“This is entirely absurd,” says Elspeth, correctly.
“Faith is an attempt made on the strength of absurdity,” says Cel, and hiccups. “Kierkegaard said that.”
“That sounds—out of context.”
“Faith is an attempt made on the strength of things taken out of context.”
“You’re drunk.”
Another on-point observation from Elspeth!—who, Cel sees, is staring at her sadly.
“Why did you ever even take this job?” she says.
Cel considers: she must have had an answer to this once.
“I have a degree in English,” she says finally. “I wanted to do something with words.”
“Words, Cel? Any words? Like the way Leni Riefenstahl wanted to do something with images?”
“Come on.”
“I’m sorry. I just never could have imagined you devoting your life to making fun of the poor.”
“Making fun of the poor? Who the hell do you think watches this show?” Cel realizes she is somewhat shouting; she needs to start spending less time with Luke. “It isn’t rich psych students, I’ll tell you that. It’s not the staff of The New Yorker. They’re the ones wringing their hands over this thing. Poor people, believe it or not, have real problems.”
“Jesus, Cel.”
“Anyone who thinks the show is making fun of poor people has to think poor people are actually like that. That they’re actually fucking their goats.”
“Well,” says Elspeth. “It’s finally happened. You’ve finally started to believe your own bullshit.”
“Go fifty miles outside any college town and it’s wall-to-wall goat-fucking, as far as the eye can see.”
“You’ve definitely started to believe your own bullshit, Cel. You’re, like, converted.”
“You know why rich people hate the show so much?” says Cel. “Because they’re afraid of how much it disgusts them. Because it makes it so much harder for them to feel so tolerant and great about themselves. Because they need poor people to be these exalted endangered panda bears—or lazy wretches, you know, depending on their politics. But maybe those are equally fucked up.”
Cel is crying, apparently. She goes to the window to hide.
“I thought you cared about me,” she says dramatically. Like everything she really means, it comes out sounding false: maybe Elspeth thinks so, too.
“Cared about you?” says Elspeth. Cel is blinking through her tears. In the distance, some building’s swordfish-nosed antenna is blinking at her right back. “And who would that be, exactly?”
* * *
—
Leaning on Mattie’s doorbell, Cel realizes she probably should have called ahead. She’d been galvanized on the way over—stirred by alcohol and insult and the newfound conviction that, no matter what Elspeth said, she did, once in a while, know how to do the right thing. She sobered up somewhere along West Houston and now the principles in play seem murkier, as does the logic of showing up unannounced. And yet, is this not a matter of professional urgency? Luke would certainly argue that it is. She should probably have called him, too, now that she thinks of it.
Mattie seems surprised to see her, though not as surprised as he should be.
“Oh,” he says, his eyebrows arcing into vortices. “I thought you might be someone else.”
She apologizes for bothering him and he says not to worry and then Cel is inside Mattie’s apartment, sitting on a surprisingly frayed sofa, while he fetches her a glass of water she didn’t ask for. The apartment is spare, nearly parsonic—more damning evidence of Christianity: she’ll have to tell Luke about that before she leaves. Because she is leaving, she realizes, even if no one is going to make her.
“I came to bring you this,” says Cel, handing him the envelope. “It’s a recording of your conversation with that VIP guy.”
Mattie mouths the word Oh before he says it.
“I thought you’d probably want to have it,” says Cel.
“Yes,” says Mattie. “Yes, certainly I do.”
He looks at the envelope intently, though he does not open it. Probably he’s waiting for Cel to leave. She begins to stand.
“Did you listen to it?” says Mattie.
“Oh.” She sits again. “Yes. Yes, I did. I’m sorry.”
Though she doesn’t know why she should be, she somehow actually is.
“I don’t know what it means,” she tells him. “I mean, I don’t know what he means by it.”
“I might have an idea.”
“That’s, well. That’s good. But you’ll actually probably want to be discussing that with Luke, mostly, because actually I guess I’m quitting?” Should she say this so baldly? And shouldn’t she be saying it to Luke, come to think of it? “I’m giving my notice, I mean.”
“Ah. Well. Good for you.” Mattie drops the envelope on the coffee table and leans back. “What’s next?”
“I think I’m going to go to California.”
“California, huh? Well, that shouldn’t be hard for you. Most Changed, and all.”
Cel is surprised he remembers this about her. Then she remembers that he remembers everything. Then she remembers, very faintly, that it isn’t even true.
“Well. I’d tell you a secret about that, but.”
“But people really need to stop telling me their secrets.”
“This one’s pretty mediocre. You could probably even guess.”
“You were voted something else, then,” says Mattie. “Most Likely to be Reluctantly Employed by a Tabloid Television Show. You were never voted Most Changed at all.”
“I was.” She pauses for what she hopes is clearly comical suspense. “It’s just I didn’t.”
“Oh?” Mattie looks her up and down, as though it’s possible Cel has been a twelve-year-old all along. “You stayed the same, you mean?”
“I mean I wasn’t really any way at all.”
“So you were born for PR!” Mattie rolls his neck; she can hear it cracking. “Tell me this: did you lie a lot as a kid?”
“Did I lie a lot?”
“Withdrawn.”
“I mean—what’s a lie? What’s a lot? I mean, I guess. Doesn’t everyone?”
“What did you lie about?”
“I don’t remember.”
He smirks, like, has she forgotten the subject under discussion?
“Well, little things, mostly,” she says. “Or—they weren’t really lies, more like stories? I had this long con involving four-leaf clovers.”
“And here I thought the real money was in network TV.”
“It was spectacularly stupid. I’d pick two clovers and pull two leaves off one of them and braid the stems around and then go running to the other kids and say I’d found a four-leaf clover. They didn’t understand why I was so much better at finding them. I told them it was because I lived in the woods. But it was weird they believed me, because we pretty much all lived in the woods.”
Cel is sure she’s never discussed this with anybody, and she can’t believe she’s discussing it with Mattie, at midnight, in his own apartment. She can’t believe this is his apartment—it looks like a student loft, the crash pad of an underpaid commuter. It poses the corollary mystery of the one Cel encountered in her own apartment: Nikki’s clothes, her concerts, her juicer. How had Cel thought these fit into the equation—the unforgiving calculus of income versus expenditures?
The answer was, they didn’t, and neither does this place.
“Anyway,” she says, “this went on for years. I was actually kind of known for it. I’d do it sometimes in high school, even, just to maintain my cover retroactively.”
“That isn’t really a lie, though, is it?” says Mattie. “More like a really bad party trick.”
“That’s exactly how I thought of it!�
�
“And then you learned your lesson and you never lied again.”
“Well, not exactly.”
“No?”
“Once I told a girl I’d had a bunch of horses that had died,” says Cel. “The horses part was to make her think I was secretly rich, even if she’d maybe heard other things. The dying part was to account for the fact that there were no horses.”
“Lying for personal gain,” says Mattie. “You were born for sales.”
“But it backfired—because she wasn’t impressed at all, she was just sad!” Cel laughs. “I think in another life I probably would have been a town gossip. I just happened not to know any, so I had to make things up.”
Cel likes this sentiment as a sentence, as a jokey thing to say—it sounds like it could be true, and surely it is true of someone, and who’s to say this someone isn’t her? But even as she says this she knows, with unusual conviction, that it is not. And she is seized by the realization that nobody besides her knows this, and that if she doesn’t say it out loud to Mattie M right this instant, then nobody ever will.
“No,” she says. “I guess that’s not it, either.”
“No?” says Mattie. Even though he doesn’t ask her to elaborate, Cel somehow believes he wants to listen: is this the sorcery he uses on his guests? She has never for one moment thought that Mattie actually cares about them—but right now, she can see why some of them seem to think he does.
“My first lie I remember,” says Cel. “I was maybe four or five. I spent all of recess making this really elaborate monster footprint in the mud. I wanted to show it to these other girls to scare them.”
Cel realizes that even if she can articulate this thing, the only two people who know it will be her and Mattie M, and that this is quite possibly worse than no one knowing it at all.
“And I showed it to them and they were terrified, and I was very pleased. But then this little boy came over and told the girls he’d made the footprint, even though I could tell he was kind of scared of it, too. And I remember thinking how brave he was to do that. It really blew my mind that he was lying to be good, and that there were things that could be kindnesses only if nobody knew that’s what they were. And that I, the villain of this story, was the only one who knew what he was doing, and to tell anyone about it would be undoing his kindness. There was this thrill and shame and secret amazement in that, I think.” She laughs and shakes herself a little. “The moral of the story being that truth is complicated.”
“You should have been in intelligence work,” says Mattie. “Or fiction writing. Some kind of intellectual retail.”
“I should have been a missionary, maybe.”
“Probably not that,” says Mattie dryly. Then: “You want to know what sold C. S. Lewis on Christianity?”
“C. S. Lewis?” What she really means is: Christianity? Cel isn’t even sure if this conversation is legal: does this apartment count as the workplace?
“J. R. R. Tolkien—you know, the Hobbit guy?—told him that the whole thing, Christianity, was a true myth. A true myth, you know? I’ve always liked that.”
“So you are a Catholic!”
“Who told you that?” says Mattie. “Never mind, I know who told you that.”
He goes to the window and places his hands against the glass. Above him, a smeared, greasy-looking moon hovers over the skyline.
“What’s that thing that Mencken said?” he says, as though this were something they were only just discussing. “Something like, a philosopher is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat that isn’t really there—a theologian is the man who finds it?”
“Is that a true myth?” says Cel. “Maybe he just says he finds it.”
“Well, exactly.”
“Promise me you’ll never say any of that on television,” says Cel. “It’ll give poor old Luke a grand mal seizure.”
“I won’t.”
“He’s been trying to tell me for years you were religious.”
“I’m not.”
“Good,” says Cel. “Because it is way too late to be useful.”
Mattie comes back to the couch and sits beside her. He’s so close she can see the calcium deposits on his fingernails. Is it possible he was really living here all along—coming back night after night to this apartment, with its Nixon-era furniture and its fragile, assertively middle-class lighting? What would Cel have done if somebody had told her this? The same thing anyone else would do: she would not have believed it.
“Why do you think Ryan Muller wrote to you?” she says.
“I really don’t know,” says Mattie. “I’ve thought about it a lot. And all I can come up with is this: I think he knew he couldn’t shock me. I think he figured that, whatever he could say, I’d probably heard worse.”
Cel isn’t going to ask if this turned out to be true. She still doesn’t give a shit about Ryan Muller’s privacy, but she is beginning to give something of a shit about Mattie’s. It’s this apartment that is doing it—it’s wearing her down, with its teetering bookshelf and its dusty tomes of political theory. She somehow feels she knows too much already.
“Did you ever think of going back to politics?” she says. “Before all of this, I mean.”
“Quite a bit, actually.”
“Why didn’t you?”
He looks at her and mouths the word Contract.
Oh, Cel mouths back, then says aloud: “Of course.” She looks away from him, toward his little window. Broadway is out there somewhere, she supposes. All Cel sees is her own pale reflection, the definitive darkness beyond.
“You know what I wanted to do?” she says.
“This, obviously.”
“Never mind. I mean, it’s ridiculous.”
“Would you believe I have an extremely high tolerance for the ridiculous?”
“I sort of wanted to do stand-up,” she says. “You know, comedy?”
“Why not. You’re funny.”
“You never laugh at my jokes.”
“Don’t I?” he says mildly. “I always mean to.”
So now Cel knows he doesn’t think she’s funny. She waits to start holding this against him, but it isn’t happening. This is another entirely novel mental state: she wonders how many of these constitute some sort of neurological emergency.
“Jokes are true myths, too, aren’t they?” Mattie is saying. “Stop me if you’ve heard this one! Man on a sinking ship frees his pet gull from its cage. There’s a joke. Or a true myth. I mean, in this case it’s actually true. Whatever made the guy do that is the thing I want to believe in. They should make that into a religion.”
“I’m sure someone has,” says Cel. “If there’s one thing your show has taught me, it’s that someone out there has done absolutely everything.”
“That’s the worldview of an extremely old person. You’re much too young to say things like that.”
“I was raised by my grandfather,” says Cel. “More or less.”
“I knew someone who used to say that sort of thing about everything,” says Mattie. “Though I guess he was young then, too.”
Cel nods respectfully, trying to look as though she really does believe that she, too, will get old. Privately, she has her doubts.
“You know what I think?” says Mattie. “I think you’re the kind of person that in another life could have been absolutely anything.”
“But here we are,” says Cel. “In this one.”
“Exactly,” he says, holding his palms up to the sky.
THIRTY
semi
Ten years into the plague, and what are we left with?
We are left, occasionally, with miracles: tonight they’re letting Brookie out to see my play.
I usually skulk in the back—embarrassed to be seen attending at all—but Brookie’s wheelch
air means automatic front-row seats. It’s a novelty to see the thing up close—the actors’ makeup ghoulishly mimetic; their bodies starved, with Method lunacy, into emaciation. The curtain goes up on such a figure—supine and shrouded, way up in the hinterlands of stage left. The spotlight is aimed several feet downstage from him, casting a circle the actor does not reach, conjuring a sense of loudly cosmic exile that strikes me, frankly, as unfortunate. But then, if I wanted to be a control freak, I should have written a different play.
The figure is draped over a grate, shivering in a way that makes us understand both that this is a floor heater, and that it isn’t actually the winter. Actors terrify me: I hope to never understand what they do. For a moment, we listen to him pant. Then he painfully rolls over and begins crawling toward the light.
And even though they know what’s coming, the crowd gasps when they see his face: this time, this is the beginning.
NARRATOR:
It was during the Black Plague that they began marking the dead. Someone told us this, once upon a time, and for all we know it could be true.
For a while, we kept a tally of our own—the faces all done in the same bad makeup, the bodies all posed with the same uncharacteristic formality. Or maybe not all, but who can remember now? The scale of loss will come to rob each death of its particularity. One day we’ll come to be jealous of our early miseries—those losses that still felt singular.
There are ways only young hearts can break. In the end, even grief turns out to be finite: a resource we can squander just like time, and in ways we’ll never stop regretting.
CHORUS:
We went to Tina Turner–themed drag shows. We went to support groups for the worried well.
We still went cruising, sometimes, and pretended we were new in town. We pretended we were still pretending to be straight.
We went to therapy, to address the childhood emotional emergency that might cause the disease to psychointubate within us.
We went to a snuffling Hungarian doctor on Clinton Street. He gave us brutalizing, old-world massages and sent us home with a tincture that looked like and probably was paprika.
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