by Ben Marcus
“Plus her being my father’s widow.”
Dr. Graco frowned.
“What was that?” she asked.
“You know, her also having been involved with my father, before he died. I guess I left that part out.”
Dr. Graco took a moment to write in her notebook. She wrote quickly, and with a kind of disdain, as if she didn’t like to have to make contact with the page. A fear of contaminants, maybe. A disgust with language.
It had sometimes occurred to him that therapists used this quiet writing time, after you’ve said something striking, or, more likely, boring, to make notes to themselves about other matters. Grocery lists, plans. One never got to see what was written down, and there was simply no possible way that all of it was strictly relevant. How much of it was sheer stalling, running out the clock? How much of it just got the narcissist in the chair across from you to shut up for a while?
She wrote through one page and had turned to another before looking up.
“I am sorry to hear about your father.”
“I should have told you. I apologize.”
“He died…recently?”
“Two weeks ago. That’s why I was away. My missed appointment. Which I paid for, but. I was gone. I’m not sure if you.”
“I see. Do you mean it when you say you should have told me?”
“Well, I found the prospect of telling you exhausting, I guess. I was annoyed that I had to do it. To be honest, I wished you could just, through osmosis, have the information, in the same way you can see what I’m wearing and we don’t need to discuss it. It’s just a self-evident fact. You could just look at me and know that my father is dead.”
She resumed writing, but he did not want to wait for her.
“That’s not a criticism of you, by the way. I don’t think you were supposed to guess. I mean I don’t think I think that. Maybe. You know, to just be sensitive and perceptive enough to know. I am sometimes disappointed about your powers, I guess. That’s true, I should admit that. I just wish I had, like, a helper, who could run ahead of me to deliver the facts, freeing me up from supplying all of this context when I talk to people. Otherwise I’m just suddenly this guy who’s like, my father died, blah blah. I’m just that guy.”
“But you weren’t. Because you didn’t tell me. You were not that guy.”
“Right, I guess.”
“So then who were you?”
“What?”
“You didn’t want to be the guy who told me your father had died, so by not telling me, what guy did you end up being instead?”
For some reason, George saw himself and Pattern, as kids, waiting on a beach for their lunch to digest, so they could go swimming. Pattern was dutifully counting down from two thousand. It was a useless memory, irrelevant here. He remembered when he shopped and cooked for his mother, when she wasn’t feeling well, and then really wasn’t feeling well. He cleaned and took care of her. His father had already planted his flag in California. He was that guy, but for such a short time. Two weeks? He’d been very many people since then. Who was he when he didn’t tell Dr. Graco that his father died? Nobody. No one remarkable. He’d been someone too scared or too bored, he didn’t know which, to discuss something important.
“That just made me think of something,” he said finally. “The word ‘guy.’ I don’t know. Have you heard of Guy Fox?”
“I assume you don’t mean the historic figure, Guy Fawkes?”
“No. F-o-x. Porn star, but that’s not really a good label for what he does. It’s not clear you can even call it porn anymore. It’s so sort of remote and kind of random, and definitely not obviously sexual. Or even at all. I mean almost, just, boredom. Anyway, it’s a new sort of thing. He provides eye contact. People pay a lot. He’ll just watch you, on video. You can stream him to your TV, and he’ll watch you. People pay him to watch while they have sex, of course, or masturbate, but now supposedly people just hire him to watch them while they hang out alone in their houses. Whenever they look up, he’s looking at them. They are paying to have eye contact whenever they want. They want someone out there seeing them. And he’s just amazing. Apparently there’s nothing quite like getting seen by him. It’s an addiction.”
“Ah, I see. Well, I’m afraid we have to stop.”
Afraid, afraid, afraid. Don’t be afraid, George thought. Embrace it.
For once he wished she’d say, “I’m delighted our session is over, George, now get the hell out of my office, you monster.”
* * *
—
Bowing to a certain protocol of the bereaved, George acquired a baby dog: hairless, pink, and frightening. His therapist had put him onto it after he kept insisting he was fine. She explained that people who lose a parent, especially one they weren’t close to, tend to grieve their lack of grief. Like they want to really feel something, and don’t, and so they grieve that. That absence. She said that one solution to this circular, masturbatory grief, is to take care of something. To be responsible for another living creature.
Except George and the animal had turned out to be a poor match. That’s how he put it to the dog catcher, or whatever the man was called when he sent the wet thing back, and then hired cleaners to sanitize his home. The animal was more like a quiet young child, waiting for a ride, determined not to exploit any hospitality whatsoever in George’s home. It rarely sprawled out, never seemed to relax. It sat upright in the corner, sometimes trotting to the window, where it glanced up and down the street, patiently confirming that it had been abandoned. Would it recognize rescue when it came? Sometimes you just had to wait this life out, it seemed to be thinking, and get a better deal next time. God knows where the creature slept. Or if.
Did the animal not get tired? Did it not require something? George would occasionally hose off the curry from the unmolested meat in his takeout container, and scrape it into the dog bowl, only to clean it up, untouched, days later. The animal viewed these meals with calm detachment. How alienating it was, to live with a creature so ungoverned by appetites. This thing could go hungry. It had a long game. What kind of level playing field was that? George felt entirely outmatched.
One night George tried to force the issue. He wanted more from it, and it wanted absolutely nothing from George, so perhaps, as the superior species, with broader perspective in the field, George needed to step up and trigger change. Be a leader. Rule by example. Maybe he had been playing things too passive? He pulled the thing onto his lap. He stroked its wet, stubbled skin, put on one of those TV shows that pets are supposed to like. No guns, just soft people swallowing each other.
The dog survived the affection. It trembled under George’s hands. Some love is strictly clinical. Maybe this was like one of those deep-tissue massages that release difficult feelings? George forced his hand along the dog’s awful back, wondering why anyone would willingly touch another living thing. What a disaster of feelings it stirred up, feelings that seemed to have no purpose other than to suffocate him. Finally the dog turned in George’s lap, as if standing on ice, and carefully licked its master’s face. Just once, and briefly. A studied, scientific lick, using the tongue to gain important information. Then it bounced down to its corner again, where it sat and waited.
* * *
—
Months after his father’s death there was still no word from Pattern. After he’d returned from California, and cleansed himself in the flat, gray atmosphere of New York, George had sent her another email, along the lines of, “Hey Pat, I’m back. I’ve got Dad’s dust. Let me know if you want to come say goodbye to it. There are still some slots free. Visiting hours are whenever and whenever and whenever. —G.”
He never heard back, and figured he wasn’t going to—on the Internet now Pattern was referred to as a fugitive wanted by Europol, for crimes against the environment—but one night, getting into bed, his phone made
an odd sound. Not its typical ring. It took him a minute to track the noise to his phone, and at first he thought it must be broken, making some death noise before it finally shut down.
He picked it up and heard a long, administrative pause.
“Please hold for Pattern,” a voice said.
He waited and listened. Finally a woman said hello.
“Hello?” said George. “Pattern?”
“Who’s this?” It wasn’t Pattern. This person sounded like a bitchy tween, entitled and shrill.
“You called me,” explained George.
“Who’s on the line,” said the teenager, “or I’m hanging up.”
George was baffled. Did a conversation with his sister really require such a cloak-and-dagger ground game? He hung up the phone.
The phone rang again an hour later, and it was Pattern herself.
“Jesus, George, what the hell? You hung up on my staff?”
“First of all, hello,” he said. “Secondly, let’s take a look at the transcript and I’ll show you exactly what happened. Your team could use some human behavior training. But forget all that. What on earth is new, big sister?”
She wanted to see him, she said, and she’d found a way for that to be possible. They had things to discuss.
“No shit,” said George. He couldn’t believe he was actually talking to her.
“Wait, so where are you?” she asked. “I don’t have my thing with me.”
“What thing?”
“I mean I don’t know where you are.”
“And your thing would have told you? Have you been tracking me?”
“Oh c’mon, you asshole.”
“I’m in New York.”
She laughed.
“What?”
“No, it’s just funny. I mean it’s funny that you still call it that.”
“What would I call it?”
“No, nothing, forget it. I’m sorry. I’m just on a different, it’s, I’m thinking of something else. Forget it.”
“O-kay. You are so fucking weird and awkward. I’m not really sure I even want to see you.”
“Georgie!”
“Kidding, you freak. Can you, like, send a jet for me? Or a pod? Or what exactly is it that you guys even make now? Can you break my face into dust and make it reappear somewhere?”
“Ha ha. I’ll send a car for you. Tomorrow night. Seven o’clock.”
* * *
—
George met Pattern in the sky bar of a strange building, which somehow you could not see from the street. Everyone had thought the developers had purchased the air rights and then very tastefully decided not to use them. Strike a blow for restraint. The elevator said otherwise. This thing was a goddamn tower. How had they done that? The optics for that sort of thing, Pattern explained to him, had been around for fifteen years or more. Brutally old-fashioned technology. Practically caveman. She thought it looked cheesy at this point.
“A stealth scraper,” said George, wanting to sound appreciative.
“Hardly. It’s literally smoke and mirrors,” Pattern said. “I am not kidding. And it’s kind of gross. But whatever. I love this bar. These cocktails are just violent. There’s a frozen pane of pork in this one. Ridiculously thin. They call it pork glass.”
“Yum,” said George, absently.
The funny thing about the bar, which was only just dawning on George, was that it was entirely free of people. And deadly silent. Out the window was a view of the city he’d never seen. Whenever he looked up he had the sensation that he was somewhere else. In Europe. In the past. On a film set. Asleep. Every now and then a young woman crept out from behind a curtain to touch Pattern on the wrist, moving her finger back and forth. Pattern would smell her wrist, make a face, and say something unintelligible.
But here she was, his very own sister. It was like looking at his mother and his father and himself, but refined, the damaged cells burned off. The best parts of them, contained in this one person.
“First of all, George,” Pattern said. “Dad’s girlfriend? Really?”
“Trish?”
“What a total pig you are. Does this woman need to be abused and neglected by two generations of our family?”
“How could you know anything about that?”
“Oh cut it out. It astonishes me when I meet people who still think they have secrets. It’s so quaint! You understand that even with your doors closed and lights out…Please tell me you understand. I couldn’t bear it if you were that naive. My own brother.”
“I understand, I think.”
“That man you pay to watch you while you’re cleaning the house? On your laptop screen?”
“Guy Fox.”
“Oh, George, you are a funny young man.”
“That’s actually a fairly mainstream habit, to have a watcher.”
“Right, George, it’s happening all over the Middle East, too. A worldwide craze. In Poland they do it live. It’s called a Peeping Tom. But who cares. Baby brother is a very strange bird.
“So,” she said, scooting closer to him and giving him a luxurious hug. “Mom and Dad never told you, huh?”
“Told me what?”
“They really never told you?”
“I’m listening.”
“I’m just not sure it’s for me to say. Mom and Dad talked about it kind of a lot, I mean we all did. I just figured they’d told you.”
“What already, Jesus. There’s no one else left to tell me.”
“You were adopted. That’s actually not the right word. Dad got in trouble at work and his boss forced him to take you home and raise you. You were born out of a donkey’s ass. Am I remembering correctly? That doesn’t sound right. From the ass of an ass.”
He tried to smile.
“I’m just kidding, George, Jesus. What is wrong with people?”
“Oh my god, right?” said George. “Why can’t people entertain more stupid jokes at their own expense? Je-sus. It’s so frustrating! When, like, my worldview isn’t supported by all the little people beneath me? And I can’t demean people and get an easy laugh? It’s so not fair!”
“Oh fuck off, George.”
They smiled. It felt really good. This was just tremendously nice.
“You don’t understand,” he said, trying harder than usual to be serious. “Mom punted so long ago I can’t even remember her smell. And Dad was just a stranger, you know? He was so formal, so polite. I always felt like I was meeting him for the first time.”
He tried to sound like his father, like any father: “Hello, George, how are you? How was your flight? Well, that’s grand. What’s your life like these days?”
Pattern stared at him.
“Honestly,” said George. “I can’t stand making small talk with people who have seen me naked. Or who fed me. Or spanked me. I mean once you spank someone, you owe them a nickname. Was that just me or were Mom and Dad, like, completely opposed to nicknames? Or even just honey or sweetie or any of that.”
“Jesus, George, what do you want from people? You have some kind of intimacy fantasy. Do you think other people go around hugging each other and holding hands, mainlining secrets and confessions into each other’s veins?”
“I have accepted the fact of strangers,” said George. “After some struggle. But it’s harder when they are in your own family.”
“Violin music for you,” said Pattern, and she snapped her fingers.
He looked up, perked his ears, expecting to hear music.
“Wow,” she marveled. “You think I’m very powerful, don’t you?”
“Honestly, I don’t know. I have no idea. Are you in trouble? Everything I read is so scary.”
“I am in a little bit of trouble, yes. But don’t worry. It’s nothing. And you. You seem so sad to me,�
� Pattern said. “Such a sad, sad young man.” She stroked his face, and it felt ridiculously, treacherously comforting.
George waved this off, insisted that he wasn’t. He just wanted to know about her. He really did. Who knows where she’d vanish to after this, and he genuinely wanted to know what her life was like, where she lived. Was she married? Had she gotten married in secret or something?
“I don’t get to act interested and really mean it,” George explained. “I mean ever, so please tell me who you are. It’s kind of a selfish question, because I can’t figure some things out about myself, so maybe if I hear about you, something will click.”
“Me? I tend to date the house husband type. Self-effacing, generous, asexual. Which is something I’m really attracted to, I should say. Men with low T, who go to bed in a full rack of pajamas. That’s my thing. I don’t go for the super-carnal hetero men; they seem like zoo animals. Those guys who know what they want, and have weird and highly developed skills as lovers, invariably have the worst possible taste—we’re supposed to congratulate them for knowing that they like to lick butter right off the stick. What a nightmare, to be subject to someone else’s expertise. The guys I tend to date, at first, are out to prove that they endorse equality, that my career matters, that my interests are primary—they make really extravagant displays of selflessness, burying all of their own needs. I go along with it, and over time I watch them deflate and lose all reason to live, by which point I have steadily lost all of my attraction for them. I imagine something like that is mirrored in the animal kingdom, but honestly that’s not my specialty. I should have an air gun in my home so I could put these guys out of their misery. Or a time-lapse video documenting the slow and steady loss of self-respect they go through. It’s a turnoff, but, you know, it’s my turnoff. Part of what initially arouses me is the feeling that I am about to mate with someone who will soon be ineffectual and powerless. I’ve come to rely on the arc. It’s part of my process.”