Woke Up Lonely

by Fiona Maazel

  “I have to. Unlike some people, I actually have a job.”

  “Don’t leave! You can’t imagine the strain I’m under.”

  “Whose fault is that? Just think about what I said. And if that doesn’t work, then okay, think about Ida.”

  He squeezed her arm even tighter. “I think about her all day long. Promise you’ll come over later. Just to talk.”

  She freed herself. He tried to follow her out, but the Laundromat owner, who’d been leaning against a dryer and watching them the whole time, put out his hand, saying, “Hello, I recognize you. My name is Max Chen. I haven’t paid my taxes in three years. I have a wife who doesn’t love me and a girlfriend who doesn’t love me, either, now that I stopped paying for her English classes.” Thurlow nodded and called out for Esme, except a woman folding Incredible Hulk Underoos said, “Oh my God, Thurlow Dan in a Laundromat? You really are like the rest of us. Hey, see how big these Underoos are, my boy’s going on thirteen but he’s still got some issues since his father died and God knows I’m scared to raise a boy on my own and it’s not like I have anyone to confide in about it.” Again, he watched Esme trudge through the snow, away from him, only this time, he thought there was a chance she’d be back.

  “That’s good,” he said to the woman. “I feel like I’m closer to you already. No wait, I am closer to you”—and he smiled because sometimes for preaching the same thing over and over you forget you also believe what you’re preaching. He patted her shoulder. “There’s an event later, not far from here.”

  “Oh, I know,” she said, and pointed at the double helix tattoo inched across her wrist.

  By now the Laundromat was clotted with people. Taking photos, sharing their stories. He told them all to come to the event; he was headed there himself. At last, his SUV pulled up outside, and in came the driver with such purpose of stride, everyone got out of his way without being asked. He took Thurlow by the elbow and led him out.

  Dean was waiting for him in the backseat, with a coat across his knees. “Did something go wrong this morning?” he said, and sent the driver an angry look, which meant he’d chewed him out already.

  “Do you really have to carry that thing around?” Thurlow said, and he nodded at what appeared to be a rifle nosed out from under Dean’s coat. “It’s stuff like that that’s giving people the wrong idea about us.”

  “Sorry,” Dean said. “I can put it away, just stick with the Glock,” and he felt for the holster strapped under his arm. He unzipped a gear bag in the trunk and, from the sound of it, stashed the rifle among several of its kind.

  Dean was head of security. Part bodyguard, part bureaucrat, and, as of late, part freedom fighter. He’d come into the Helix after his wife died, and had ascended the ranks with the hooks of his faith. But now, in his fourth year, he’d gotten overzealous in the prosecution of his work. Sometimes, in a panic, Thurlow imagined him and the thousands like him just miles away from the Helix House in Cincinnati, closing in like zombies but still under his command.

  He gripped his forehead. He was sweating. He’d had a Twix for dinner last night and nothing since.

  Dean leaned over to retrieve a hunting knife strapped to his calf. He cut an apple in four slices and put the plate on the seat between them. The soft sell: sometimes it worked.

  “Any news?” Thurlow asked.

  “We’re frisking the staff every day now. No cell phones, nothing. Chances of infiltration are nil.”

  “Good. But I want you to do it twice a day. Morning and night.”

  “Check,” and Dean jotted it down in a spiral notebook. He seemed glad for the orders. He scratched his neck, which was collared in green from a double helix bijou at the end of a gold chain.

  They were headed to a warehouse by the airport. “We’re expecting five thousand,” Dean said. “Give or take. The whole country will be Helix in no time.”

  “Nice work,” Thurlow said. “But get me a new driver.”

  Dean nodded.

  “And buy me a new suit. And have some flowers delivered to the hotel. Roses. And get to a toy store. No, a clothing store. Ask them what all the girls are wearing these days and buy every color.”

  Dean wrote it all down.

  “Make that two dozen roses,” Thurlow said. “Red and white”—because he wanted a bouquet for Ida, too. In the vestry of his dreams was always one in which he reunited with his child, bearing roses.

  He looked out the window and tried, for the rest of the drive, to reinstate the paralysis that had overtaken him on the bus. A terrifying moment—to be so helpless—but also transcendent, because how often does love overrun your experience of life so thoroughly that it lays waste to everything else?

  They arrived at the warehouse, which could probably fit five thousand, but, just in case: a Jumbotron outside for spillage and stragglers. It was twenty degrees out, but no one would care.

  Thurlow sat in a small office. His nerves were like the third rail, like if he thought too much about what had just happened with Esme, he’d electrocute himself. He took a few deep breaths and focused on his speech instead. He thought of the audience, which calmed him down. Five thousand people who’d come to plead their needs. Bodies packed like spices in the rack. Faces upturned, hope ascendant. Tell us something great, Thurlow. Charge the heart of solitude and get us the hell out.

  He stayed in the back for half an hour, then marched onstage. In the room: eyes pooled with light, skins pale as soap. He leaned into the mic and began.

  “Here is something you should know: we are living in an age of pandemic. Of pandemic and paradox. To be more interconnected than ever and yet lonelier than ever. To be almost immortal with what science is doing for us and yet plagued with feelings that are actually revising how we operate on a biological level. Want to know what that means?”

  Decor in the warehouse was bare-bones. Just a couple of spotlights trained on him and the dais, and a screen that lit up just then with a double helix. The sound from the speakers wasn’t reverbed, but it was gritty. The upshot was to make this gathering lowbrow and intimate, despite how many people were there.

  “It means,” he said, “that loneliness is changing our DNA. Wrecking our hormones and making us ill. Mentally, physically, spiritually. When I was a young man, I felt like if I didn’t connect with another human being in the next three seconds, I would die. Or that I was already dead and my body just didn’t know it. Sound extreme? I bet not. I was lonely by myself; I was lonely in a group. So let me ask you: how many of you feel disassociated from the people you love and who love you most?”

  He heard, from the audience, nodding, grunts, snuffles. Applause from a group cozied in the rafters. And a woman who began to cry. To wail with her head flung back, so that her arms seemed to lift of their own accord. She began to talk to her neighbors. She’d been married thirty-five years. Could you really be this alone after thirty-five years? Her husband worked for the Department of the Interior. He was about to turn sixty, was a good and kind man. And yet here she was. Someone passed her a microphone; she shared her story with the room. Sometimes, she said, she’d wake up in the night, stare at the stranger next to her, and say: Olgo, I like cheese sticks and corn in the can, and when no one’s looking I wet my finger and dip it in the rainbow sprinkles at the back of the cupboard, and you love these things about me, you know me, so why can’t I be reached? And then she cried some more.

  Two Helix came up on each side of her. They held her hands. They said: We know.

  The woman blotted her eyes with the cuff of her sweatshirt. She would join, no doubt. She might as well. It cost only ten dollars a head to be here, but the reward was priceless. The idea, thus: Come in with your best friends, whose lives are as alien to you as yours is to them, come in steeped in the tide of loneliness and despair that grows out of precisely these moments when you’re supposed to feel a part of things, because, after all, you’re hanging out with your best friends. Come in a wreck, leave happy. How? Start from the begi
nning. Start over, start fresh. Tell me something real. At issue was not just isolation born of actual, literal solitude, but the solitude of consciousness. The very thing that lets you apprehend feelings for other people also tends to keep you severed from them.

  There was a Pack for her not two hours away. As soon as membership cleared five thousand in any one area, a Pack was born. The Helix was seventeen Packs in seventeen states. Fifty-two million website hits a month. Bonds nationwide.

  Thurlow drank from a water bottle. He said, “Now, I know what people say. They say that extreme detachment usually means mental illness, but that the pioneering spirit of individuality just means you’re American. Freethinking and unencumbered. But what we have today? When so many of us are destitute of intimacy with other people—intimacy of any kind—that’s American, too. And it’s not right. Now, believe me, because I know. I know firsthand. From my life and also from polling and statistical modeling procedures that corroborate a decline in frequency of every single form of social, civic, religious, and professional engagement since 1950. These stats are the God of tedium. But I’ve read them. The Roper Social and Political Trends survey, the General Social Survey, the DDB Needham Life Style studies, Gallup opinion polls, Mason-Dixon reports, and Zogby files. The bottom line? We are cocooned in all things, at all times, and it’s only getting worse. Today we debrief with our pets and bed down with Internet porn. So what can we do?” He paused here while the crowd said, “Tell me something real!”

  “That’s right,” he said. “Tell me something real. Talk to each other. Get back to basics. And start feeling better.”

  As he spoke, he managed to contact the audience with his eyes, to see people one by one, and in this way to blinker and laser his attention.

  When he was done, he thanked everyone for coming. He said they’d made his day.

  Cheers, applause, exeunt.

  There was a new suit waiting for him at his hotel. Twenty-four roses and puffer vests in red, blue, green, purple, yellow. He had it all sent to his penthouse, then headed there himself. He pressed his head against the elevator door and nearly fell out when it opened to his room. He was so tired. The event had taken hours—they all took hours—so he had time enough only to shower and shave. Perk up. Esme was coming. She might even be on her way. He had forgotten, though, about Vicki, who was standing tall at the foot of his bed with legs apart. PVC boots zipped up her thighs. A latex corset and thong.

  He tossed his coat on the duvet. “Get dressed,” he said, and he took off his shoes. “Not today.” He made for the window, peered out the blinds. The White House facade was soft-lit, soft yellow.

  Vicki looked herself over and shed her leather gloves. Her arms were marbled with self-tanner. She slapped the floor with a crop. “Slave!” she yelled, but she gave it up fast. “Oh, come on, Thurlow. Even a hooker has feelings. I’ve been waiting here forever.”

  He plopped on the bed, faceup. Two minutes of rest, and then he’d shower. “Traveling Companion,” he said. “Please.”

  She folded her gloves. “Sorry,” she said. “But what’s wrong? Are you okay?”

  “Just tired,” he said. “Not to worry. Now get dressed—you have to go.”

  Instead, she lay down next to him. She’d just had her hair cut and dyed. It was brick red and shorn so close, he could see a birthmark the shape of Vermont traverse her skull. He reached for the side table and handed her a gift certificate to a cosmetics store. “Here,” he said. “Spend it however you want.”

  “Wicked,” she said. “I love presents.”

  He went back to the window. Vicki sat up on her knees and jutted her lower lip. Pushed her head into his ribs. She wore silver studs in both cheeks, which she’d gotten after a Helix rally in North Hampton to celebrate the start of her new life. She had been coming to Thurlow twice a week for two months and traveling with him as he went. Everywhere except North Korea, about which she was peeved but smart enough not to say so.

  “I need to shower,” he said. “If anyone knocks, take the back door out.”

  The concierge rang to say he had a message, and could he send someone to deliver it? Vicki put on a robe and brought the envelope to Thurlow, who turned it over in his hand.

  “Aren’t you going to open it?” she said.

  “No.” He tossed it on the table.

  “Can I?” When he didn’t answer, she opened it herself. “Do sido in Pyongyang? Think. That last part’s underlined,” she said. “What does it mean?”

  He closed his eyes. “It means my ideas are stupid and my life is worthless.”

  She came up next to him. “Oh, honey,” she said. “You are so not fine,” and she swiped a tear come down his face with her thumb.

  He pointed at the roses boxed on the dresser. “You want those?”

  “If they’re from you. So how did it go today? I bet you did great.”

  He perked up a little. “Five thousand floes. I think we got them all.”

  “Amazing,” she said. “All those people whose lives you’re improving.”

  “I’m glad you think so.”

  “Don’t you?”

  He nodded. He knew he was helping people but often lamented that, for his efforts, he hadn’t been more helped himself.

  She put her hands on his chest, and when he did not push her away, she got on her knees and unzipped his pants.

  He touched her cheek. Traced the flume at the base of her neck and rested the pad of his thumb there. It was always the same with his Traveling Companions, them trying and failing to rout the grief that tyrannized his inner life. And yet for Thurlow, this was the essence of a fetish—maybe, even, of all his doings: their incapacity to resolve a need alongside their aptitude for coming just close enough to sustain hope.

  After a minute, she said, “Is it that you don’t want me anymore? Is that what’s happening?”

  “Vicki,” and he tried to raise her to her feet, though she would not budge. “I want to say something to you. If what we have here ever comes to an end, if the Helix comes to an end, you should know that you have the right to a lawyer. And that you don’t have to say anything to anyone without one. Because it’s possible—the way things are headed—it’s possible this could all end badly. And soon. I’ve put us in danger.”

  She laughed and burrowed deeper between his legs. She worked her lips and jaw and the studs gleamed and his heart cracked because whatever optimism he’d marshaled under the banner of finding his wife in D.C. had starved in the poverty of his chances.

  “I’m serious,” he said. “I think you should go home. It’s not safe with me anymore.”

  She paused—“Uh-huh”—and then carried on. After a minute more, “This isn’t working, is it?”

  He helped her to her feet.

  “Can I try again later?” she said.

  He shook his head. “Go home, Vick.”

  “I am home. Remember? You’re scaring me, Thurlow. Can’t I just sit here with you? Talk for a little, like you say all the time?”

  It was dark outside, but he turned off the lights and led her to bed. She got on her side to face him. It was true, she was home. And in this he could take comfort. He could say his TCs had benefited from their association with him. Vicki, and before her Lois, Charlotte, Isolde, Ruth. A girl like Ruth would never have seen Santa Cruz or the Rockies if she hadn’t joined up. When he found her, she was anemic and homeless, trading blow jobs for blow under the BQE in New York. Had her life gotten worse? Or what about Isolde, whose name marked the extent to which she knew anything beyond the one-mile radius around her shack on the banks of the Cache River in Arkansas? He’d taken her to South Korea. He’d taken her to North Korea, where she’d doled out mints to children who’d spent the morning exercising outside the Study House of the People.

  Vicki pressed her body up against his and said, “So, you know how my parents are sick and everything?”

  “Yes, but tell me again. Tell me everything.”

  And she did. She
’d been a griddle chef at a diner off I-95 while also teaching adult literacy at the corrections facility in town. Working eighty hours a week to pay off interest on debts acquired from her parents, who had been in a house fire and lived in hospice because neither could breathe on his own.

  “But you know what?” she said. “I couldn’t even bring myself to visit them. It was too hard. Isn’t that horrible? That’s my dark secret.”

  He looked at the clock. He said that one time, when he was a kid, the Christmas tree had caught fire, and for the seconds he should have been calling for help or getting a bucket, he just watched the flames lash the wall and craze the windows—the bubbles were mesmerizing—but when the firemen showed, he pretended to have been asleep.

  “Oh, I get that,” she said. “That’s a fear of responsibility. I fantasize about my parents dying at the same time because, as bad off as they are, it’ll be worse if they don’t have each other, and worse for me, too. Which is even more horrible. I mean, I love them, but still.”

  And when he didn’t respond, she said, “Is this helping? Do you feel better? You always say that being always happens in a social context. Is this a social context?”

  He took her hand in the dark and held it to his chest.

  She kept talking until the winter dawn grayed up the walls and bedspread. And so, for Thurlow, another sleepless night. Alone, but not. Ever thus.

  ESME RUSHED OUT OF THE METRO. Or walked as fast as possible, given the rubber gams distending her legs, and her chest vest, which weighed a ton. A C-cup bosom that swung low, and a furl of belly fat that D-curved around her waist, not to mention the load of vulcanized ass piled on her rear. Christ, this fat suit. Christ, this life.

  Times like these, she wished she and Jim had a more convenient rendezvous point. The Air and Space Museum was in the middle of nowhere. She spotted him at the entrance. She pinched his arm, and when he gave her a confused look, she laughed and said, “Hey, it’s me.”

  “My God,” he said. “You are terrifying.”