her tight shirt over her pouched belly, and sidles toward me, slings an arm around my shoulder. “I’ve been reading tarot,” she says. “Do you want to know what I found out?”

  I start shaking my head. “Don’t.”

  “Wouldn’t you rather know?”

  “You’re wasted,” I tell her.

  “Mellie, listen. You don’t want what you think you want,” says Nancy, following my gaze.

  Paul peers at me. “You look so much nicer. Like a nicer person.”

  Judah gently nudges me, on his way to the kitchen to make coffee. “I think, because of your glasses.”

  “Damn it.” I touch my hands to my eyes. “I left them in the car. They cost a hundred and fifty dollars.”

  “That’s how I do it,” says Nancy. “Be clear-eyed. Look it in the face.”

  She’s never going to be a ballerina. Not in Cleveland. Not with some lesser company. “I have to get my glasses, OK?”

  Judah hands me his keys. “You remember where I parked?”

  I flee into the hall, Nancy watching me go through her carefully drawn cat eyes. She’s never going to get Judah. She doesn’t know anything I don’t know. As I wait for the elevator, I think of Andi, her quality of not one thing or the other, kid or grown-up, sexy or naïve, strong or weak. That’s what gives you power, even if you’re thirteen years old and can’t afford new clothes and have to behave for the social workers. No one really wants the truth. Judah, in the car, asking me if she’d really come tonight. They want mysterious, the neither one nor the other. My problem is I’m obvious. So it’s my actual feeling I have to change, if I want to be liked. The trick is figure out how to feel in-between things, love and not love, without inhabiting one particular state, how to stop wanting what I want so badly.

  The elevator door slides open. I squint. It’s a thin woman with bangs and then I recognize the artist from upstairs, the penguin woman. She is crying. My myopic gaze must contort my face into something mean, because the girl sneers back at me.

  I let out a sound, oh, and draw back.

  “Fuck. You,” says the penguin artist. “Fuck. You. You. Stupid. Little. Twat.” She shoves past me, elbow hard to my ribs, and stumbles into the hallway. This cannot be her floor. Is not even her tower. I step toward my own reflection in the elevator’s brass. Stupid twat. My heart thumps. I’m the twat. And it doesn’t mean bitchy. It’s something else—small and obvious and hideous. My best friend is a whore and I’m a twat and I should never have taken off my glasses. Because my face is a twat face, obvious and ugly. The door opens on the parking lot, and I force myself into the underground air, the odor of garbage and exhaust. Judah’s Saab is where I remember: wedged into the half-spot beside the Brougham. I let myself in and then I sit. Stupid twat.

  I want to go home, but that would be a mistake. If I go sulking back to my mom’s, I might never go to another loft party or hang out in a building shaped like a castle or figure out what it is that makes boys walk through rainstorms for you. Whatever happened at the loft, the red shiny thing, is like a deepening wound. I need to learn to feel differently. Besides, I think, I deserve it. After the week I’ve had, of course I need a little help. It’s too late to go home, too late to do homework, and you can always extrapolate the phase of the moon. I put on my glasses and stick a spoon in my mouth and—

  —pop—

  —I am messing with the glove box in somebody’s ancient Saab. The ceiling fabric has peeled away. In the foam, glyphs have been etched but they are illegible in the dim light of the parking garage. Someone’s weed is in there, paraphernalia, some condoms, and a photograph of little girl and an older teenaged boy. I know the photograph isn’t recent, is worn, has been studied. The boy, a blond, has a look of uneasy authority, both pleased and bewildered to be trusted by this little child. The girl is redheaded, is tiny, is wearing sopping wet clothes. It looks cold in the picture, the light dusk or dawn. The leaves are not yet on the trees in the background. You hope for adults, urging sweaters and blankets from beyond the frame, but even if they are there, it’s clear that the child will under no circumstances let go of this hand, not to loop her arm through a sweater, not for anything. I turn the sheet over and there are their names. Kif-Vesely’e. The strange words roll easily on my tongue, and I know them, the people and the place where they are standing, Kif-Vesely’e, but I can’t quite. Can’t quite.

  The square of photographic paper is irresistibly bright and sharp, as if it were colorized. It reminds me of something else, a penguin, a glass bulb. I stare at the image, the adult-acting boy, the sopping wet girl who will not let go his hand. The photograph has thingness, a weight like history or significance. I recognize it, even though I have never seen it before. I take a paperback from my book bag and slip the picture between its pages.

  In the elevator, staring at my spectacled reflection, I return to myself, floor by floor.

  The apartment is dark and quiet when I reach it. The pop star is gone, and Judah has threaded a reel of film into a projector. We are watching Niagara Falls ’84, which turns out, in fact, to be soft-core porn. I don’t know what hard-core entails, but there’s everything on this video that I imagined there wouldn’t be, penises, close-ups, penetration.

  Judah is standing behind me. “S’fucked up, right? I mean, right?”

  I shrug. Cloud blesses me with its cool, but this still is the most vagina I’ve ever seen. Up to and including my own. So, yeah, s’fucked up is correct.

  “I’ve met that woman,” he says of the girl blowing the penis on screen. “She’s not that nice in real life, but still, she’s a person. That’s what my father does, he makes real people into that.”

  “Where are Paul and Nancy?” I ask.

  Judah points a thumb through the door to his father’s bedroom. I listen, and can hear athletics within, muffled animal sounds. Paul, at camp, did this thing for me once. It’s blurry, physically blurry, My vision was already so bad, that in the memory, I can see myself but nothing beyond the perimeter of my wingspan. Paul didn’t know me. He’s a year older, was in the boy’s cabin, but for some reason, he helped me. I was in the forest, alone, and lost and everyone was gone, and he came for me.

  At the back of my throat, there is lemon. From the bedroom, Nancy howls, and Paul shushes, and I’m grateful to cloud for its rescue.

  “Are they an item?” Judah asks.

  I shake my head. “I don’t even know why they do it. It’s like, an activity for them. Like TV or cards.”

  Judah turns off Niagara Falls. “I don’t believe in that, sex for something to do.”

  The penguin, which is to the left of the television, near the wall, is bothering me. It needs adjustment, is misaligned.

  “It can’t be wax,” he says, following my gaze. He’s standing much closer to me than I realized.

  “Let’s plug it in,” I say.

  Judah shrugs and then shifts some stuff until he finds a socket. The lamp works, the penguin‘s whitened eyes glowing brighter than the rest of it. The light through its surface is red, as if there is a real heart and actual organs inside. I’m on drugs. But still, there’s something incredibly alive about it. That penguin could hoist itself onto the window sill and ride the eaves down to the Fenway below. It wouldn’t surprise me.

  “What is it?” I say. “If it’s not boredom?”

  Judah’s mouth is the surprise, his hand on my nipple.

  “Oh,” I say, and I open to meet him. He prizes apart my lips with his lips which are harder than lips I recall, harder than the spin-the-bottle lips of my recent memory. These lips are drinking from me and I am not sure what my own mouth is doing because it will not l
isten to me. Vividly, I am thinking of Paul against me on the dance floor, of the spot in the small of my back where I felt his hot empty place. I am stealing back the kiss that was taken from me.

  Judah and I wake to fire. The armature of the lamp stands in a puddle of its own wax, and the thing is aflame. The fire alarm is sounding. Paul and Nancy emerge wrapped in sheets and still laughing. I am aware that I am wearing bloody underpants, that I still have not called my mother. There’s a fire for Christ’s sake, every reason to run, but I resist the instinct because I want to watch. I want to understand what happens between Judah and Andi when she walks through the door. She is wearing clothes too large for her, and carrying a broken fan in her left hand. Judah is naked, untangling himself from me. The fire is leaping up the curtains. There is smoke and heat, but the two of them stand still in the flames and stare at each other, like they are inviting the meltdown to come.

  On cloud, people say, pain passes through you. Or glances off you. Suffering can be released. The question is, then what? What becomes of those experiences which we have not experienced? In the apartment of the soft-core pornographer, the boy I love grunting in the next room, my body underneath Judah’s surprisingly heavy body, I anticipate the way the night will disappear. In the early morning, I will walk back to Nancy’s house in time to call my mother. She will never know; Dr. and Dr. Dussel will never know. The night will have been erased. But once the moment is upon me, I understand this formulation of erasure isn’t entirely accurate. Somewhere, in some way, the aching self still exists. She remains entangled with my current self; I could collide with her at any time. It is me I’ve put through this night, even if the cloud allows me to deny it. Elsewhere, in some dimension that has as much reality as this one, I end the night cradling myself, shaking and sobbing, disgusted and ashamed.