Pretend I'm Dead

by Jen Beagin

There was a silence while she turned this over in her mind. “Are you telling me you’re a pimp?” she asked. “Because that would be worse than having no teeth. Much worse.”

  “I prefer ‘Gangster of Love,’ ” he said, somewhat smugly.

  “Terrific.”

  “It’s not what you think,” he said. “Since I work nights, I let them use my bed, provided they change the sheets. I give them a clean, safe place to conduct business. I consider it an act of kindness.”

  “What do they give in return?”

  “Beer money, actually.” He raised his shoulders in a so-sue-me gesture.

  “But you’re sober now,” she reminded him.

  “I know,” he said. “Look, this isn’t Taxi Driver, okay? These girls aren’t twelve years old. I’m not the one turning them out. They’d be doing it anyway, only they’d be out God knows where, in the back of a van—”

  “Dating a pimp isn’t what I envisioned for myself at this point,” she interrupted. “At any point,” she corrected herself.

  “All I ask is that you try not to judge me.”

  She sat there for a minute, trying.

  “You can leave if you want,” he said. “I’m not holding you hostage here. We could end this right now, in fact. But I don’t think we’re done with each other yet, do you?”

  “No,” she said morosely.

  “Look, I’ll start packing tomorrow,” he said. “Okay? I’ll move in next week.”

  * * *

  TWO DAYS LATER, IN THE middle of a Thursday night, he called and said he was having trouble reading the writing on the wall. She knew what he meant, and replied that she, too, couldn’t always see what was right in front of her. She needed some distance from it, space—

  “No, Mona, there’s actual writing on the wall, but I can’t read it,” he interrupted. She heard panic in his voice. “It’s only there when I turn the lights off and I hold a flashlight to it.”

  “What’s it look like?” she asked.

  “Like a swarm of bees, scribble-scrabbling.”

  “Scribble-scrabbling?”

  “Yeah, like, protecting the queen,” he said.

  “Are you on mushrooms?”

  “It’s ballpoint ink, strangely enough,” he continued, ignoring her. “Red ballpoint.”

  “Well, is it cursive, or what?” she asked, at a loss.

  “Yeah, only it’s swimming backward. It’s indescribable, really. Could you come over? Just for five minutes? I’m freaking out.”

  She sneaked into the back of his building, ran up the stairs, and let herself in with the key he’d given her. He was passed out on his back with his mouth ajar, naked except for a hideous turquoise Speedo, clutching a flashlight against his chest like a rosary. She looked at the walls: nothing there, of course.

  She figured he took one Mellaril too many, but in his nightstand drawer she found a dirty set of works surrounded by dirty cotton, and her head started spinning. His arms were bruise free, but his hands and feet were swollen and she saw the beginning of an abscess on his ankle. He must have been putting it in his legs or feet. Fuck!

  His notebook was lying open on his pillow and she read the open page:

  I have renewed my travel visa to my favorite island. Now I can come and go without being stopped by the border police and accused of trespassing. It is pathetic how much I’ve missed this island’s scenery, its exotic food, its flora and fauna. Tonight I am in my little plane, flying around the island’s perimeter. To amuse myself, I perform tricks: triple corkscrews and low, high-speed flybys—my version of a holding pattern. But I’m running out of gas. The engine keeps cutting in and out, making little gasping noises. I’ll probably crash any minute now.

  She was offended that she didn’t see her name in his diary. She tried nudging him awake, but he was out cold. No point in hanging around. She didn’t want to leave, though, without him knowing she’d been there. Rather than write a note, she removed her left shoe and then her purple sock, and slipped the sock over his bare foot. He flinched but never opened his eyes.

  Over a week passed. He didn’t call and wouldn’t answer his phone. She waited for her back to go out, which was usually how her despair chose to manifest itself, but instead she became suddenly and bizarrely noise sensitive. At the supermarket she was so overwhelmed by the noise she had to clamp her hands over her ears and hum to herself, sometimes abandoning her shopping cart. After an embarrassing incident at Rite Aid, wherein she asked a woman if there was any way the woman could quiet her baby, who wasn’t even crying, just cooing, she had the bright idea to purchase earplugs, and took to wearing them whenever she left her apartment.

  At work she raided people’s refrigerators, often taking breaks in the middle of the day to eat and lounge around in their living rooms, reading magazines or watching television. When there was nothing to eat, she raided medicine cabinets. Xanax, Valium, Vicodin, Darvocet—only one or two of whatever was on the menu, enough to take the edge off and still be able to vacuum. She’d always had a snooping policy—No Letters, No Diaries—but when she was high and itchy she read people’s diaries and personal papers. She read them hungrily, even if they were boring. And they were almost always boring. Afterward, she felt nauseated and ashamed, as if she’d eaten an entire birthday cake and then masturbated on their bed.

  It was while reading Brenda Hinton’s weight-loss diary—full of body measurements, scale readings, and daily calorie intakes—that she finally broke down. That is, she had a coughing attack, which triggered a gripping back spasm, the likes of which she’d never felt before. She fell to her knees and lowered herself the rest of the way to the floor, where she lay for twenty minutes or so, staring at a water stain on the ceiling while Brenda Hinton’s dog, a miniature schnauzer with an underbite, calmly licked her elbow. Eventually she reached for the phone and called Sheila in Florida.

  “What’s the matter?” Sheila asked.

  “Back,” she said. “Muscle spasm.”

  “Yoga, honey,” Sheila said.

  “The downward dog isn’t going to help right now.” The schnauzer seemed to roll his eyes at her. She decided she didn’t like dogs with bangs.

  “I never hear from you. What’s going on?”

  She spilled the beans: she’d fallen for an addict, someone she met at the needle exchange. They were in a relationship. Yes, a romantic one. He’d been sober for six months. Now he wasn’t. “Blah, blah,” she said. “You’ve seen the movie a million times.”

  To her relief, Sheila didn’t offer any banal Freudian interpretations.

  “Maybe now you’ve finally hit bottom.” Sheila sighed. “I know you won’t go to Al-Anon, but it’s time to get on your knees and start talking to your H.P.”

  “What’s that again?”

  “Higher Power, babe.”

  “Right,” she said. “Small problem: I don’t believe in God. As you know.”

  “What happened to Bob?”

  Bob had been her nickname for God when she was a child. She’d talked to Bob like an invisible friend. She’d mentioned this to Sheila in passing once, years ago, and Sheila never forgot it.

  “Bob’s dead,” Mona said. “Prostate cancer.”

  “He’s not dead, sweetie,” Sheila said sadly. “But forget about Bob. Your H.P. can be anyone. It can be John Belushi or Joan of Arc or Vincent van Gogh. In fact, Van Gogh might be perfect for you. He was tortured by his emotions, never received positive feedback, and died without selling a single painting. If his spirit is out there, it can relieve you of your suffering. So, start now. Get on your knees and ask Vincent for help.”

  * * *

  SHE TOOK THREE DAYS OFF work, two of which she spent resting her back. On the third day she hobbled to the Hawthorne and let herself into his room. He was in the same position as last time, lying diagonally on his bed and wearing only his underwear. His room was trashed: he’d stopped doing laundry, emptying ashtrays, taking out the garbage.

  She waved her hand in fr
ont of his face, snapped her fingers. He opened his eyes momentarily and whispered, “I’m gonna put my boots on and make something happen.” Then he nodded out again. She envied the blankness on his face.

  Her presence never fully registered with him and she sat in the corner for twenty minutes, feeling as invisible as a book louse. It was worse than the way she felt at work, passing in and out of rooms, a ghost carrying a cleaning bucket.

  Again, she wanted to let him know she’d been there. She removed an earring and placed it on his nightstand, along with some items from the bottom of her purse—a broken pencil, a ticket stub to a Krzysztof Kieślowski film, several sticky pennies.

  It became a kind of ritual. Over the next several weeks she visited his room and left behind little tokens of herself: his favorite pair of her underwear, a lock of her hair, a grocery receipt. When she was feeling bold, she tacked a picture of herself onto the wall near his bed. But now he was never there when she was. She figured he was out and about, making something happen somewhere. Still, leaving the items made her feel less adrift, less beside the point. In fact, she was amazed by how much a few minutes spent in his room—marking her territory, as it were—seemed to straighten her out.

  One day he surprised her by being not only there, but awake and lucid. She hadn’t seen him in three weeks and was startled by the amount of weight he’d lost, particularly in his face—his eyes were what they called sunken—and by the fullness of his beard, which he tugged on now as he sat on the edge of his unmade bed.

  “Are you here to deliver one of your voodoo objects?”

  She shrugged, embarrassed. “I guess I’m worried you’ll forget me.”

  He nodded thoughtfully, as if she’d just said something really interesting. She noticed the loaded syringe parked on his nightstand, waiting for takeoff. “Looks like I’m interrupting your routine,” she said.

  “I can wait until you leave.”

  “Pretend I’m not here,” she said, and felt her chin tremble. She’d missed his voice, his anecdotes, his eyes on her.

  “I have to hop around on one leg to find a vein these days. It’s humiliating enough without an audience.” Apparently the feeling wasn’t mutual; he didn’t miss her eyes on him, or anything else about her. In fact, he barely looked at her. She sat down in the armchair.

  “Why’d you relapse? Is it because we’re moving in together? If it freaks you out that much, we don’t have to do it.”

  He shook his head. “It’ll sound stupid to you.”

  “Try me,” she said.

  He pursed his lips, shook his head again.

  “What’s with the sudden reticence?” she asked. “I thought you were the show-and-tell type.”

  He crossed his legs, lit a cigarette, blew smoke toward the ceiling. If she were one of those willful, high-maintenance girls, she’d be throwing a tantrum right now—stomping her feet, interrogating him, demanding answers. But then, a high-maintenance girl never would have set foot in the building in the first place, wouldn’t even be seen in the neighborhood. “You know, you’re lucky I’m so easygoing,” she said, stupidly.

  “It was free,” he said after a minute. “And it hadn’t been free in twenty years. It’s hard to say no when something is free, especially for someone like me.”

  “That’s your excuse?”

  “It’s really as simple as that,” he said. “It has nothing to do with you.”

  “Is that all you have left?” she asked, nodding toward his nightstand.

  “For now,” he said.

  “If I buy some more, can we do it together?” she asked. “I have a wicked backache.”

  He studied her face for several seconds, finally acknowledging her, but it was quickly followed by indifference and his gaze returned to the floor.

  Since he’d apparently chosen drugs over her, even after everything she’d shared with him—her mattress, her secrets, her so-called beautiful whatsit—it seemed only fair that she know what she’d been up against. She pulled forty dollars from her wallet. “Is this enough?” she asked, placing the money on the bed.

  “Cut it out,” he said, rolling his eyes.

  “I’m serious,” she said.

  He picked up the syringe and held it in front of her face. “This is this,” he said emphatically. “It isn’t something else. This is this.”

  She blinked at him. “Is that a line from a movie?”

  He crossed his arms. “Maybe.”

  “You’re being slightly grandiose,” she said. “You know that, right?”

  “Yeah, well, you’re not taking this shit seriously enough,” he said.

  * * *

  TWENTY MINUTES LATER, THEY WERE sitting on his bed and he was inserting his only clean needle—the loaded one on his nightstand—into her arm. “That syringe looks really . . . full,” she said, too late.

  “Believe me, it’s barely anything,” he assured her.

  The next thing she knew, she was lying on the floor of a stuffy attic. The air smelled like pencil shavings. A fan, some high-powered industrial thing, was on full blast, making a loud whirring noise and blowing a thousand feathers around. It was like the Blizzard of ’78. Then the fan clicked off and she watched the feathers float down, in zigzaggy fashion. They landed on her face and neck and she expected them to be cold but they were as warm as tears, and that’s when she realized she was crying and that the feathers were inside her. So was the fan. The fan was her heart. A voice was telling her to breathe. She opened her mouth and felt feathers fly out. There was a rushing noise in her ears, a mounting pressure in her head, a gradual awareness that something was attached to her. A parasite. She was being licked, or sucked on, by a giant tongue, a wet muscle. The sucking sensation was painful and deeply familiar, but there was no comfort in the familiarity, only dread, panic. She felt herself moving, flailing, trying to get away from it.

  When she opened her eyes she felt a presence next to her on the bed. An exhausted female presence. She gasped, turned over, and found Mr. Disgusting sitting on the edge of the bed, scribbling in his little notebook.

  “Ah, you’re back,” he said. “You had me worried for a minute.”

  She tasted blood in her mouth. “Did something . . . happen?”

  He closed his notebook, placed his pencil behind his ear. His pupils were pinned. “I lost you for a few minutes.”

  “I passed out?”

  “I think you must be allergic to amphetamines.”

  “What?”

  “You have a cocaine allergy,” he said patiently, as if he were a doctor. “You’re probably allergic to Novocain, too. And caffeine, maybe. Does coffee make your heart race?”

  “I thought we were doing . . . heroin.”

  “I mix them together,” he said. “I mean, nothing major—just a little pinch. It was meant for me, not you, and I’d forgotten about it.”

  “Where are my boots?” she asked.

  “You looked like a half-dead fish lying on the pier, just before it gets clobbered.”

  “So what,” she said. “Who gives a shit?”

  “I do,” he said. “That’s why I took such careful notes. I knew you’d want to know exactly what happened.”

  “So what if I died while you were taking notes? You’re obviously too wasted to take me to the hospital.”

  “Since when do you care about dying? Besides, I knew you wouldn’t die die. I was keeping my finger on your pulse the whole time. Your heart stopped beating for about five seconds and then it normalized. Let me ask you something: did you see anything? A white light? A tunnel? Dead people?”

  “I was inside a vagina,” she said. “A giant vagina, it felt like, but then I realized it was regular sized and I was just really small.”

  He smiled and nodded, as if he’d been there with her. “Whose was it?”

  “My mother’s, probably.” She shuddered and hugged herself. “Is it cold in here?”

  “You have a really weird expression on your face,” he said.
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  “Do you realize how shitty it is to be born?”

  He did some slow-motion blinking.

  “It’s excruciating—physically, I mean. There must be some mechanism in the brain that doesn’t allow you to remember, because if you had to live consciously with that memory . . . well, you’d never stop screaming.”

  “It’s called birth trauma,” he said, nodding. “But I doubt it compares to other kinds of trauma. You know, like slavery. Or torture.” He gave her a significant look, but she was too nauseated to respond. She got out of bed, hobbled down the hall to the bathroom, locked the door behind her. There it was, her stupid face in the mirror.

  Where’s your lipstick, she heard Sheila’s voice say. You look like hell. Why don’t you get on your knees—right here, right now—and talk to your H.P.?

  She was on her knees two minutes later, vomiting into the already-filthy toilet. Puking was easy, almost pleasurable—like sneezing. She flushed, examined the ring around the bowl, imagined herself dumping Comet into it, scrubbing with a brush, spraying the lid with Windex, wiping it clean with toilet paper, moving on to the rest of the toilet—the tank, the trunk, the floor around it—

  Detach, she ordered herself. Observe. Observe the dirt.

  Someday, hopefully, she’d be able to enter a bathroom, even on drugs, and not envision herself on her hands and knees, scrubbing the baseboards with a damp sponge—

  And that’s when she noticed Mr. Disgusting’s handwriting right next to the light switch:

  If we had beans,

  we could make beans and rice,

  if we had rice.

  * * *

  BACK IN HIS ROOM, HE was still in bed, propped up against the filthy wall with a belt around his arm. His body was slack, his eyes half open. She wondered if he’d had more dope all along, or if he’d gotten it from one of his neighbors while she was in the bathroom.

  “Sometimes I wish I were made of clay,” he mumbled.

  He was miles away now, in his little plane, she imagined, flying around his favorite island. She put her boots on and he opened his eyes and said, “No, no, no—stay.” He patted the space next to him on the bed. “I’ll read you a story. Chekhov. ‘The Lady with the Dog.’ ”