Six months after inheriting the dresses, gowns, coats, and shoes, Echo’s most treasured pieces were beginning to look worn-out or had their zippers broken. Designers gave her more clothes, but there had been no time to wear them and nowhere to store them. She had already gotten rid of all her furniture to make room for shelves for the knits and racks for the dresses. Rows of shoes lined the walls of her room. All of her mementos and family photos, her cheap luggage, her terrible old clothes, had to be put into storage.
Fashion week whirled her across dance floors, cheek to cheek with starlets, and had her running barefoot in the dying grass of the Tuileries. One moment she found herself on the long tables of Dior’s dinner in the industrial ballroom of the Palais de Tokyo, pressing a silk pocket square to her small lips. The next she was lined up on Chanel’s staircase waiting to have her picture taken. That was when she spotted the first of what she called The Others.
The first one was a tall woman of indeterminate age, whose long hair was so blond it was absolutely white. She stormed through the door draped in a Balenciaga cocktail dress intricately boned at the waist. She grabbed a glass of champagne from a tray and threw it back with an audible gulp. Echo recognized the dress immediately. She squeezed her way down the stairs and put her hand on the woman’s shoulder.
Close up, she could see that the cream collar of the dress was stained with lipstick in the front and there was red wine spilled on the hem.
“Excuse me,” Echo said. “I love your dress, where did you get it?”
The woman spun around and smiled at her with wine-stained teeth, spilling some of her champagne on the floor. “Oh, you’d never believe it,” she cried. “I got it at the Kilo Shop right on Saint-Germain and it absolutely changed my life. Every time I wear it, I get lucky!” She toppled away, wiggling her hands at the waiter holding the plate of crudités, swaying and spilling, all the while Echo couldn’t take her eyes off her.
There were more sightings of women wearing clothes with ironic elegance. Olga from Italy with a gypsy mother who found four pairs of shoes left behind in a hostel bathroom. Finnish Cecil with the shaved head and eyes like precious stones, who spent a semester of tuition money at a consignment shop. A small Japanese woman who stuffed herself into a corset that was too small for her but nevertheless swore that it was made for her.
Afterward, Echo couldn’t stop thinking about these mislaid articles drifting aimlessly through Paris and the women who wore them. They were so familiar these women, the delighted awe of new indulgences right there on their faces. Were they all remnants of Mega? Did they recognize it in Echo as well?
On the last night of shows, instead of heading out to the after parties, Echo turned up unannounced at Nicholas’s town house wearing a brand-new hot-pink Versace number under her enormous mink coat. But to her surprise, right after taking her coat, he nearly blocked her from continuing on.
“What…is going on with your face?” he asked. “Are you sick?”
“What do you mean?” she said, touching her lips and cheekbones with her fingertips.
“Maybe it is this outrageous dress you’re wearing. Why don’t you go home and change into that slip of yours? You look so nice in it.”
“I can’t find it.” Echo groaned. “I think I left it in that hotel in Tokyo.”
“What a mistake,” Nicholas said. He shook his head as if he’d never been so dissatisfied with anyone. “You should have never left Asia without it.”
Walking home along the left bank of the Seine from his town house, Echo thought she saw another blue whale, spouting water over the river’s surface as it swam up alongside the sightseeing ships. Standing there, paralyzed with feeling, she remembered a scene from her childhood—while shopping with her parents, she had cried because she was thirsty. She had hugged their legs and told them she was thirsty, but they were too busy and forgot about her until at last she had burst into tears. They laughed at her then: who cries over being thirsty? But at that moment Echo didn’t know how long that terrible thirst would go on for; for all she knew it had been with her forever.
Echo thought of the plane, still missing. The last thing she wanted was for some boat to dredge up a wing, a seat cushion, a waterlogged suitcase filled with cosmetics. Locating the final destination of the missing passengers would mean the end of hope. An enduring mystery was better than just another accidental tragedy. Echo pleaded with the vessels and the radars that they never find what they were looking for.
Had she wanted to, it would have been so easy to walk to her rented apartment, where she would fill her luggage with the dead girl’s clothes and then dispose of them in various dumpsters around the city. Her lost-and-found jacket would be waiting for her and she pictured herself pulling it over her bare shoulders with a deep sense of relief. At the edge of the bank, she carefully took one arm out of her long coat and let the other sleeve slide off her arm by the smooth silk lining. The coat landed softly in the murky river and floated away, her trifling gift to the whale. It could hold a lot of secrets, this water. Hers was nothing.
Future Cat
The Wine Ager had arrived unceremoniously in a big flat box a few days earlier, along with her grocery delivery. Before Maggie read the instructions, she’d completely forgotten what it was and why it had come. It was the color of a brass instrument, the shape and size of an old record, with a groove going through the middle the width of a man’s wrist. A shiny button glowed warm and pink from the rim. When pressed, a word popped up in cartoonish letters.
age, it read.
Maggie slid a cheap bottle of wine into the groove and pressed the button. Nothing happened. She poured a glass, raised it to her lips, and took a sip. It tasted fine, she thought. Feeling more experimental, she put her basil plant on the plate, pressed the pink button, and watched the leaves shrivel and the stalks go limp. The tiny cactus from the bathroom was more or less unaffected.
At the wine shop downstairs, she picked out a bottle of 2016 Château Margaux cabernet sauvignon that was supposed to improve with time. At home she popped it open, poured two ounces or so into a wineglass, placed the bottle into the groove, and pressed the button. She poured a second glass and then tested them both. It did change the flavor somewhat, the aftertaste of berries lingering in her mouth. The color might have coated her glass longer when she swirled it, but other than that she couldn’t really tell the difference.
When the advertisement for this Wine Ager appeared on her computer screen, she couldn’t control herself and clicked “buy” right away. She’d recently purged out-of-date iPods, iPads, a VHS rewinder shaped like a Corvette, and a jiggling adhesive mask that was supposed to work out her face. She already had a robot vacuum, a neck massager, an air purifier, a humidifier, and a dehumidifier. What was one more impulsive appliance purchase?
She had been expecting a state-of-the-art high-tech gadget, but the thing in front of her looked more like something someone’s mother might pull out of the attic in order to display pomegranates, scented candles, or gourds.
The first living thing Maggie aged to death was a garden snail she peeled off the sidewalk. Her finger hovered over the button before she pressed it. The snail’s shell withered away in seconds, turning foul and brown. Then, before she could inspect it, her cat, a black and white rescue named Small Cow, jumped up and knocked the remains under the refrigerator. He tilted his head up at her, eyeing her suspiciously.
“Come here, you,” she said while noisily shaking the bag of dried duck organs that gave her magical powers over him. Last summer Maggie had heard Small Cow meowing pitifully in the rain behind a dumpster. She’d brought him home, cleaned the gunk from his eyes, and picked out his fleas by hand in the sink. Still, the callous and unsentimental animal barely acknowledged her without taking bribes. He gently nudged her arm with his head and she rubbed his cute furry face with a pink heart for a nose until a bird flew by. Small Cow went over to the window, got up
on his hind legs, and looked outside, like a toddler.
“The box says that it allows you to enjoy young wines without waiting years for them to mature,” she told her boyfriend, Greg, over the phone.
“What does?” In the last year Greg had been promoted from product engineer to executive VP in charge of development. Company profits were booming, and the new responsibilities cluttered his brain. “Sorry, what were you talking about again? Wine?”
“My new Wine Ager,” Maggie replied. “It just came in the mail today. I have no idea how it works, but it’s definitely doing something.”
Greg made his usual sound indicating for her to go on.
“Let me read the description to you, okay?” she asked, shifting the phone from one ear to the other so that she could read the box. “ ‘The Wine Ager™ is made of a patented metal alloy that creates its own electrical field. This field travels continuously between the plate and the individual bottle of wine, interacting with molecules to speed up the chemical reaction of aging. Our special metal alloy acts as a catalyst to drive the aging process without adding any substances to the wine itself while substantially changing its taste and character.’ ”
She paused. “Are you listening to me?”
“Yeah,” said Greg. “Taste. Character. You bought this thing that takes shitty wine, whacks it with electricity, and, boom, it’s better tasting. I got it.”
“Not necessarily better tasting,” said Maggie, “just older tasting. It makes the wine older than, well, I guess it depends on how many times you press the button actually.” She put a bag of rock-hard avocados on it. “Actually, it’s really sending the wine into the future,” she said, then repeated it for emphasis: “The future.”
“Anyway…” said Greg after a long pause, “what kind of underwear are you wearing?”
She rolled her eyes even though he couldn’t see her. Greg’s important deadline was to launch a new networking app called Chicken Tinder.
“The big beige ones.”
“Why? Just to torment me?” he asked. Being promoted had also made Greg very horny. Maggie guessed it came with the territory of feeling so important so much of the time.
“I’d say they are vaguely medical,” she added. “The kind of practical undergarments suitable for someone who is writing something that will probably turn out to be shit.”
“You put too much pressure on yourself,” Greg said. “What you do is hard. You should go outside, enjoy the nice weather for me.”
His tone was so gentle. She wanted to put her eye socket against his shoulder. She didn’t know what made her feel worse, when he used to ask about her work or that now he assumed that it was not going anywhere.
Maggie hung up the phone and pressed the button next to the avocados but didn’t bother to see what happened to them.
Spring had finally arrived. It was impossible to judge the emotional repercussions of such a long succession of dreary days on Bay Area inhabitants. But it was over. The days were warm enough that her daffodils, no longer frozen, were able to express themselves. At the bakeries down in the Mission, people shamelessly stuffed their faces with fresh strawberry pies. Grown men were taking bites of each other’s brownies. Girls stood outside wiggling their winter butts this way and that.
Maggie knew this even though she spent most days inside her apartment, avoiding this mysterious elusive “work” that she called her “book.” Ever since she quit her job last fall to focus on it, every attempt at writing made her feel like an imposter. She would rather do anything else. She wanted to eat the pages so they wouldn’t exist anymore. Therefore the Wine Ager presented itself as an irresistible distraction. She couldn’t seem to leave the damn thing alone. Her brain refused to stop coming up with more things that would benefit from a few extra years to reach peak goodness.
A bottle of soy vinegar went from five years to fifteen in front of her eyes, and licking a drop off the tip of her finger, she could picture its new journey through ceramic urns in the sun. As she watched the contents go from thin and flat to thick, viscous, and velvety in its bottle, it occurred to her to try it with a sad jar of pickled cabbage. Within seconds, the leaves bubbled with frenzied fermentation, becoming as ripe and pungent as anything her grandmother could have dug out of her cellar.
There were even a few debut novels on her bookshelf she’d put off finishing. With a few rounds on the Wine Ager, she found one novel’s narrative tone less grating, as the teenage characters conveyed much-needed self-awareness and wisdom far beyond their years. In another, a central character matured out of the storyline altogether, divorcing her abusive husband and running away to Antigua with a childhood fisherman friend.
Certainly the last thing Maggie wanted was to be two years older than she was, or two months, or two days. She was keenly aware of time lines, expiration dates of food, the shelf life of flowering plants, and the appropriateness of behavior at any given age.
When she first started writing in earnest, she’d been a completely different person. Back in college, she had won writing contests and been bestowed with such titles as “emerging” and “promising.”
It was during that boom of minor achievements that she met a chain-smoking dreamboat named Maxi in the student bar where he was playing electric guitar with his hands and a keyboard with his foot. He was an international student from Moscow with a Cyrillic tattoo across his broad emaciated chest. Plenty of girls already knew what it meant: until we meet again.
Just standing next to Maxi made her feel more like an artist. He struck everyone as a person who can derive all his pleasure from music, as if nothing else, not even what time it was, ever mattered. He taught Maggie how to play the Miles Davis improvisations on the piano, using her stories to write top-line lyrics to melodies. He would pick her up and run around the supermarket with her on his back, singing their song at the top of his lungs. He promised to send the arrangements to the best bands in the country. He made her picture those songs being pop hits in Finland. Jakarta. Japan. When he talked like that, swinging his arms against her cooking pans turned into cymbals, she believed him. Those days they were transcendent, made innocent and immortal with—it seemed so obvious now—all the time they still had in front of them.
She would have been willing to spend the next five years feeling like an artist just standing beside him. She would have followed him from one state to another, hopping from artist residency to colony, drinking cheap Polish vodka, and taking it out on each other in taxis. Because when they talked about the things they loved, it always felt like singing. They made up on people’s stoops and kissed in a way that made people call the police. They owned nothing but each other, and that was what they fought over. Who needed to sleep more? Who was busier? Whose career would be more important for the greater world? Which one of them would be the bigger monster?
Then a whole year passed after graduation. Instead of applying for academic fellowships and Ph.D. programs, Maxi convinced her to go with him to an artist residency his poet friend had told him about, on an island without electricity or plumbing that two outdoorsy bros bought off of Craigslist. Huddled together beside a perpetually dying fire, they put lyrics to songs he composed and told each other stories about their families, comparing upbringings in their different communist countries, and that was when Maggie realized how truly impractical both of them were, each in their own way. When she left after three weeks, on a wooden dinghy with a UTI, Maxi chose to stay there alone, happily making analog samples of magpies and birds or whatever.
“Do you have a plan?” she asked him as they said goodbye. “Any plan at all?”
“It’s not at the top of my priorities right now,” he said. “Whatever is supposed to happen will happen.”
She watched him scraping dried mud off his shoe with a stick for a minute before saying, “So you think I’m just going to take care of everything for you?”
“No,”
he said quickly, not looking up at her. “I wouldn’t expect you to do that.”
When Maxi’s visa expired during his trip home to visit family in Chelyabinsk, he was banned from reentering the country. He asked her to take care when shipping his guitars. Maggie entered an MFA program in the Midwest, but this time she earned very few distinctions. After that, she got realistic about her prospects. She began following a strict set of behaviors, avoiding carbohydrates, dark liquor, and tobacco products. She moved back to San Francisco, where she got a job writing content at a ride-sharing start-up in order to pay off her student loans. The job was boring and made her feel underappreciated, but somehow that gave her a higher opinion of herself, like she had been wronged by a stupid world.
Greg approached her at a networking event. She accidentally slept with him after too many unusually complicated cocktails and then he bought her an iPhone for her birthday. She was charmed by how caring he was toward his younger sisters. Early on during their dating he’d said, “If this doesn’t work out, I’ll be your older brother,” and she surprised them both by bursting into tears. She had to keep going out with him after that so as not to be rude, and before she knew it two years had gone by and he asked her to marry him.
She said she would think about it. Technically, she was still thinking about it.
None of which would explain why, shortly after making herself lunch, she aged her cat. Not a minute after the idea popped up in her head, she found herself hoisting his tubby body onto the dining table.
“Don’t move, Small Cow,” she said, scooping his tail onto the plate.
Before he could dart away, she pressed the age button. Immediately she regretted it. The process itself didn’t seem to inflict physical pain, at least not that she could see. Small Cow hacked and coughed a couple of times, but then he stepped off the plate and sat on his haunches, looking dazed.
Home Remedies Page 16