The Smash-Up

by Ali Benjamin

  * * *

  —

  Out there. Here. There is no difference.

  Them. I. Again: no difference.

  Causeeffect backforth actionreaction All these distinctions dissolve, are undone.

  Never were.

  Later, much later, when all of this is over, and he’s trying to explain, he’ll try to describe this place. He’ll use words like “expanse.” “Void.” “Abyss.” “Nothingness.”

  None of them will begin to capture it.

  It is eternal solitude, loneliness without bounds, the worst sort of hell, and it will never end.

  * * *

  —

  The jackal is still there when the world starts to return, when Ethan reenters his monkey body, with his monkey arms and monkey face and monkey ears and monkey toes and monkey ball sac and monkey knees. It is there when he relearns walls and windows, shirt fabric on skin, the yellow spot on the ceiling where the upstairs radiator leaks.

  It’s still there as words return, as he relearns the demarcations between things—hazy, at first, like figures seen through mist, but gaining clarity:

  In, out, there, here, cause, effect.

  Now, then. Self. Other.

  It is still there, the jackal, as he feels the pieces of himself slotting into place, like he’s a LEGO figure that had been ripped apart, left adrift in an ocean of LEGO bits, then reassembled, slowly, brick by brick. He knows it’s there, because every time he closes his eyes, he sees it. Watching, waiting.

  It’s only when the final LEGO bricks are finally snapped into place, as the final window separating him from everything else seals shut, that the jackal speaks again. It still speaks with the words that aren’t words, in that voice that is everywhere and nowhere, and it comes only, at last, when Ethan remembers he is a man with a past. With a wife.

  That’s all over now, the Jackal says, and Ethan knows the beast means all of it: the time he and Zo walked through Park Slope in the rain at two a.m. and it felt like the world was theirs alone, the time they fucked in a prairie preserve, somewhere in Missouri, maybe, or Oklahoma, halfway through a road trip to Texas for an aunt’s funeral, the way during their daughter’s birth he laughed and sweated through his shirt and smiled at Zo’s pained brow and assured her everything was going to be fine, just fine, the sense they belong to each other, that they could make promises and keep them. All of these moments, all of the others, the ones he remembers, the ones he doesn’t, their whole messy, complicated everything, has been distilled into a singularity that pops like a soap bubble and vanishes forever.

  That’s all over, and it’s never coming back.

  Or maybe he’s not quite put back together. Not entirely. It’s as if one or two of the LEGO bricks didn’t get put back where they should, because when Ethan wakes (midmorning, he can tell by the angle of the light, the lazy chirr of a late-season cicada outside his window), he’s at once inside his body and outside of it. It’s as if some part of him is watching himself, even as he lifts his head from the pillow, turns to look at the clock radio (11:42 a.m.! He’s slept in as if he’s a college student! A kid!).

  He sits up. Rubs his hair. Half of his head shaved to stubble, the other half full.

  He sees himself doing all these things—lifting, looking, sitting, rubbing—as if with some sort of third eye, disconnected from himself.

  The room is bright, the air is clear.

  Something happened last night, and he’s not entirely sure what he’s supposed to do now. The jackal is gone, but the animal’s final words—That’s all over now—linger in his bedroom like a forlorn spirit.

  And yet.

  And yet: look how beautiful the room is: the honey glow of the walls, the tangle of bedsheets, the eager way Hypatia’s tail thumps at his rising.

  His throat burns. The whiskey, maybe.

  Maddy’s nowhere to be seen.

  He goes to the bathroom, sees his reflection: asymmetrical, uneven, a man who’s half one thing, half another. Razor on the counter, hair still in clumps on the floor. He takes a piss, finishes shaving his scalp himself. Long hair on his chin, short stumps on his head. When he’s finished, he scoops up all the hair, lifeless, useless, like fingernails that grow on a dead body.

  In the kitchen, Zo’s crock, the one where Maddy was storing her mushrooms, is in pieces on the floor. The ziplock bags are gone, though: rescued, presumably, by Maddy while he was wherever he’s been. He stares at the shattered ceramic. Picks up the pieces one by one, placing each carefully in the garbage. He nicks his finger on one of the shards, watches blood pool on his flesh.

  There’s a swell in his heart he can’t entirely explain, both mourning and joy.

  He puts Hypatia’s leash on, takes her out in the backyard, hears the wind in the leaves above. It’s a shuffling of papers, that rustle: a kind of caress. He smiles. Watches himself smile. Then he watches himself steer Hypatia out of the yard, to the street, and begin walking slowly down the hill.

  * * *

  —

  They’ll divorce amicably. That’s what he decides as he descends into Starkfield. He glances around, as if he’s seeing the town for the first time: the peeling clapboards, the buckled sidewalks, all the lovely, sad potential of this place.

  Light lines the edges of the trees, like someone’s painted strips of white. Hello, trees, you magnificent bark-cloaked beasts.

  If he and Zo are to divorce—which maybe they won’t, except maybe they will, doesn’t feel like it’s his to control, frankly—he’ll make sure of it: they’ll be amicable. They’ll make great co-parenting partners.

  If.

  Which, now that bright sun is streaming through the leaves (high noon now, and look at him, just getting started on his day!) he can no longer entirely picture.

  Sure, maybe at first they’ll have to force themselves to be friendly, but they can do that, of course they can. For Alex’s sake. For their girl, their wonderful child who is, he realizes, right at that moment submitting to tests in some hospital office in downtown Boston.

  The distance between Alex’s “now” and his own is surreal, absurd.

  Other couples have good divorces, remain friends. Surely he and Zo can too. They’ll find a new rhythm, remember how much they liked each other in the first place, remember why. Their newfound distance will make it easy to see all the good in each other.

  They’ll all have dinner together once a week: he, Alex, and Zo. Maybe twice a week. Perhaps he and Zo can call each other for advice—not just about Alex, but about life, love. He imagines Zo saying something like, He used to be my husband; now he’s my best friend.

  The air is crisp, the sky the blue of a child’s drawing.

  * * *

  —

  In the village green, signs rise from the grass like toadstools:

  No SCOTUS abusers

  I do not consent

  Believe Women, believe Zo

  Rally, Saturday 10am

  That rusted truck is there, too, the GMC that he and Alex followed on the way to Parents’ Night: the one with the behemoth flags and all those screaming bumper stickers. The truck is parked outside of the Flats.

  Ethan looks back and forth between the truck and the rally signs, trying to make sense of the argument they’re having: opposite and amplified. Both make him feel as if he’s standing in a museum, peering through glass at some inexplicable artifacts from a long-extinct society. He can’t possibly understand these messages, or even imagine their purpose.

  He ties Hypatia to a parking meter outside the Coffee Depot. The usual morning crowd is long gone from the coffee shop, the place at midmorning strangely empty and still.

  Yes, look: there is Nancy pouring the same beans into the same coffee grinder. There is the whirring of the machines, the amateur art on the walls.

  He pu
lls a plastic bottle of water from the cooler. This, too, is an artifact: transparent plastic bubble surrounding clear liquid, a snow globe without snowflakes. No dancing hula girl, no Greetings from Florida irony here. He pays for the water without speaking, the cash from his wallet almost unrecognizable. He sits in Willie Nelson’s window seat, watches Hypatia through the glass, notices the white fur on her nose, the careful, arthritic way she lies down when she finally gives up waiting for him. Hypatia, like he, like everyone, is growing old. He observes this thought neutrally, with no attachment. Certain death as mere fact, untethered from fear.

  He stays there, in that seat, blinking. He does not count the minutes as they pass.

  By the time Ethan returns to the house, it’s late, almost two p.m. His phone is on the counter. He’d set it down sometime at the start of an evening he thought would go another way. It is a sleek rectangle, not much bigger than a pack of playing cards. He presses it, and it blinks to life.

  There are fifty-two notifications. Five texts from Maddy from earlier in the day:

  hope you had a good trip. Wink emoji.

  Find any infinite truth?

  You’re sleeping it off, I’m hanging w Arlo

  See ya later.

  Seven from Zo, also from this morning:

  Just got to Children’s. Wow, this place is really something.

  Alex is bouncing all over the place—talking a million miles a minute

  We forgot her medicine argh, I’m already exhausted

  A clown just came into the waiting room.

  I despise clowns.

  Okay, they just called us in. Wish us luck.

  Talk later.

  There are four calls from Dr. Ashleigh, as well as a voice message, time-stamped to her final call at 11:22 this morning.

  You know what, Ethan? I think I have enough information at this point to know that for whatever reason, this just isn’t working. I’m going to wish you well.

  All the other messages—voicemails and texts—are from Randy. These, too, are like messages from some far-off world, extinct. These have nothing to do with him.

  Ethan imagines the humans behind the texts: Zo sitting in a waiting room with a clown, trying to quiet a rapid-talking Alex. Then in some doctor’s office, watching doctors evaluate their daughter. He thinks of Randy, and of the people who work for Randy. People who surely need jobs, health insurance. They will be better off because of what Ethan is going to do today. He sends a single text to Randy: About to go to the Humphrey. All good.

  He feels a warm glow as he opens his laptop.

  First, he types out a message to Dr. Ash. He moves his fingers on buttons that translate his thoughts into ones and zeros, which will reassemble into thoughts again on the other side. Dear Ashleigh, say the ones and zeros, I got your message, and I agree, this isn’t a fit, but I wish you happiness, peace. He pauses, thinks about the transparent, desperate need that lies beneath her business model—to be seen, to be needed—then adds: Everyone is doing the best that they can.

  He presses Send.

  He takes out two pieces of paper, a green pen. Then he opens Google, pulls up one of the stories he saw yesterday: Evie Emerling: Just Another Hollywood Hypocrite with a Hybrid.

  He’s not interested in the post itself—in some lonely writer’s desperate clinging to his own resentment, as if enmity were some sort of lifeboat that could possibly save a person. No, Ethan’s interested in the photos slapped across the top of the page: a series of images snapped in Montauk: Evie stepping out of a pale-blue Prius, then turning away, shielding her face when she notices the camera.

  Ethan zooms in on the car: New York plates.

  He zooms in further: the plates are fuzzy, but not impossible to decipher. The first letter is a K? No…an X. He moves between photos, piecing the plate numbers together one at a time.

  XTP-334. He writes the number down on the first piece of paper, green letters against white.

  Then he stares at a new blank page, trying to figure out what to say. What are the exact words that will convey his good intentions, that he—the anonymous writer of this letter, faceless and nameless, omniscient, benevolent—is really just looking out for her?

  We are all connected, he wants to say, you and me and everything else.

  He was right last night: words are the problem, they aren’t adequate. All he has are twenty-six symbols—a pocketful of lines and dots—to convey the fullness of his heart, the ripples of sadness he now sees everywhere, all the world’s love and longing and fear, inextricable from his own.

  The fact that he may have loved her once, even if it was just for one night.

  He sits for a long time. He’s not sure how long. Then he picks up the green pen again, begins writing.

  He’s just setting the pen down when the kitchen door opens. He stands, expecting to see Maddy, home from her morning with Arlo O’Shea. He wants to tell Maddy about all that he’s seen. All that he’s come to understand. But it’s someone else entirely who comes bursting into the house.

  “Daddy!!!!!”

  * * *

  —

  It’s as if his daughter exists in two places at once. One version of Alex is in Boston, sitting in a neurologist’s chair, answering doctors’ questions, or completing spatial-recognition tasks, or watching the line made by some doctor’s moving finger, or whatever it is they do at Children’s. And then there is this version, the miraculous, grinning version who’s slamming into Ethan with all the bone-rattling impact of an NFL defensive back, force equals mass times acceleration.

  He stumbles backward. “Whoa, whoa, easy there.” These are the first words he’s spoken aloud since the mushrooms kicked in; they come to him from some murky, dark place, as if language itself is a long-ago dream, only vaguely remembered.

  He touches Alex’s hair, her shoulders. She feels real. “But how are you here?” he asks.

  “Daddy, I met a big white dog named Boomer at the hospital. Boomer’s a service dog, and I think Hypatia should be a service dog because his owner told me you just need the dog to be calm and not bite…”

  As she rattles, Ethan picks up the note to Evie, folds it up, and slips it in his pocket. Alex either doesn’t notice or doesn’t care.

  “…also met a baby named Jackson whose nose and lip were all messed up but he was really cute, because, Daddy, did you know that people smile with their eyes? Jackson’s mom gave me some chocolate because I was so nice to him, and oh, I met a girl clown, and can you please, please, please send me to circus camp this summer? And guess what, on the way home Mommy stopped at a rest stop that had a McDonald’s and a Honey Dew Donuts, and she let me get something from both, and Daddy, where’s your hair?”

  Ethan leans down, tells Alex to feel his head, and then his daughter’s hands are all over his scalp.

  Zo enters, suitcase in her left hand, crumpled McDonald’s bag in her right. “Hey,” she greets him. She drops the suitcase on the floor. She does not approach him. Ethan watches as she takes in his shaved head.

  “You’re home so early,” Ethan says. “I…I planned to have dinner ready.” He watches himself lie.

  “Yeah, they didn’t make Alex do the last couple of tests,” Zo explains. Her voice is more weary than angry. “I stupidly forgot the medicine, so by lunchtime, she couldn’t focus on anything. The doctors said that by then they’d seen what they needed to see, and that—this is a quote, mind you—they’re ‘not in the torture business.’ ”

  “Oh. Well, what else did they say?”

  Zo glances at Alex. “Later,” she says.

  “But everything’s okay?”

  “Everything’s okay. It is what it is.” Zo crushes the McDonald’s bag, lifts the lid from the trash can. She pauses. “Huh.”

  “What?” He knows what.

  �
��My crock,” she says. Just taking it in.

  “Oh, that,” he says. “Sorry, I was looking for something, and I knocked it down. Pizza cutter. I couldn’t find the pizza cutter.”

  Yes, he is a liar. A monkey man lying from his monkey mouth. Look how casually he lies.

  Zo drops the McDonald’s bag on top of the broken ceramic, turns to Ethan. “Hon, I’m going to need you to take Alex out of the house for a little while.”

  Ethan touches his pocket, feels Evie’s note through the denim. “Sure, in a little bit. I’ve got a couple of errands I need to run first.”

  “Please.” Zo’s voice is flat. She’s not asking him to do this. She’s telling him. It’s like she somehow knows what he did last night, what he wanted to do, and now he owes her and they both know it.

  Alex throws herself against Ethan a second time. “Mommy said you’d take me out for ice cream!” she says. She starts panting like a dog, then pumps her fist and chants. “Ice! Cream! Ice! Cream!”

  “It’s important, Ethan,” Zo says. Ethan stares at her, tries to think.

  Fine. Okay. There’s a handmade ice-cream shop over by the Humphrey, one of those foodie places where they charge a thousand dollars a cone, or thereabouts. If he has to, he can make this work.

  But for the record, he doesn’t exactly feel amicable about it.

  * * *

  —

  Before leaving the house, he goes over the plan in his head:

  Coneheads with Alex. Get the kid a massive bowl of ice cream, something that will last.

  While she’s eating, jog up to the Humphrey.

  In the parking lot, find a blue Prius with New York plates. XTP-334.

  Slide the note under a windshield wiper.

  Slip away quickly, then return to Coneheads to pick up Alex.