The Answers

by Catherine Lacey

  The Relational Experiment required her not to say anything unless Kurt faced her or asked her a direct question. She was supposed to remain attentive, alert, to always have something to say but never to say it unless asked.

  Sometimes he would tell her this scene was a reference to a certain director or film or style; she would never have heard of this director or film or style, he knew, and sometimes he would turn around and explain it to her, but other times he just said, Incredible, and kept working.

  You’re completely uncontaminated. It’s so incredible. You’re the only person I’ve ever met who can see a work for what it really is.

  From the floor she watched him work, her back against the wall, trying to discreetly readjust herself when her leg fell asleep or back went stiff, but when she came in the next week, a small chair was in her spot at the back of the room. It seemed like a child’s chair, almost, and something about this felt insulting. She was still standing, staring at the chair, when Kurt entered the room.

  I had Matheson get you a chair.

  Oh, thank you.

  Because I noticed how last time the floor didn’t seem very comfortable.

  She tried to keep her expression neutral.

  Is everything okay?

  Oh, yes. Of course.

  You know, I have very specific ideas about the … aesthetics of a room. I’m very influenced by it. Every room should have a function and everything in the room should serve that function.

  They were some weeks into the GX, so this wasn’t news to Mary, but he spoke with a kind of confidential seriousness.

  It may not seem like much, but this is … an important … moment. For us.

  She looked at the chair and at him.

  I had the chair put in here because I want you here. His heart rate was elevated, though Mary did not pick up on his nerves, just heard that familiar tone of a man telling a woman something he believes she should already know.

  What I’m saying is that you’re a part of this process now. And I need you to be here. Because, you are … significant … to me.

  She thought of something she’d studied in a history class—years ago, the facts all foggy—something about a king who wouldn’t allow those in a room with him to have their head higher than his head, all the chairs built low to the ground, maybe only inches, and anyone who was taller than him had to crawl in the king’s presence.

  I care about your comfort. I really do.

  She put her hand on top of the hand he’d put on her shoulder, a protocol, until she remembered another protocol—that he was waiting for her to sit down so that he could sit down, so she did. She sat in the tiny chair.

  It was unclear to Kurt why Mary’s presence made him feel things differently, deeper, more clearly. The only other person whom he could remember this sort of feeling with was William, though the significance of that friendship was hard to untangle from the significance of that time in his life. Kurt was sixteen, his mom had just been diagnosed, and William was the son of a woman Kurt’s mom had met in her support group. The four had these sleepovers during the worst parts of chemo, the women taking care of each other, the sons taking care of each other, a sudden, short-term family for the eight months before Kurt’s mom passed. William and Kurt often stayed up late playing card games, almost never talking (what was there to say?) and Kurt pretended that it wasn’t weird when William would put his head on Kurt’s chest (in the middle of the night when they had to share a pullout couch) because (Kurt reasoned) he didn’t want to embarrass William, but, really, Kurt didn’t have to pretend it wasn’t weird because it wasn’t weird—it somehow made sense. The two of them were twinned by seeing their mothers unravel like this, and together they became younger and older at the same time.

  After the funeral Kurt had left for L.A., drowned his grief in saying yes to every job, in making no room in his days to stop and hear the absence of her voice. Success made the world strange, as he could never tell who was smiling at him and who was smiling at what they wanted from him, and it made him think of William, how their need and use for each other was so simple, like a spoon. Sometimes Kurt considered calling William’s mother, but was too afraid she might not answer, that she might have died or moved, or that if she did answer, he wouldn’t have a good excuse for all the years he hadn’t called. He didn’t want to be that person who found his own success more interesting than the people he used to know. As time went, it became harder and harder to imagine himself calling. Then it was impossible to imagine himself calling. Then the memory of William was just this warm press on his chest and the feeling of not having to explain or protect himself. But wouldn’t a better person have stayed in touch? Wouldn’t a good friend have remained a good friend? All of this sat quietly in him, large but far-off, like a mountain seen from a distance on a clear day. Matheson reminded Kurt of William (just a little, in the eyes, in certain kinds of light), which was at least part of the reason Kurt had hired him all those years ago, but Mary reminded Kurt of that feeling he’d had with William, that easy intimacy.

  From her tiny chair Mary watched Kurt working, clicking and squinting and watching and rewatching the same clip. She tried to feel, in her body, the little tendon Ed had told her about at her last session, just below the ribs, a rare and tiny tendon that most people don’t have. Something had made this rare tendon grow in her, and something else had made it scrunch, become the crumpled root of all her problems. In the dark, as Kurt played the same clip over and over, Mary tried to put her awareness on the tendon, but she couldn’t seem to find it in her body. She wondered how Ed could be so certain about what was inside her.

  Kurt swiveled around to face Mary in the dark, the three screens behind him all paused on different close-ups of his face in profile, the difference between the angles almost imperceptible. Kurt had been playing and replaying each take, having great difficulty choosing one.

  I just thought of something, he said, backlit by himself. Do you think love is the measure of how sad you would be if someone died?

  Without pausing she asked, How do you measure sadness?

  Kurt recognized her expression (lit softly in that low light) as the same one she’d had in the last moment he saw her during their first session, at the Savant House. It was painful and peaceful and made him want something, and at the same time it made him feel he had everything he needed.

  I like having you here, Mary. I don’t think I’ve ever gotten so much done in a day as I have on the days that you’ve been here.

  He hadn’t answered her question and she got the sense that she might ask him a lot of questions that he would never answer.

  Do you ever have that feeling, that you need someone else to tell you how you feel? That you need to see your feelings reflected back at you?

  All the time, she said.

  They sat in the dark for a while after that.

  I think I’ve lost something, Mary. It seems I want my privacy more and more, but I also want, more than ever, to be understood. And somehow I think this film is what will make people understand me, but I’ve been working on this edit for over a decade now and I can’t seem to make it as complete as I can see it in my head. And you know—wanting someone to be in your head, wanting everyone to see what’s in there—that’s the opposite of privacy. It just doesn’t add up. I feel like there was something in the middle that’s been taken out.

  He turned to the screens again, looked at the large images of himself, then turned back to face her. His hair was chaotic and placed, an abstract painting, the edges of it glowed while his face was blacked out with shadow.

  But it’s not enough to just tell a story anymore. I’m so tired of stories of people pretending stuff on camera, plots and acting and effects. The world doesn’t need any more nice films or stories. I want to make something bigger than that, something that changes people, you know, becomes a part of someone. Not a product, a fifteen-dollar ticket and ninety minutes of your life. I want to make a whole life, something huge. />
  Maybe it’s this. Maybe you’re doing it now.

  She meant this film (though she’d seen less than a minute of it), but Kurt thought she meant the GX.

  You really think so? His voice jolted at the affirmation, his needs laid bare. He was his most genuine in the dark, as anyone would be, and if she had struck a match at that moment, she would have seen his real face, the one everyone has and no one shows to anyone.

  At the end of these sessions Kurt always left first, but sometimes he lingered awhile, staring at Mary, saying nothing. He liked the way the screen light coated her face in a strange blue.

  13

  2:23 a.m.

  FROM: chandra@onelight.com

  TO: mparsons@universaltravel.com

  SUBJECT: THE WHAT AND WHY

  It must be strange to hear from me like this, but I believe you can understand.

  You of all people.

  Sometimes people die while they’re still alive.

  It’s all so clear to me now.

  It must be strange to hear from me like this.

  The first one came two weeks after the GX began—probably just a misunderstanding or sent by accident, a note for herself now out of context. Or it could have been some other Chandra, not her Chandra, because Chandra had never mentioned anything called One Light and she always told Mary about the healing circles and women’s communes and whatever else she joined. The fact, also, that Chandra hadn’t returned Mary’s last two calls probably meant that she’d gone on a technology cleanse. So most likely, it wasn’t her. It couldn’t be. It must have been nothing.

  A week later, two more.

  3:14 a.m.

  FROM: chandra@onelight.com

  TO: mparsons@universaltravel.com

  SUBJECT: RE: THE WHAT AND WHY

  My mind has become too powerful, Mary.

  Dying was the only way I could serve the other Devotees.

  We are all in the light now.

  My mind is a meeting place, and everyone is inside me, speaking.

  It’s so beautiful. Soon you’ll see.

  We all understand what is happening to you.

  We have seen everything.

  3:56 a.m.

  FROM: chandra@onelight.com

  TO: mparsons@universaltravel.com

  SUBJECT: RE: RE: THE WHAT AND WHY

  It must be strange to still be alive.

  But you’ll soon die the way I did.

  Soon, you will see.

  It’s almost over. You’re almost here.

  Mary remembered Chandra had taken a writing class one semester and had become serious about it. She began spending all her free time speed-reading the books her peers mentioned casually, the things it seemed everyone had read years ago. She learned to refer to the writing faculty by their first names, even the ones she’d never seen. On weekends she nursed tepid beers at the dive where the writing majors hung out, their notebooks and paperbacks scattered across soggy tables as they debated whatever novel was getting the most polarizing reviews, some lauding it, sure it was pure brilliance, genius, others certain of its inauthenticity, warm bullshit in hardback. They spoke with the kind of passion that only the young try to get away with, all so sure there was a right idea to have, that they either had it already or needed to find it and show it to the others.

  But Chandra ultimately decided against switching her major, claiming she couldn’t get over the falseness of the other writing students, the falseness of fiction itself. Mary remembered a conversation they’d had about it sophomore year, the two of them drinking burned coffee in the student center. Chandra said she wanted to make something more immediate and less oblique than a story—you know, something where you can’t tell where the line is between regular life and art—so maybe, Mary thought now, these e-mails were an attempt at that, a sort of performance.

  It’s all so artificial, you know? I don’t want to make something that is so separate from life. (Midmorning light glowed in the frizzed edge of Chandra’s hair, wild curls flopped to one side.) If you’re picking up a book or a magazine to read something—I don’t think people really … I don’t think they really … I just don’t think it’s the best way to really have an impact on someone. It can’t just be, like, once there was this person and they did these things and felt blah blah blah. Or I don’t think I want to do that anyway. I want to make something that changes people.

  Mary sent a reply to chandra@onelight.com—Hey C, just wondering where you’ve been?—but it bounced back.

  Delivery to this address failed permanently

  ERROR CODE: 550-No such user—psmtp

  Three days later, another.

  4:37 a.m.

  FROM: chandra@onelight.com

  TO: mparsons@universaltravel.com

  SUBJECT: RE: RE: RE: THE WHAT AND WHY

  I always knew. You never had to tell me.

  I saw your father bury you and I watched you crawl out of the ground.

  We’ve reversed time, the devotees and I, we’ve fixed everything.

  Soon it will all make sense.

  Tell Ed not to worry.

  She dialed Chandra’s number before she even realized what she was doing. Nothing. She redialed. Nothing.

  They hadn’t spoken since before Mary started the GX, and every day since then had been tightly scheduled—weekdays at the agency, long lunch breaks with Ed, half her nights spent catching up on the work she was perpetually behind on at the office, as the other half of the week she had to leave work early to go through wardrobe, makeup, and sensor application protocols before a session with Kurt—but still, despite the fact that every minute of her life had been rented or given to someone else, Mary knew she was still the person inside her body, the little monster in herself that had let all these people (these people she loved) disappear.

  All she ever seemed to be doing was drifting from people—Aunt Clara, her parents, even Paul, in a way. Chandra being gone became everyone being gone and Mary increasingly felt her body was made of something else, of metal or glass, of insects or small animals. She went to the office bathroom and threw up—quickly, efficiently—threw cold water against her face, into her mouth, her eyes, her nose. She braced herself against the sink for a while—fluorescents buzzing above her, water dripping off her face, cool sweat on her scalp—then lowered herself to the tile floor, counting her fingers, one to ten, over and over, into the high hundreds. No one found her.

  14

  A younger version of Rachel would have been too offended to take this gig with Kurt Sky—playing the Maternal Girlfriend (what in the fuck?) to this white guy who was a year older than she was (typical)—but paying off her half of the kids’ orthodontist bills, she decided, was worth it. If nothing else, just to get Chris off her case about it. All she’d had to do so far was hang out in that loft for a couple hours each week, scratch his back, make him grilled cheeses, run her fingers through his hair, fold his laundry, receive flowers from him on his mother’s birthday, wear linen tunics and those weird sensor things, rub a spit-smeared thumb across his face sometimes—and, sure, it was a little strange, but it was no weirder than some of the adult-baby stuff she used to do. It wasn’t hard to imagine the appeal in returning to a time you knew nothing.

  But what had seemed straightforward for the first few weeks became, during the fifth session, just too much. That experiment required her to sit in the living room and listen to Tchaikovsky, slowly getting drunk on white wine in the middle of the day, first vacantly staring out the window and ignoring Kurt, then weeping inconsolably, moaning and clinging to him as he asked what was wrong, to which she was supposed to shake her head, remain silent.

  It was a reenactment of Kurt’s last memory of his mother before the chemo began, a sort of drama-therapy experiment that Yuri had come up with, though Rachel hadn’t been told any of this, just felt something was weirdly fucked about the scene. During her exit protocol Rachel overheard Kurt crying in that athletic, frantic way—and, sure, nothing was inherentl
y wrong with crying—but she sensed something wasn’t right, and maybe because she was so full of chardonnay or maybe because all that Tchaikovsky had pushed her nerves up to the surface, she finally lost control and asked Matheson, What the fuck was that all about?

  One of the not-twins who was removing her sensors stopped for a moment, asked if he should leave, but Matheson insisted they were fine—There’s no problem here.

  But what in the hell is all this, really?

  Your Relational Experiment went well, and we—

  No, this was fucked up. It’s like … am I supposed to get beat up by his abusive dad next week? It’s like—I don’t even know what the fuck …

  She was out of breath, half-drunk and sweaty. All her thoughts scattered.

  I understand you’re concerned, but Yuri is with Kurt now, and he’s fine. You’ll feel better after your compartmentalization meditation. I know it might not always make sense, but you just have to trust we know what we’re doing.

  But I don’t know what you’re doing.

  Done with his work, the not-twin let himself out quickly and Rachel said, Fuck this, left without changing out of her wardrobe, and not until she sat on the floor of her living room after her four-train commute back to Jersey did she finally look down and think, What in the fuck am I doing in a tunic? She got up, fixed herself a cup of tea, threw the tunic to the floor as the water boiled. She tried to laugh at her day, that she had just made six hundred dollars reenacting some old childhood scars with a famous actor. What was her life? What was she doing?