by Sarah Gerard
“I must have gotten lost.”
He walks to the kitchen and very calmly pours himself a glass of water. The air in the room feels as if it will detonate. He walks back to the desk and chugs the entire glass looking out the window. I watch him. He sets the glass down again.
“I know you were with Daniel,” he says, observing the street. “Please tell me the truth.”
“I wasn’t.”
“I know you were. I talked to Heidi. She’s in Boston and Daniel isn’t with her.”
“Well, I didn’t know that,” I say. I wonder whether Heidi is having a similar conversation right now with Daniel. “Why were you talking to Heidi?”
“I think you know.”
“I really don’t.”
“I’m calling Daniel.”
“Go ahead.”
The window shatters. Tiny pieces of glass land on his shoulders and in his hair. The base of the window has broken into jagged angles. A stream of blood drags from Aaron’s forehead to his nose, down to his chin. I breathe into my hands. I’m shaking.
He bangs his bloody head against the wall.
“Stop it,” I say. I place my hand on his forehead. My fingers are warm with blood. I lead him to the bathroom and sit him on the lid of the closed toilet. I look into his face.
“There are no carriages in Prospect Park,” he says.
“What?”
“You think I’m a piece of shit, so you fucked Daniel.”
I grab a conditioner bottle and throw it as hard as I can against the wall. It breaks open, sliding in iridescent lines down the plaster. I want to destroy him. I want to light his corpse on fire. “I didn’t fuck Daniel,” I say.
“Why would you lie to me?”
“Because I hate you.”
“You shouldn’t say things you don’t mean.”
I shove him.
“This is abusive,” he says.
“Shut the fuck up,” I say. “Shut the fuck up, you piece of shit.”
I wrench open the shower. I shove him forward into the water and shampoo the glass from his hair. He bleeds on the towels as I dry him. I press a corner of one onto the gash and tell him to hold it there while I find the Krazy Glue. When I return, he’s taken the towel away from his forehead and is purposely bleeding all over himself. I pinch the two sides of the broken skin together.
“You need to hold still,” I say.
He pulls away, and I grab a fistful of his hair. I look him in the eye as I use my thumbs to close the wound. I wipe the excess glue away with the towel, and filaments of cotton lint remain behind. Aaron gives up fighting. His head falls back limply against my stomach.
“You scare me,” I say.
Twenty
I shut down all communication. I lock myself in the bathroom once a day and cut myself with a broken Bic razor. Aaron discovers this while I’m walking around naked one day, after a shower. I let him know in so many words that he’s responsible. His clinginess and suspicion, and constant, low-grade criticism of me—compounding my burden as our home’s primary breadwinner—have driven me to this extreme; it is my only outlet. I begin taking notes toward a memoir about leaving my husband, hoping I will force myself to finish it, but weeks go by and I can’t seem to turn my rough outline into prose. I don’t communicate with Daniel. I act like he doesn’t exist. I continue to deny ever seeing him that night, and assume he corroborates my story because we don’t hear from Heidi—it’s as if we were never sort-of-friends with them. When we see their baby on Instagram, we don’t discuss it.
We broke the lock on the bathroom door during one of our fights, so I announce aloud when I have to shit. Aaron comes in anyway to get something from the cabinet. A turd plops. “Oh, sorry,” he says, with no urgency. He proceeds to retrieve the item. “Okay, okay,” he says when I tell him to leave. A small animal has been moving through my colon since the morning after I slept with Daniel. I’ve learned from WebMD that I can in fact be constipated while having chronic diarrhea because the liquid flows around the obstructions. The discomfort of constipation blends with the lingering tenderness of my pelvic floor muscles from the abortion. A hemorrhoid on my anus has healed with a flap of skin remaining behind like a flag. I tried to remove it by cutting off blood flow with dental floss, but this only served to cause an infection and has left behind an open sore.
Aaron still tries to rim me, which is painful and humiliating, but I can only bring myself to admit this sometimes, trying to spare the last of his manhood. I’m repelled by the thought of having any kind of sex with him, but if I turn him down two days in a row, he starts crying, and though I think of myself as someone who is comfortable with men crying, I’ve found this to only be true in theory. Aaron asks me for reports on my bowel movements, trying to be supportive and sympathetic. He wants to know when I’ll be back to normal, ready to fuck him. He thinks I don’t love him anymore. “How was it?” he asks every time I leave the bathroom.
ODESSA CALLS ME, and I happen to be headed to the subway, which provides a temporal limit to our conversation, so I answer and tell her she has ten minutes. I anticipate her telling me something along the lines of her being at the police station with Ian because he robbed a 7-Eleven and was caught with someone else’s Suboxone. Trees are turning amber and littering the ground in crushed leaves. I pass a wall of vines with sparrows flitting into the thin cover they provide. “It’s nice to hear your voice,” I say.
“You won’t believe where I am right now,” she says. Her sniffle is meant to signal that she’s crying. She pauses for effect. “I’m at the hospital. Mission died last night.”
I stop walking.
“They managed to resuscitate him. They called me at six o’clock this morning to come get him.”
I lean against a garden gate, check the time, and decide that I don’t care if I’m late for work. I’ll tell the bookstore someone died. I drop my backpack.
“He was squatting at a house in Roser Park, shooting heroin with crusties,” she says. “He overdosed and they dumped him outside the ER.”
“Is he still homeless?”
“He’s been couch-surfing since you broke up with him.”
“I thought he would’ve found a place by now.”
“Of course you did.”
“I thought you hated him.”
“I saw him at Zine Fest and he gave me a Steel Reserve. We did key bumps in the alley.”
“Did he say anything about me?”
“Does that matter right now?” I realize she’s calling to blame me for Mission’s overdose. He’s given her the idea that I ruined his life—that if I’d stayed with him, none of this would have happened. I’m where his downfall began. “He’s going to be okay,” she says. “Not that you asked, but he should be fine.”
“I’m so glad,” I say.
I imagine him sleeping on a bare wood floor littered with cat shit. Flushing the toilet with a bucket of rainwater. Jamming a dirty needle into the back of his hand. He’d wanted me to drop off the grid with him, escape the ever-present eyes of the NSA, Illuminati, and New World Order, somewhere in the disused suburbs of Berlin. I threw him out to avoid that fate. Odessa thinks I should have stayed and guarded him from it.
“Why did he call you to pick him up?” I ask her. “Why didn’t he call his mother or one of his crusty friends?”
She’s quiet.
“’Dessa?”
“And so will I, Nina. I had a hard morning, I haven’t eaten yet, but I’ll be fine. Thanks for your concern.”
“Don’t be like that.”
“My friend died today, and I’m here to be with him while my daughters hang out with the senile old lady next door, possibly drowning or choking, but don’t worry about us. We’re all good over here.”
A hedge rustles. A piss-stenched hobo appears in my periphery, asking for change. I ignore him and he asks for my phone number. I tell him to fuck off and he threatens to shut me up with his dick.
“What was that?” says O
dessa.
“Someone asking for change.”
“Did you give him any?”
“No, I don’t have any.”
“Really, Nina?”
“Yes, Odessa. I’m poor, remember? My husband doesn’t work, and my job pays minimum wage, and I don’t carry cash because it costs money to use the ATM, and I can’t even get approved for a credit card. Whenever I try, my credit score plunges. Is that what you want to hear? Am I struggling enough for you?”
“It just seems unlikely that you don’t have any change.”
“Why did you even call? To be a cunt? I’m sorry you’re having a shitty day. Sorry you’re cranky about it. I’ve already been through all that shit with Mission. There’s a reason I broke up with him three fucking years ago. It’s sad that he’s not doing well. He wasn’t doing well when I met him. I gave him a real life, which he didn’t appreciate. You want to take care of him? Have fun being yet another person’s mother.”
I hang up.
The bum has snuck into the garden next door and is tugging his meat behind a shrub, watching me. I turn away, pick up my backpack, and continue walking toward the subway. I reach the intersection and an SUV cuts close to the corner, almost taking me out. Odessa calls me back. “You think I’m white trash,” she says when I answer to say, “I’m not doing this.”
“It’s fine,” she says. “I am.”
“What does that even mean?”
“It means you think you’re better than me. You’re a big New Yorker now, a married lady, publishing one shitty book review in the Brooklyn Rail, and now you think I’m beneath you. Is this conversation even real, Nina, or is it all copy for you?”
“You’re a very talented person, Odessa,” I say. “You’re so smart, so charismatic.”
“I don’t need you to reassure me.”
“I just wonder what you could have done with your life if you hadn’t had a baby right out of middle school.”
“I wonder what you would have done if your nana hadn’t paid for your fancy-ass grad school.”
“Maybe you could have gone to college or pursued acting. Or biology? Politics? Travel? Become a high-class hooker? Moved to New York with Dennis as your sugar daddy? I just wonder what kind of life you could have made for yourself. It’s too bad you can’t go back in time.”
“Yeah, I know what you mean,” she says. “I just wonder if you ever feel something fundamental is missing inside you, Nina? Like there’s a void inside you that can’t be filled and probably never was? Part of being a decent person that you just don’t have so all that’s left of you is a really horrible bitch that no one can stand?”
“Maybe,” I say.
I BEGIN GOING to poetry readings because I know Aaron won’t want to come with me. He doesn’t understand poetry and feels threatened by male poets and their ability to be femme and sexually irresistible even when they’re ugly. He’s threatened by what he terms their “poet coats,” and their illegible references to Tikkun and Hegel and Simone Weil. These poets are more prone to talk about panda videos, Lana Del Rey, carnivorous plants, and David Lynch, but he doesn’t need to know that. “Tube worms are fascinating,” I say to a group smoking and shivering outside the Poetry Project on a Monday night. “But also narcissistic. They brag about not having anuses, but look closer: the bacteria inside them have anuses.”
“We talking about Melania?” says one, joining the circle.
My phone rings and I see that it’s Daniel. I consider not answering it since Heidi recently blocked me on Instagram, which I take as a bad sign. When I lurked on my finsta, I saw that all of her photos were of the baby; there were none of Daniel. It’s ten o’clock, and outside the church it’s freezing, the first plummet, but inside it’s too quiet for conversation. He calls again, then texts me: I’m sorry to bother you, but I really need to talk to someone.
I walk a few yards toward the street.
“I don’t know how to tell you this,” he says. “I tried to kill myself. I took a drill bit to my wrist.”
“What?” I say. I look back toward the group, which is beginning to file back inside for the reading. I walk around the courtyard of the church and crouch against a wall. “Where are you?”
“I’m fine. It was a month ago. I have limited mobility in my hand now,” he says. “I can’t play guitar. Frankly, I’m embarrassed more than anything.” He breathes into the receiver.
“I’m so sorry,” I say. “I didn’t know.”
“Listen, I need to ask you something.”
“Sure, anything.”
“You said you loved me that night. Did you mean it?”
“What night?”
“That night.”
I search that night at his apartment, then realize he’s talking about college.
“I was wondering if you’d meet me in person.”
“I can’t tonight, I’m sorry.”
“Are we friends, Nina?”
“Of course we are.”
“Do you still want to be my friend?” He’s crying.
“Of course I’m your friend, Daniel. Of course I am.”
We pick a bar in the East Village. It takes him thirty minutes to get there. When we hug, he gives off a thick, sweet smell, like old laundry. I examine the feeling that forms in my gut, sick with knowing something I can’t pinpoint. He smiles with his teeth, a bit too happy. We take our drinks to a corner.
“It’s good to see you,” I say.
“I told you I wasn’t done with you,” he says.
I look at his hands. I see no scar in the space between his palm and his sleeve. The bottom of his sleeve is streaked gray.
“Where are you staying?” I ask.
“On the floor of my friend’s art studio.”
“How long have you been there?”
“A few weeks.”
He looks up from the table, and his pupils are dilated. I watch him struggle to form words. “She has her own reasons which I dare not impart upon,” he says, attempting a British accent. His hand rests on my hand. “Do you know why I asked you here?”
He leans in to kiss me and I turn away. He brings my chin toward him with his other hand.
“Daniel, please,” I say.
I leave my body as he slides toward me around the booth. I watch myself from the next table. He kisses me and pushes his hand inside my waistband. His finger enters me halfway. My pussy burns from the lingering imbalance of the abortion.
“Listen, I’m here for you,” I say, moving away, suddenly returning. I take his hands in mine. His finger is sticky. “Daniel, you know I’m your friend, right?”
He’s crying. He places my hand on his dick through his jeans. I stroke him compassionately.
“Everything will be okay,” I say. “I have to go home now.”
He holds my face in his hands. I try to pull away from him, but he won’t let me.
“Let go, Daniel,” I say gently. He doesn’t. I realize my hand is still on his dick and remove it. I pry his fingers from my hair. “You’re hurting me,” I say.
“I’m sorry,” he says as I stand to leave.
“You have nothing to apologize for.”
“I’m sorry, Nina.”
“Talk to you later, Daniel.”
I check my phone on the train. I wrote this song for you, he’s texted. It’s a Spotify link to U2’s “With or Without You.” I block him.
I DEVELOP A yeast infection from the mix of Daniel’s dirty fingers and old blood. I try to cure it naturally with a clove of garlic wrapped in cheesecloth shoved up my vaginal canal. This only makes me reek of garlic. I follow the advice of my intersectional feminist Facebook group, VagChat, and douche with diluted tea tree oil, which burns like napalm. I’m halfway through drinking a bottle of apple cider vinegar. We find out that yeast likes to hide in the warm, moist folds of Aaron’s foreskin. He develops a cheesy buildup and a rash of tiny abscesses on his head. Against my advice, he washes it and applies antibiotic ointment. The water fee
ds the fungus while the ointment suffocates and irritates the rash. We both get on a steady regimen of Monistat, him applying the soothing ointment that comes in my twenty-five-dollar kit, me penetrating myself three times a day with a plastic tube filled with chalky cream. He asks me multiple times if I’m sure it’s a yeast infection. “What are you implying?” I say.
I squat in the tub to clean myself, the “whore’s bath.” I apply fresh Monistat cream from the shared tube in our toothbrush holder. I can tell something is wrong as soon as I leave the bathroom because Aaron doesn’t immediately greet me. Usually, even if we have only been apart for a few minutes, he acknowledges me when he sees me again, like a domestic animal, but he doesn’t even look at me. He’s sitting on the love seat with my laptop open on the coffee table, my email up on the screen. He’s naked because he wants his dick to dry out, to help the fungus die.
“I have a confession, Nina,” he says. He sits forward on his elbows and turns to me. He looks somber and resolute. “When you were in the bathroom, I searched your email. It’s not something I’m proud of and I’ll never do it again.” His voice is calm, which means he’s suppressing violent urges. “Why Daniel?” he says.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I saw the email you wrote him.” He slams my laptop closed.
“I didn’t send that because I never even finished it. We literally slept, Aaron. We were sleeping in the same bed together. Asleep.”
“Please don’t insult me.”
“It was two weeks after my abortion. I was suicidal. You were at your parents’ house. I was alone. I saw Daniel at the bar. He gave me a Xanax, and I fell asleep at their apartment. Nothing happened. We didn’t even touch each other.”
He grips the table and pounds his head against it. I run to him and place my hand in the way.
“I was depressed, too!” he says. “Why didn’t you talk to me?” His forehead is bright red, split by the vein. “I could have used someone to talk to. My mother had just had surgery.”
“I did talk to you.”
He pushes me out of the way and lifts a chair from the kitchen. He slams it down on the tile, and it breaks into pieces that fly around the room. “Why am I not enough?” he screams.