by Irene Gallo
I don’t know what to say to that. It’s stupid, but he’s smart, and he says it so hard.
He grins up at me, full-lipped, beautiful. The lighthouse beacon comes around again and lights up his silhouette and puts his face in shadow except his small, white teeth. “I mean, come on. If I weren’t here—wouldn’t you be having a good night?”
“You’re wishing you’d never known me, you realize. You’re shitting all over me.”
“Dominga Roldan! My knight.” There he goes, closing up again, putting on the armor of charm. He likes that Roldan is so much like Roland. It’s the first thing he ever told me. “Please. You’re the suffering hero at this table. Let’s talk about you.”
I surrender. I start talking about fucking Jacob.
But I resolve right then that I’ll save Nico, convince him that it’s worth it to go on, worth it to have ever been.
* * *
I believe in good people. Even though Nico has what we call “resting asshole face” and a job that requires him to trick people into giving him thousands of dollars (he designs the systems that keep people playing smartphone games, especially the parts that keep them spending), I still think he’s a good man. He cares, way down.
I believe you can feel that. The world’s a cold place and it’ll break your heart. You’ve got to trust in the possibility of good.
I dream of gardening far south and west, home in Laredo. Inexplicably, fucking Jacob is there. He smiles at me, big bear face a little stubbled. I want to yell at him: don’t grow a beard! You have a great chin! But we’re busy gardening, rooting around in galvanized tubs full of okra and zucchini and purple hull peas. Hot peppers, since the sweet breeds won’t take. The autumn light down here isn’t so thin as in New York. I am bare-handed, turning up the soil around the roots, grit up under my fingers and in the web of my hands. I am making life.
But down in the zucchini roots, I find a knot of maggots, balled up squirming like they’ve wormed a portal up from maggot hell and come pouring out blind and silent. And I think: I am only growing homes for maggots. Everything is this way. In the end we are only making more homes, better homes, for maggots.
Jacob smiles at me and says, like he did: “I’m just not ready for your life. It’s too hard. Too many people get hurt.”
I wake up groaning, hangover clotted in my sinuses. Staring up at the vent above my mattress, I realize there’s no heat. It’s broken again.
The cold is sharp, though. Sterile. It makes me go. I get to the hospital on time and Mary’s waiting for me, smiling, my favorite partner armed with coffee and danishes and an egg sandwich from the enigmatic food truck only she can find. For my hangover, of course. Mary, bless her, knows my schedule.
Later that day we save a man’s life.
He swam out into the river to die. We’re first on the scene and I am stupid, so stupid: I jump in to save him. The water’s late-autumn cold, the kind of chill I am afraid will get into my marrow and crystallize there, so that later in life, curled up in the summer sun with a lover, I’ll feel a pang and know that a bead of ice came out of my bone and stuck in my heart. I used to get that kind of chest pain growing up, see. I thought they were ice crystals that formed when we went to see ex-Dad in Colorado, where the world felt high and thin, everything offered up on an altar to the truth behind the indifferent cloth of stars.
I’m thinking all this as I haul the drowning man back in. I feel so cold and so aware. My mind goes everywhere. Goes to Jacob, of course.
Offered up on an altar. We used to play a sex game like that, Jacob and I. You know, a sexy sacrifice—isn’t that the alchemy of sex games? You take something appalling and you make it part of your appetites. Jesus, I used to think it was cute, and now describing it I’m furiously embarrassed. Jacob was into all kinds of nerd shit. For him I think the fantasy was always kind of Greco-Roman, Andromeda on the rocks, but I always wondered if he dared imagine me as some kind of Aztec princess, which would be too complicatedly racist for him to suggest. He’s dating a white girl now. It doesn’t bother me but Mom just won’t let it go. She’s sharp about it, too: she has a theory that Jacob feels he’s now Certified Decent, having passed his qualifying exam, and now he’ll go on to be a regular shithead.
And Mary’s pulling me up onto the pier, and I’m pulling the suicide.
He nearly dies in the ambulance. We swaddle him in heat packs and blankets and Mary, too, swaddles him, smiling and flirting, it’s okay, what a day for a swim, does he know that in extreme situations rescuers are advised to provide skin-to-skin contact?
See, Mary’s saying, see, it’s not so bad here, not so cold. You’ll meet good people. You’ll go on.
Huddled in my own blankets, I meet the swimmer’s warm brown eyes and just then the ambulance slams across a pothole. He fibrillates. Alarms shriek. I see him start to go, receding, calm, warm, surrounded by people trying to save him, and I think that if he went now, before his family found out, before he had to go back to whatever drove him into the river, it’d be best.
Oh, God, the hurt can’t be undone. It’d be best.
His eyes open. They peel back like membranes. I see a thin screen, thinner than Colorado sky, and in the vast space behind it, something white and soft and eyeless wheels on an eternal wind.
His heart quits. He goes into asystole.
“Come on,” Mary hisses, working on him. “Come on. You can’t do this to me. Dominga, let’s get some epi going—come on, don’t go.”
I think that’s the hook that pulls him in. He cares. He doesn’t want to hurt her. Like Nico, he can’t stand to do harm. By that hook or by the CPR and the epinephrine, we bring him back. Afterward I sit outside in the cold, the bitter dry cold, and I can feel it: the heat going out of me, the world leaking up through the sky and out into the void where something ancient waits, a hypothermic phantasm, a cold fever dream, the most real thing I’ve ever seen.
I flail around for something human to hold and remember, then, how worried I am about Nico.
* * *
Don’t judge me too harshly. This is my next move: I invite Nico to game night with Jacob and his new girlfriend, Elise. Nico is a game designer, right? It fits. I promised Jacob we’d still be friends. Everything fits.
It’s not about any kind of payback.
Jacob loves this idea. He suggests a café/bar nerd money trap called Glass Needle. I turn up with Nico (Cool jacket, I say, and he grins back at me from under his mirrored aviators, saying, You really can’t tell!) and we all shake hands and say Hi, hi, wow, it’s so great, under a backlit ceiling of frosted glass etched with the shapes of growing things.
“Isn’t that cool?” Jacob beams at me. “They do that with hydrofluorosilicic acid.” He’s growing too: working on a beard and a gut, completing the deadly Santa array. Elise looks like she probably does yoga. She arranges the game with assured competence. I wonder how many times Jacob practiced saying hydrofluorosilicic, and what their sex is like.
Nico tongues a square of gum. “That’s really impressive,” he says.
The games engage him. I guess the games engage me too: Jacob will listen to anything Nico says, since Jacob cares about everything and Nico pretends he doesn’t. “I love board games,” Jacob explains.
“I love rules,” Nico replies, and this is true: Nico thinks everything is a game to be played, history, evolution, even dating, even friendship. Everything has a winning strategy. He’ll describe this cynicism to anyone, since he thinks it’s sexy. If you know him you can see how deeply it bothers him.
It’s Sunday again. I worked eighteen hours yesterday. I’m exhausted, I can’t stop thinking about the swimmer flatline. Jacob looks at me with the selfless worry permitted to the ex who did the dumping.
If I weren’t here, I think, wouldn’t you be having a good night?
The game baffles me. Elise assembles a zoo of cardboard tokens, decks of tiny cards, dice, character sheets, Jacob chattering all the while: “These are for the other w
orlds you’ll visit. These are spells you can learn, though of course they’ll drive you mad. This card means you’re the town sheriff—that one means you eat free at the diner—”
Elise pats him on the hand. “I think they can learn as they go.”
We’re supposed to patrol a town where the world has gotten thin and wounded. If we don’t heal those wounds, something will come through, a dreadful thing with a name like the Treader in Dust or whatever. Nico’s really good at the game. He flirts with me outrageously, which earns a beautifully troubled Jacob-face, a face of perturbed enlightenment: really, this shouldn’t be bothering me! So I flirt back at Nico. Why not? He’s the one getting a kick out of meeting my ex and out-charming him, out-dressing him, talking over him while he sits there and takes it. And wouldn’t Mary flirt, to comfort him? To remind poor forlorn Nico that the world’s not so cold?
Only Nico doesn’t seem so forlorn, and when I look at Jacob, there’s Elise touching shoulders with him, which makes every memory of Jacob hurt. As if she’s claimed him not just now but retroactively too.
Even Elise, who’s played it a hundred times, can’t manage this damn game. The rules seem uncertain, as if different parts of the rule book contradict each other. Jacob and Nico argue over exactly how the monsters decide to hunt us, precisely when the Magic Shop closes up, where the yawning portals lead. Oh, Nico—this must be so satisfyingly you: You are beating Jacob’s game, you’re better than his rules. Even Elise won’t argue with Nico, preferring, she says, to focus on the emergent narrative.
It all leaves me outside.
I drink to spiteful excess and move my little character around in sullen ineffective ways. Jacob’s eyes are full of stupid understanding. I look at him and try to beam my thoughts: I hate this. This makes me sick. I wish I’d never met you. I wish I could burn up all the good times we had, just to spare myself this awful night.
That’s what I thought when he left. That it hadn’t been worth it.
“Can we switch sides,” Nico asks, “and obtain dreadful secrets from the Great Old One?”
“You could try.” Elise loves this. She grins at Nico and I savor Jacob’s reaction. “But your only hope is that It will devour your soul first, so you don’t have to experience the terrible majesty of Its coming.”
And Nico grins at me. “What an awful world. You’re fucked the moment you’re born.” Making a joke out of his drunken despair, out of dead Mandrill and his own hurt. Of course he doesn’t take it seriously. Of course he was just drunk.
I am everyone’s sucker.
“I think you can do that with an expansion set,” Jacob adds helpfully. “Switch sides, I mean.”
“Let’s play with it next time,” Nico says. Elise bounces happily. There probably will be a next time, won’t there? The three of them will be friends.
“I feel sick,” I say, “it’s just—something I saw on shift. It’s getting to me.”
Then I go. They can’t argue with that. They all work in offices.
Nico texts me: Holy shit we lost. Alien god woke up to consume the world. We went mad with rapture and horror when it spoke hidden secrets of the universal design although I did shoot it with a tommy gun. Game is fucking broken. It was amazing thank you.
I text back: cool
What I want to say is: you asshole, I hope you’re happy, I hope you’re glad you’re right, I hope you’re glad you won. I believe in good people, you know, but I used to think Jacob was a good person, and look where that got me; I just wanted to cheer you up and look where that got me. I pull people from the river, I drag them dying out of their houses, I see their spinal fluid running into the gutters and look where all that gets me—
Jesus, this world, this world. I feel so heartsick. I cannot even retch.
And I dream of that awful board, piled with tokens moving each other by their own secret rules. A game of alien powers, but those powers escape the game to move among us. They roam the world cow-eyed and compassionate and offer hands with fingers like fishhooks. We live in a paddock, a fattening pen, and we cannot leave it, because when we try to go the hooks say, Think of who you’ll hurt.
So much hurt to try to heal. And the healing hurts too much.
* * *
The hangover sings an afterimage song. Like the drunkenness was ripped out of me and it left a negative space, the opposite of contentment. It vibrates in my bones.
I get up, brushing at an itch on my back, and drink straight from the bathroom faucet. When I come back to my mattress it’s speckled, speckled white. Something’s dripping on it from the air vent—oh, oh, they’re maggots, slim white maggots. My air vent is dripping maggots. They’re all over the covers, white and searching.
I call my landlord. I pin plastic sheeting up over the vent. I clean my bedroom twice, once for the maggots, once again after I throw up. Then I go to work.
Everything I touch feels infested. Inhabited.
Mary’s got an egg sandwich for me but she looks like shit, weary, dry-skinned, her face flaking. “Hi,” she says. “I’m sorry, I have the worst migraine.”
“Oh, hon. Take it easy.” The headaches started when she transitioned, an estrogen thing. She’s quiet about them, and strong. I’m happy she tells me.
“Hey, you too. Which, uh—actually.” She gives me the sandwich and makes a brave face, like she’s afraid that someone’s going to snap at someone, like she doesn’t want to snap first. “I signed you up for a stress screening. They want you in the little conference room in half an hour.”
I’m not angry. I just feel dirty and rotten and useless: now I’m even letting Mary down. “Oh,” I say. “Jesus, I’m sorry. I didn’t realize I’d … was it the epi? Was I too slow on the epi last week?”
“You didn’t do anything wrong.” She rubs her temples. “I’m just worried about you.”
I want to give her a hug and thank her for caring but she’s so obviously in pain. And the thought of the maggots keeps me away.
They’re waiting for me in the narrow conference room: a man in a baggy blue suit, a woman in surgical scrubs with an inexplicable black stain like tar. “Dominga Roldan?” she says.
“That’s me.”
The man shakes my hand enthusiastically. “We just wanted to chat. See how you were. After your rescue swim.”
The woman beckons: sit. “Think of this as a chance to relax.”
“We’re worried about you, Dominga,” the man says. I can’t get over how badly his suit fits. “I remember some days in the force I felt like the world didn’t give a fuck about us. Just made me want to give up. You ever feel that way?”
I want to say what Nico would say: actually, sir, that’s not the problem at all, the problem is caring too much, caring so much you can’t ask for help because everyone else is already in so much pain.
Nico wouldn’t say that, though. He’d find a really clever way to not say it.
“Sure,” I say. “But that’s the job.”
“Did you know the victim?” the woman asks. The man winces at her bluntness. I blink at her and she purses her lips and tilts her head, to Yes, I know how it sounds, but please.say: “The suicide you rescued. Did you know him?”
“No.” Of course not. What?
The man opens his mouth and she cuts him off. “But did you feel that you did, at any point? After he coded, maybe?”
I stare at her. My hangover turns my stomach and drums on the inside of my skull. It’s not that I don’t get it: it’s that I feel I do, that something has been gestating in the last few days, in the missing connections between unrelated events.
The man sighs and unlatches his briefcase. I just can’t shake the sense that his suit used to fit, not so long ago. “Let her be,” he says. “Dominga, I just gotta tell you, I admire the hell out of people like you. Me, I think the only good in this world is the good we bring to it. Good people, people like you, you make this place worth living in.”
“So we need to take care of people like you.”
The woman in scrubs has a funny accent—not quite Boston, still definitely a Masshole. “Burnout’s very common. You know the stages?”
“Sure.” First exhaustion, then shame, then callous cynicism. Then collapse. But I’m not there yet, I’m not past cynicism. I still want to help.
The man lifts a tiny glass cylinder from his briefcase, a cylinder full of a green fleshy mass—a caterpillar, a fat, warty caterpillar, pickled in cloudy fluid and starting to peel apart. He looks at me apologetically, as if this is an awkward necessity, just his morning caterpillar in brine.
“Sometimes this job becomes overwhelming.” The woman’s completely unmoved by the caterpillar. Her eyes have a kind of look-away quality, like those awful xenon headlights assholes use, unsafe to meet head-on. “Sometimes you need to stop taking on responsibilities and look after yourself. It’s very important that you have resources to draw on.”
Baggy Suit holds his cylinder gingerly, a thumb on one end and two fingers on the other, and stares at it. Is there writing on it? The woman says, “Do you have a safe space at home? Somewhere to relax?”
“Well—no, I guess not, there’s a bug problem…”
The woman frowns in sympathy but her eyes don’t frown, God, not at all—they smile. I don’t know why. The man rolls his dead caterpillar tube and suddenly I grasp that the writing’s on the inside, facing the dead bug.
“You’ve got to take care of yourself.” He sounds petulant; he looks at the woman in scrubs with quiet resentment. “We need good people out there. Fighting the good fight.”
“But if you feel you can’t go on … if you’re absolutely overwhelmed, and you can’t see a way forward…” The woman leans across the table to take my hands. She’s colder than the river where the man went to die. “I want to give you a number, okay? A place you can call for help.”
She reads it off to me and I get hammered with déjà vu: I know it already, I’m sure. Or maybe that’s not quite right, I don’t know it exactly. It’s just that it feels like it fits inside me, as if a space has been hollowed out for it, made ready to contain its charge.