Made for Love

by Alissa Nutting

  He leaned into his rearview mirror to make sure—yes, she was wearing a T-shirt with the face of Dolphin Savior on it. I’VE BEEN SAVED! was written across the shirt’s graphic in neon pink cursive lettering. Wow, Jasper thought. How great that that catastrophic event in my life worked out so well for the guy.

  After driving all night, Jasper and Hazel pulled into the parking lot of a diner in a small southern town off the interstate. “You should get going,” Hazel said. “I’ll eat here and sleep there.” She pointed to the diner, and then to a run-down efficiency motel across the street. “We should’ve dumped my dad’s body and brought that cooler,” she joked. “I could’ve just napped in that for a while. Provided I didn’t accidentally close it so tightly that I suffocated inside.”

  There were people who paid a lot of money to get inside something and feel suffocated, Jasper knew—one of his cons had been convinced that a birth reenactment ceremony would be the key to unleashing her full sales potential at the auto, home, and life insurance company where she worked. Coming out of the birth canal as an infant, her clavicle had gotten stuck against her mother’s pelvis for hours. I’ve been stuck ever since, she’d declared to Jasper. I left my true aptitude for success behind in my mother’s vagina, she’d told him, and I’ll be damned if I’m not going to go back and get it. This going back didn’t involve her actual mother—she wanted to go to a retreat in the Mojave Desert where gurus would slather her with a mix of silicone lubricant and strawberry jelly then force her to worm her way through a snug foam cylinder ten feet in length. Yeah, he’d told her, you should go for it! knowing full well she wouldn’t have the money to do it after he left. That one he didn’t feel quite as bad about as all the others. She already wanted to be robbed.

  But he did feel bad. About her and everyone else. He’d provided the rabbit woman with some names, and she’d given him a list of current addresses; if he left now, he could make it to some of the houses before the download happened, if it was going to happen. Before Byron began to hunt him down.

  “You’re the best thing I’ve ever done,” Jasper said to Hazel, smiling. “Thank you for the opportunity.” The competition wasn’t very fierce, but it was still a nice sentiment to be able to share with another person.

  “You’re sure welcome,” Hazel said. “I’ve never had anyone express gratitude for the way my poor decisions placed us both in mortal peril. Really though, thanks for maybe risking your life to maybe save mine.” She placed her hand on his, which felt awkward, then leaned in and gave him an even more awkward-feeling hug. He was glad he’d never be in a position where he had to try to con Hazel. She might be harder than most to pretend to fall in love with.

  HAZEL WENT INTO THE DINER’S BATHROOM AND DECIDED TO PRACTICE the speech she’d give Byron if the deactivation didn’t work. “I’m sorry I didn’t fall in love with you,” she said to her reflection in the mirror. “I tried to.” This was the nicest true thing she could think of to say. Hazel suddenly had an urge to go out with kindness, not as a superiority thing but as a guilt thing.

  She didn’t know the full extent of the changes Byron wanted to usher into mankind, but they didn’t seem like they were going to foster nurturing human connections. Something far larger than her own life seemed about to end. Had she been responsible, even a fraction of a percent, for any of his heart’s hardening? If so, she wanted to explain.

  Yes, unfiltered Byron would creep out a lot of people. But he was truly a genius. “You know how impressive you are, of course,” she continued. “That’s what’s unfair. You could’ve married someone who was actually amazed by you instead of someone who just pretended to be. I’m sure many people out there truly would’ve felt honored to be the inaugural host to all your brain implements. It was a bad match. I knew we were different, but I thought it might turn out all right because my parents were total opposites. They weren’t suited to each other at all and fought all the time. To them, compatability didn’t matter; they’d committed and they were married and that was their life. Plus they didn’t have money. I thought it would be really easy to fall in love with a rich person.

  “I know how dumb all this sounds. When I realized I wasn’t going to be able to love you, I should’ve just told you. We hadn’t been married long when I realized. Maybe you realized the same thing. Or maybe you wouldn’t have cared, but I should’ve told you. It just seemed crazy to give you up. Everyone told me I was so lucky that I figured I’d start feeling lucky soon. It’s not your fault I never did.

  “Now I feel like when you find me, you won’t kill me,” Hazel continued. “You’ll just keep me holed up somewhere, or do some kind of brainwashing. But brainwashing feels too easy. I know you want me to be aware of my suffering. Can I at least have a virtual reality pod to while away the time? That is one thing I’ll agree with you on. There are many vicarious lives that are preferable to actual ones.”

  She stood at the sink with the faucet on as the download time neared, just in case it happened and she threw up.

  It ended up not happening, but she still vomited. Hazel felt that it would’ve been inappropriate not to vomit, somehow. The alternative would’ve been just standing there, looking into the mirror and grinning, and she worried that the general universe might interpret a lack of dramatic action as ingratitude. Here, was what Hazel hoped to convey as she bent down next to the faucet, I’m overflowing with emphatic thanks.

  When she finished, she felt good about the decision. Hazel was not looking to start her new life off on an anticlimactic foot.

  22

  HAZEL DECIDED TO STAY IN THE TOWN WHERE JASPER HAD DROPPED her off and get a job at the diner because the manager-owner was very mean and bossy and somewhat resembled her mother. This pretend intimacy felt good to Hazel because it was also distant. Mother semblance she could deal with and even right now liked a little. Were her actual mother to resurrect from the grave, she could not work for her. In a restaurant or anywhere else. Even or especially if her mother’s second life depended on Hazel being an employee.

  She said her only requirement was that she didn’t want to work out in the front with people, which she blamed on an anxiety disorder. “Well, it’s hotter in the back and you get paid less,” her boss warned her. “But you come in the back door in the morning, so you can show up to work looking like anything.” Hazel couldn’t decide if this was a commentary on her present appearance or not. “You can just roll out of bed and walk up. The cook staff sure does. They’re always hungover. One morning the dishwasher, Pierre, kept scratching at himself, his private self, and finally went to the bathroom, then we heard him laugh. When he pulled down his underwear, a used condom fell out. He’d gotten so drunk the night before he didn’t even remember having sex. These are your colleagues if you work in the back. Good luck and God bless.”

  She asked if she had to fill out paperwork. “I can pay you cash but I’ll pay you a lot less. It’s nothing personal. I’m running a business. If you’re that desperate it would be irresponsible of me, from an economic standpoint, not to take advantage.” Hazel agreed; she was grateful not to have to lie on the forms or make up a formal name.

  What should her name be, Hazel wondered, if she were to rename herself appropriately? Maybe “Oh Well”? Or “Should Have Tried”?

  Except when the manager asked her what her name was, she panicked and said, “Hazel.”

  Everyone called her boss the Big Cheese, but Hazel wanted to be very polite so she tried to treat it like a legal name, with “Cheese” being the surname, and would call her “Ms. Cheese,” which always made her boss give her a very confused look.

  “Doesn’t take much to make you uncomfortable, does it?” Ms. Cheese said to her once by the ice machine. Hazel was looking at a roach on the floor that had been stepped on; its barbed leg was doing an end-game twitch. Warm wind and sunshine were coming through the back door as the produce supplier wheeled vegetables in, and Hazel was thinking about how difficult (if not impossible) it was to keep
anything contained—how bad and good always join hard together. Hazel nodded; discomfort was her resting state after all, and Ms. Cheese had walked up to the ice machine and looked both ways and said, “I need a little pick-me-up today,” and grabbed the scooper out of the ice machine. She pulled her shirt down and began packing her bra with ice, then handed Hazel the scooper and walked away.

  Despite the yelling, Ms. Cheese seemed to like Hazel enough to have designs on fixing her up with her son, who lived in a nearby city but never visited. Hazel tried hard to put these fantasies to rest. “I’m barren,” Hazel lied, “and a lesbian, or maybe even asexual, but if I’m even a little sexual it’s lesbian, and I’m a practitioner of a radical religion that the government thinks is a cult.” “Well, you might not have tons in common,” Ms. Cheese said, “but I could see it working.”

  The steam of the kitchen felt like a form of amnesia, which Hazel liked. She decided she’d recommend working in a restaurant to anyone who was trying to forget everything they’d ever done. All that mattered were the orders, up and out and to-go. Unless she screwed up, it was a near-invisible job—not once did someone picking up an order stop and say, Who placed these fries inside this Styrofoam container? Could I meet that person? Is that possible?—and even if she did screw up, it just meant Ms. Cheese coming back and yelling at her. “I should make you go out and apologize,” she’d say, “but that wouldn’t work because you look so downtrodden. Our wronged customers would end up apologizing to you instead, probably taking the change out of their pockets and giving you any extra money they had and feeling bad about themselves for complaining. ‘Don’t go in there,’ they’d start telling other people, pointing to our diner. ‘They screwed up the toppings on my hamburger order, then when I said something, the saddest woman in the world got trotted out from the back. Something in this lady’s eyes conveys the expression of an actress starring in a commercial for intestinal discomfort medication, the prescription kind, a woman who’s clenching her jaw and gripping her abdomen. When she is making no expression at all, that is still what you see when she looks at you. I went in for lunch and left with a mantle of guilt and gravid unease. Try the pizza joint across the street.’”

  But that pizza, Hazel pointed out, really was not that good. “You eat it all the time, don’t you?” Ms. Cheese countered. Hazel could only nod. It was still pizza.

  Ms. Cheese sighed and kicked a large yellow trash bucket labeled FOOD WASTE ONLY. It rolled a few inches on its tiny wheels. Hazel didn’t understand how the wheels on this receptacle could be so little. They were a real win for the small guys. “Melted cheese is a culinary veil,” Ms. Cheese said, stepping up to the waste bucket again. “A foxhole where mediocrity can hide.” She gave it another kick and a piece of onion skin lifted into the air and floated down to the tile floor right near the drain grate. They both paused to stare at it because it seemed as if it could also be the shed husk of their collective disappointment, something to ponder and mourn.

  It reminded Hazel of a tarantula molt display she’d seen once at a natural history museum. The tarantula skins had a disconcerting tempura look about them. They provided no spiritual reassurance. She’d stood in front of the informational tablet that gave a description of the molting process and read and reread it for hours, and become very sad, because it felt like an apt psychic was reading her fortune. Not just her own, but every living thing’s. Molting was not easy—the spider didn’t eat for weeks and seemed mainly dead and its leg joints began weeping fluid and its stomach went bald. The psychic stress was incredible. Interrupt a tarantula during the molting process and it could die. Afterward its new skin is temporarily so vulnerable that the very insects it consumes, like crickets, can injure it.

  The silver lining is that if the spider is missing a leg, the leg can grow back. It will be a smaller, less-functional leg, a sort of spare-tire doughnut situation, but a true second chance.

  Hazel wondered if molting, which was kind of like giving birth to your self, was more painful than giving birth in the regular way. She remembered her mother telling her how during labor she wanted to die. The pain was that intense. “And I’m no cream puff,” her mother reminded her. “That is next level. I kept telling your father to go home and get his gun and shoot me in the head, right between the eyes; I was grabbing his hand and putting his finger on my forehead just so, screaming, ‘Here! Here! This is where the bullet goes! Straight into the brain!’ And of course the only gun he has is an antique from his grandpa; no ammo at all, doesn’t even fire; he felt the need to tell me all this instead of getting the staff to hurry it up with the epidural.”

  Hazel didn’t have this pain for comparison, but she felt an affinity through her own pain and how bad she seemed to be at life. Except that the cause of her own pain was less specific, and she had no idea if she would ever be able to push it out and feel better.

  In some ways it was silly how physical the pain seemed, like a big duffle she toted around with her all the time. She often pictured her sadness as an IV cart she had to wheel everywhere she went, its bag dripping a heavy fluid that was keeping her sick instead of making her better. Hazel moved slowly, which sometimes made Ms. Cheese yell, but Ms. Cheese wasn’t born yesterday. “In addition to my son, whom I talk about daily, I have five daughters I seldom mention,” she told Hazel. “But I’ll speak of them now to say that I have six kids, and they were all young at the same time. And sometimes in the grocery store when they’d want something, they’d all lie down on the floor and grab onto my ankle, three on each side, to try to get me to buy it. But instead I’d just walk to the checkout counter and drag them all behind me. It would take about twenty minutes to get ten feet but I’d do it. And well-meaning people in line, men especially, would be like, ‘Ma’am? Do you want some assistance with these kids? I can administer punitive slaps to them, or threaten them using the masculine tenor of my voice?’ and I’d say, ‘No thank you, they’ll all let go when we get to the parking lot because the cement will scrape their stomachs.’ Because it did. But it took forever to get there, and that’s the way you walk all the time, Hazel, and you are a tiny thing, so you must be pulling serious demons. Take a break and slug into the deep freeze if you want; see if you can ice the monkey on your back into submission. Because I need you to refill all the mayo jars before the dinner rush, and if some hustle isn’t involved you aren’t gonna make it.”

  Other nights she would hand Hazel a barely drunk milk shake left behind by a customer, one who looked very healthy, Ms. Cheese always stressed, and tell Hazel to drink it in front of her so she could confirm that calories were entering Hazel’s body. “I have seen about everything,” Ms. Cheese said. “Witnessed the very worst sort of tragedies. But your story I do not ever want you to tell me. I don’t want to know what happened. I think it would mess with my head. You are loveless and haunted and I wonder daily if it’s bad luck to have you around.”

  “It’s probably not good luck,” Hazel agreed. Ms. Cheese filled the empty portion of Hazel’s milk shake glass up with aerosol whipped cream.

  “I had to fire a kid once because he kept sucking the nitrous oxide out of the whipped cream cans. He admitted he was doing it to get high, that was the main reason he said, but he also told me that one weekend he’d done a powerful hallucinogen and had a vision that the gas inside whipped cream cans was actually the trapped souls of dead people who’d been violently wronged. They were trapped in there kind of like a genie in a bottle. If he inhaled them then breathed them out, they could be saved and ascend to the spirit world; if he didn’t, they were doomed to power aerofoam dessert toppings then be extinguished forever. I said, in that case, do they grant him a wish when he saves them? Because he needed to go wish for a new job. And he said, ‘No, it’s more an act of service I’m performing for the dead community.’ A real hero, that kid.”

  This thought depressed Hazel even more all day. Imagine dying only to fall into a spirit trap and get imprisoned inside a can of whipped cream.


  ON THE TV IN HER EFFICIENCY MOTEL ROOM (THE OWNER GAVE HER a decent monthly rate), Hazel watched the interviewer lean in and place her hand upon Byron’s. The motel where Hazel lived wasn’t very clean, but it was next door to a Laundromat, so the air often smelled like dryer sheets. This made everything seem a little fresher than it actually was.

  Hazel learned that Byron had reported her “missing and troubled,” wracked with grief due to the terminal illness of her father, who also seemed to have disappeared. He was offering an enormous reward for any information. He said he feared she’d been kidnapped due to his financial stature and fame, and that something terrible had happened before the demand could be made. “The search for answers regarding what happened to Hazel is my highest priority,” he said, “alongside my responsibilities to Gogol shareholders.”

  The woman interviewing him was notorious for getting emotional reactions out of celebrities. She’d infamously made the pop star Dolphin Savior break down in tears.

  “How are you managing to go on amidst your wife’s disappearance?” she asked, scanning Byron’s face.

  “I describe my work as the technologies business,” Byron said. “But what I really sell is access to information.” He paused a moment. His pupils reflected the LED stock stream from the face of his watch; it moved across the surface of his eyes like a visible memory. “As Hazel’s husband, I am supposed to have more information about her than anyone else does. So the loss is also compounded by all sorts of lesser feelings—humiliation, fraudulence, inadequacy. At the end of the day I have to assume the unthinkable and begin gestures toward moving forward.”