The Likely World

by Melanie Conroy-Goldman

  Emily looks at Juni. The bruise has come in on her forehead, rich with blues and greens. At the back of her breath, I can hear the lingering catch.

  “Be clear with me: this is a condition? For you sticking with me? Or, it’s a suggestion? Because I feel like the beach would work, too.”

  Emily takes my phone, punches in a number, and puts it on speaker. I hear hold music from the local light station.

  “My ex,” Emily says. “He did so much cloud, a certain thing happened to him. I could see it when he was hitting us, me or Leo. It was like, we weren’t quite alive to him. We weren’t people. He was always an asshole, Mellie. He was always violent, but the hitting and pushing, it was real to him. With cloud, it was different. It was like he was doing a chore, when he hurt us, like he was kicking the shit out of a bag of trash.”

  I nod. The staticky soft rock plays through the phone.

  “When I got here, last night, that was you, Mellie. Your own kid is upstairs. She’s not breathing. What does she do? She comes for you, her mom. And you’re not there. You’re busy licking someone else’s secondhand cloud off their dirty paper. I’ve had sponsees relapse, and I had one die. I can take it. But a kid, a little baby. I’m not having that on my conscience.”

  “Hello?” says a voice on the speaker phone.

  Emily grasps my hand as I reach for it.

  “If you’re half-assed, tell me now,” Emily whispers. “Put Juni out to foster till you get your shit together instead.”

  “Hello?” says the voice again.

  “I’m not half-assed,” I say. And I’m not. Now that I’ve made my decision, relief floods me.

  I’m still spelling my name into the receiver when I finish packing, and Emily leads me around the house, flicking off lights, unplugging appliances. Even with insurance, it’s going to be very expensive. I have enough savings in the bank to get me through a couple of weeks, but then I run out, unless I can somehow manage to do the underpants job.

  “You worry about that when you get there,” says Emily. “Even a couple of weeks, it’s worth it.”

  I nod, take my keys off the counter, but my sponsor shakes her head, and I hand them over to her. I’m in no position to mother, no position to drive. Then I follow her out the door.

  I don’t want to go, obviously. I don’t want to be in a room full of convicts having fake epiphanies. I don’t want to eat communal meals and have chores and learn fucking life skills. I’m an adult; I own a house and drive a car, and I want to be able to have a stupid relapse if I feel like it. I’m going anyway.

  We exit through the garage. There, on the car seat, are all the licked and discarded scraps of paper. I think of the man, the OD TO man from my dream. I think of the lemon-burn of a lick of cloud, of Kif-Vesely’e, the feeling of being observed through a one-way mirror. Emily is right: I need to stay away.

  Emily presses the button on the garage door. For a moment, it sticks, as if offering me an out, a second option, but then, it is closing, and we are walking across the lawn to Emily’s car. Before I can draw a next thought, they’ve transferred me to the next agent, and I begin my recitation of symptoms. Paranoia, I read from the card Emily’s prepared. Delusion. Manic acting-out.

  “You going on vacation?” shouts my neighbor.

  “Aruba,” says Emily.

  “I hope you arranged someone to take in your garbage cans this time.”

  By the time I hang up with the agent, we’re halfway to Quincy. There is an intake number, a preauthorization code, and I reach for my paperback and—it’s not there. The feeling is like forgetting your head, or the briefcase with the bomb inside.

  “We have to go back,” I say.

  Emily shakes her head. “You’re due there in fifteen minutes.”

  “It’s important,” I say. Something the size of a penny, lodged between two pages.

  “You know what your face looks like? A liar’s face. I don’t care what the lie is right now, what scheme you’re still working, but I want you to think about what this would be like if you were on Medicaid, how it would go down if you were homeless or HIV positive, or a hooker.”

  “OK,” I say. “OK.”

  “No going home. Not for tampons, or some stalker in your driveway, or some asshole boss whose approval you need. I don’t care if you left the stove on and your house is going to burn.”

  “I said OK.” Still. It does feel like the house is on fire, like I’ve left something there which will burn. I remind myself that I’m impossibly lucky. I have someone like Emily, and I have Juni. I’ve made it to the program; I have my thirty-one days. But, it’s almost like I’m on the cloud, that kind of splintering. I can sit here with her, I can let her lose pay and spend a personal day, I can make it all the way to Quincy, but some sliver of me is thinking about the little object inside my paperback. I had hidden something even from myself. It. You’ll know where to find it.

  part two:

  abroad

  One

  New York City

  1993

  This is the tail end of a certain New York City. This version is the city of sirens and crack vials and cherry bombs going off beneath alarmed cars. This is the New York City of squats in the Lower East Side, and people you know still living in Manhattan. I am aware, downtown, of several places where I can get a meal for under four dollars. More often, and at the moment, I am in my boyfriend’s apartment uptown. I’m supposed to be here studying for finals, away from the distractions of the dorms. But he’s paged me to say that he’s on his way, that there’s a thing we need to talk about.

  Now, I have about thirty minutes to prepare.

  It is twilight; in Morningside Park, a blue peculiar to this region of Manhattan descends. For a moment or an hour, the light of dusk and the light of the city are in equilibrium, and everything appears washed of detail. There are no angles, no edges. At my best, I am like this hour, blurred. I love the feeling during sex, when I am high on cloud, that I have deputized my body to tend to Mr. Boyfriend, that my mind is roaming elsewhere. These twilit moments, I am bodiless, adrift in the murky blue. I have no hunger for things I cannot have, no worry over the weight of my mistakes.

  Which evidence of my crimes, I wonder now, has Mr. Boyfriend uncovered? I perch on the windowsill, make a small note in my paperback, and feed myself a dose of cloud. His apartment is huge and empty. He has the first-generation anxiety about the quality of his decorating taste, like is it gauche or tacky. In order not to get the colors wrong, he’s relied on a palette of black and white. Black sofa, zebra rug, white chair, gray ottoman. On the walls, a couple of WPA-era prints of poor people and some lithographs from nineteenth century artists. One of them is on cream paper with gold trim, and I catch Mr. Boyfriend staring at the image uncertainly from time to time. I know he isn’t puzzling about the subject—a set of sketchy figures under the weight of what are either wings or a bundle of firewood—rather, he is grilling himself about the cream and the gold, whether these are errors.

  I could help him. At my internship with a small production company run by two perpetually warring brothers, one of the ADs has begun to have me look over the sets. We run on a slim budget, and have to make do on a single take, so the directors commonly have their work checked and double checked. I catch things no one else does, the clock hands set to the wrong time or the reflective surface that will mirror back the camera operator. I am said to have a good eye, but it’s more than this. It’s a perceptual ability I link back to my dumpster-diving days; I know in advance if a take will make the cut. I can see the failure before it comes.

  Incidentally? This whole apartment, Mr. Boyfriend’s whole apartment, is off. Despite his caution, despite his monochromatic approach, he’s got irredeemably shitty taste. If I were in charge of continuity for my mediocre lover’s life, I would clear these seven rooms of everything but the zebra rug. It arrived in a shipping container from Russia, which is what his family does, ship things hidden in other things. The rug just appear
ed, Mr. Boyfriend says—he is always playing naïve about the actual nature of his family’s business—along with crates of outlet strips. Perhaps he knows that it was once a real zebra, but I look at it and sense an extraordinary path, its heat-soaked birth on the veldt, the poacher’s bullet, the traveling caravan, the vast container ship, and its arrival at this Manhattan apartment. I couldn’t see that rug thrown away. We would make love on top of it, the one tragic object, if I were having a different kind of relationship.

  Passion’s not the point for me. That is to say, my boyfriend is worth a lot to me regardless of passion. I mean, financially. And now he needs to talk. Earlier this evening, when I returned his page with a phone call, I asked him, could he just stop off at Bello’s for the penne? I was stalling him. I needed the interval to mount a defense.

  Before I met Mr. Boyfriend, I was racking up debt in the financial aid office at a rate of a $124.67 per day. I’d cancelled my dining plan, and was feeding myself, buying books and subway tokens off the $150.00 a month I made at Yankee Muffin. I could have pulled it off, ramen dinners and library texts, except I was also simultaneously running a hefty tab downtown, where my Alphabet City dealer charges a buck twenty for a two-fer of cloud. I’d gone ten straight days eating only mixed-berry and white chocolate chip muffins which, because they are disgusting, go unsold at the end of the Yankee Muffin workday. February, and I still hadn’t bought half the books for my classes. The night I met Mr. Boyfriend, I was living on muffins and cloud.

  I took the train to midtown to meet my father’s mother. Her doctors had sent her to Sloan-Kettering about a lump for which help was already too late. She took me out to dinner at one of those places that serve prime rib and seem fancy to rich people who never went to college. It was a darkened restaurant, red carpet and walnut banquettes. In a corner booth was my grandmother, this sick woman who didn’t feel dressed up without a brooch, clasping and unclasping her purse. I was thirty-five minutes late, underdressed, unshowered. The purpose of the dinner, though it would not be mentioned directly, was the fact of my grades, which had slipped from As to Bs and then to low Cs. I ordered a bourbon while she picked at the olive dish. When my eyes adjusted, I could see the growth on her neck. It was just below the jaw, and she’d styled her wispy hair to try to cover it.

  “So, are you getting the checks?” she asked.

  I wasn’t. My mother forgot, cashed them, intending to give me the proceeds, and then needing unexpected car repairs or a new dress for a date with a man from the personals. Also, she considered maintaining her apartment a parenting expense, even though I’d spent the previous two summers with Nancy in Western Mass.

  “Of course,” I told my grandmother, white chocolate muffins churning in my stomach. “Yes.”

  “You should write me more often,” said my grandmother, who would be dead two months later, the trust checks permanently diverted. I gulped the bourbon, my grandmother frowning. “Nobody in our family ever drank,” she said. “Do they drink on your other side?”

  After her nurse came to fetch her, I found the nearest bar. It was bland, with TVs and only six or so patrons, but Mr. Boyfriend was among them. I wanted to get drunk, and I didn’t have any cash, and he was buying. Maybe it matters and maybe it doesn’t that my glasses were broken, tucked in my pocket with the tape around the eyepiece, and so I looked prettier than usual. Also, I’d learned in the interim some basic things about how to dress for my body type and shape my eyebrows which knowledge improved the quality of boy I was able to attract by about 40 percent. Still, 140 percent of what I’d drawn before doesn’t equal sex god. Mr. Boyfriend was short and had a bad haircut, but I don’t think we were about how I looked or he looked. Probably, it was my familiar thing of sad guys who think I can improve their stock, might make them look more responsible at holiday dinners. You get that about Mr. Boyfriend, that the extended family see him as unequal to his inheritance, that they all think they could handle things better. That night last winter, I went home with him and my financial prospects improved. Is he in love? Do I owe him something in return? These kinds of questions don’t rise to the level. I need the money more than I need to be good.

  —pop—

  The tab hits, swallows whatever worry I’d been harboring, cleans it out, and returns the better part of the evening to me. Mr. Boyfriend. Something to talk about. Penne from Bello’s. I look around the apartment, hone in on a sense of glimmering significance in Mr. Boyfriend’s study. He has a desk in there, book shelves, the usual shit, but mainly he uses the room as a place to toss the mail. It mostly hits the desk, but as the months wear on, some of it cascades onto the floor, the Publisher’s Clearinghouse, the bill from the chiropractor’s office, and all the revenue checks. He’s the sole heir to the shipping business, but, he tells me, it’s not the picnic it might seem. There’s a network of immigrant cousins and associates who are always onto some riskier scheme, whose foolhardiness he endorses by his inattention to the family business. There’s a chemical factory in Pripyat, in the actual Chernobyl exclusion zone. Lunacy like that. He is forever after himself to take things in hand. “Call a meeting, tour the warehouse.” Meanwhile, it’s me he should be worried about. I’ve learned the look and character of the payment envelopes; I know which checks are small enough that they won’t be missed. I keep a glue stick in my pocketbook, have a technique with a moistened Q-tip and a nail file. There are check cashing places that don’t care what my ID says.

  Tonight, the study is transformed, the teetering stacks of correspondence now in neat piles, slit envelopes in the waste bin. Mr. Boyfriend has been investigating me. I call Yankee Muffin and ask to speak to my assistant manager. He’s a familiar variety of pervert, is constantly trying to lean up against the counter girls when he’s instructing us on hygienic practices. My whole life, I’ll never meet a girl who hasn’t put up with the same. Not in retail, or service or entertainment or media, not in New York, or Los Angeles where I spend my twenties, nor in Boston where I eventually wash up, will I ever meet a woman who hasn’t been groped or humiliated or otherwise had to deal with it. Sometimes, at Yankee Muffin, I’ll puke, but that’s as much to get the muffin out as it is because of the assistant manager’s erections. Plus, I have cloud, so I can always just get past it.

  “Hey,” I say, phone perched on my shoulder so I can peel out of my uniform orange polo and khakis. Mr. Boyfriend is always on me to wear tighter clothes, but I tell him this isn’t New Jersey. “Did you tell me someone called earlier?”

  “Jah,” says the pervert manager. He is not German or anything. He just thinks this is funny. Just like it’s funny to rub up against the female employees when he passes us behind the counter.

  “Can you elaborate?”

  “A guy was checking your references. Were you generally on time—I said no. Did you handle money or bank deposits? I said, yes. Did you ever steal—I said no. Did you dress appropriately at work? You looking for a new gig, Mellie? You leaving us?”

  “Jah,” I say and hang up the phone.

  An instant before the click, my pager begins to buzz. The number isn’t one I recognize. It is evening. The ambulances approaching St. Luke’s have begun their nightly wailing. I’ll admit it’s a bit of a chronic problem with me, underestimating people. I think: if they’re not quite as smart as I am, they must be dumb, but that doesn’t always follow. Mr. Boyfriend, for example, isn’t stupid; he’s just lazy and insecure. And I don’t have a good instinct of what he’ll do if crossed. I’m not convinced he’s scary, but there’s the shady import stuff, a tendency to punch walls that can be disconcerting. Probably, it’s a good idea for me to come up with some sort of plan, but cloud makes such action feel urgent at the level of penne from Bello’s, as the question of whether he’ll buy me an appetizer. I write the seven-digit number from my beeper into the paperback and then dial it with 718, 917 and 212. Individuals associated with the Avenue D Bodega occasionally contact me. I’m thinking also it could be my uptown delivery guy with a
new beeper number. My cloud connections put me in the practice of returning calls. But, for the moment, I can’t make sense of who’s paging me.

  I scrape deodorant under my arms, spritz perfume, and reline my eyes. I can at least look decent for the confrontation. Cloud sometimes takes too much edge off. The beeper pings again, and I find a black dress on the floor of the bedroom, then flip the pager display over, like it might read as words—how you can type help with upside down digits. Something about the last four numbers sparks my circuitry. 7285. 7285. 7285.

  Nancy, who’s three and a half hours away, has been paging me from this spiritual retreat. She’d lost her housing in the aftermath of a campus building takeover. The suspension wasn’t permanent, but Nancy wasn’t going to write some crap apology and promise never again to et cetera, because she still believed in the cause, obviously.

  “Although, college activism is complete bullshit. Overeducated kids yelling at overeducated adults, and meanwhile, people out there are suffering.”

  On short notice, housing options had been limited. Anyway, this girl Andi we used to know showed up in a crisis, and both of them found work at this health farm in the Pioneer Valley.

  Now, I try the unknown pager number with her Berkshire area codes. It rings.

  Nancy had gotten political second semester of sophomore year. This anthro professor from Unmaking the Western Mind turned her on to Paolo Freire and Althusser and meanwhile, the protest crowd was throwing these outrageous all-night dance-a-thons. Eventually, the activist students had occupied a building—two whole weeks in there, this one dean’s office—until admin had cut off the sewage and cops had come to lead them away. The stink, after they’d left, had been what was covered in the press. Gone to shit, said Nancy, literally. She wasn’t done with politics after that, but she had to regroup.