Made for Love

by Alissa Nutting

  “No one has ever said that to me,” she told him. “I cannot believe the most important person I’ve ever met just told me that.” He laughed and tilted his head, staring at her like she was someone familiar whom he hadn’t seen in a long time. It was satisfying the way she could give him false praise and his attention to her automatically seemed to deepen. Soon she was acting like he was the most enthralling person she’d ever met.

  Hazel was twenty-two; he wasn’t that much older than she was, twenty-seven, but he felt older by decades. It was hard to explain. Part of it was just success and power; Hazel had never been so close to someone so successful before. Byron’s looks weren’t anything special—he was a rather plain white guy, tall and thin with long fingers whose tips were oddly circular. When he placed them on the table and slid them back and forth while talking, they reminded Hazel of the suctiony paws of a tree frog. Was he good-looking? Would she like to have his fingers perform an adhesive walk down her leg? She couldn’t decide. But she loved how happy she was making him just by appearing to have a great time.

  His haircut creeped her out the way freshly hedged lawns sometimes did, making her feel like life was already over and she’d arrived on the planet too late: people had tamed everything wild, which was the same as destroying the wildness since taming it turned it into something so different. We pretend when we want to forget things are dangerous, she thought, though she immediately failed to apply this concept to herself or reflect upon why she was pretending to be super taken with Byron when she wasn’t.

  One of the only things Hazel knew herself to be great at was concealing her true feelings, so it made sense for her to showcase this talent front and center whenever she needed to impress others. It was a skill she’d learned early on. Sitting there with Byron, she began remembering how she’d often wanted to scream when lining up for the bus at elementary school because everything felt so artificial. No one was okay, but it was not okay to say that. There they were, ages five to ten, most of them in brightly colored clothing with cartoon backpacks that seemed designed for a utopia in an almost-mean way. They were all emotional messes, especially Hazel. She watched the news with her parents at night and hardly slept because of it. She had a hard time playing in large groups of friends because her own house was so quiet that recess overwhelmed her—she was romantic and would’ve preferred just one special friend, but this was not how social dynamics worked. One of her classmates had a brother with cancer. Others were mean, shy, hungry, sad. By the age of nine, Hazel sometimes had a fantasy daydream at school where the teacher walked into the classroom and yelled,

  ISN’T EVERYTHING HORRIBLE? DOESN’T THE PAIN OF THE WORLD OUTWEIGH THE JOY BY TRILLIONS? WOULD YOU LIKE TO PUSH ALL OF THE DESKS INTO THE CENTER OF THE ROOM AND BURN THEM IN A GIANT BONFIRE? THEN WE CAN RUN AROUND SCREAMING AND WEEPING AMIDST THE SMOKE IN A TRUTHFUL PARADE OF OUR HUMAN CONDITION. SINCE YOU ARE SMALL STATURED, CHILDREN, IT MIGHT HELP OTHERS TO FEEL THE FULL BRUNT OF YOUR AGITATION IF YOU WAVE STICKS AND SHRUBBERY OVER YOUR HEADS ALL THE WHILE. WE DON’T WANT TO KILL ANYTHING WE DON’T HAVE TO KILL; EVERYTHING LIVING THAT WE’VE EVER SEEN OR KNOWN WILL DIE WITHOUT OUR INTERVENTION, OURSELVES INCLUDED; THIS IS A PSYCHOLOGICAL LEAD BLANKET THAT EVEN OUR MOST PERVASIVE MOMENTS OF COMFORT CANNOT CRAWL OUT FROM UNDER AND ONE UNEXTINGUISHABLE SOURCE OF DESPAIR, SO WE WON’T BE PERFORMING ANY RITUALISTIC SACRIFICES; THAT’S NOT THE DIRECTION WE WILL GO IN JUST YET; HOWEVER, ASSISTANT PRINCIPAL LAWRENCE IS ON THE PROWL FOR A ROAD CARCASS WE MIGHT BE ABLE TO USE AS A REPRESENTATIVE PROP BECAUSE NOWHERE IN OUR AUTUMN-THEMED POSTER BOARD DÉCOR IS MORBIDITY OR DECAY SYMBOLIZED. OUR SCHOOL BOARD MEMBERS CANNOT AGREE ON HOW BEST TO ACKNOWLEDGE THE BOUNDLESSNESS OF HUMAN CRUELTY. IN OUR SOCIETY SOME OF YOU ARE FAR SAFER AND MORE ADVANTAGED THAN OTHERS; AT HOME SOME OF YOU ARE FAR MORE LOVED; SOME OF YOU WILL FIND THAT CONCEPTS LIKE FAIRNESS AND JUSTICE WILL BE THIN, FLICKERING HOLOGRAMS ON THE PERIPHERY OF YOUR LIVES. OH, LOOK, CHILDREN—I SEE MR. LAWRENCE IN THE DISTANCE DRAGGING A PORTION OF A HIGHWAY-SLAUGHTERED DEER. LET’S GO HELP HIM LUG IT INSIDE AND BE REMINDED THAT WE TOO INHABIT BODIES MADE OF MEAT-WRAPPED BONES; LET’S MEDITATE ON THIS CORPOREAL TERROR.

  Whenever her mother had asked, Hazel always told her, School is great.

  Byron didn’t seem to feel any corporeal terror. Hazel felt like he must know all kinds of calming, existential secrets that she didn’t, which only strengthened her urge to win his favor so he’d share them.

  At the end of the interview, Byron took her right hand and clasped it between both of his. This superrich person really likes me, she realized. Her adrenaline spiked and she felt an invigorating wave of accomplishment surge over her; her chest filled with a sensation befitting the visuals of an effective mouthwash commercial. An outbreak of goose bumps bloomed over her body.

  In hindsight, Byron’s cold skin might have had something to do with this. Or maybe it was his parting words to her, addressing a subject she hadn’t told a single person about.

  “I’m so sorry,” Byron had said, “that your mother is dying.”

  THE DAY AFTER INTERVIEWING BYRON, HAZEL WOKE TO HER PHONE ringing. This was a surprise since it had been shut off for nonpayment for over three weeks. Who calls on a dead phone, besides a dead person/ghost or a spiritual higher power, and which possibility was more frightening?

  Her immediate thought was that her mom had just died and was calling her from the beyond. “OH. Shit,” Hazel muttered. It was early for Hazel, around 9 AM, and she was hungover, which her deceased mother would totally be able to detect from Hazel’s voice.

  Her mental lexicon of images of possessed phones began to flash through her mind—demonic tongues coming out of the receiver and licking the person’s earlobe with green saliva, retractable needles stabbing through the handset’s speaker holes the moment the unsuspecting recipient placed the receiver against her head. Hazel put on an oven mitt then picked up the phone with the gloved hand. She held it out in front of her at a distance for a moment. Better to let the haunted device make the first move.

  “Hello?” Hazel heard a voice say, a male’s voice, which let her sigh with relief. It wasn’t her mom’s fresh ghost. All other deadies felt easier to handle.

  “It’s Byron Gogol.”

  “You died?” Hazel exclaimed. In the silence that followed, she realized there could be another explanation and tried to backpedal. “I mean my phone was dead. I mean it hasn’t been working,” Hazel said. She hoped this made it sound like the problem had been a service or a technical failure. Jenny had just given her money, but Hazel planned to spend it on liquor and convenience-food items.

  In truth she didn’t want to know of her mother’s passing, and her mother had already stipulated that there would be no funeral. Let’s not do good-byes, she’d insisted the last time Hazel was home. Come give me a firm handshake and we’ll agree to see each other later. A gentlemen’s agreement. And Hazel had, though she’d wanted to acknowledge the grappling voice in her mind, half her women’s studies professor and half—who? Octavia Butler? Hazel liked to imagine every thought she had that felt feminist was coming into her brain directly via Octavia Butler’s spirit—Neither of us is a man, Mom. Also you certainly are not gentle.

  “But I guess my phone is working now?” She knew that wasn’t a charming thing to ask, so she tried to think of what might charm him. “It’s great to hear your voice,” she said.

  “I wanted to hear yours, too, so I took care of your bill. Would you like to go out this evening?”

  Some facts about herself, facts she now realized Byron clearly knew, like how she was broke and about to flunk out of college, couldn’t be camouflaged. But her words and expressions didn’t have to match reality. He’d like her more if she seemed to adore him already, so she did. “This can officially be my only-Byron phone,” she said. “I won’t tell anyone else it’s back on. If I answer and it’s anyone but you I’ll just hang up.” Then something less contrived slipped out. “But how did you know my mother is dying?”

 
Already, though, she was imagining dinner, an upscale affair maybe involving a piano, or pianos. Fancy restaurants probably did not stop at one piano. She had nothing to wear. She did buy clothing on credit cards (and occasionally shoplifted, easing her conscience with the knowledge that the company used sweatshop labor. She told herself that stealing sweatshop-labored garments and wearing them was somewhere on the family tree of protest for human rights.). But most of her clothing was intentionally distressed—holes, skunk-spray patterns of bleach, faux cigarette burns, patches. Christ, her dying mother had said the last time Hazel returned home. Christ, Christ, Christ. Were you recently assaulted? What kind of a look is that! If I saw you walking down the street, I’d stop the van and ask if you needed a ride to the police station. You know what those jeans say to me? “I was gravely wronged. I have a report to make.” And not in a good way!

  Her clothes didn’t match the grand degree of agreeability and optimism she wanted Byron to think she possessed.

  “I’m sorry if that felt like a violation,” he said. “My team had to investigate you yesterday before we spoke. They’re pretty thorough, in terms of electronic records. In terms of most things.”

  Hazel wondered if he worried about her being too sad to party with him, or whatever the evening plans were, due to the maternal situation. How best to convey that she wasn’t fraught with grief without seeming like a monster? “We’ve reached a point of acceptance with her condition,” Hazel said. She borrowed this language from a hospice pamphlet titled “Reaching a Point of Acceptance With Your Condition.” It had sat on their coffee table for weeks, unopened, then was finally thrown away when her intoxicated mother refused a bottle of Ensure by karate-chopping it down with the side of her hand and spilling it everywhere. “What should I wear tonight?”

  “I’ll send you something,” Byron said. “Be ready at eight.” Then there was the dial tone. Hazel decided to call the library and inquire about the current balance of her fines, always hefty. She had no plans to pay, but she wanted to call someone since her phone suddenly worked.

  What he sent was a gray leisure suit and slip-on shoes, made of the same fabric as his workers’ clothing and his own. It was both sensual and androgynous, hugging her small breasts but also changing the parameters of their shape into something more concave and winnowed, like two tiny abdomens. The shoes were incredibly comfortable, so much so that they gave her the disconcerting feeling of having no feet at all. She walked slowly in them, filled with the suspicion that she wasn’t doing it right.

  “Walking feels like not walking, in these!” was the first thing she planned to say to him that evening. “Best shoes ever!” She’d drunk a few personality beers before the car arrived, thinking Byron would be in the car that was picking her up, thinking they were about to go to dinner and her buzz would soon be diluted by food. But the car had only a silent driver who made her sign a form declaring her physical person was harboring neither secretive recording devices nor undisclosed biological specimens. A screen in the car played looped footage of select portions from Byron’s speaking engagements. Hazel pressed every button she could find in an attempt to change the channel, finally opening the partition by accident. “Please don’t touch anything,” the driver said to her without looking back. Then the partition closed.

  WHEN THEY ARRIVED AT THE HUB, AN ESCORT TOOK HER THROUGH A ten-minute labyrinthine walk back to a mood-lit room where Byron sat in a hanging black chair that looked like a hollowed-out alien egg. He was absentmindedly typing on something in his lap that appeared to be a sheet of glass while watching something in the corner of the chair that also looked like a sheet of glass. There was a large bowl on the table in front of her that Hazel eagerly walked toward, hoping it was filled with nuts or another snack food, but it was filled with small white rocks alight in a bed of blue flames. She had to pee so badly.

  Byron smiled and stood up as Hazel walked into the room. So this is how it feels to have someone be really happy to see you, she thought. “You look stunning,” Byron said. “Don’t you love these clothes?”

  “I’ve never felt anything like them!” Hazel exclaimed. “They make me hate my skin for not being made out of this material. And the comfort level of these shoes. My feet feel totally seduced. Every time I take a step I expect the shoes to start whispering dirty things to me in French.”

  Byron was very pleased. “We’re on the same page. I’m curious to know—what do you think of the house?”

  His smile was beaming, anticipatory. Hazel realized that he wanted her to continue the statements of awe. Her performance of being dazzled was her ticket of admission.

  “I’m just trying not to hyperventilate,” Hazel said. “I won’t move my head to the right or the left because I’m already overwhelmed. If I indulged my peripheral vision too I would probably faint.” She swallowed and decided to make a risky move. “I missed you,” she added.

  Byron’s face went blank and Hazel chided herself for overreaching. But after a moment he said, “There’s something I should tell you.”

  Hazel felt her cheeks flush. She’d pushed too far, too soon. Or had she?

  “I feel the same way, Hazel,” he said. “I think you and I should talk about the future.”

  “I’d love that,” Hazel said, a placeholder phrase to conceal her shock. The future? Why focus on the negative? her father would say anytime she brought up her future. Or her past, or her present. What did he mean? “This is embarrassing,” she said, “I think it’s my excitement, being here. . . . Do you have a bathroom?”

  Byron winked. “Wait till you see. Here, Fiffany will take you.” Byron pressed some sort of button inside the egg and a female worker appeared. “Are you menstruating?” she asked Hazel in a low whisper. “Only select facilities are calibrated for this possibility.”

  “I doubt it,” Hazel answered. She was a bit of a denier when it came to her cycles; all her underwear were stained. Unless she was bleeding profusely, she took a very laissez-faire position on the whole thing. She felt that giving her period the cold shoulder made it end more quickly each month than rolling out an assortment of absorbent products to give it the grand welcome.

  The woman’s eyebrow rose. “Right this way.”

  “Are there any vending machines or anything?” Hazel asked, hoping for some charity. She didn’t have any money, and hadn’t brought any credit cards. If a tech millionaire couldn’t pick up the tab for a snack, who could?

  “We’re more into vitamin packing.” The woman reached down to her pant leg and produced a small wrapped package of pills, seemingly from a fold in the cloth, like a magic trick. Hazel blinked.

  “These are drugs?” Hazel asked, hopeful.

  “Bioengineered kelp,” the woman corrected. “Let me give you a second packet. They might help you sober up a bit.”

  “Oh good,” Hazel said, although this immediately made her decide she’d pretend to take them but not swallow. “Do you have any water?”

  The woman held open a door and rolled her eyes. “They dissolve. Sublingual.” At Hazel’s blank stare, she rolled her eyes again. “You put them under your tongue.”

  Hazel stepped into the room. It was pitch-black until the door closed, then a single beam of light shot down from the ceiling to illuminate a toilet. It looked like the toilet was floating in the middle of outer space. Squinting, Hazel walked over and sat down on it, disturbed to find her pee didn’t make a sound; what did make a sound was a whoosh and a rush of heat between her legs upon her urine stream’s conclusion. Like she’d just been wiped dry by a sunbeam.

  The light turned off and another light illuminated a sink across the room. She stood and pulled up her pants then tried to feel in the dark for a button to push to flush, but the entire toilet seemed to have disappeared. “This place is wild,” Hazel said aloud. Just that morning she’d been considering either purchasing a used toaster at Goodwill or doing a series of intentional Dumpster dives in search of one.

  Led back to Byron
, Hazel entered to find him pointing a determined finger at the wall, sorting through supersize projections of her. There were various images from throughout her life—yearbook photos, theme park pictures taken of her during a roller coaster’s descent. “Do you know how interesting you are to me, Hazel?”

  She giggled a little. Part of her had the urge to run from the house or compound or whatever it was—what the hell was going on here, after all?—but a larger part of her felt curious and lucky. Jenny would be dying right now. Already Hazel imagined telling her: Giant pictures of my face!

  “I’m going to be direct,” he said. “Efficiency is important. My schedule and lifestyle largely prohibit traditional dating, so here it is: I’d like to pursue a romantic relationship with you. The connection we have is undeniable. I was thinking we could agree on an initial six-month commitment? What do you say?”

  “Commitment?” Hazel asked. It was one of those words she’d of course seen in advertisements and books that held great meaning for others but had no application to her own life, words such as “vacation” or “insurance” or “long-term goals.” Certain parts of the English vocabulary had always existed in the margins for her that way, like a religion that she didn’t believe in but appreciated knowing about.

  “Nothing legally binding, of course. We have to establish trust, so I’ll take you at your word. But I ask that for the next six months, we date exclusively. Then we’ll evaluate our relationship.”

  “Evaluate?”

  “Decide where we want to take things. If the relationship should advance, maintain, or . . . well, as we say in business, dissolve.”

  “Under our tongues,” Hazel said absentmindedly, recalling the kelp packet. “Oh,” she said, looking up to find Byron’s full attention directed upon her, a nascent smile upending his wide mouth. “Sorry, I was thinking of something else.”

  “Is that your way of accepting?” Byron asked, suddenly looking both aroused and amused. “Are you suggesting that we kiss?”