Break in Case of Emergency

by Jessica Winter

  Soon, of course, Jen would feel embarrassed, and she would probably apologize to Meg and Pam. She knew that even now. For the moment, though, she enjoyed this period of reprieve from the symptoms of congenital shame. Her friends were supposed to know these things. And yet, Jen thought, if she were a better friend she wouldn’t burden them. What, after all, were they supposed to do with such information?

  As Jen tumbled out of the cab and into her building’s lobby, as she slapped meatily at the elevator button a few times before noticing the OUT OF SERVICE sign, and as she galumphed up five flights of stairs, then down one flight, a matter-of-fact voice cutting in and out amid the jagged smear of her consciousness was asking Jen a familiar question.

  Here is the swimmer.

  Where is the shore?

  “She drowned,” Jen murmured wetly to her key as she stabbed it in the vicinity of the lock on the door to her apartment. “She der-ow-ooooned.”

  Inside the apartment, both the door to Jen and Jim’s bedroom and the door to the nest for the hypothetical tiny future boarder were closed, and Jen wasn’t sure which room Jim had chosen to fall asleep in. There were cinders in her mouth. Her legs were licorice. She bandied in her heels to the refrigerator, grabbed a pint of ice cream out of the freezer, and flopped down on the couch next to Franny, who leaped down and took up residence instead on the kitchen counter, five feet away, establishing that she would not take sides in any domestic conflict. Jen jumped at the sound of an admonishing voice. Her downstairs neighbor was scolding her for walking across the floor in heels, tapping her broomstick of judgment against her own ceiling. Without thinking, Jen yanked off her heels and threw one and then the other across the narrow room, where they left scuff marks on the lumpy-sealed fireplace and ejected a cry of infuriation from the downstairs neighbor, her broomstick-rapping now more insistent.

  Jen had forgotten a bowl and spoon for her ice cream, but instead of risking the further wrath of her neighbor, she popped the lid on the container, licked off some butterscotch-and-chocolate-chunk swirls, and opened her laptop, clicking over to the Total Transformation Challenge submission page. She teethed and sucked more ice cream from the pint and sloppily wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. She considered the instructions for the seventh category and typed a response.

  TTC CATEGORY 7: HEART

  How can you challenge your heart to open itself to every possibility and spread its love and charity far and wide? How can you make your heart beat in perfect rhythm with that of your world, your friends, your partner, your children?

  Your response here:

  I challenge my heart to be a better, more understanding, less judgmental partner.

  But can I vent for a second? It drives me crazy when Jim drops inside jokes in conversation with other people, and it drives both of us crazy that it drives me crazy. It’s a stupid little thing that doesn’t matter, but marriage has a way of magnifying those stupid little things—I know it’s a cliché, but it’s also like, if it’s such a little thing, then it must be easy to fix—so why not just fix it? Whenever he drops the inside jokes without any sense of his audience, I feel this compulsion to explain what he’s talking about, translate for him, not make the other person feel left out and awkward, even though the other person is by definition left out of a marriage and it just makes things more awkward to linger over it—oh, and also, just by the way, it makes Jim feel like shit, which seems relevant. Why do I fixate so much on stupid little things when he is (generally speaking in most respects not tonight but almost all the time) so great?

  Anyway, this is how I would have explained the inside joke to Meg tonight. On our first date, we were in this wine bar, and it was too bright and too loud and too first-date-y, but then this song came on, “Burning Airlines,” which is the first song on Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy), the Brian Eno record. It was so random—the soundtrack to the date was, like, a Springsteen song and then the kind of lite bossa nova you’d hear in Starbucks and then boom ENO ART ROCK. And Jim and I started talking about that record title, Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy), how it’s the best title of a record ever, and we didn’t know at the time that Tiger Mountain is an actual place with an actual mythology, we thought maybe it was the name of Brian Eno’s estate and it had tigers having pool parties in a moat and operating trebuchets and stuff, and we just started riffing about how tall Tiger Mountain might have been, and the weather conditions on Tiger Mountain, and the types of tigers populating Tiger Mountain, and different strategies for taking Tiger Mountain and winning the hearts and minds of native Tiger Mountainers—Mountaineers? Mountainites? Mountainians?—whom we’d assume would battle fiercely and to the death with any marauding infidels with plans for taking Tiger Mountain by strategy or otherwise. It was just the dumb, half-drunken bullshitting you do with someone when you’re figuring out that you really, really like them and part of the reason you like them is that you like the same stuff.

  That following Monday, Jim mailed to me a beautiful replica of the illuminated manuscript of William Blake’s “The Tyger,” with this hilariously laconic note about “enjoying our time together,” and I felt out of breath to be looking at this gift and thinking about what the gift meant and thinking about the thought that had been poured into the gift. So then I mailed to him a print of a lithograph by Paul Ranson, a French painter who died young, called “Tiger dans les jungles.” And tigers and Tiger Mountain, however we were defining it, became the central metaphor or inside joke or whatever of our relationship. That was our courtship—trading postcards of tigers through the mail, like we were exchanging handwritten love letters on parchment bundled in ribbon via furtive horseback messenger. I mean, that wasn’t all of our courtship—we also had sex all the time, in fact, we had sex the night of our first date, and we had all three kinds of sex on our second date (or all four, depending on how you’re counting)—which was a Saturday, so we also had breakfast the next day, eventually, around four p.m.—and by the third date we were skipping the date part and just having sex. I had it in my head that it wasn’t going anywhere, that he was this wayward grad student with a shitty apartment and an impressive comic-book collection who couldn’t possibly present a viable long-term “practical” option, and pretty soon the physical attraction would fade and I could go back to the real world and Meg could set me up with a banker-who-doesn’t-act-like-a-banker and for now I could just enjoy this sex-and-tigers bubble before it burst. In fact, I remember our friend Lauren saying to me something like “Get out of the bubble, make sure to spend time outside the bubble”—like a warning, like she could see what was happening, like if I kept fucking this guy eventually the bubble would seal itself over with bodily fluids and force of habit. But I never did that thing that would happen sometimes with friends in college, where they’d become infatuated with someone and just fall off the grid for a while. I introduced Jim to Meg and Pam and Lauren right away. We did stuff together, even though sometimes we were late to whatever we were doing, because we were having sex. Everyone liked him a lot, except Lauren. Lauren thought Jim was “sketchy.” I never see her anymore.

  The tiger thing really stuck. We’d go to Prospect Park Zoo to look at the red pandas and be like “Look at all the tigers on the mountain!” Or he’d send me a text to ask me how a presentation went at work, and I’d text back TIGER MOUNTAIN I AM IN YOU, which would mean it went well. And then when I started working at LIFt, or, rather, when I realized that my job at LIFt was a total fucking farce, my job became Tiger Canyon, which was the exact opposite of the triumphant majesty of Tiger Mountain—Tiger Canyon was this arid, rocky depression with no tree shade or reliable sources of clean water, where wild animals stalked and disemboweled their prey. Jim would start getting texts from me when I was crying in the bathroom like MAULED BY TIGERS and TAKING TIGER CANYON (BY STRANGULATION).

  Maybe all this sounds like precious gibberish, the language of twins. No one should ever attempt marital exegesis. It’s like opening the door on a d
arkroom—better just to let this stuff slosh around in obscurity.

  But maybe all the explaining and accommodating and apologizing I do—to my friends, to my colleagues, to this empty box—is a way of proving I’m real. I exist in three dimensions. I know that sounds weird. I can try to explain. So sometimes with Leora and Karina and people like that, I get the sense that their big problem is that they don’t think of other people as real—not everyone, but younger people, people outside their class or income bracket, people who don’t “inspire” them somehow. And even the people who “inspire” them are abstractions—they exist as boxes to be ticked on their checklist of personal growth. I have the opposite problem. My close friends, my real friends, become unknowable to me, paradoxically, because I know them well enough that their lives seem real and mine seems—not fake or imaginary, I don’t mean it like that, but like a bluff, and that’s the moment a fissure opens—and I actually don’t think I’ve ever used the word fissure out loud, or exegesis, for that matter, which I guess means this email is a conversation I’m too embarrassed to have out loud with anyone or anything more consequential than an empty box—but anyway, a fissure opens in the friendship because I start to feel sheepish and back away from this nice person who is just being nice and everything becomes awkward.

  I think that’s why—stay with me here, this is connected—my heart drops into my stomach every time I find out that one of my friends has harvested from the Garden of Earthly Delights. It’s never because I myself want to have a hypothetical tiny future boarder (although I do) or don’t want to have a hypothetical tiny future boarder (although sometimes I think I shouldn’t) or don’t not want to have a hypothetical tiny future boarder (although that may be most accurate). It’s because my friend has it together enough to have—to create and bake and provide for in all senses—a hypothetical tiny future boarder, and I do not. For whatever reason, I don’t. It’s like a metaphor, or a metonym, or symptomatic of a comprehensive incompetence: biological, psychological, financial, marital, “spiritual.” It’s gotten to the point that on the way to work in the mornings I look around at all the people crammed into the train car and think, How did all these people come to be? How did their parents time it out just right like that? How did they become alive? What do they know that I don’t? Why won’t anyone just tell me? And I conclude that it’s because whatever they’re doing and however fucked-up their lives might be, at least they’re not pretending. At least they’re not faking that they’re real people. That they’re verified as authentic. Leora loves that word, authentic. Maybe if you raise the hem of their shirt you’ll see a little gold seal stamped to the base of their spine, certifying their authenticity.

  It’s weird because the realest thing I’ve ever done—and I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I can trust you, empty box—is fall in love with Jim. It was undeniable and more or less instantaneous and I didn’t have to do anything or figure anything out or strategize or hire experts to advise or intervene. It was not a choice. I did not choose him. I don’t know if that is wonderful or terrible. Maybe a stronger person—a more pragmatic person, a person who doesn’t bluff and fake her way through life, who thinks ahead and whose future is as formed as her present and who keeps a ledger of accounts—would have turned away from Jim, would have turned away from that love. She would have broken the love in two, because she was strong, not weak. Or her strength would have prevented the thing from forming that she’d have to break. She never would have wanted it so badly and continued to want it so badly endlessly forever and always with every

  Jen stopped and sat back. Her lips were dry and her bladder was full and her head was full of ungulate children.

  She pressed the delete key and watched the entry rewind on itself, first letter by letter, then word by word, then entire lines evaporating in one backward swipe. She made a mental note to ask LIFt’s web developer to put character limits on TTC posts. She quit the browser, shut the laptop, and curled up on the couch without taking off her clothes, brushing her teeth, emptying her bladder, or switching off the lights. The dented tub of ice cream on the coffee table sagged and melted throughout what remained of the night. In the morning, the dried streak of ice cream had crusted over the back of Jen’s hand. It looked like a blister, the remains of a burn that might not leave a scar.

  Good News

  Jen sat in her LIFt cubicle, spine straight, hands folded in front of her keyboard, eyes trained on her desk phone. She picked up the receiver, replaced it, and watched the phone some more. She broke off half an Animexa tablet and swallowed it dry, watching the phone. She picked up the receiver, dialed a number, replaced the receiver, and watched the phone some more. She walked to the vending machine, procured pretzels, ate the pretzels while watching the phone. She walked back to the vending machine, procured a diet soda, drank a diet soda while watching the phone.

  Jen picked up the phone and dialed and chewed the edge of the mouthpiece as it rang.

  “Hi, Dakota,” Jen heard herself saying. “I’m sorry to bother you—I’m realizing that we never settled on my fee for Mrs. Durbin’s portrait, and I was hoping we could discuss it now?”

  Dakota said nothing.

  “I admit I should have brought this up before, and I understand that the prestige of this project and the honor of being asked to do it are generous payment in themselves?”

  Dakota said nothing.

  “And I’m so very grateful to Mrs. Durbin for the opportunity?”

  Dakota said nothing.

  “And really with all that in mind I would be happy with any fee you thought was appropriate and again I do apologize for not raising this earlier?”

  Dakota said nothing. Bertha Mason laughed, then slipped both hands around Jen’s neck to silence her.

  “I will discuss this with Mrs. Durbin,” Dakota finally said. “In the meantime, could you send me your bank routing information?”

  When Jen hung up the phone it immediately rang again.

  “Hi, Jennifer. This is Shawna from Dr. Lee’s office. We were expecting to see you during walk-in hours sometime last week. Just checking in to see that everything’s all right?”

  “Oh, yes,” Jen stammered. “I’ve been meaning to—I mean—but everything’s fine.”

  “We were hoping maybe—you’d had some good news on your own?” Shawna asked.

  Daisy—it must have been Daisy—had pinned a photograph of a camel nuzzling a Komodo dragon to Jen’s cubicle wall. Jen watched the camel and the dragon as a puddle of absurd despair spread inside her chest.

  We were hoping

  Jen wasn’t even sure which one Shawna was. Nose-ring Shawna? Banana-clip Shawna? Shawna who had an expeditious rapport with the billing department? Or was that Sheila? Shana? It had never occurred to Jen that the generically pleasant people behind the henhouse desk had ever conceived of her in more than generically pleasant dimensions, certainly not to the extent that they could formulate expectations and desires on her behalf.

  Good news

  “Jennifer? Are you there?”

  What is good news? Is a lack of good news equivalent to bad news? Is it good news if one doesn’t actually spread the news? And what about last time? When good news turned into bad news? Wasn’t the only way that bad news happened last time was because good news happened first? Doesn’t good news—sometimes, maybe, last time yes—beget the worst news you could ever imagine?

  Better no news

  Say nothing

  Thanks for nothing

  “I’ll keep you posted,” Jen said.

  Yes

  Above Jen’s bathroom ceiling, a hollering child repeatedly body-slammed himself to the tile, as he was scheduled to do every morning between six-fifteen and six-forty-five a.m., as Jen sat on the edge of the tub staring at the test, then at the small pile of broken tiles and unidentified black ooze collecting where the edge of the tub met the floor, then at the test again. It never seemed very scientific. It looked like something out of the play doc
tor’s kits her brothers had as kids—alongside the plastic stethoscope and cartoonishly oversized bandages, maybe they’d find a popsicle stick attached to a pen cap, Magic Markered in blue with a positive or negative sign.

  Jen walked down the hall from the bathroom to the room for the hypothetical tiny future boarder, opening the door for the first time since the night of the LIFt party. Jim was curled in a sleeping bag atop the naked futon, his curved back to the door. Jen molded her body to the shape of his and pressed her face into the back of his neck.