The Insides

by Jeremy P. Bushnell

  “OK,” she says.

  “OK,” Unger says, smiling as though taking pleasure in an unfamiliar idiom. “Then I suppose all that remains is the transactional portion of our conversation.” He cranes about in his chair, hauls up the suitcase. Maja rises to take it from him.

  She tightens her grip on the handle and feels the reassuring weight of the case. Even though it’s only half of her total fee, the amount of cash here is considerable. It’s enough for her to live on for a year: over a year, if she spends carefully. And she always spends carefully. She allows herself a moment to think of the time that this money buys her, just one moment to enjoy the sensation of her growing control over the future, the way money gives some structure to the imperceptible, the unknown, that which is always before her.

  “Thank you,” she says.

  3

  HEARTBREAKERS

  When Ollie was twenty-three years old, she loved her life.

  She was living then in the Hudson Valley, working on Donald’s farm: long hours, every day, under the sun. It was difficult work, exhausting—hard on her joints, her wrists and her knees and her back—but she loved it.

  She loved pulling carrots out of black soil.

  She loved manning the table at the farmers’ market on Sundays, passing food along to people who would just appreciate it, openly. People would just give her money and take the food she’d grown and they would smile happily at her in a way that was totally honest. Appreciation without guile; intention without calculation. It was her favorite way for people to look at her.

  She loved the long August evenings. She loved sitting at the picnic table, eating fried potatoes, drinking vodka lemonade, watching Donald practice archery in the yard, holding her boy close in her lap.

  She didn’t love the mosquitoes, but she did love killing them, loved the little splotch of blood left behind on her arm after she’d smash them midfeed. Her blood. Mine, she would think.

  She loved the sweat and the dirt and she loved falling into bed exhausted and entering a sleep so solid that no dream could get inside it.

  Basically she loved the work. This was not a surprise: she’d always believed that work would be satisfying. For a long time she believed this on faith alone, a dumb faith that was nourished by just about exactly nothing in her childhood. Not watching her mom nod out on a bare mattress in a crumbling room in some squat. Not watching NYPD eviction task forces hit her dad in the lower abdomen with a plastic truncheon. Not being moved around from one Child Welfare Administration group home to another. Not, at age thirteen, fucking a grown-up who had nothing more to offer her than a way to get out of the rain.

  But then she met the street magicians, the gutter witches and warlocks who found her in Tompkins Square Park, who invited her into their temporary encampments, erected in whatever empty lot or abandoned building they could find that week. In those spaces they would tend tiny shrines and salt-fires. These were the people who confirmed for her that work was worth doing.

  Not work like jobs; they didn’t do jobs. Of the dozen or so that she trained with, there were maybe like two who had ever held a job for longer than a week. Work, for them, was a thing that they called the Great Work, and they were dead serious about it. She could never get any two of them to agree on what the Great Work was, exactly, beyond that it involved emancipation of the will.

  Magic, she remembers them saying, is about applying will. Basically using your will to bend the universe. They taught her how to try it, and she tried it, and for a while nothing happened, and she began to suspect that it was all a bunch of bullshit.

  But then, at age nineteen, almost exactly one year into these studies, she met Donald, an NYU grad student who had started appearing and reappearing at the edge of their world, describing himself as a quote-unquote participant observer. He claimed to be writing something about the anthropology of transient punks.

  She didn’t realize that he was the thing she was asking for, not at first. The first detail she noticed about him was his soft little belly, which she wanted to pierce, as though she were a flint arrowhead. She’d spent all nineteen years of her life thus far developing contempt for soft people and their reek of easy living. And when she first met him, she thought his project was contemptible: the first time he explained it to her, he referred to the crusties as the voluntary homeless and she laughed in his face and walked off, wouldn’t even look at him for the rest of the day. But he kept coming back. He kept coming back, kept observing, kept participating. He stayed through the summer and through the fall but it wasn’t until winter that she really decided he was a serious person, because winter was when it got to be really tough to spend all day stamping around in the streets and the subway stations with no particular place to go. Nobody would do that voluntarily, she believed, unless they were a serious person, and this was how she came to believe that his project was, in its own way, a legitimate form of work, a legitimate expression of his will. This was how she came to respect him. And that was what made it OK to go home with him, when he invited her, to spend the night in his two-room apartment rather than in a homeless shelter or huddled over a steam vent.

  He was willing to give her distance when she was sick of him, and that was what made it OK to talk to him when she wasn’t. Importantly, he was the first person who she could talk to about family. About what it was like to have been taken away from her family at age nine. About missing her mom and dad even though they were drug abusers and fuckups and really did neglect her and really did leave her in harm’s way. About wanting to have a family again one day, a real family. This was something she couldn’t talk to the street magicians about, not really. If she would bring it up with them they would say what do you need a family for, you’ve got us. And there was some truth to that: they served as a family to her in many ways; they cared for her, they treated her with kindness—they took responsibility for her, which was more than she could say for her own parents, more than she could say for any of the foster placements that CWA arranged for her. Inherently she knew, though, that this was not enough, that a roaming band of like-minded souls is not a family. Any time she’d say this to the street magicians, though, they’d shout her down or laugh her off, which honestly she thought helped to prove her point as much as anything. But Donald listened, and he talked about his own family, about how money had fucked it up, about how he wanted to build something different for his own kids, when the time came. And somewhere in those conversations she found herself thinking: This. This is the guy. She found herself with a goal toward which she could apply her will.

  She hadn’t really needed to use magic to make it happen, or not much, anyway. A couple of candles, a circle made from spices she’d pinched from a market, kid stuff, nothing advanced. She wasn’t bending the universe so much as she was nudging it in the direction that it wanted to go anyway. They spent a year together, just the two of them, from one winter to the next, and during that year Donald’s project stalled, which was maybe OK, because during that year they were busy drinking and talking and fucking and fighting. Growing comfortable together. And she was deciding that she wanted to have the boy.

  The boy, she thinks at herself now, thirty-three years old, lying fetal in her bed in her muggy Bronx apartment, the stink of meat still all over her. She feels a bitter anger at herself for using those words, for reducing him to an abstraction. She demands that she think his name. She thinks his name: Jesse.

  She demands that she look at the photos that she keeps in the cigar box, in the bedside table’s lone drawer. She does not look at the photos.

  The point is: another nudge and there he was, the boy—Jesse—just as she’d imagined him.

  On Jesse’s first birthday, around a cake—the first birthday of anyone’s she’d ever celebrated with a cake—she had the idea that she wanted Donald to give up on the stalled dissertation, that she wanted the three of them to leave the city. On Jesse’s first birthday she decided that she wanted to make a life on the tiny parcel of
farmland that Donald’s family owned but had practically forgotten about, that she wanted to take its attendant ring of deteriorating buildings and make them into her home, to take Donald and Jesse and make them into her family. For real for real for real. She wanted it, and she arranged it, and the universe provided, with infinite bounty. The universe provided her with carrots and picnic tables and goats and alpaca and pigs and the skills to slaughter. All hail. Twenty-three years old—just barely an adult—and her Great Work was complete. Twenty-three years old, and she was happy.

  She was happy, so she quit using magic, and she concentrated instead on the farm, and raising Jesse, and loving Donald, and she told herself that she could be happy this way, doing this, for a long time. And she wasn’t wrong.

  But then at thirty she met Ulysses, who ran a homestead fifteen miles up the road.

  Ulysses was smart; Ollie figured that out right away. He had gone to Harvard Business School, she learned, and upon graduation he very quickly began to amass a fortune doing day trading, and when this fortune reached a particular threshold he promptly left the Wall Street game and bought forty acres of Hudson Valley land. Eventually he would explain to Ollie that this had been the culmination of a long plan of his: his grandfather had owned a parcel of land, and the later loss of this land was understood, within the family, as being a consequence of racial injustice, and so the teenage Ulysses began reading up on Reconstruction history, and the long sad tale of black landownership in America. From this history he developed particular ideas about the relationship between property ownership and personhood; he developed a theory that black people should build up capital and then use this capital to purchase as much property they could, and that subsequently they should work this property fruitfully: that doing this, en masse, would be the thing that would move them along the path to being recognized, finally, as full citizens of what Ulysses called this fucked-up racist country.

  It was exhilarating, frankly, for Ollie to hear someone talk like this. Her mother had been black, and for most of her youth and adolescence Ollie had been able to pass either as black or as white. She often presented, during those years, as ethnically ambiguous; but she’d also learned the ability to switch from one identity to the other when circumstances necessitated, when she could see some benefit to doing so. But by her eighth year on the farm, she’d stopped using that ability: she just presented as white all the time. Donald was white, and the college students who they’d hire to help out with the summer labor were usually white, and most of the people she talked to at the farmer’s market were white, and her child looked white. Her skin was dark from long hours out in the sun but so was everyone else’s, more or less, so no one seemed to notice: everyone treated her as white and after enough time she came to inhabit that identity reasonably comfortably. But the very first time she met Ulysses he looked at her with open recognition and she felt something inside that was unmistakably a note of doubt: doubt about whether she’d been right to let that aspect of her identity stay hidden for so long. It began to feel like a form of suppression. And after that, she started to meet with him more often, on some flimsy pretense or another, and Ulysses would start talking about black emancipation under neoliberalism, about learning the workings of capital as a way to master the tools of the white power structure, and she could feel these ideas touching something in her that nobody had ever touched before, and on top of being intellectually exhilarating she also had to admit that she found the entire thing to be impossibly, achingly hot.

  It didn’t hurt that Ulysses was just a beautiful man to begin with. He was smart, and he was beautiful. And although she loved Donald, and Donald was certainly smart, she had never really been attracted to him, not exactly, and she found herself believing that she deserved, maybe just once in her life, to fuck a man who she actually thought was beautiful. So she decided that it would be OK to give things just one more nudge. To cheat the world one more time. What she didn’t think about, or what she chose to ignore, were the Possible Consequences.

  She sits up in bed now, far away from Donald and the farm and their son, rubs her eyes. She opens the lone drawer in the bedside table.

  Don’t, she tells herself.

  For God’s sake, she retorts, against herself, they’re just photos. They can’t hurt you.

  She pulls out the cigar box, opens it up. The photo on top is the most recent one she has. In it, Jesse is nine. He was a shaggy little metalhead at age nine, long greasy curly locks and a denim jacket with goat-head pentagram patches that she’d sewn on herself. You’re going to be a heartbreaker, she used to mumble into his hair, not quite wanting him to hear.

  She doesn’t touch the photo, or look at any of the photos beneath this one. She knows the math: this picture of him is two fucking years old now. What he looks like, now, at age eleven, she can only guess. Donald’s blocked her on Facebook and she hasn’t been back to the farm. I never want to see you again, he’d screamed at her, the night she left. Don’t ever come back here, he’d said. And she’s consented to this: she hasn’t been back to the farm in just over a year.

  Unless you count the vision.

  She’s not sure she should count the vision. But she’s not sure she shouldn’t count the vision.

  It happened last winter. It must have been a Monday or Tuesday because she had the night off. She was at a Goodwill in Harlem, checking out the scratch damage on a $7 coat, when, suddenly, a series of black pinpoints seemed to open up in the grain, as though the leather were spontaneously rotting in her hands. She had frowned, reinterpreted the spots not as holes but as tiny particles, specklets, attempted to brush them away. But they swarmed around her hand, tadpolelike, untouchable. It was then that she realized that they weren’t a thing that was happening to the leather but rather a thing that was happening to her sight. She had a sudden fear that somehow she’d perforated her eyeball; her fingers went up reflexively to check for leaking blood, slime, humors. She found nothing.

  The pinpoints doubled in size, developed angry-looking barbs and curlicues. No longer like tadpoles, more like exotic fish. They began to effloresce at their edges, although at their cores they were still a dank black. They reminded her of the vents that she’d occasionally seen the street warlocks open up in the air. They’d open a door and step in, and it would take them—somewhere else. It would take them into this weird dark space they called the Inside.

  They would use the Inside for something that she never quite understood, some kind of prestidigitation that required a spare dimension to function right. Sometimes she’d peer in and see things moving in there, animals maybe, squirming away from her gaze as though they could tell that she was looking at them. The experience would make her feel queasy, dizzy, half on the verge of passing out, and that was exactly how she felt as the blobs in her optical field began to bleed together, coalescing into a palpating inky cloak, threatening to block out the Goodwill entirely.

  Pain began to shear into her head. Seeking stability, she reached out and grabbed onto the clothes rack, tightened her fist around the comfort of a cold metal rod.

  And then the world began to smell like ground-up batteries, and then the center of the blob burned up, like film melting in a projector: suddenly she could see through it. What she saw on the other side was not the Goodwill. It was the farmhouse, the living room of the farmhouse, the center of her former home. The stone hearth, the fireplace. It was as though she were standing right in the center of the room. Or, not quite: something about the view was a little off, a little wrong: she was looking down on the fire from the wrong height, at an unexpected angle, the way she might see it were she standing on a tall stool. She looked down, at the spot where her feet should be. And there she saw an old sketchbook of hers, in Donald’s hands. It was as though she had risen from the pages.

  It startled her to see it: she had nearly managed to forget that she’d spent most of a year teaching herself to draw by recording the sights of the farm. Donald rifled through the book and s
he saw her own old work flit past—images of radishes, of lichens, a wren’s nest, the cleavage patterns in a piece of slate—and with each image a memory came shuddering back, and with each memory came pain, more pain, of a different sort than the migrainous pain the vision itself was driving into her skull, but no less real.

  You’re still there, at the farm, she’d thought, spacily. You’re not free of that place. You left a part of yourself behind.

  And then Donald threw the book into the fire.

  No, she thought.

  And then she had a seizure.

  She doesn’t remember it, really. She just remembers her vision going incandescent and her body giving one giant jerk, remembers the cold metal rod springing out of her hand uselessly. And then some unknown segment of time passed, and the next thing she remembers is being splayed on the floor, bleeding from the tongue, with an elderly couple hunched over her, gripping her limbs, holding her steady with a surprising, animal force. They’d urged her to remain lying on the floor; instead she sat up. They’d urged her to stick around for an ambulance; instead she pushed her way through the knot of gawkers and headed out into the street, sucking in gulps of cold winter air. She came home to this apartment and made Victor hold an ice pack against the bruised back of her head for an hour.

  You’re not free of that place, she thinks again, now, looking at the top photo in the cigar box, which she does not allow herself to touch.

  Her perfect life, her Great Work: it had a good run. But she can’t be sad. She won’t allow herself to be sad. She has so much, even without it. When she was young, there was a period where all she wanted for her future was to live longer than her mother had lived—twenty-eight years—and to die without losing her teeth. And now she’s thirty-three, and she works at Carnage, an amazing job, a job some people would literally kill her to get, and it’s satisfying work, and that’s so much. Or it’s enough, anyway, most days. To still have satisfying work in her life: that’s enough. That’s what she tells herself, on mornings like this: You don’t need to want more. You don’t need to want anything at all.