by Ben Marcus
Well, that wasn’t fair. Probably, George figured, her staff conducted proclivity research so that it could provide bespoke orgasms to these titans of industry, whose children Pattern was boiling down for parts, whose reefs, mines, and caves her company was thoroughly hosing.
At home Pattern was probably submissive to a much older spouse, whose approach to gender was seasonal. Or maybe his sister wasn’t married? It was difficult to remember, really. Perhaps because he had probably never known? Perhaps because Pattern did not exactly speak to any of the old family? Ever?
Now, with Mother in a Ball jar and Dad finally passed, George was the last man standing. Or sitting, really. Sort of slumped at home in the mouth of his old, disgusting couch. Trying to figure out his travel plans and how exactly he could get the bereavement discount for his flight. Like what if they tested him at the gate with their grief wand and found out, with digital certainty, that he super sort of didn’t give a shit?
His most recent contact with his sister was an email from [email protected], back when her rare visits home were brokered by her staff, who would wait for their boss in a black-ops Winnebago out on the street. Ten years ago now? His mother was dead already, or still alive? At the time George wondered if Pattern couldn’t just send a mannequin to holiday meals in her place, its pockets stuffed with money. Maybe make it edible, the face carved from meat, to deepen the catharsis when they gnashed it apart with their teeth. Anyway, wouldn’t his sister like to know that there was now one less person who might make a grab for her money? She could soften security at the compound, wherever she lived. Dad was dead. Probably she already knew. When you’re that wealthy, changes in your biological signature, such as the sudden omission of a patriarch, show up instantly on your live update. You blink in the high-resolution mirror at your reflection, notice no change whatsoever, and then move on with your day. Maybe she’d have her personal physicians test her for grief later in the week, just to be sure.
The question now was how to fire off an email to his very important sister that would leapfrog her spam filter, which was probably a group of human people, arms linked, blocking unwanted communications to their elusive boss, who had possibly evolved into a smoke by now.
Simple was probably best. “Dear Pat,” George wrote. “Mom and Dad have gone out and they are not coming back. It’s just you and me now. Finally we have this world to ourselves. P.S. Write back!”
* * *
—
George went to California to pack his father’s things, intending a full-force jettison into the dumpster. He’d only just started surveying the watery one-bedroom apartment, where he could not picture his father standing, sitting, sleeping, or eating, mostly because he had trouble picturing his father at all, when a neighbor woman, worrisomely tall, came to be standing uninvited in the living room. He’d left the door open and cracked the windows so the breeze could do its work. Let the elements scrub this place free of his father. He needed candles, wind, a shaman. And on the subject of need: after sudden travel into blistering sunshine, he needed salty food to blow off in his mouth. He needed sex, if only with himself. Oh, to be alone with his laptop so he could leak a little cream onto his belly. Now there was a trespasser in his father’s home, suited up in business wear. It was enormously difficult to picture such people as babies. And yet one provided the courtesy anyway. An effort to relate. Their full maturation was even harder to summon. He was apparently to believe that, over time, these creatures, just nude little seals at first, would elongate and gain words. A layer of fur would cover them, with moist parts, and teeth, and huge pockets for gathering money. Was there a website where the corporate Ichabods of the world showed off their waterworks, gave each other rubdowns, and whispered pillow talk in an invented language? Perhaps a new category beckoned.
“Oh my god. You can’t be George,” the woman said.
George sort of shared her disbelief. He couldn’t be. The metaphysics were troubling, if you let them get to you. But day after day, with crushing regularity, he failed to prove otherwise.
The woman approached, her nose high. Examine the specimen, she possibly thought. Maybe draw its blood.
“I can’t believe it!”
He asked if he could help her. Maybe she wanted to buy something, a relic of the dead man. The realtor had said that everything had to go. Take this apartment down to the bones.
So far, George was just picking at the skin. He was looking through his father’s takeout menus, skimming the man’s Internet history. There were items of New Mexican pottery to destroy, shirts to try on.
Maybe he’d dress up like his father and take some selfies. Get the man online, if posthumously. If no one much liked him when he was alive, at least the old man could get some likes in the afterlife. Serious.
The woman remembered herself.
“I’m Trish, Jim’s…you know.”
“Uh-huh,” George said.
“I won’t even pretend to think he might have told you about me,” Trish said. “It’s not like we were married in any real official way. At least not yet.”
Oh god. A half wife.
The last time he spoke to his father—months ago now—George remembered not listening while his father said he had met someone, and that she—what was it?—provided the kind of service you didn’t really get paid for, or paid enough, because damn this country! And that this new girlfriend was from somewhere unique, and George knew to act impressed. Certainly his dad had seemed very proud, as if he’d met some dignitary from another planet.
So details had been shared, just not absorbed. Would she tell George now that his father had really loved him? Pined and whatever, wished for phone calls, had the boy’s name on Google Alert?
“Of course, Trish,” George said, and then he smacked his forehead, ever so lightly, to let her know just what he thought of his forgetfulness. She deserved as much. They embraced, at a distance, as if his father’s body were stretched out between them. Then she stepped closer and really wrapped him up. He felt her breath go out of her as she collapsed against him.
George knew he was supposed to feel something. Emotional, sexual. Rage and sorrow and a little bit of predatory hunger. Even a deeper shade of indifference? History virtually demanded that the errant son, upon packing up his estranged and dead father’s belongings, would seek closure with the new, younger wife. Half wife. Some sort of circuitry demanded to be completed. He had an obligation.
It felt pretty good to hold her. She softened, but didn’t go boneless. He dropped his face into her neck. Lately he’d consorted with some hug-proof men and women. They hardened when he closed in. Their bones came out. Not this one. She knew what she was doing.
“Well, you sure don’t smell like your father,” she said, breaking the hug. “And you don’t look like him. I mean not even close.”
She laughed.
“Oh I must,” said George. He honestly couldn’t be sure.
“Nope. Trust me. I have seen that man up close. You are a very handsome young man.”
“Thank you,” said George.
“I think I want to see some ID! I might have to cry foul!”
* * *
—
They met later for dinner at a taco garage on the beach. Their food arrived inside what looked like an industrial metal disk.
George dug in and wished it didn’t taste so ridiculously good.
“Oh my god,” he gushed.
It was sort of the problem with California, the unembarrassed way it delivered pleasure. It backed you into a corner.
After dinner they walked on the beach and tried to talk about George’s father without shitting directly inside the man’s urn, which was probably still ember hot. George hadn’t unboxed it yet.
“I loved him, I did. I’m sure of it,” Trish said. “When all the anger finally went out of him there was something so
sweet there.”
George pictured his father deflated like a pool toy, crumpled in a garage.
“He called me by your mom’s name a lot. By mistake. Rina. Irene. Boy did he do that a lot.”
“Oh, that must have been hard,” said George. Who was Irene? he wondered. Had he ever met her? His mother’s name was Lydia.
“No, I get it. He had a life before me. We weren’t babies. It’s just that I suppose I want to be happy, too. Which is really a radical idea, if you think about it,” Trish said.
George thought about it, but he was tired and losing focus. He preferred a solitary loneliness to the kind he felt around other people. And this woman, Trish. Was she family to him now? Why did it feel like they were on a date?
“It’s just that my happiness, what I needed to do to get it, threatened your father,” continued Trish.
“My father, threatened,” George said. “But whatever could you mean?”
Trish laughed. “Oh I like you. You’re nothing like him.”
George took that in. It sounded fine, possibly true. He had no real way of knowing. He remembered his father’s new radio, which he had watched him build when he was a kid, and whose dial he twisted into static for hours and hours. He could make his dad laugh by pretending the static came from his mouth, lip-synching it. He remembered how frightened his father had been in New York when he visited so many years later. George held his arm everywhere they went. It had irritated him terribly.
What else? His father made him tomato soup once. His father slapped him while he was brushing his teeth, sending a spray of toothpaste across the mirror.
George was probably supposed to splurge on memories now. He wasn’t sure he had the energy. Maybe the thing was to let the memories hurl back and cripple him, months or years from now. They needed time, wherever they were hiding, to build force, so that when they returned to smother him, he might never recover.
After their walk, they stood in a cloud of charred smoke behind the restaurant. The ocean broke and swished somewhere over a dune. Trish arched her back and yawned.
“All of this death,” she said.
“Horn-y,” George shouted. He wasn’t, but still. Maybe if they stopped talking for a while they’d break this mood.
Trish tried not to laugh.
“No, uh, funny you should say that. I was just thinking, it makes me want to…” She smiled.
How George wished that this was the beginning of a suicide pact, after a pleasant dinner at the beach with your dead father’s mistress. Just walk out together into the waves. But something told him that he knew what was coming instead.
“I’m going to comfort myself tonight, with or without you,” Trish said. “Do you feel like scrubbing in?”
George looked away. The time was, he would sleep with anyone, of any physical style. Any make, any model. Pretty much any year. If only he could do away with the transactional phase, when the barter chips came out, when the language of seduction was suddenly spoken, rather than sung, in such non-melodious tones. It was often a deal breaker. Often. Not always.
* * *
—
After they’d had sex, which required one of them to leave the room to focus on the project alone, they washed up and had a drink. It felt good to sip some so-called legacy whiskey from his father’s Pueblo coffee mugs. Now that they’d stared into each other’s cold depravity, they could relax.
Trish circled around to the inevitable.
“So what’s up with Pattern?”
Here we go.
“What’s she like? Are you guys in touch? Your father never would speak of her.”
Probably due to the nondisclosure agreement she must have had him sign, George figured.
“You know,” he said, pausing, as if his answer was more than ordinarily true, “she’s really nice, really kind. I think she’s misunderstood.”
“Did I misunderstand it when her company, in eighteen months, caused more erosion to the Great Barrier Reef than had since been recorded in all of history?”
“She apologized for that.”
“I thought you were going to say she didn’t do it. Or that it didn’t happen that way.”
“No, she did do it, with great intention, I think. I bet at low tide she would have stood on the reef herself and smashed it into crumbs for whatever fungal fuel they were mining. But, you know, she apologized. In a way, that’s much better than never having done it. She has authority now. Gravity. She’s human.”
“What was she before?”
Before? George thought. Before that she was his sister. She babysat for him. He once saw her get beaten up by another girl. She went to a special smart-people high school that had classes on Saturdays. Before that she was just this older person in his home. She had her own friends. She kept her door closed. Someone should have told him she was going to disappear. He would have tried to get to know her.
* * *
—
In the morning Trish recited the narrative she had concocted for them. Their closeness honored a legacy. Nothing was betrayed by their physical intimacy. They’d both lost someone. It was now their job to make fire in the shape of—here George lost track of her theory—George’s dad.
Trish looked like she wanted to be challenged. Instead George nodded and agreed and tried to hold her. He said he thought that a fire like that would be a fine idea. Even though they’d treated each other like specimens the night before, two lab technicians straining to achieve a result, their hug was oddly platonic today. He pictured the two of them out in the snow, pouring a gasoline silhouette of his dead father. Igniting it. Effigy or burn pile?
“We didn’t know each other before,” said Trish. “Now we do. We’re in each other’s lives. This is real. And it’s good. You’re not just going to go home and forget me. It won’t be possible.”
George would sign off on pretty much any press release about what had happened last night, and what they now meant to each other, so long as it featured him catching his plane at 9:30 a.m. and never seeing her again.
As he was leaving, Trish grabbed him.
“I would say ‘one for the road,’ but I don’t really believe in that. Just that whole way of thinking and speaking. It sounds sorrowful and final and I don’t want that to be our thing. That’s not us. I don’t like the word ‘road’ and I definitely don’t like the word ‘one.’ Two is much better. Two is where it’s at.”
She held up two fingers and tried to get George to kiss them.
George smiled at her, pleaded exhaustion. It was sweet of her to offer, he said, and normally he would, but.
“You know, research shows,” Trish said, not giving up, “that really it’s a great energy boost, to love and be loved. To climax. To cause to climax. To cuddle and talk and to listen and speak. You’re here! You’re standing right here with me now!”
“I’m sorry,” said George. “I guess it’s all just starting to hit me. Dad. Being gone. I don’t think I’d bring the right spirit right now. You would deserve better.”
It didn’t feel good or right to play this card, but as he said it he found it was more true than he’d intended.
Trish was beautiful, but given the growing privacy of his sexual practice, such factors no longer seemed to matter. He would probably love to have sex with her, if she could somehow find a way of vanishing, and if the two of them could also find a way to forget that they had tried that already, last night, and the experience had been deeply medical and isolating. It was just too soon to hope for a sufficiently powerful denial to erase all that and let them, once again, look at each other like strangers, full of lust and hope.
* * *
—
“Is that a bad thing,” George asked his therapist, after returning home and telling her the basics.
“And please don’t ask me what I think,�
� he continued. “The reason people ask a question is because they would like an answer. Reflecting my question back to me, I swear, is going to make me hurl myself out of the window.”
Together they looked at the small, dirty window. There were bars on it. The office was on the ground floor.
“I’d hate to be a cause of your death,” said the therapist, unblinking.
“Well, I just wonder what you think.”
“Okay, but I don’t think you need to lecture me in order to get me to answer a question. You seem to think I need to be educated about how to respond to you. There are also many other reasons people ask questions, aside from wanting answers. You’re an imbecile if you think otherwise.”
“Okay, you’re right, I’m sorry.”
“Well, then, I think it must be lonely. I do. To find yourself attracted to a woman who also seems, as you say, attracted to you—if that’s true—and to think you’d be more content to fantasize about her than to experience her physically. So it sounds lonely to me. But we should also notice that this is a loneliness you’ve chosen, based on your sexual desires. Your sexuality seems to thrive on loneliness. And I can’t help but sense that some part of you is proud of that. Your story seems vaguely boastful.”