by Lucy Ives
I was following Whit Ghiscolmb up Broadway, vaguely in the upper eighties. Northern Broadway was a far wider boulevard than downtown, extending up an immense slope, an infinite Olympian hill of majestically low grade. Whit was wearing some sort of Amish reworking of the rollerblade, made of leather with rawhide laces, steel wheels. How I knew so much about the roller boots Whit had on I do not know, as he was some ten yards ahead of me, and the distance between us appeared, realistically enough, to be increasing.
As in so many of my dreams, I had already panicked. One never really knows where a dream begins, what its first scene is, or at least I do not. At any rate, Whit was already pumping away, skating easily. I struggled after him, but my knees were numb; it was impossible to command them to bend correctly, to propel my feet. I was ashamed. I felt a kind of sadness that would have resembled the kind of sadness one feels for a minor lost thing, the annoyance of a charm dropped off a bracelet at the beach, that is, if the sadness had not been so carefully mixed with dread.
I came to a campsite. I mean, I was suddenly elsewhere. There was a group of good-looking campers a little bit older than me, all searching around on their hands and knees, really giving the ground a good once-over. One or two appeared to be wearing the daisy-shaped mouthpieces last seen in Lorelei’s excursion. These solicited advice from an assembly of evidently eloquent millipedes, grubs, and beetles. I was approached by a young man in shorts with a thick black beard. He took me aside. We stepped under a tent where there was a young woman in a purple T-shirt, her skin golden, lightly freckled. This woman began to question me, and I began to answer her in French. I had to use the most rudimentary words in order to make myself understood. Mostly loan words from the English.
I explained that I was the sister of the girl who had been killed. I had not seen her for several days, but during the night of the previous evening, I had dreamed a dream, and in the dream there was a serpent in my stomach, and when I woke up it was gone.
The young woman, totally unfazed by either my unusual language or the tale of serpent-flavored continuity drift, politely asked what, never mind this sister, had happened to me.
I pointed, sniffling, to my knee. “I fell and cut myself, and then we put on this bande d’aide.”
wednesday
[ 12 ]
On Wednesday I was not just on time to work, I was a full hour early. I had slept like a log for approximately three hours and then arisen Lazarus style. I had floated through the subway.
I gained my desk, brought the computer to life. I intended to complete a few rudimentary email tasks before planning my day. I went into my inbox.
It was not to be so.
There was a pair of troubling messages. I decided to open the lesser of the two evils first. It was from Bonnie, timestamped 6:02 A.M. The subject line read “Call me when you get this.” There was nothing in the body.
The second email was titled “Checking in.” It was from Fred. It told me that Fred would like to have lunch around one P.M. today, please, if I was planning to be in the office (a curious conditional) and might be available. It didn’t say anything else. It had been sent eight minutes after Bonnie’s missive.
My heart was throttling itself like a mouse with its head caught under a trap. I sternly instructed myself that such a reaction was not just overkill but also premature. I took some deep breaths. I picked up the handset of my office phone, punched 9 for an outside line, and dialed Bonnie’s cell, which is a number I have, not even inadvertently, memorized.
She picked up after two rings. “Hi.”
“Good morning,” I said. “I just saw your message.”
“Yes.”
I waited.
“Stella, are you sitting down right now?”
The subtext of this question totally escaped me. “At my desk, yes,” very proud to be telling her that I was already in the office.
“OK,” said Bonnie, “and your back is supported?”
I think I was at this point mainly relieved that Bonnie’s interrogation had once again mercifully not turned to the matter of Frederick Lu. Although something in my brain chided me. This conversation was reminding me of a dialogue I had entertained with my friend Cate a week ago, our umpteenth rehearsal of the dissolution of my alliance with Whit. I had been describing the afternoon on which I came across Whit’s sext collection. I was describing the feeling of that moment, of nothing being as it had seemed, which was a little like being in an earthquake, if this is something you have ever experienced. Whenever I took a step, to walk across the carpet, for example, to the window, with its pleasant view of August sky, it seemed like the carpet, the floor, felt either six inches higher than it should have been or six inches lower. Wherever I tried to put my foot, it came to rest in a place other than that which had been anticipated. I finally had to sit down, and while sitting I had an experience that I described to Cate as the feeling of “the unconscious rushing into my face, like a face-size river or waterfall.”
Cate asked, “Did you faint?”
I thought about it for a second. It was difficult to remember everything. I told her no. But I said that it was possible that I had gone in and out of consciousness, that there had been these bright bursts, mental flares.
I briefly replayed this exchange in my mind now. To Bonnie I said, “The chair is doing its work.”
“OK.” She paused. “So I’m just going to tell you this. Paul passed away. His sister found him.”
I swallowed, probably audibly. I had the distinct sensation of having already known that Bonnie was going to tell me this.
“They’re not sure yet if it was a suicide or an accident.”
“Oh.” Then for some reason I said, “What kind of accident would this be?”
“The kind,” Bonnie told me, “where you overmedicate yourself.”
“OK,” I said. I wasn’t crying or really doing anything. There was something weird in the air, like a thought. Someone somewhere seemed to be thinking the phrase Things can get so unrelentingly bad.
“Well, now you know. There’s the end to that mystery.”
Bonnie didn’t say anything for a moment and neither did I.
“I’m sorry.” This was Bonnie again. “I don’t mean to be so callous. I’m actually pretty shaken. I’ve known Paul a long time. You work with someone and you think that’s his life.”
I didn’t know if or how Bonnie expected me to respond to this. It seemed like what she was saying was accurate. It was additionally, I reflected, proof of how Bonnie herself lived, along with a symptomatic lack of imagination as far as the existences of others were concerned.
“Well, I guess I’ll let you go, then.”
“Right,” I said.
“I’ll be in on the late side.”
“Yes.”
“I’ll see you?”
“Yes,” I told her.
“Till then,” she said, and hung up her phone.
—
IT WASN’T THAT I WASN’T busy. It was just that the task of diverting myself with accomplishment seemed overwhelming on this particular day. I stared at Fred’s email for a while and finally responded to the effect that I would gladly join him for a midday collocation, he should just name the time and place.
There was no more Paul, I thought to myself. No one to wonder over anymore, or to feel superior to, or to feel oddly touched and appreciated by. I considered getting up and going to gaze into his empty office as some sort of maudlin gesture of farewell. But just as I thought this thought, a strange spell came over me. My brain kept repeating the words “his empty office, his empty office.” Paul was no longer here.
I, I recalled, had tampered with evidence. I’d copied files from Paul’s computer onto a portable drive and had begun to read them. Not that there was going to be a criminal investigation, necessarily. Then why was this the first thing that came to mind? I mean, it’s possible that being told that Paul had addiction issues of some kind had something to do with it.
; But could Paul not have just died? Could he have been—and how to put this with a minimum of drama—encouraged to do so?
I was really not particularly into contemplating these possibilities. I regretted immensely the fact that they were so persistently coming to mind. I wanted to stop this series of ideations and go back in time a couple of years, pausing for a moment at the Delaware retreat to elect not to pay a visit to the brick hut inhabited by Fred Lu, and I wanted go back into the somewhat deeper past to tell Whit that things weren’t working for me, and that I loved him but this couldn’t go on, that I needed to do what I was going to do in this life and if that bothered him so very much and gave him the impression that I was an uppity baby-hating snob so very much then we should not be living together or even speaking to each other, because it was really fucking shitty and reactionary for a man with so much education and, basically, some nonnegligible supply of human decency to be telling the person he had, early on but still, verbally accepted as his life partner that she was not able to at once love him and be the person that she (indubitably) was.
But I could not go back into the past. At least, I could not go back into a personal past. And what that left me with was history.
I thought about this for a moment. It was not clear to me whether anything in my life was going to be OK ever again. I mean, this was truly how I was feeling. But there was something in me that was causing me to simultaneously feel that I could not practice avoidance, I could not just shirk this. For whatever reason I was implied.
I stood and went down the hall, let myself into Paul’s haven. Things appeared much as I had left them. I switched on the computer and typed “PASSWORD” in the dialogue box.
OK, I thought. Now for a moment of truth.
I pressed ENTER. The system told me there was an error with my username or password. I tried again. Nothing. And again.
Fuck, I thought. Possibly some agent has acted to prevent me from gaining access to Paul’s files! And then I thought, Shit! Because without warning there came the sound of knuckles casually applied to Paul Coral’s door. And you can guess who that was.
“Hey!” I nearly yelled, spinning in Paul’s chair.
Frederick Lu’s face was hard to assess. It was possible that he was betraying a genre of sympathy for me, that he believed that he had interrupted me in the midst of some manner of grieving ritual with which he was unfamiliar, but it was also not outside the realm of all livable and/or probable events that the affect now slowly dawning on his countenance was the product of the realization that he had just caught me snooping.
“Good morning,” Fred said.
My hands were not so much shaking as vibrating. “Hi,” I said. I was really not sure what I should do.
Fred blinked. He allowed his shoulder to contact the doorjamb and he leaned. “I guess you heard.”
“I did.”
“There’s so much we didn’t know about him. About Paul.”
I nodded. I made my hands into fists and then attempted to tuck them into my lap so their continued autonomous quivering would be less visible. “It’s true.”
Fred shrugged, and I was unnerved to perceive what looked like a tear beginning along the lower rim of each of his eyes. I think an expression of horror must have shown up on my face, because Fred gasped, “I’m very sorry.”
I was quickly on my feet and wrapping my arms around Fred, who was now audibly weeping. The only thing stranger than this turn of events was that I myself felt absolutely nothing. “It’s OK,” I muttered. I wasn’t sure if I was referring to Fred’s sudden display, to the uncertain status of our relationship, or to our mutual loss of Paul. Indeed, I was fairly sure that not a single one of these things was “OK,” nor did I have any confidence that any one of these minor disasters was going to be resolved to anyone’s satisfaction, anytime soon. Above all, it was disturbing to be in such close proximity to Fred Lu. It wasn’t something I’d anticipated when I began my day. He was so lean, as of course I remembered, and also so tall in comparison to me, and his body, as I embraced it, was additionally very warm inside his immaculate and exceptionally nice-smelling and very high-quality clothes. I decided it was time to separate. To be honest, I had begun to move on from critical and/or paranoid thought to other more material, shall we say, reflections. “Are you all right?”
Fred sniffed. He was feeling in his pocket. I felt amazed to watch him produce an actual pressed handkerchief. He handled this item so casually, too, as if everyone walked around with one. “Yes, thank you.” Fred ministered to his face and patted his lustrous hair. He seemed to want his face to settle back into its usual pert professional mask, but it was not cooperating with him.
“Do you maybe,” I hazarded, “want to forgo lunch?” I didn’t pose this question entirely innocently. It was intended as a test.
Fred balked but then speedily recomposed. He released a nasal “Oh.” Then he said, “Sure, I understand.”
I tried not to let out an enormous laugh of triumph. I forced my face into a shape I felt approximated innocence. “I just meant, maybe we could go for coffee now, instead? I mean, since we’re already talking?”
I watched Fred mentally check his calendar. He experimented with a few substitutions before coming back to me. “That makes sense. Let me just do one thing at my desk and I’ll meet you by the stairs.”
—
THERE WERE SO MANY THINGS I could think. That was always the thing. And yet the feeling, that feeling, in spite of Paul’s sudden death and so many other regrets and so much infuriation, would not stop. It was the feeling of it being my birthday as it had never once been my birthday on my actual birthday, the feeling of it being some imaginary type of Christmas yet to be invented, the New Year, of it being spring for the first time, the face of a tiny kitten who is speaking fluent Spanish and is also a genie who can grant your wish, of being truly implied as the person I really was when another person spoke my name. My heart was a piece of paper. It was a paper fan. It was a dove. In spite of everything, it moved for Fred.
I also knew that Fred was capable of needing things from me. But this didn’t mean that he felt, in turn, moved to change his life in order that it become responsive to my needs and wants. That was just the way things were—or, that was where we had left it. There were, according to Fred, “things you do not understand” inherent to his existence.
In spite of our insoluble asymmetry, Fred and I were now together descending the steep stairs to the cafeteria catacomb. We were in short order surrounded by glittering white tile, a much-contested intervention on the part of a Dutch designer acclaimed for her antiseptic restraint. We weren’t speaking, and it took until we were settled across from one another, burned coffee in hand, to begin the exchange.
“Thanks for reaching out.” This was me. As usual, there had been a total reset in the course of our transit.
Fred said I was welcome. His face appeared oddly muscular.
I decided I would be generous. “It’s good to talk.”
“It is.”
“How are you holding up?”
“You are referring to the events of this morning?”
“You’re asking if I’m talking about Paul?” I asked.
There was a pause. “Well, I wasn’t the one sitting in his office chair at nine A.M.” Fred gave me a long look, sipped from his cup. “I take it you were just wrapping things up there with regards to the checklist?”
“Of course.”
“Never mind, then, Stella.”
It was now my turn to more carefully scrutinize Fred. He sounded a little angry, miffed. He took a moment to consider his fingernails. “I have to tell you,” he began, “you and I have to figure out a way to work together. I can’t have you doing, for example”—he was looking down into his Styrofoam cup—“what you are doing right now, staring at me that way. And when I walk into a room, it’s like I’ve committed a crime. I can’t have that. I first of all don’t deserve it and second it’s not, as I’m sure yo
u understand, conducive. It doesn’t work for what we are trying to accomplish here.” Fred pursed his lips, eyes intent on what was occurring along the surface of his drink. At the center of his forehead, a slender branching vein popped gracefully out. “I don’t mean to pull rank, and I know that things,” he concluded, “have not been very clear.”
“Right.”
“That’s true for me, too. I hope you understand that.”
This, by the way, is the sort of sentiment that makes my stomach turn over. I would rather hear almost anything than that an individual is entertaining feelings for me but that he is doing so at arm’s length, the better to reassure himself that he can exit the situation whenever he wants. In Fred’s case, this was a very, very long arm. It covered the distance of multiple months with ease. Who knew how far into the future it extended. It was likely steadily working its way into the past as well, rearranging events at its leisure. And it made hearing from him about whatever it was he might admit to feel a kind of agony, for any feeling once admitted could just as easily, elastically, be taken back again. Nothing would be said here unless it had already been engineered to be retractable.
Fred began to twist the knife. “I’ve worried about you, Stella. Some of the things you said. I worried that you might even hurt yourself.”
“I don’t like that,” I told him.
Fred kept talking. “But you really said those things, Stella. To me. I realize that I shouldn’t and won’t simply let a statement like that go by. I can’t. Not now. Not after what happened”—he paused—“with Paul.”
I was probably speaking too quickly. “FYI, I was living with someone who was lying a lot and that does funny things to a person, you know? Like, things have names, but if you don’t treat those names with respect, the world becomes distorted. That’s how it was. Sorry. I’m sorry you got involved with that.”
“I know. I’ve been trying not to be confused by your attachment to that”—he was searching for a word—“that individual.” If this was a reference to Monday night, it did make a kind of sense that Fred could currently be concerned, re: harm, re: me.