The crowd suddenly seemed sinister, impatient, perverse. Everyone was standing in a line going somewhere terrible or talking to an angry child, little dictators with huge eyes and chocolate or dirt ringing their terrible mouths, freakishly colored animal corpses hanging on their backs. The vendors were all screaming—screaming orders to each other or advertising their cheap games or flimsy shit for sale. The scent of burning meat was everywhere. People dug their sharp teeth in cones of red ice. People were moaning, were covered in sweat, and no one seemed well.
We have to get out of here, Kurt said, taking her hand, running them through the awful people, this last place on earth they needed to be. They ducked into a juice bar and confronted a large cooler of bottles—green, yellow, milky-white, and red juices—and Kurt was paralyzed by the colors, the mystery of all these liquids, the impossibility of even imagining putting a liquid like this into his body at this precise moment, this sensationally complicated and overdetailed moment, not noticing that Mary was talking to the boy behind the counter.
I’d like a water.
Totally. What kind?
Of water?
We have coconut water, aloe water, ginger water, vegetable water, herb-infused water, yellow watermelon-juice-enhanced water, turmeric water, and deionized apple-cider-vinegar agave water.
She felt dreadful and dry.
Oh—and honey lemon water. And maple water.
I couldn’t— Don’t you have water?
We have waters.
Regular water?
We offer micronutrient-enhanced hydration.
Why can’t you answer me?
The boy behind the counter stared at Mary, smiled, caught on to her high, then saw and recognized Kurt, who was still captivated by all the bottles of colored liquids. A previously unnoticed man in a white apron smeared with beet juice switched on the metal juicer, this death machine, and he scowled as he forced carrots and celery stalks into this contraption and his hair may or may not have been made of worms and the boy at the register now had a look of utter derangement and he appeared to be a human carrot, a vegetable cannibal. Kurt and Mary bolted out the door, ran all the way home, hand in hand, down a less crowded street to avoid the fair again, and they rushed past his doorman Jorge, not even saying hello, frenzied and determined to be alone in the perfectly calibrated comfort of Kurt’s loft.
Why did we ever go anywhere? Kurt asked, breathless, in the elevator. He held her to his chest and she clung to him and for a moment they were happy and peaceful enough to not wonder how they might keep this feeling forever, how they might cheat the system.
They spent the rest of the night doing the secretly magical things that people on psychotropics do—locked in unashamed eye contact, talking in slow truisms that whittle all the world’s problems down to a single sentence or word, weeping over mundanities turned profound—water falling from a faucet, a pen rolling across the counter, pillow prone on the floor.
The comedown came slowly and as Mary drifted in and out of some half-asleep dream or half-awake trance, she couldn’t tell what was the drug’s trick and what was her own perception. She was faintly aware of something happening to her body. A pressure was on her feet, then her legs, between her legs, against her belly. She felt almost paralyzed but she managed to reach out and feel Kurt sleeping on his side of the bed and she tried to move her legs but she could not move her legs and she reached up, and felt Kurt’s shoulders hovering above her but at the same time she could not reach up, was not reaching up, and her body spun inside itself and it was hot and cold at once and she felt she was safe but locked up in a very small space and she couldn’t tell if she was being held down or held still or had somehow become nothing at all.
She looked toward the window and Kurt was there, looking at the skyline, and she looked at the bedroom door and he was there, too, backlit and leaning against the jamb and she felt his legs against her legs and his arms wrapped around her and she felt something inside her body, and she wondered if all she felt inside her body was just more of her body, and she wondered if she had somehow come unstuck in time but she also felt stuck in time, unable to get away from the feeling that all the time she’d spent with Kurt was somehow circling her, sieging her.
Every memory she had of him flashed by—from that first session in that hidden bar, to all the silent afternoons in his loft, to their dinners together, the hours in the editing room, the black cars he sent her away in some nights or the black cars they shared on others. She remembered Kurt laughing with her or serious with her or smiling at her or crying and she remembered the tender shock on his face the first night the Anger Girlfriend appeared, and the way his panic seemed increasingly performed with each visit from Ashley. She thought of the night he told her about his mother, about how she lived and died, about what happened to him after, and though Mary was still mostly thankful that he asked her nothing of her past, she also vaguely resented that he’d never asked and felt his lack of curiosity must have meant he cared for her not at all— And wasn’t that okay? Since he was her employer? Since this was all some strange experiment or therapy or game?
But as the drug wore off like a season’s snowmelt, she found a plain sadness. She had lost her family, a preventable loss, and taught herself to not even miss them. But hadn’t it been their responsibility to not lose her? Or did children eventually become the parents to their parents, as she’d once heard someone say, and if so, had that already happened to her? At what age did you lap them? Had she missed her chance? And what happened to parent-children without their child-parents? What could she do now?
As another day broke, Mary stared at Kurt’s sleeping face, marveling at how he could be asleep while she was so awake, her eyes and mind clear now, and she knew she loved him in a way that immediately required her to hate him, a little, for how he had never asked her what had happened to her. But would she have even told him about the cabin, about Merle, his manifesto, her little lonely beginning? But this was what people in love do, isn’t it? Give each other their stories as a way to re-hear them, as a way to re-understand their histories, what those histories did to them, what they do to them still?
Though losing his mother was the most painful thing Kurt had ever felt, he almost enjoyed, in a way, telling the story of her loss more than twenty years later because her death was the most human thing that had ever happened to him and it sometimes seemed to be the last truly human thing that had happened to him before his life became surreal, and before he began taking that surreal life for granted, floating somewhere near himself, watching himself become more known—but when he told the story of his mother, when he recalled the way she looked at him in those last days when they both knew she was leaving her body and he was staying in his, Kurt became, again, a whole person, a human on the earth, but when he stopped telling this story, he floated back up again, went away from himself, watched himself almost live.
As Mary stood in the bathroom that morning, she thought of what she’d seen in Kurt’s face the few times he had spoken about his mother, of how his face became softer in a way, as if some system of tethers that had been controlling him from the inside now went slack.
If you take everything for granted, then you’re blind, but if you take nothing for granted, you’re paralyzed, she said, aloud, watching her mouth in the mirror.
And as she said this, some of that paralysis fell away. She still had a vague sense that something had happened to her body in the night, but when she searched herself for evidence of something, a bruise, a sore spot, she only found a soreness deep in her head.
21
Neither Kurt nor Mary had noticed they were being photographed through the juice bar windows, didn’t see two paparazzi keeping pace with them across the street as they ran home, hand in hand, but by morning the photos had been sold and published and republished and a dozen reporters had spoken to the cashier and juice-maker, and a few thoughtless think pieces had been written overnight, each making guesses as to who the extr
emely normal-looking girl with Kurt was and why they hadn’t bought any juice and what were they running from or toward? All the while Kurt and Mary were oblivious, sleeping, living low to pay for all the high they’d had. Mary returned to bed from the bathroom and he held her with the intimate remove of a child holding a blanket.
Kurt Sky isn’t even my birth name, he said later, as midday light began to make their late bed seem strange. It was Kurtis Joel Kerensky. And no one knows. Not even Matheson. Only you.
If he had told her this while they had been high, she might have felt the significance of his giving her something of himself he’d never given anyone else, or she would have seen how this made them similar—both born under names they’d shed—but she wasn’t high anymore, and she couldn’t see the world from that angle. Back on the heavy earth, this didn’t feel like much at all, so as he told her the story of how he changed his name, all Mary could think was how she would never tell him what her first name had been, that protecting her history was the only way she could control it, that if no one knew the way her childhood had been taken, then she had, in a way, taken it back.
Kurt took his time telling her this story that supposedly no one else knew, how it had, at some point, involved his mother signing something while she was on her deathbed, and though Kurt made some expression in the dim bedroom light that this was an emotionally significant detail to him, his expression didn’t—and this embarrassed Mary—seem genuine to her. She tried to make a face signaling to him that she had registered this story as emotionally resonant, that she could almost feel what he felt, but he didn’t seem to notice, kept talking, and she began to wonder how she’d ever survive another day in his company, how she’d ever made it this far. Of course it was just her job to care, to listen, to be available, and she knew this was employment, not a relationship, that she was merely participating in the worldwide tradition of dreading one’s work, but she felt a new difficulty in getting herself to cooperate, to go along with it all. A tide, it seemed, had gone out.
* * *
Kurt, I need to speak to you for a moment please.
Good morning to you, too, Kurt said, but Matheson just turned and walked back toward his office. It was two in the fucking afternoon, Matheson thought. Kurt followed, shrugging at Mary as he left her alone.
Midday, the loft was filled with sunlight in bright, holy quantities. Mary felt something she often felt during PAKing, that she wasn’t sure if something was really happening to her or if she was bracing so much for something to happen that she had made something happen. It could have been the drug still leaving her system or the lack of sleep or it could have been that she was worried about not seeing Ed, waiting for her body to go wrong again. She lay down on the big white couch and almost fell into something like sleep, waking only when she felt Kurt sit beside her.
What was it?
Nothing, just some photos on the Internet that Matheson is paranoid about.
She was dizzy and breathing hard. He didn’t notice, didn’t say anything, just ran his fingers through her hair and stared out the window. As she looked up at him, his face seemed somehow different, an uncomfortable comfort.
You know, Shia LaBeouf’s paper bag made so much sense to me. It seemed like the most sane thing to do, maybe the only sane thing to do.
She stared at him, totally unsure of what he was talking about.
See that’s what I like about you. You don’t know about any of this stupid Hollywood stuff.
He went on to explain this stupid Hollywood stuff, how this other actor had been fucking with it, somehow, rejecting the viewer, rejecting the industry, then he ranted for a while about identity and self-perception, about being misperceived or overperceived by others, about self-scrutiny, about mass scrutiny, about surveillance and access and intimacy and the loss of the intimate. He talked so much that Mary forgot she also had the ability to say things and her mute watching fueled him.
There is no intimate space left in my life, he said what felt like an hour later, on the edge of tears. Everyone needs privacy, a sense of the intimate. You go crazy without it. I wish people understood. And for a little while Mary did see him as a person, just this little man with the same confusions and exhaustions as anyone, desperation, a wish for some better way to be, though she hadn’t really been listening to what he’d been saying, just the way he’d been speaking, his tone, his trouble. It was possible, she thought, that’s all anyone could really do for another.
What do you think I should do?
What do you mean?
Kurt’s face scattered, eyes welled. He’d broken a sweat. About all of this? How I’ve put myself into a place where I can’t—I can’t—
He pulled Mary toward him, held her head that way her mother had all those years ago. She thought he might be crying.
I think you should quit everything, she finally said. He stroked her hair. If you don’t like it.
They parted and she stood by him and he looked at her, hesitating, noticing for the first time that she did have some grim beauty about her, something that couldn’t be seen so quickly. She was right, also, that it was time to change everything, that he was long overdue to enter some new phase. He began pacing the room, wondering how he would make his exit from the Kurt Sky that everyone had come to expect into the version of himself that he felt he was. The Gala was a week away, an event that had increasingly become a media spectacle instead of what it had once been—a fund-raiser for one charity or another, though Kurt could never remember which one. He’d always gone unaccompanied, and each year he vowed, with increasing certainty, that he would not return the next year, as the event seemed increasingly false and performatory, a large-scale publicity stunt, a cry for attention from the people who already had everyone’s attention. Every year he went back and every year he regretted it. But this year he would go and not regret it. He would use it as his stage to make his exit, to make a statement about falseness.
That afternoon he had Matheson commission a custom gown for Mary, a simple black silk slip dress with a headpiece, a cape that obscured her whole face. It hung on her with an inevitability, as if her body had created it, grown it off her skin like a thin pelt, capping her crown to clavicle, the drape perfect.
Kurt issued no statements and took no questions as the pair made a slow walk down the red carpet, camera flashes epileptic—Kurt Sky and this cloaked woman, her stride not exactly elegant, both her hands gripping his elbow to steady herself on heels. In minutes several blog posts had run alongside the eerie pictures of them—Kurt with an alarmingly mundane expression, Mary invisible except for her bare, pale arms. The first site to post about it crashed from the traffic, the head of a peloton taking the brunt. A hashtag immediately sprang up (#baglady), gathering reports from inside the Gala. (Some speculated it was botched plastic surgery, while others thought she might be an android, as she was robotically motionless for the entire evening, and for a while it seemed to echo a stunt by an emerging L.A. performance artist who had, only a few weeks before, sat in a gallery for fourteen hours a day with a similar bag over her head as every episode of every season of Game of Thrones played and played and played.) Some were amused and others annoyed at what a spectacle Kurt and his bag lady had created, usurping all their lesser stunts, their translucent gowns, their unlikely dates, the just-divorced power couple each arriving as a part of a new power couple. The Gala itself consisted of a dinner no one ate, a series of presentations no one listened to, then a lot of standing around, everyone looking around to see everyone else looking around.
Kurt and the bag lady made their exit just as the presentations were beginning, a trail of paparazzi following them from the venue, following their car to Kurt’s loft. The photos were so valuable now that some charged into the apartment lobby, the flashes reflecting wildly off the mirrors and white marble, Jorge screaming, threatening to call the police.
Ashley had been in the loft for two hours, ready for a session that had been long ago scheduled, a
Relational Experiment that Matheson hadn’t moved (intentionally or not, it was never clear) after Kurt had come up with this Gala stunt. Bored and furious at the long delay of Kurt’s arrival—which would mess up her sleep and potentially thwart tomorrow’s training—Ashley began roaming the loft, slightly tilting the frames on the wall, going through his desk, disorganizing his closet, leaving thumb smudges of lipstick on white bedsheets and towels, until a cluster of framed photographs in his office stopped her—Kurt with his first Oscar, glowing and delirious and so young, and a candid in a restaurant taken by a friend who went on to become famous for photographing his famous friends—and a teenaged Kurt with his mother, scarf tied over a bald head (her fearful face, flattened out by a flash, smiling at days she’d never see). Some of Ashley’s anger dissolved, or stalled for a moment, until she looked at the last photograph: Kurt with his arm slung around a younger man. A familiar face. A terrible and familiar face. She threw it across the room, smiling though she wasn’t happy.
The Research Division crowded around her video feed, some of them trying to analyze the data, baffled by the rise and fall of her activity patterns, how each photograph had done something drastically different to her. None of them knew, as Ashley’s background check or brain scans could tell them nothing of it, what seeing that face had meant to her.
If she’d been a more superstitious person she could have seen a conspiracy, a plot against her, but she didn’t believe in such things. What she knew then was that this job was no longer worth it, that she could no longer rent herself to this man and his experiment, and with this attitude she began to storm around the loft, to all the rooms that had been deemed off-limits, the rooms without surveillance, and though one member of the Research Division stood, made a move to the door to bring Ashley back, Matheson told him to sit, to let her go, that it was fine. Why he permitted Ashley to go where she liked is also unclear, whether he had an intent, whether he planted what Ashley discovered in the editing room.
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