[This is another chapter of my debut novel, when we reach we, out tomorrow.]
The first thing she noticed about him was his hair. Rich dark curls like the ribbons of birthday presents from childhood. You know in books when they describe a female character as having “ringlets”? Or “corkscrews”? His hair was like that. Beautiful and fine as a girl’s. And he was usually accompanied by a girl, very pretty. But not today. She set down his order of fried cakes. “Here you are.”
“Thank you.”
She got the sense that he didn’t want her to leave, but she wasn’t sure what to say. Shevek had been so different, and the two of them had developed their own strange language together, and sometimes it felt like that was all she knew. Sometimes she wondered if she still knew how to talk to people, especially someone her own age. “Your girlfriend isn’t here today."
He seemed a little embarrassed, but also pleased that people's affection for him had been noticed. "She's not my girlfriend."
“Oh. Do you want her to be?”
“I have no idea what she wants or what I want.”
“You could ask her.”
He laughed. “How?”
“Just ask, are you my girlfriend? Are we exclusive?”
“And if she says no?”
“Then you can ask why. And if she says she doesn’t want to date you, you can ask why again.”
He laughed. “I don’t think I would ever have a conversation like that.”
“Why?”
He laughed again, then, a third time. A big round laugh that sort of tumbled out of his mouth into the room. And then the room expanded to make room for the sound.
His voice had a quality that reminded her of her sister, and her dad. How low the sound went, and then how high. She felt a pleasant ache of pain all over her lower abdomen.
“Or maybe the truth is not that you can’t ask her, but that you don’t want to,” she said. “Maybe you what you really enjoy is the play, the pranks, the pleasant conversation…”
“You think I’m puerile.”
“Not at all. It’s a matter of preference. Some relationships are lived on the ground with your toes in the dirt. And some relationships are lived on mountains, in the high, thin atmosphere people inhabit before love. Maybe that’s where you want to be.”
“Is that where you want to be?”
She shook her head. “The altitude makes me nauseous.”
His face was drawn in straight, even, parallel lines from the forehead to the chin. But his upper lip and eyelashes curved upwards so delicately. It’d be impossible to call his face either masculine or feminine. But “androgynous” wasn’t quite right either.
A man's innocence. A woman's experience. A boy with the blush and temper of a girl.
His lower lip had a little shine on it from the fries. She found herself wanting to wipe it off, with a heavy cloth napkin, or the pad of her thumb, to lick it away.
“You’ve got a nice grid,” she said.
“What?”
“You know,” she said. “The face is a grid.” She reached out her index finger, and not touching him, but almost, traced three horizontal lines across his face, and then one vertical line down his nose. “It's nice. Yours.”
He was delighted. “You’re fascinating.” She found herself embarrassed, sweating suddenly, although she wasn’t sure why. “You’ve got a nice grid too. Beautiful.”
Beautiful? Leah didn’t know about that. She still avoided mirrors, not intentionally, she just wasn't particularly curious about her appearance anymore. The question didn't interest her the way it once had. But she caught occasional glimpses of her face in polished silverware, in the irises of mens’ eyes, and she was pleasantly surprised to find that she’d turned out quite attractive after all, the type of woman whom, in high school, on a day trip to the city, she might have walked past in the street, and wondered if she'd ever become. Her restaurant uniform - dark slacks, dark shirt, no logo, always ironed - made her look serious, and slightly removed from the fray, like an ambassador on foreign soil she called home. Her stubbornness and selfishness had boiled over and reduced to a gentle, warm, unselfish solitude, with an occasional flash in the eyes. When he looked at her and she blushed, he saw a girl who was day by day leaving the last of girlhood behind. Quiet, tall, slender, more muscular than she seemed, confident, slightly aloof, with a strange silence, a woman who didn't seem to be particularly interested in the drama, who was concentrating on something else.
“When does your shift end?”
She blushed. “9.”
“I’ll wait for you.” And he did. He stayed in that seat for hours. Each time Leah had a moment between tables she looked across the room and felt a thrill up and down her spine when she saw him there, still sitting, smiling slightly. But by the time her shift ended, he was nowhere to be found.
You didn’t actually like him, she told herself as she wiped down the tables. You didn’t want him. You don’t even know his name. She didn’t want to acknowledge to herself how much she had enjoyed talking to him, how much those brief minutes had meant to her, how much more she had wanted, and how quickly she had come to want it.
I’m lonely, she realized. And once you start, it's difficult to stop: I’m lonely. Lonely. Lonelylonelylonely. She frowned and scrubbed harder. Okay, you’re lonely, okay, what? Don’t whine. Don’t complain. Work harder. You have things to do, you know that. Warm self hatred spread through her body when she realized she was fastening each of the buttons extra slowly in the pathetic hope that he would miraculously reappear in the extra seconds. I’ll wait for you, she scoffed, trying to cover self hatred with more self hatred. Trying to cover a hole with emptiness. I’ll wait for you.
She finally resolved to leave, did one final sweep of the building, and opened the door. And there he was. Her stranger. Standing quietly at the dark border of the rest of the evening. Waiting for her.
“Well?”
He watched her as she walked towards him. She signaled a passing taxi and opened the door. He looked at her with an expression she couldn’t quite grasp and climbed in. She closed the door and told the driver her address.
“Starting to rain,” she mused, looking out the window. Droplets of water coming together, then apart. She knew how she sounded: calm, confident, disaffected. He couldn’t hear the lump in her throat.
“I just realized,” he said, “I forgot to ask your name.”
“It’s Rachel.” She lied. Why had she lied? She had this fantasy of starting over completely, of not bringing any of her past relationship into this one. I’m going to do it different this time, she thought. This time I’ll stick the landing. This is who I’ll be.
He could tell something wasn’t quite right, but he didn't press it.
She opened the door. She dug up an extra toothbrush from God knows where. They took turns with the shower. Afterwards, he took off his towel. A pause.
“I don’t want to have sex tonight.”
“That’s fine.” A palm on the shoulder. “Can I touch you like this?”
“Yes, that’s fine. That’s - ” a little exhale - “that’s nice.”
Arms taking in arms.
“Good night.”
They slept together that night and many nights afterwards. It's good, she thinks. I like this. I like how your foot and hair and fingers twist in mine. And she wonders if sleeping with another person is one of those things that become banal by the time you're 40. Maybe it's just that it's tonight and it's never been tonight before. But part of her, the only part she always trusts, is certain that even if they were old, even if they had done it a thousand times, a thousand times a thousand times, it would be new, because they would make it new. Like a sunset, or a fried egg, or glass of water after sweating. Waking up next to him. Her new old friend. Recalcitrant stranger ever to be won and lost again. And maybe, after waking, something warm, doughy, with chunky peanut butter toasted. It's good, she thinks. I like this. I could like this - living like this - for a long time.
Later, after breakfast, she asks him, “So what's your name?”, pretending to be joking, but not really, not at all.
“Why?”
“Just. Because.”
“It’s Rachel,” he said, grinning.
"Don't bullshit.”
“It’s John.”
“Actually?”
“No.”
He wouldn’t tell her more than that. This is modern dating, after all: a sadomasochistic zero-shot zero-sum game of who can give away the least information, who can care the least, who can guard their heart the most.
So they didn’t know each other’s names. But the city opened for them. Cities can do that, open like flowers for two people who are falling in love. Despite knowledge, despite fear, everything they pretend to understand. Winter. They took the train, stared at each other in silence, traced each others’ fingers over the holdbars.
Girl who breathes on the frozen glass and writes, “I love you Jeff” into the fog and the boy goes “Who the fuck is Jeff?” and she turns to him and says in deadpan,"You are Jeff."
Boy whose laugh sounds like generous people clapping.
Boy whose laugh sounds like waves coming into shore.
Boy who writes her a letter from across the city and all it says is, “We’ve never been drunk together, we should do it.”
Girl who gets drunk on three shots of some clear-colored alcohol on a fluorescent kitchen counter and all she wants is to tell him exactly what loving him feels like. Better than alcohol. Warmer. Straight to the bones. And I’m pretending to be drunker than I am because I don’t have the courage to say this to you sober. Sometimes I get scared, baby, because I know the world is always changing, and I want what’s between us to stay. I want you to grab my waist and wrap your arm around it.
Sunday. Monday. They went to bed. Monday. Tuesday. They go to bed. In bed they make love. She'd always hated that phrase: “make” “love”. Sex is already so full of sentiment, it doesn’t need sentimentality. But she understood now. Hot white rice in the morning. Baby bring your thigh next to mine. Do your thing the way you do.
Afterwards she covered him in kisses, in questions. Is your name Odysseus? Is your name Ozymandias? Is your name Orpheus? Is your name Odo? He laughed. Your beautiful mind. Your beautiful, brilliant, baffling mind - it’s going to shit. It's all that work you do at night. It's driving you up the walls.
It’s true, she was waking up very early those days, around 3 in the morning, and working on the ansible. He thought this was intentional, that she was exceptionally devoted to science. This was not the case. She was having dreams again. Violent, disturbing dreams with no start or finish. She ran away from them by running into her work.
She saw little nagging worms, thousands of palefaced maggots which wriggled into her ear, and they began to bite at the inside of her ear, and it hurt, and kind of tickled, and they said: Choose us. Choose Nike. Choose the average American woman who owns 27 pairs of shoes. Choose little girls sewing things, little girls in big halls. Choose the little cuts all over their little fingers. Choose life. The girls were bony and serious looking. They were working on dresses, and the dresses were cute, but she didn’t like the pattern, and then she saw them on the ground, and they looked different, more modern, more artistic, torn in this very fashionable way, and dyed in a different color, and finally she realized those colors and patterns hadn’t been intentional, that they were stained with blood.
She saw miles and miles of monocrops, fields and fields of corn, and the fields withering, the corn turning dry; yellow, then brown, rows of people with calloused skin in the fields not speaking to each other, hunched over the failed harvest in the oppressive heat, praying for rain, but then when the rain came it was acidic, and it burned your skin to touch.
She saw flags burning, American flags, and others she couldn’t recognize, and the smoke was acrid and stung her lungs. She dreamt of bombs the size of buildings, she watched them falling like buildings, she watched them just until the moment they hit the ground and then she opened her mouth and screamed and all the pictures were over.
She saw birds slamming into skyscrapers, not knowing that the walls were made of glass, little lives being lost over and over and over.
It was the ansible, she thought. She was prompting it beyond its specifications, she was pushing too hard, beyond the scope of what it had been designed to do, and it was showing her these crazy images. Earth on fire, people on fire. Men hiding in huge gray bunkers. Men screaming in some other language. Children with strange smiles that couldn’t be undone. She tried to forget those children, their smiles, but they came back to her in dreams.
There were a woman that she kept seeing again and again. A stranger. Dirty, matted, with a deranged look in the eyes. Chanting Wunchiled WUNCHILED WUNCHILED WUNCHILED. Something about her face seemed familiar, as if Leah had seen her before, but she couldn’t remember from where.
The future enters into us in order to transform itself in us, long before it happens ..
And underneath all these new nightmares there was one from a long time ago - a young girl wearing white cotton who waited and waited for her, and when she reached out, was gone.
And another girl, older, sitting in the back of the classroom. Who was obstinate and zitty and ugly and rude. Who chewed watermelon gum and stuck it under the table. And didn’t deserve to die.
In the morning, though, things were alright. There was a boy sleeping next to her, and he made it easy to forget about all that. All he had to do was move towards her very slightly, not even touching her, just adjusting his posture so he could look at her a little more, and she felt herself getting wet all over.
Do you want him? Do you want this?
Yes, God. Yes. I look at him and the inside of my mouth goes wet.
Do you want to move in? Do you want him to move in? When?
His face clouded a little when she asked. “I don't think - I don't know if that's the best idea."
"Oh," she said. "Why?"
" I’m going to be moving away soon."
"Why?"
"To travel.”
“Oh,” she said. “Okay.”
He worried she wasn't picking up what he was putting down. “There's so much life to live," he said. "There's so much more to see."
“Okay,” said Leah, unsure of where exactly the conversation was going. She just wanted to have easy mindblowing sex again and again. “Where are you going?”
He shrugged. The destination wasn’t the important part to him. It was the act of seeing, of having seen, and then of leaving, of having left.
“And what is it exactly that you want to see?"
"You figure that part out after you’ve seen things.”
“Okay,” she said, and turned away, watching the sun go down. She saw, underfoot, a strange plant whose name she did not know, and she leaned down to touch it, but did not pluck it out of the ground. She only caressed it, gently, the earnest stem, the fragile leaf. Suddenly she felt a sharp, deep stab of longing for her mommy. And for Noah, the boy with the rarest gift of all - to know what you want without experiencing everything you don't want. To know where you belong before needing to know all the places you don't belong.
You only start asking yourself what you want in a relationship when things are going poorly, when you're upset. When things are going well, you’re on cruise control. You’re eating honey straight from the jar with your index finger and getting tickled and having the time of your life destroying your body in the other normal ways. But you should always be asking yourself these questions. Where is he going, where am I going? Are those destinations compatible? Who is he? What does he want? Who am I? What do I want? You should be asking yourself questions all the time.
Humans evolved to like sugar and can be conditioned to eat it at the expense of all other nutrients. You know him. He’s a chocolate bar. You'll do better overall if you eat other things too. No matter how much you like sweetness, you'll be sick after the third meal of chocolate.
I wish I could tell you that she ate her piece and pushed the plate away. I wish I could tell you that she knew how to let go and leave with grace and poise. But that’s not the case. She wasn’t a lady. She was just who she was. A miserable mouth that wants and wants.
One afternoon on the way home from work, she saw him on the other side of the street with another girl, his hand wrapped around her waist. The two of them were laughing and laughing. Leah watched in pure shock. What could be so funny in the entire world for someone to laugh like that?
Then they leaned in and kissed each other, and she felt something easy and simple break inside her, as if someone had cracked her sternum. Ow.
FUCK YOU OW i fucking hate you bro i never ever ever want to see you again i hope you have fun with this girl she looks nice pretty i hope she's nonconfrontational i hope she blows you in some alley at midnight and it’s so fucking awesome yeeeeeaaaahah i hope you have a good time i want you to be okay really i want you to be so so much more than okay and realistically we are not going to be colinearly okay or even orthogonal so we can be parallel i guess or skew and i can't stomach the idea of never seeing you again so i hope i do see you again even in another life even in another time i hope i can be your friend but i do hope your heart breaks a little first.
She tried not to think about that girl’s face or body, tried not to compare it to her own. “If Cicero hadn’t been born, there would have been another Cicero.” If it wasn’t that girl, she told herself, it would have been another.
I hope you like your life. I hope her name is Leah. I hope you two have something that, if you close your eyes, you can almost convince yourself tastes like love. Go on, go ahead, believe in yourself, see where it gets you.
He didn’t do anything wrong. The two of you never agreed to be exclusive. You never agreed that you were dating. It just takes time. Men settle down when they’re ready to settle down. Everyone eventually wears out. It just takes time. Time doesn't mean personal development or realization. It just means time. If you’re lucky, you’re the last one. Norman Mailer's sixth and final wife.
And it goes both ways. Remember Shevek? He probably had decades of hellos and goodbyes before you. Maybe part of why he wanted you so much, so intensely, why he was so insistent on so much, so fast, was because by then he wanted the real thing, if such a thing exists. The pair bond. What he was hoping for. Even uncertain. He wanted it. He was ready.
(Will I continue to think about Shevek for the rest of my life?!? Even if I never see him again? As if I were going to meet him again on Tuesday?)
Who am I? What do I want? Who is this boy? Beautiful browneyes? She knew him well enough to know that if she asked him the right way … if she told him what she had seen, and maybe cried a little while also getting angry at herself for crying … if she told him that she was going crazy and she didn't know what to do .. that she wanted him to be hers and only hers, pinned to the bed .. he would do it. He would do anything. Even if he turned away from her, in the very act of turning away he would have followed smiling.
Should she stay with him? Should she go? She had no idea. Be lucid, Leah. Be balanced.
Remember: if you're having an extreme emotional reaction, you're projecting. What you saw itself is just information about the world. Omg. Fuck you
Then it occurred to her, suddenly: if the ansible was capable of accessing the past, was it also capable of accessing the present, or the future? Why had the idea never occurred to her before? Immediately she knew that it was possible, that the math would check out. She knew by the feeling. Even with her hands trembling, even sick to her stomach, body drunk on the feeling of betrayal, her mind was filled with a clear, cool intuition, like clean water, like a well which she had only drunk from once before, while making the ansible, and which she knew she could trust.
But it would be wrong. It would be wrong to look into his future or his past. It would be unethical, went a voice in her head. Not just run-of-the-mill prying - a misappropriation of science. But another voice in her head went, “A misappropriation of science? Shut up."
She continued walking the rest of the way home. Quick steps.
I'd just do it once. To see whether we end up together. What his face looks like in five years.
A little bell ringing in the back of the brain. Don't.
She ignored it and began to fiddle with the ansible.
The voice came back again. Don't. Don't. Not because it's wrong, but because if you look within your beautiful heart, you already know what will happen if you stay with him.
No, I don't. Why do people keep saying that I know things? I don't know anything
You know him.
No, I don't.
You know him. You know that if you ask him for something, subtly enough, and often, you can get him to do anything. You know that you'll put pressure on him, whether or not you mean to, just by the fact of who you are. In a few years, you'll have moved in together for real. You'll be happy. You'll keep working. You'll have enough money to move into a bigger apartment, in a better neighborhood, one where the people look happier, or at least more healthy. The bigger apartment will feel empty, and you'll have children to fill the emptiness. You'll be good parents. You'll love them as they grow. They'll show you how the world changes, how it's always changing. And you'll walk around, night after night, alone, in the streets of the city, that changed world, and you'll each be unhappy, because you'll feel like you lost something. But you won't have the words to say it, so you won't, and silence will fill your house and make it unbreathable. So you'll go outside again, and catch a little breeze. And you'll wonder what it would be like to be that breeze. To be lifted.
That night he came back to her. He'd picked up a pizza from a shop next door. She licked the grease from his bottom lip. She didn’t mention what she'd seen, didn't say anything, didn’t act any different. They washed and went to bed.
"Should I turn off the light?"
"You can keep it on," she said.
He paused. A nameless intuitive feeling of wrongness. She liked the lights off while fucking. Or dimmed. Why was she sitting up? And so straight? Why the fear trickling into his chest?
She sensed his fear then, although she didn't share it. It was as if she was looking at him from a great distance. She touched his shoulder then, lightly, wanting to tether herself to him, down to the bed, to their life together, while it was still here. In a few seconds a few hundred moon cycles flashed before her eyes. All those mornings she woke up first and watched him sleep, wanting to touch him, not wanting to wake him. There probably won't be another.
“Lauran,” she said, and his face twisted in shock. Not just confused but caught off guard, not just caught off guard but ambushed, trapped.
"Lauran," she said, slower, gentler. Now she knew his name, although she didn’t know how she knew it. “I've been having these dreams."
And look at his lovely even spine. Look how noble and patient he is even in his defensiveness, in his confusion. Shevek, she knew, would have dismissed her. He would have laughed then, said "you’re so cute", pulled her down to the bed or into some puerile conversation. But Lauran was silent, looking at her. Old browneyes. Attentive brows above them.
"I've been having these crazy dreams," she said, quiet. "I don't know for how long. Years. I don't always remember what they're about. And when I do, what I remember usually isn't the important part. I don't know what's the important part. Maybe the feeling that I'm very, very far from the place I need to be. I don't know why I need to be there, or how to get there, or if I ever will. But the place - even though I haven't ever seen it - the place is so beautiful that I think - I think I have to try to go there. Just the attempt alone would be worth it. I think I have to go. And I think you have to, too."
He looked up. His eyes were wet.
"Don’t - Don't you want this?"
What's "this"? Me? Him? The little apartment with a queen bed with two body-shaped divots in it?
She looked down. He would choose a stranger or a skyline over you, she thought. And I hope he chooses those things, too. Not just over you, but over anyone, if he wants it.
"Yes, of course," she said. "You know me baby. Want want want." He grinned then, despite himself, and she reached out to touch him, his cheek, his forearm. "But if we keep giving ourselves what we want, we'll never get to what we need."
He turned his face away then, so that he didn't have to see her. He didn't say anything. But he moved his spine forward, despite himself, to give her more of himself to touch.
Despite knowledge, despite fear, everything we pretend to understand…
She looked up. He leaned in. She moved her hand down. He moaned slightly. Lord God that moan. She wanted to carry it with her forever.
Lauran.
Yes, he said.
I love you. He covered her mouth with his palm. Don't say that. But I do, she said, and began to cry. He turned her onto her stomach and began to move into her from behind. I love you too, he said as he fucked into the mattress. Oh how I love you.
It was always going to be like this, I guess.
Like what?
Loving. Leaving. Pepperoni.
Probably.
But it was worth it, right. The voice goes higher, ever so slightly, at the last word, the inflection point. It was worth it, right? A question, not a claim.
We need so badly something to believe in. To be told who we are.
Yes. It was worth it. All worth it. It's always worth it.
What's "it"? A tautology? Who cares. Does it matter whether you were a lover or a liar? A grifter or a hero? Does it matter whether we call this thing LOVE or an attachment not carefully chosen, a wooden horse or a gift? You can be grateful for it anyways. You have an idea of how the world should be, and you have a nonzero amount of agency. The English word agency comes from the Latin word agere, meaning "to act", which comes from the word ago, meaning "I do." I do. So do.
i love this i love the stream of consciousness tangents and the fracturedness and style