by Alex Leslie
“You don’t have to log in if you don’t want to.”
But of course she would. She wouldn’t be able to resist inputting her name and password, a jumble of the letters in Melanie’s name and 0703, the anniversary of their first date, coffee and a documentary about penguin migration, which had made Melanie cry on the walk to Soma’s car afterwards—“I can’t believe how many of them die”—and Soma had kept walking, uncomfortable, thinking that she would not call Melanie again, that this woman was just too much for her, too much. So she hadn’t answered the first two voicemails Melanie left after that date, both of them five times longer than any message a normal person would leave, Soma had thought, calmly, rationally, pressing Delete.
Username and password, muscle memory. Raymorl0703. She is a hacker’s dream, these numbers embedded in all of her passwords. Banking, cell phone account, debit and credit PINs, passwords to dating websites she’d secretly cruised for the last few months of their six years together, not out of serious interest but for passive entertainment. Lots of people must do this, she’d thought. It’s innocent. She’d aimlessly browsed the profiles of hopeful women, their open-ended self-descriptions and whimsical profile
images. Rosie the Riveter; a panda holding a plate of brownies; a smirking Tina Fey. Half the profiles of people in their twenties used that actress from the TV vampire series Soma can’t watch because of the blood—a wan, pastel cheekbone of a woman who isn’t even very attractive, her vampire boyfriend cropped out. One woman wrote to her: We have so much in common, it’s like we’re meant to be, can I see a photograph? Soma had deleted the message in a panic, the sounds of Melanie showering after her ride home coming from the bathroom. Melanie had loved her cycle commute across two bridges and along the river. Now, driving those bridges, Soma looks straight ahead, the bike lane a hard margin against her memory. The yellow backs with silver stripes. Each one is Melanie.
“Why do I have to say anything?”
Her little brother is silent on the other end of the line.
“If you say nothing,” he says finally, “you’ll feel worse.”
“God, we’re all such”—she breathes the word heavily: “Robots.”
“If spending time on that thing makes you feel like shit, just don’t log in. It’s a piece of shit anyway,” he adds encouragingly. “Lots of people don’t use it. It doesn’t matter anyway,” he lies.
She says goodbye and logs in.
The blue and white blocks, the faces in yearbook arrays. It’s all suddenly so incredibly small, the quips and posts, tickets printed with script and hurled to the wind.
Click. Her profile. Click.
Her profile photo is a ferry deck shot taken by Melanie—gull origami nighttime flight, wind-slapped cheeks, Soma’s hair exploded in a dark swarm. Her stomach twists at how post-coital the photo looks, as if they’d just fucked on the ferry deck against the Pacific-chilled white steel.
Melanie had bellowed over the rushing wind while taking the photo: “Put your arms out. Wider. Wider.” Laughter. “Wider.”
That smile, no idea what’s coming. You idiot.
She deletes the photo, fingers popping wild across the keys. Heart absently hammering. Her drink slops onto her leg, just missing her keyboard. The smell of rum spreading down her thigh.
A powder-blue avatar pops up.
A no-her. Statuesque graphic. She can’t even erase herself—there will always be another digital stand-in.
She scrolls through her newsfeed. Melanie’s endless number of acquaintances, Soma’s co-workers who she sees every day, Melanie’s friends from veterinary school, Melanie’s friends from her bike-racing squad. A few friends from Soma’s undergrad, from over a decade ago. But mostly these are Melanie’s people. Profiles attached to her by the tentacles of her dead relationship. Where are her people?
Soma types into the blue-bordered status box, Moving on is hard but
Delete delete delete.
Well they say that
Delete.
The sun will come out tomorrow so smile smile smile
Delete.
Starting a new time in my life, looking forward to the next chapter.
Delete.
You are all going to die alone kids. HAHAHAHAHA!
Delete.
Settings.
Deactivate profile.
Are you sure you want to deactivate your profile?
And then the social networking system taunts her with loneliness, displays photos of her acquaintances, with a repeated message under each face:
Stacey will miss you,
David will miss you,
Leslie will miss you,
Max will miss you,
Matthew will miss you,
Janice will miss you,
Pat will miss you,
Ray will miss you.
Deactivate.
Click.
No one really watches the TVs in the gym—five flat-screens set on mute. Soma’s weight routine (eight machines, then free weights) overlaps with the evening string of game shows.
The subtitles roll past:
[DO YOU WANT
TO TAKE THIS CHANCE
TO INCREASE YOUR
EARNINGS TO ONE
HUNDRED AND FIFTY
THOUSAND DOLLARS?]
The host’s face twitches. The camera sweeps the
audience.
[AUDIENCE APPLAUSE]
The contestant is in her mid-fifties. She perches in a black blazer with orange piping. She’s wearing a taupe headband. Who wears headbands?
[WILL YOU TAKE
THIS CHANCE?]
[YES.]
The lights dim to a smoky blue, then dissolve into a white dome.
[SUSPENSEFUL
MUSIC]
[YOU HAVE REACHED
THE NEXT LEVEL
PAMELA.]
The woman spreading backward, legs out, blocky gums and teeth in a close-up.
[AUDIENCE
APPLAUSE]
Soma presses slightly upward. This week, she increased the weights to ninety pounds to see how it would feel. Her muscles climb and ache. The way her lungs feel when she spends slightly too long under water. She holds the weights there, in that place of almost too much.
[YOU’RE MOVING ON
TO THE NEXT LEVEL.
HOW DOES IT FEEL
PAMELA?]
[INCREDIBLE JUST
INCREDIBLE]
Soma can’t catch her breath. Melanie loved these shows as much as Soma hated them. “I can’t resist the pageantry,” Melanie had said. “I love it for the same reason I love Harry Potter!” Soma would leave the room, stand in the kitchen, washing dishes until Melanie came into the kitchen and put her arms around her from behind, whispered into her neck, “Don’t hate me because I love the things you hate.” She said this about lots of things: Chicken McNuggets meals, documentaries about the British royal family, malls, dried seaweed, SPCA commercials, cargo shorts, long-distance biking. She used to go on daylong rides to Tsawwassen, the town by the ferry terminal, and come back and lie on the dog bed and moan. Soma never understood, watched her, mystified—this exuberant human with whom she happened to split life.
Soma holds the weights away from her body until the sensation shreds through her bared teeth. She could hold it here forever. She lets it back in. Slowly. Draws it back to her chest, lets it bear in hard, lets it press there. Back and ass rooted to the seat of the machine. Opens her legs wide. A feeling glows in her, a hand at the base of her spine. Melanie’s voice in her ear: Do you feel that? That’s your pelvic floor. A shudder tumbles through her.
In what bedroom, where had she said this? How many more times, these summonings in her body? Melanie’s hand cupping the base of her spine.
She lets the weight
s go.
They slam down on either side of her ears.
She heaves, staring at the screens. Were there this many competition shows before the economy collapsed? Recession porn. The shows are far-ranging. High school math teachers performing Broadway musical numbers; B-list movie stars paired off and hacking out tangos; a show about a Christian family with twenty children, crewcuts and braids and checkered shirts. Why are these people inflicting this on themselves? Soma thinks. Melanie loved this crap. Especially the Christians, their colonies of offspring, their plans to renovate the double garage to raise more alpacas. It’s a family project! Everybody pitches in! They are, Soma thinks spitefully, like a revivalist Chuck E. Cheese.
A girl, eleven or twelve, tells the talent show audience that she shares a bed with her single mother, that her father was an alcoholic who beat them. The judges prompt her performance of an old Etta James number.
[THE STAGE IS
YOURS.
IN YOUR OWN
SWEET TIME SWEET
HEART.]
The girl sings beautifully, body finishing with a bird’s joy bow at a pool of water. Her face so open and pure, Soma has to look away.
She wants to tell them, You don’t owe anything to anybody.
She wants to tell them, You can look away.
It is easy to stop. This is what she has discovered.
Easy to stop answering email. Easy to come and go from the paperwork at the office, bring nothing and leave nothing behind. Move through the cream-and-steel lobby, the wax museum of co-workers. So easy to heave off all things. So easy. So easy to write back to Melanie’s best friend, Jared, Stop emailing me. I’m not Melanie and you never went out of your way to get to know me, and delete his responding email without reading it. All things are contracts, not covenants. Easy to say nothing. Easy to stop acknowledging, and then reading, invitations. Easy to not move in relation to others. To amputate herself from gatherings. Melanie, who was a gathering.
The ultimate test of strength, the trainer had said at the introductory weightlifting class, is to be able to hold up your own weight. Hold yourself aloft. The trainer, a woman in her late fifties, made of thick rope and cantilevered joints, veins like exposed wires. Soma watched her, amazed. Melanie had been the one who exercised, duct-taped an uncle’s caving headlamp to her bike before buying the proper gear. Her gear was always left piled by the front door for Soma to throw into the laundry room. Now when Soma opens their front door, she still smells Melanie’s sharp sweat, almost reaches for her wet jacket.
The community centre’s automated call for the weightlifting class had popped up on their landline voicemail a week after Melanie moved out. Soma hadn’t known Melanie had signed up for a weightlifting class. She hadn’t known Melanie had any interest in refining her cyclist body, her tendons already violin-tuned. This message is for Melanie Lee Rhymer, a voice had recited. This is a reminder.
Soma had gone to the class. She’d told herself it was to try something new, but really she had thought Melanie might be there. At the class, a woman in her seventies told them she was there for her osteoporosis. “Turns out my bones aren’t what they used to be!” she said cheerfully, and the whole group burst into laughter.
The woman at the next locker looks over at Melanie. “Good workout?”
“Yeah.”
“You were working hard in there.”
It had never occurred to Soma that someone could be watching her. But, of course. What else would people do, while lying around grunting? “Thanks.”
“How long’ve you been lifting?”
“Not too long. Couple months I guess.”
“You’re pretty solid.”
“I think I’m getting there.”
Small talk is a way to keep moving. Small talk is a kind of humming. Soma never understood this before—she always wondered at the uselessness of it. For her, cocktail parties and grocery store aisle conversations were exercises in failed lip-reading. Melanie had mocked this affectionately: “You just don’t understand people at all, do you?” Now she understands.
“I’m George, by the way.”
“George?”
“It’s short for a name so horrible and ugly I refuse to inflict it on others.”
“Georgephine?”
“Oh my god! Nobody’s ever guessed before.” Soma laughs, zipping up her jeans.
George’s hair is shaved close. When she bends to untie and slip off her sneakers, Soma sees that the back of her head is surprisingly flat. Like a zombie head, Soma thinks to herself.
“I’m Melanie,” Soma says.
George glances up. “Hi, Melanie. Long day?”
“Pretty average.”
George nods at her shoes.
“Just a long day at work,” Soma says. “Passport office.”
“Sounds exciting.”
“It is what it is.” Soma shrugs and George nods. “The work is not letting people drive you nuts. And the dental coverage.”
“I get that.”
“Come for the living wage; stay for the free root canals.”
“Well I’m a teacher. When we aren’t on strike, we’re arguing about going on strike. Good workout?”
“Amazing workout.”
George strips quickly. A body that has lifted weights for years. She’s probably in her mid-fifties. Something Soma’s father told her once—you can tell someone’s age by the backs of their hands.
“You’re here all the time now, eh?”
“Pretty much every day,” Soma says.
George nods, drifting toward the shower, pulling on her flip-flops. “It can get pretty addictive, once you get into it. Nothing better.”
Soma drives home, hair damp from her shower, her shoulders and arms injected with honey endorphins. The cyclists pass her, brilliant fish in a parallel stream, their safety jackets smeared across her wet windshield.
At home, it takes an instant to reactivate her Facebook profile. The grid of friends’ faces, her truncated history. And then, there is Melanie’s face. She’s shaved one side of her head, the hair on the other side scooped up around her ears and heaped boyishly, and there is another woman’s face in the photo. Their eyes and cheekbones are matching and bright.
Don’t click on her.
Don’t do it.
Internet law.
What’s on your mind? the status box asks her.
She types in: The person you most want to see will become the person you least want to see.
She presses Post and logs out.
She’s getting stronger. A hinged thing. Flesh firm around her joints, her shoulders suddenly, one day, blades.
Soma has watched her body in the mirrored wall in the gym, watched her body change. Her neck plunges into her collarbone. When she turns and looks at her back in her bedroom mirror, it is a raised plateau. Her outside layer has peeled away. She remembers those anatomical models from high school biology class, human puzzles, their removable spleens.
The men at the gym now call her bro. One day, a shrug-nod, and then, coolly, hey bro. The luck of broad shoulders. Her new bro status pleases her in spite of herself. She moves the pin in the weights to 120 pounds. Mid-lift, she looks at her right arm, the new tough packet resting there. When she felt the new muscle for the first time, her mind flooded with worry: A lump. Her mind looks for reasons to panic everywhere. No, this is what she’s been working for—this hardness. Beside her, a man strains on the piece of equipment dubbed the birthing machine. Weights attach to pads placed against the inside of each thigh. He squeezes and releases. Aaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhh. Soma ties her shoelace to conceal her smirk.
The woman, possibly a dancer, who balances on the exercise bench every night. One arm extended. A weight at the end of her arm, muscle a perfect arc, a soft band. Soma watches. The pure control of motionlessness.
She types in: You are the only one pretending to be you.
There are people and their ways of moving. There are the storks and the straight-necked and the sufferers, backs bent, ears blocked out by the steel orbiting rings. The men who strut the length of the floor. The men who supervise the shapes of their muscles in the mirrored wall, sleeves summoned upright. How could anyone who goes to a gym think that women are the vain sex? Late at night, rows of men’s hands wrap the metal bars. One man, compact and anguished, paces to the water fountain after every set of repetitions. Another guy guides his body through cycle after cycle on the leg press, extends and withdraws, pumping the bellows of a great machinery. Soma feels it occasionally as she lifts—a roughness in her blood. She has realized that her muscles have their own busy lives. Sometimes when she pulls on the weights, there is an absence there; sometimes, there is a humming, a throbbing, begun before she makes her demand. Soma ignores these quiet pulses, learns to pull with the same force every time.
When she tells Josiah about the weightlifting, she makes sure to slip it in casually at the tail end of one of their phone calls, but he stops and his voice lowers on the other end of the line. “Whoa whoa whoa, what?”
“Weightlifting,” she says.
“That’s awesome. How long? What?”
“Pretty much every day.”
A long pause. “Since Melanie left?”
“Yeah, pretty much.”
“Well, that’s great, Lo, that’s great, that’s really great, good for you. I mean, I’m really glad you found an outlet.” He pauses, waiting for her to say more, then pushes. “So, is it helping?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I mean, you’ve been having a hard time. Dad called me. He says you don’t answer any of his emails or phone
messages.”
“That’s because all of his emails and phone messages are about kale.”
“Lo. Look. We all know what she did is pretty fucking terrible. I mean, who fucking—who just leaves like that? But, I mean, you two were always—”
“Always what?”