Certain American States_Stories

by Catherine Lacey

  I considered replying to the monk with a statement in kind, but no part of his body was my favorite version of that body part—except for his hair, thick and greasy. That, I loved. Though hair is less a body part than a cell graveyard, reshaped into an identity, a death halo.

  FOURTEEN

  Another thing about the quiz: I could never discern Aroused from Afraid. Got zero of four.

  FIFTEEN

  A few nights before the silence vow the monk told me we were isolated beings.

  A pure union is only possible with the infinite, he said, so trying to create a pure union with a human being, an isolated being, will just lead to suffering.

  He told me he was exploring the infinite through his body and this meant intimacy with isolated beings who were not isolated inside my being. He said something about attachment. He said this all so softly, while brushing my hair. I’d been sleeping most nights at his house by then and he bowed to me each morning and served me green tea in tiny porcelain cups.

  We must focus on the infinite—not suffering, not ourselves.

  I felt lonely and relieved, and I felt vindictive but peaceful, and still massively, terribly sad.

  SIXTEEN

  Why do all my feelings come like street drugs, cut with something else?

  SEVENTEEN

  While the monk was brushing my hair, my eyeballs were swelling wet, and even though he was behind me he somehow sensed that swell and said that tears are an expression of attachment and attachment to an isolated being leads to suffering. The crying sank back in. I didn’t cry. I didn’t even not-cry. I just sat there, feeling him brushing my hair, running his fingers over my scalp, kissing the tops of my ears, the back of my neck, the dull points of my shoulder blades—tenderness from a safe distance, tenderness without the eyes, tenderness between isolated beings.

  EIGHTEEN

  The authors of the internet quiz used many different sets of eyes from many human heads, but there was one set, a woman’s eyes with black liner and a little shadow, and every time those eyes came up I guessed she was happy, though she never was. Yet isn’t it true that some emotions hide behind other emotions and other emotions are behind those emotions and there is so much, too much, at work in us, so much emotional spit-swapping, that I don’t know how anyone can say anything about what anyone else might feel.

  NINETEEN

  You’re not even a real monk, I said, no longer sad, just angry, and when I heard him weep behind me I realized that’s all my anger wanted, to pull something from him, so the anger left.

  I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it. Of course you’re a real monk.

  You’re imprisoned by illusion, he said.

  I turned to see that his eyes, in fact, were dry and easy.

  I’ve never called myself a monk. I never said that. I’ve merely spoken to you about the social evolution of the human species. Nationalism is the enemy of the collective salvation of human consciousness. Individuality is an insult to the infinite. How many times do I have to say we’re all illusions?

  I wanted to know where that left us, as a couple, but I didn’t have a precise answer to his question, so I said nothing. The truth is my memory has been going for so long, I don’t think it will ever come back.

  TWENTY

  Like this: a stray memory of a bright summer morning, light splattered on a cat dreaming or dead on the sidewalk—why does that wreck my day, my week, so completely? There’s a word for the scrambling of senses, but there’s no way to explain how I’m always reeling from unclear feelings and memories, no word that’s not an insult, anyway, or a diagnosis.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Amelia told me she’d been at a café that morning, and a man was there with a baby, presumably his baby, a semitoddler, no hair yet, just a wobbling grasp of walking. Dad was being real permissive—letting the kid wander, crawl to the next table, toss saltshakers, get dodged by waiters. After a while, the baby crawled under a table and found something on the floor—Amelia wasn’t sure what, exactly—and being a baby, the baby put the discovery in his mouth and after a moment the dad noticed the baby had gone silent and that the baby had this look on his face like he’d just found a feeling he wanted to unfind and the dad jumped out of his chair with a sudden urgency and he reached under the table and got the baby and tried to get whatever it was out of the baby’s mouth but it wasn’t in the baby’s mouth anymore—it was, it seemed, deeper inside the baby. Perhaps a little blood was also leaking from the baby’s mouth, and the baby’s face was fading and the dad was trying not to panic, but the dad was absolutely panicking when he shouted, Is there a doctor in here? and his voice cracked like a teenager and Amelia said it made her wonder what this dad, who was probably in his midthirties, what this man would have been like as a teenager, if he could have ever envisioned, back then, being a father to a baby with blood in his mouth, eyes kind of rolling, skin going pale.

  Then what happened? I asked.

  A lot of people stood around, then an ambulance came.

  Was it okay?

  I don’t know.

  Was it glass? Did the baby eat glass or have a seizure or something?

  No one said.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Because I don’t know what happened to that baby, I can listen to Amelia tell this story again and again. Without an ending, it’s as interesting as the beginning of a day.

  TWENTY-THREE

  The non-monk actually is bald now. He shaved his head, took a vow of silence, and went to a movie while it was still light out. I didn’t know about any of this until he came over, letting himself in though I’d never given him a key. He has his ways of getting in; I’d like to know his secrets.

  I said, You look different.

  He ran a hand over his head and looked up, using his eyes to gesture.

  Not just that. It’s something in your face.

  He took out a note card and pencil, wrote, I just saw a cartoon, a kids’ movie.

  Somehow he didn’t have to explain the vow of silence. I understood this sort of thing might come with monk territory.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  But I also understood the difference in his face wasn’t just the vow or the cartoon or his bare head. I didn’t know exactly what it was, but I wanted to take it out of him, to prove I knew it was there.

  I knew it was something very important and very close and very far away. Something as necessary and hidden as an internal organ.

  Small Differences

  Whether or not I did the right thing—whether or not I was just being a “good friend”—whether or not I was lying when I said it was convenient for me to feed a cat for two weeks in an apartment a thirty-four-minute walk from my apartment—whether or not I genuinely wanted to be the sounding board for the serialized updates of his breakup (what she said or did not say, what he accidentally texted, what he can infer from her most recent tweet, Instagram, or Tumblr post)—whether or not I, to some degree, relish his suffering—whether or not he is, as she said, unable to care about anything that is not happening directly to him and whether or not I agree with her—whether or not his narcissism and/or solipsism is inextricable from his character—and whether or not my inclination toward his narcissistic and/or solipsistic company reveals something sad about me—and whether or not I even enjoy his company or have just become habituated to it—whether or not, in short, I am or he is or we are both terrible people, and how terrible we may or may not be—all of this is still debatable.

  Nathan and I met as undeclared majors of the late, late twentieth century after he failed to be exempt from Intro to Creative Writing. (The office-hour plea: I’ve already been introduced, a ratty stack of pages as his exhibit A.) His stories were the predictable homages in the style of an Important Male Novelist, often featuring a Russian exchange student named Nikolai: The women is bad, Nikolai said, and we must not say so, but always remember, she is, all the she, is bad. Nathan was commended for creating such a rich, opinionated character, but not by me. My notes o
n his submissions were all a variation on Why should I care? His notes on mine (gruesome crime fiction with unintended religious overtones) were usually arguments against my most recent notes for him. And I don’t remember why or how because I no longer understand the state I was in back then (heartsick over the idea of Jesus the way that other girls were heartsick over the idea of River Phoenix) but somehow this was the beginning of Nathan and I sleeping together, episodically, for the next ten years plus.

  I was the type to wander a Rite Aid alone and empty-handed, for hours—a favored pastime of a teenager wondering why a belief in Jesus no longer feels satisfactory. I stared at nail-polish removers and thought about how I’d never be a youth minister. I compared nutritional supplements while considering the conditional and imperfect nature of human-on-human love. Even attempting to imagine ever having a feeling at all comparable to the infallible devotion I’d had (or fabricated) with the Son of God was like searching for a needle in a haystack while suffering from a severe hay allergy and knowing, all the while, there is no needle.

  A few weeks after I first met Nathan we were in a poorly lit park at dusk, and I was explaining how I got that lopsided-cross tattoo on one ankle and the shaky JC in a heart on the other, and I know it’s trite to remember that he pushed a lock of hair behind my ear and grazed the backs of his fingers against my cheek, but that is what I remember happening so that must have been somehow important to me, and maybe that was the moment I accepted Nathan as someone who had a position in my life, a right to it, a tenure in it. And I probably believed, back then, that he was actually listening to the story of my teenage recommitment to Christ, which had happened after lights-out during a youth-group retreat. Three girls from my cabin and I snuck out to the little chapel in the woods, where we all confessed to occasionally doubting the validity of the Bible and the existence of God and sipping from a water bottle of vodka at the Sophomore Spring Fling the previous April, and Sherry Evans even admitted to a blow job and we confessed those and other sins, together, aloud instead of in silent prayer, and we knew that Jesus would forgive and completely forget—at least, that was what the youth pastor had said, that if you were to ask Jesus what sin he most recently absolved from someone, Jesus, our Lord and Savior, would just look at you dumb as a pancake (that’s how he’d said it), he’d look at you dumb as a pancake and say, I don’t remember. And since this was what Jesus did, I knew that forgetting was something I should also strive for (What would Jesus do? was always the question) but I could never forget Sherry Evans saying she’d given someone a blow job (and who?). But then we gave each other tattoos with a sewing needle and india ink and some of us cried out of joy or pain and we all did that kind of praying where you have your arms out, palms up, face up, eyes closed, swaying, murmuring words or whisper-singing and I remember thinking about how I looked like a picture of a perfect Christian, like those people in the commercials for gospel-music CDs and I wondered if anyone in those commercials had ever given anyone a blow job but I immediately asked for forgiveness for having this thought, but had it again and asked forgiveness again.

  When I told Nathan this story I was trying to cultivate an air of mystery to match his air of mystery and I probably believed he was so impressed by it that all he could say was Wow and start making out with me, but when I referenced the recommitment and tattoos some months later he sort of nodded and looked off and I knew he probably hadn’t been paying attention, that he was just waiting for me to be done. Maybe I believed he had that kind of amnesia that Jesus had, that our present overshadowed whatever I may have been like before we met, but after Mom met Nathan on Parents’ Day she said, quoting Paul, Honey, bad company corrupts good morals, and I knew what she meant but I told her she didn’t know him like I did.

  I hope you’re right. I sure hope you’re right, and I knew she meant, you know … Hell.

  It is true that Nathan was “bad company” but that was what had made him good company to me—I needed bad company to keep the bad in me company. And despite several bad incidents during and after college from which it seemed Nathan and I would not recover (canceled plans and harsh words and his guitar thrown down a concrete stairwell), we did, somehow, always, recover. I once tried to rationalize that his name meant “giver,” according to a baby-names book, and I believed that his inherent generosity would eventually become apparent, that he would grow into that name the way some kids have to grow into their ears or feet and I should just be patient. But then I realized that names are just given, not earned.

  It’s clear now that Nathan and I have always had just enough respect for each other to withstand a mutual disrespect.

  * * *

  I hadn’t heard his voice over a phone in many years (we had changed from phone-call people to text/e-mail/comment people as the times had accordingly changed) so when he called that afternoon and said, Nikky! What’s going on? I just said, Nathan, what’s wrong? because I am not the kind of person who can tolerate these kinds of things.

  Oh, I’m fine, he said, just wondering if you could take care of Echo while I’m out of town for a couple weeks.

  I surprised myself when I said, Sure, of course, and he said, Really? You’re sure? because I’ve always had a habit of finding some extenuating circumstance to prohibit me from doing even the smallest of favors, but I said, It’s no problem—I’d love to, and I knew I wouldn’t really love to, and I knew it was out of character for me to be so giving, but lately I was wondering if there was a way out of my character and I figured this wasn’t the worst place to start. We hadn’t seen each other in several months, at least—maybe since that night at the Ethiopian restaurant when I told him I wasn’t going to have sex with him anymore because I’d decided that a sex life was a waste, a liability, a bore.

  I don’t want kids. I’m tired of boyfriends. There are other pleasures in life.

  He was either listening or making his I’m listening face. A single lentil clung to his lip.

  Do you want me to tell you what I think?

  I was surprised he’d asked for permission. The lentil was still there.

  No, I said.

  Actually there was another meeting after the Ethiopian dinner—a spring day in the park, a bottle of wine, a long talk that reminded me of those long talks in dorm rooms and quads that had cemented our friendship or courtship or whatever busted ship it was. He’d told me about how well things were going with Analiese and he seemed remarkably genuine about it, settled, not at all like the Nathan I’d always known. I asked myself something that I have been asking myself ever since: Can people really change?

  I haven’t even slept with anyone else since I met her, he said, and I don’t even want to.

  There’s no way to say this nicely, but the truth was that Nathan and I would often have a little sex while one or both of us were in technically committed relationships with other people, but only a little sex and not for any good reason more than habit and it’s hard to break habits, everyone has a few, and if it’s just smoking you can smoke and say, Oh, here I go with the smoking again, I know I shouldn’t but I just do, but if you have a low-grade, persistent infidelity habit there is no low-grade, persistent infidelity section in a restaurant or fifty feet from a government building and there is no patch for kicking your infidelity habit and there is almost no socially acceptable way to talk about being unable to stop yourself from having a little sex with a person who is not your Publicly Declared Sex Partner.

  That day in the park, however, I was still on my celibacy kick, smug like a juice faster, and even though we later went to his apartment to watch a movie, we did exactly that and I fell asleep on his couch and he went to his room and I woke up in the middle of the night and let myself out. Since then, many months had passed with us saying nothing to the other aside from a texted quip, a like, a comment.

  You want to know the truth? (This is Nathan, again, on the phone.) Analiese broke up with me and, to be honest, I’m in a bad way. I really need to leave town.

>   I’m mostly sure that a “good friend” should get no pleasure from hearing a “good friend” say he has been dumped and is in a bad way, but Nathan had always seemed so invincible to heartbreak, and baffled by the ones I’d been through—but still, I felt embarrassed by that small, reflexive smile that came when he said he was in a bad way and I tried to rationalize that smile by thinking I was just pleased to be the friend he called for emotional and feline support, that maybe our “friendship” was more than a shared tendency toward combat and a bit of detached sexual attraction. Maybe, somehow, we also had a real place in each other’s life since he was trusting me with the life of his cat and plants, these lives he wanted to keep alive—but, no—I knew I wasn’t his first call and he wouldn’t have been mine. I can admit that I smiled because Nathan had finally been broken.

  It came out of nowhere. He sounded like a televised local reporting a tornado. Everything was perfect and then, just like that … Boom.

  When I stopped by to get the keys I found him half-drunk and glassy-eyed and chain-smoking though it was barely past noon. So it had happened. He had cared more about someone than they could care about him, and in a way I was seeing history being made, though just the minor history of one man becoming more human.

  I’m sorry you’re going through this, I said. And the thing is, I was, I think.

  He said, Well—and he started to say something else but stopped. His face was bending like he might actually cry, and I’d never seen him cry except for that one time we took mushrooms but that didn’t really count, and he covered his eyes as if to turn them off so I took this blind moment to smile, again, but that pleasure came link-armed with guilt—guilt from being pleased by his pain, and that guilt, that by-product of the Jesus years, grew stronger and I know I cannot be held responsible for the guilt-pushed decisions I sometimes make, because it complicates feelings, or makes me want what I probably don’t want or distracts me with what I should want to do, or should at least want to want to do. This time the guilt made me listen for the next several hours and two bottles of wine as he ached over what had been so good, so perfect, and how could she give it all up and what had he done wrong and why and why and why.