—We accept that falling in love is a brief, delusional state and that despite people’s best intentions, relationships usually end, almost always painfully or if they endure, they are often merely endured. Have you ever wondered what is happening in the brain that allows this to happen? Have you ever wondered if there was a way out of this terrible cycle?
I paused the little man and leaned him (leaned the phone) against the baseboard, then sat up straight to listen, to take him as seriously as he seemed to take himself.
Our team has located a special part of the brain that shows us how the psychological motivation to find and maintain romantic love is also a desire to, in some ways, become another person—
I heard my own voice deep in memory—Love is a compromise for only getting to be one person—and remembered Kurt recording this, taking it and containing it in that dusk on the roof on that drug. (What was mine was not mine, was, perhaps, never mine.)
This man kept asking himself questions and immediately answering them. I got up and paced the room, felt unable to sit still, felt that someone was making me move, gripping me by the shoulders and pushing me around.
—Identity Distance Therapy uses a system of highly advanced wearable biotechnology that changes a user’s brain activity and bodily sensations to create a virtual reality experience so complete that users report a total dissolve of the self, a transcendence so profound that one believes, completely, that they are another person. And our studies have proven that a weekly ten-minute IDT session has such a profound effect on the brain that it seems to alleviate that impossible desire to be another person, that source of so much suffering that we’ve proven to be a primary reason for the demise of romantic love. A user’s disposition is so suddenly and radically transformed that they can be in a relationship without fruitlessly trying, as so many do, to escape from the self through another person.
Unhappy couples, he explained, had become fulfilled again or for the first time ever. Single people had found sudden and real and lasting and secure love almost immediately. All their uncertainties ended. They found a better way to be.
I let the video keep playing, let the phone-contained man speak to an empty room as I went to the kitchen, as I looked out the window, washed a dish, went to the bedroom and sat on the mattress, looked at my feet, looked at my hands, wondered what, if anything, I should do with them. I heard the man talking in the other room, then a different voice, Kurt’s voice, and I felt a little ache low in my chest. What was the feeling of missing someone? Was it this?
—how something makes sense that didn’t make sense before, I could hear him saying, and other words, bent by the distance between us. I wondered about all the things Kurt had ever said to me that I could no longer remember. Were all those things still somehow stitched, immovably, beneath my skin?
—These are the two biggest threats to a relationship: certainty and uncertainty—
I paced my apartment again, looked at all my things, looked at my tiny plant in the kitchen window, a cactus I had ordered from somewhere in California, this living thing that barely needed me. It disturbed me, all of a sudden, and I put it out on the fire escape, shut the window behind it, went back to the living room to see a tiny Kurt on that tiny phone screen, explaining something, talking and talking—
—Some might say that romantic frustration is just part of the human condition, that it’s an inescapable problem we all must deal with—but polio used to be an inescapable part of being a human and we no longer deal with that. Life expectancies used to be half what they are now. Literacy was something reserved for royalty and clergy. We evolve emotionally just as we evolve physically and we are not done evolving. This is the next—
But the phone died while he was midsentence and I’ve let it be dead ever since. People think you need them but you don’t.
I thought of all those billions of hearts beating out there, trying to find love or keep love going. All those people, getting in the way of each other—how do we even stand it? How do we make our way around?
I opened all the windows in my apartment. The day had been warm and bright just hours before, but had become quickly and unseasonably cold and windy. The blinds rattled and the curtains whipped and flung, as quick clouds made the sunlight flicker, darker then lighter then darker. I filled with grim thoughts, real thoughts, real questions. There are so many ways to live and die, so many ways to tell that same story, over and over, but everyone keeps trying to find a better way to tell it, a more real way to look into someone else’s face to say, I am alive like you, was born without my consent like you, will someday die and be dead in the same way you’ll be dead. What did we want from this? What did we really want from it?
I crawled onto my fire escape and felt the wet air. I closed my eyes and saw a face (perhaps yours, perhaps my own) and began to speak to it (silently or aloud, I didn’t know) and I said, You know, I’ve really never known what to do. I just keep making these decisions or not, making right and wrong turns that are never really right or wrong. I had a job, then a different job, then I was jobless. I was poor or I wasn’t. I was ill but got better, got worse again, got better. Someone died. Someone else died. Money changed hands. People changed. I changed.
And isn’t that enough for us? And who put all this fear in us, this fear of changing when all we ever do is change? Why is it so many want to sleep through it all, sleepwalk, sleep-live, feel nothing, eyes shut? Haven’t we slept enough? Can’t we all wake up now, here, in this warm valley between cold mountains of sleep? Sitting on my escape, I saw that man who often sold water bottles on hot days in the street, but since the day was ending and cold and it was time to go home, he seemed to have given up and was just trying to give them away. But everyone kept rushing past him, would not accept water from a stranger.
Acknowledgments
Thank you, Emily Bell, Eric Chinski, and Anne Meadows, tireless editors and allies, and to Jin Auh, Stephanie Derbyshire, Jessica Friedman, and Alba Ziegler-Bailey for all your advocacy and advice. Thank you, Maya Binyam, Rodrigo Corral, Patrick Leger, Brian Gittis, Spenser Lee, and everyone else at Farrar, Straus and Giroux and the Wylie Agency.
Many thanks to the people at Granta Books, Actes Sud, Big Sur, Alfaguara, Das Mag, and Aufbau, especially the translators and editors, Myriam Anderson, Teressa Ciuffoletti, Martina Testa, Damià Alou, Gerda Baardman, Daniël van der Meer, Bettina Abarbanell, and Lina Muzur. You are magicians.
This work began during an autumn and was finished during a spring at the Omi International Arts Center and I’m very grateful to the people who make Omi such a beautiful place to work. I’ve also survived on the generosity of the Whiting Foundation, the New York Public Library Young Lions, Stony Brook University, the Black Mountain Institute, the Late Night Library, and the morning crew at the Annex in Fort Greene—Justin, Mark, Mike, Ron, and Sasha. Thank you all.
I’m very grateful to Peter Musante for many years of solicitude, support, and helping me find a title. Also to Sean Brennan, Anu Jindal, Rebecca Novack, Sara Richardson, and especially Kendra Malone for being excellent readers and dear friends. And to Jesse Ball, for such kindness and galvanization, thank you.
Also by Catherine Lacey
Nobody Is Ever Missing
A Note About the Author
Catherine Lacey’s first novel, Nobody Is Ever Missing, earned her a 2016 Whiting Award, was a finalist for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award, and has been translated into French, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, and German. She was named one of Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists in 2017 and has earned fellowships from the University of Montana, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Omi International Arts Center, and the University of Mississippi, among others. Along with Forsyth Harmon, she is the coauthor of the nonfiction book The Art of the Affair. Her first collection of short stories is forthcoming. You can sign up for email updates here.
Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Part Two
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Part Three
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Acknowledgments
Also by Catherine Lacey
A Note About the Author
Copyright
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011
Copyright © 2017 by Catherine Lacey
All rights reserved
First edition, 2017
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Lacey, Catherine, 1985– author.
Title: The answers: a novel / Catherine Lacey.
Description: First edition.|New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016041342|ISBN 9780374100261 (hardcover)|ISBN 9780374714345 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: Man-woman relationships—Fiction.|Dating (Social customs)—Fiction.|BISAC: FICTION / Literary.|FICTION / Psychological.
Classification: LCC PS3612.A335 A85 2017|DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016041342
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The Answers Page 24