it's whatever you say it is / split infinity

short fiction no. 3 (TW: SA)

*

The airport is more crowded than I’ve ever seen it. There is a long, brightly lit corridor to my terminal that reminds me of Elliott, because of the summer we were apart when he was researching something about diaspora at an archive in South Carolina, and I would fly into Hilton Head Airport, an airport which was just an airport but somehow felt oppressively beautiful, with its big windows and high ceilings that made it feel like a cathedral. And so the hall at LAX always reminded me of Elliott, of Hilton Head, of spooning pomegranate into each other’s mouths on the balcony of his rented apartment, watching bachelorette parties go by while he smoked and licked blood-pink juice off my chin.

There’s nowhere to sit that won’t feel like sitting directly in the lap of a stranger, so I opt for the floor by the trash cans. Somehow the floor becomes wet—not directly underneath me, but in front of me. A blond businessman barking into his cell phone finds himself on the ground. His fall is stuttering, faltering, bringing him to his knees without him realizing what’s happening. I briefly lower my mask to mouth, are you okay?, and he nods with stoic efficiency, even as his eyes water.

Airport employees come over. There is a conference about the puddle and what is to be done about it, in some hybrid of Spanish and Arabic and English. It is decided that the trash cans behind me are a part of the Committee to Defeat the Puddle and I am asked to move. I stand and watch them slide the trash cans over the puddle, one at each end of the skid. They bow their heads, perhaps in prayer for the obvious paper towel shortage. They move one of the cans, then move it back.

People continue to walk over the puddle unperturbed. I watch every pair of shoes, waiting for a break in gait, and find none. The businessman, then, the only one punished, and probably for the crime of remaining blond into adulthood. My heart lurches. Why are some things so easy for everyone else? Why, for some of us, is everything so hard?

**

Lulu is already standing over the stove, sock-footed, red-cheeked from a run. Matthew sits at the kitchen island, complaining loudly about the reliability of my parents’ Bluetooth speaker while he scrolls through his phone in search of an agreeable playlist.

“Smells good,” I say. “Where are Mom and Dad?”
“At the store,” Matthew says. He speaks as if to be heard over music though none is playing. “Lulu needed basil and scallions.”
“Basil and shallots,” she corrects.
“Why didn’t you go?” I ask him.
He stands up and wraps his arms around her waist, hugging her from behind. “I would miss her too much.”
I make some kind of agreeable noise while my stomach tightens. Our parents come bounding through the doors, arms laden with bags, knee deep in a spirited debate about something I can’t quite make out.
“I thought you guys were just getting basil and scallions,” I say.
“You’re here, you’re here!” our mother says. She drops her bags immediately and envelops me, her hair redolent of ginger and cardamom.
“What were you guys talking about?”
“The election, dear, the election,” she says. She pulls away from me and begins unloading things from bags.
“Dad switched his registration years ago,” I say.
She sighs, wearing an expression of great weariness and profundity. “He forgot to stop being a contrarian, it would seem.”
His eyes glint. “I am no contrarian! I am a gentleman!”
She kisses him on the cheek. “Of course, dear.”
Our father drops his bags on the floor with a thud. He walks over to Lulu and Matthew. “Did you know soup dates back to the Paleolithic period?”
”I did not know that,” Lulu says.
“Lulu, we’re joining in a very proud tradition.”

Over dinner, Matthew and our father get into their usual string of disconnected arguments—over the Talmud (this I couldn’t follow, since Matthew was the only one of us who had a b’nai mitzvah), reality television (our father refers to a particular franchise as a “cancer” on society, which Matthew points out is offensive since one of the women on the show is a cancer survivor), culturally appropriative Halloween costumes (Lulu’s sister wore a lei and a palm skirt, despite Lulu’s family having no native Hawaiian ancestry, which our father railed against for several minutes before Lulu grew withdrawn and our mother plied him with more bread). I would participate spiritedly if the topic ever shifted into one of my fields of mastery, but such things—the gendered practice of historical archival, fiction about self-involved people having ennui in Berlin, the complete unabridged collection of Morgan Kelly’s texts to me since we met three months ago—rarely, if ever, come up.

My father wants soft serve, but Lulu and Matthew do not. My parents and I leave without them. I seldom experience more comfort than I do while sitting in the backseat of my mother’s twenty-year-old Lexus, listening to the low hum of her voice against my father’s, watching their hands play-fight against the radio dial, my father refusing to use the aux cord because it “steals our capacity for happenstance and wonder.”

I order a vanilla soft serve with a chocolate shell. My mother wants the same; my father wants blueberry with peanut butter. My mother sees no reason why these outcomes are mutually exclusive; my father says they have to share. She pretends to be outraged, ordering a swirl, but I see how she looks at him when the ice cream comes. We sit outside to eat it, even though the sun has been down for hours and the patio chairs are sheathed in a faint layer of dew.

“You seem down,” he says. He runs his spoon over the apex of the soft serve, decimating what could have been thousands of tiny frozen homes at the mountain’s peak.
“Who, me?” I ask.
“How are things with, uh…what’s his name? Spencer?”
“Ugh,” I say.
“Ugh?” he asks.
“He wanted to fly me out to the middle of nowhere for a wedding.”
“And you said no, presumably?”
“I barely know him.”
“Right, right, good choice,” he says. He takes another spoonful. My mother protests that she hasn’t gotten any. He takes another, then slides the cup over to her, kissing her lightly on the forehead.
“Anyway, he’s not the issue, he’s like obsessed with me and I don’t even really like him. It’s that other guy. Morgan.”
“Dr. Morgan?”
“He hasn’t finished his dissertation yet, but yes, Dr. Morgan.”
“I thought you were done with him?” my mother asks. Her spoonfuls compared to my father’s, so delicate. “You were saying…something something, nervous system dysregulation…you were saying, he was triggering your anxious attachment style.”
“He was. Is. But…every time I go to break it off, it’s like…there’s always some explanation for his behavior. Like he really does like me, but: he’s been totally underwater with his thesis. Or his sister’s on call, and he has to go watch her kids all weekend. Or his dog is sick. And it’s like, those all seem like fairly legitimate reasons not to call someone.”
“But, you know, functionally it’s all the same,” my father says, unwrapping his scarf and wrapping it around my mother, on whom it is more of a shawl, a plush shield against the elements.
“What’s all the same?” I ask.
“Whatever his reasons are for not calling you, the end result is the same. Insofar as, you know, he just isn’t calling you.”
I lick my spoon until it’s clean, then continue licking it absently.
My father turns to my mother. “Was that harsh, honey?”
“No, no, I think she understands what you mean.”
“So you think I should break things off,” I say.
He sighs. “I don’t know. I think you should be happy all the time. I think a person who, by dint of being in your life, is causing it to be this, this, this constant parade of hand-wringing and self-doubt and bad moods while you’re eating soft serve, this is no kind of companion to have.”
“Companion?” I ask.
“I don’t know what you called it before. A situationship, right, yes, a situationship. I don’t care for that at all.”
“But it’s good that we’re not rushing it,” I say.
“Sure, of course, it’s good,” he says, “in a vacuum, a very good thing that you’re not, you know, saying you’re in love with a man you barely know. But at a certain point, you know, that’s a problem in itself. That all this time has passed, and still! You barely know him.”
My father steals the soft serve back, but only as a means of feeding it back to my mother, who pulls his scarf around her tighter, and leans in.

***

The red light at Doheny and Sunset seems broken, but we’re in no rush. I roll down my window, let my arm hang down the side of Jaden’s ancient Mercedes. Directly across from us, there’s an art gallery I’ve never noticed before. I lean forward to peer through the windows. Two Orthodox Jewish boys are playing pool. Wait, what? That makes no sense. But I squint and it’s the same sight: two boys, impossibly tall and lanky but clearly teenagers, one bending at the waist and trying to aim, the other standing with his hands wrapped around a pool cue. Both wearing wrinkled tallits, peyes framing their faces, yarmulkes at the back of their heads. I read the sign embossed on the window again. It’s definitely an art gallery. I survey the rest of the space, the framed paintings on the walls, and notice a card table on the opposite side of the room. A young mother sits across from her daughter, coloring. A longer dining table next to them, a loaf of half-eaten challah at the center, six goblets arranged at six chairs.

“Oh, right, it’s Friday,” I say.
“What?” Jaden asks. His turn signal has been blinking this whole time, even though there are no cars on any side of us.
“Do you see that? In the gallery?”
“What, the kids playing pool?”
“Yeah, and they’re doing Shabbat, I guess.”
“Oh,” Jaden says. The light finally changes, and he turns left. “Cool.”

Jaden lives down the street from the Roxy in a two-bed with his sister, Jaya; the fraternal twin thing was something we bonded over immediately, although if I lived with Matthew, surely we would have burned any place we shared to the ground. She’s in Austin now, speaking at some tech conference, and we have the place to ourselves. It’s nicer than I imagined, which I have to attribute mostly to her influence. Jaden is always clean, always smelling of fresh linens, but conspicuously absent of jewelry, cologne, any kind of personal affect. I imagined something Batemanesque, if I’m being honest, but it feels like a home.

“Can I get you anything?” he asks. I shake my head. He pours himself something from a can, one of those expensive prebiotic sodas from a health food store in Venice. He turns off all the lights except for the warm yellow one above the dining table, then picks up his laptop from the couch to turn on music.

“Very vibey,” I say.
He laughs, kisses me as a response. It’s jarring, even though I knew it was coming—in addition to root beer, I can taste the spearmint from the gum I saw him surreptitiously chewing in the car.
“Sorry, sorry,” I say. I’m pulling away before I realize I’m doing it, the words leaving my mouth of their own volition.
“Don’t apologize,” Jaden says, almost reflexively. “What’s wrong?”
“I just. Can we just sit and talk for a second?” I ask. “I don’t think it’s ever escalated this quickly.”
He laughs. “Sure, sure.”
We sit on the couch. It becomes very obvious, with his face illuminated by the fractal glow of the chandelier on the other side of the room, that he is the most conventionally attractive man to ever kiss me—clean, symmetrical, soft where I want him to be, hard where it’s called for.
Elliott, with the longest lashes I’ve ever seen, the nicotine yellow nails. Morgan, green-eyed like sea glass, the dangerously crooked row of bottom teeth. The parade of lesser lovers before them, the pocked skin and pitiful haircuts, the lying about the heights, the addictions and the failings, and how I loved them anyway. How I would have stepped in front of any sword for their imperfections, how I have pored over my own reflection and found myself inadequate next to them, even when I didn’t deserve it, because of how often my heart asked after them, begged for their touch, how easily I killed myself for it. When I was a child, unchosen and unkissed, I fretted endlessly over whether I would still like how boys look up close. First kiss, 17, nose too big for his face, head too big for his body, and he was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen, even if I don’t remember his name. I let Jaden kiss me again, and it’s impossible to feel pleasure. Impossible to close my eyes, staring at him at this whisper distance, trying to catalog it for later, so I can tell Vivian and my family and all the rest of them what it was like.

****

Vivian invites all of us out to the bar on Halloween. The worst of her symptoms have passed, the antibiotics are working, she’s feeling better, she’s dressed as a character from an important art film that came out six months ago that I didn’t see. I help her with the blood splatter, show her where to hold her plastic knife for the most visually compelling photos.

“You good?” I ask.
“Distracted.” She drops her hands, still holding the fake knife by its hilt. “I told you Thomas is coming.”
“Thomas, Thomas, Thomas…”
“We’ve gone on four dates, and then I couldn’t see him for a few weeks because of the health stuff. And he said he ‘might swing by’ tonight, and it would be the first time I’ve seen him in a month.”
“Right, right. Of course. Thomas!”
She sighs and pulls out her phone to show me a picture of him. He corresponds roughly to my idea of what a guy named Thomas would look like. Vivian does the usual song and dance about how much better he looks in real life, but even with my most generous interpretations, it’s hard to imagine feeling any kind of depth of feeling for this Thomas person. It is an overwhelming relief to feel nothing for Thomas, to know that after tonight I won’t think of him again until the next time Vivian mentions him, and my heart goes out to Vivian, her eyes flickering toward the sidewalk, waiting for his arrival. Then again, surely Vivian feels the same way about Morgan, baffled by my preoccupation with him, incapable of holding information about him in her mind for more than a few minutes. My pity transfigures into intense envy. Why did I have to be born with whatever neural receptors cause me to fixate on this man? If it wasn’t him, would it have been Thomas? Some other Basic Unremarkable? Was there another option—was there a version of me who found none of this interesting at all?

It’s mostly Vivian’s friends at the bar, mainly because I don’t have a lot of friends besides Vivian. Matthew and Lulu make a brief appearance, dressed as a cow (Matthew) and a farmer (Lulu), but they have to be up early in the morning to continue their marathon training and leave after half an hour. I stand by Vivian like a sentry, maintaining conversation on her behalf when I can tell her focus is drifting to the entrance.

“Did he say what he was going to dress up as?” I whisper when the angel/devil duo we’re talking to drift away in search of a drink.
“I don’t even know if he’s doing a costume,” she says, running her fingers along the edge of her skirt.
“Hey,” I say. She continues avoiding my gaze. “Hey.” Finally she meets my eyes.
“It doesn’t mean anything. You know, if he doesn’t come,” I say. “There’s so much stuff going on tonight. And he just might not feel up to going out.”
“No, I know,” she says, her eyes glazing over and shift over my shoulder again. Liquid pools and quivers above her waterline, where two hours ago I was gently pressing a tiny white pencil. She won’t be able to get the glitter off her forehead for weeks. She is so beautiful it almost causes me physical pain.
“Anyway,” she says. “What’s going on with, uh. I don’t know. Any of the guys who aren’t Morgan?”
“Ugh.”
“That last guy was hot, hot, hot. What was his name again?”
“Jaden. Medium kisser.”
“Only medium?”
“It felt like a stage kiss.”
“You’ve never been on a stage in your life,” Vivian says.
“Yeah, but you have. It was…technically proficient? And probably looked great from the outside? And ultimately just felt like a means to an end?”
“Jesus,” she says. “If someone said that about me—”
“Yeah, I know,” I say. “I’m seeing him tomorrow.”
“Jaden?”
“No, Morgan. We were supposed to do dinner on Sunday, but he rescheduled.”
“So it’s still him, huh.”
“Unfortunately. Still the 1 seed.”
Vivian’s phone buzzes. She drops it and picks it up, drops it and picks it up again.
“Good thing you don’t have to perform an invasive surgery right now,” I say.
“Ha, ha, ha,” she says. “Oh. It’s him. He’s…he’s not coming. He’s, um. He’s sick.”
“Okay, well, then that’s a good thing that he’s staying home, right?” I ask. “It’s not safe for you to get sick right now. Not worth the risk.”
“Yeah,” she says, her eyes still fixed on the screen. “Unless he’s lying.”
“He’s not lying,” I say. “Viv, are you listening? He’s not lying. Or he is. And he’s a huge piece of shit and it’ll be really easy to get over him.”
“I know you’re right,” she says. She hands me her phone; I’m the One With The Big Bag tonight. “I just feel so stupid. You’ve known me long enough…it’s not usually like this. But it’s like…I feel like a child. Like a teenager, maybe? Or no, a child, even younger. Like my need to be around him and to…I don’t know, to win? The need is so primal and visceral in a way that I don’t normally experience with men. And that feels like a bad omen.”
“So you’re gonna break things off, then?”
“I don’t think I can.”
“You’re the strongest person I know, you can do anything.”
“I can’t do this,” she says. “If he won’t love me, I think he has to ruin me. I think that’s my only way out of this.”
We both turn to watch the sidewalk.

I wipe a film of cold sweat on my forehead and murmur half-intelligibly that I’m going to the bathroom. The overhead light is red. The walls are also red, and covered in graffiti, half of it in permanent marker or spray paint, half carved in with pen knives and house keys. I grip the sides of the sink and look down at my hands, warped and discolored by the glowing bulb above me. I wash my hands, then wash them again, slamming my palm against the faucet over and over, though the water just barely trickles out, every time.

*****

“I’m glad we’re finally doing this,” I say. I allowed Morgan to cook everything, bit my tongue about my arbitrary and arcane dietary preferences. I consider reengaging with my old therapist, Elaine, just to tell her about this breakthrough.
“So am I,” he says, pouring each of us a glass of red. “I’m sorry I’ve been so…you know. It’s been a crazy couple weeks.”
“No, of course, I totally get it,” I say. All of the food is, at last, on the table, and he sits next to me, leaning in to kiss my cheek.
“You know, it’s really remarkable how…easygoing you are about all this,” he says.
“I’m really not.”
“What do you mean? Sure you are.”
I laugh haltingly. “I don’t tell you every thought I have in my head.”
“Well. Of course not.”
I can tell I’m supposed to say something, but I down my wine instead.
“Another?” he asks. I nod. He refills my glass.
“Do you…um. Do you want to know more of the thoughts in my head?” I ask.
He sets the bottle down, takes a sip, swirls it around behind his teeth. “I guess I want you to tell me…whatever you feel comfortable telling me.”
“Would you want to know bad things?” I ask. “You know, if I felt comfortable telling you?”
“Um. I guess so. If that would make you feel more comfortable, for me to know those things. Are there bad things you want me to know?”
“No, no,” I say. “I mean, I haven’t done any bad things. And nobody’s ever done any bad things to me. So. I guess we’re good there.”
“Okay,” he says.
I drink more. “I mean, there was this one thing with Elliott. I’ve told you about Elliott, I think, my ex-boyfriend, the only really long serious one. There was this one thing with him. Or kind of a thing that happened a lot, I guess.”
“Okay,” Morgan says. His expression is unreadable.
I drink again. “It’s stupid. He just used to. I mean, it’s whatever, really, it was fine. I made him use condoms, and he hated it. So he would…you know, a bunch of times he just, like, took them off in the middle. You know, when we were having sex.”
“…Oh?”
“Yeah, like I said, it’s not that bad, I mean, it was annoying, because I asked him to stop—”
“You told him to stop and he kept doing it?”
“Well, don’t say it like that.”
“Sorry,” Morgan says. He pushes his glass away, moves his chair to be closer to me. His body is radiating heat from all the time spent standing over the stove, the oven. “I don’t know any other way to say it. It sounds…I’m sorry, I don’t want to put words in your mouth, or speak over your—”
“No, it’s fine, what are you trying to say?”
Morgan rubs his eyes. “I mean…isn’t that…that’s assault, I think. That’s, like. That’s technically…I mean, not technically, God. I’m not trying to…that’s assault. It sounds like your ex-boyfriend assaulted you.”
“God, you sound like Vivian,” I say.
“Your friend Vivian agrees?”
“Yeah, but she hated Elliott, she was always…I mean, I regretted telling her as soon as I told her. I regretted telling her all of it. She took it all out of context. Like the time he screamed at his sister on the phone while I was in the car, like, he called her a bitch for not filling up his gas tank after driving it.”
“Are you serious?”
“Yeah, I mean, he yelled a lot. But never at me, it was only at other people. And the condom thing, I mean, yeah, it was annoying, because of all the infections—”
“He was giving you STDs?”
It feels like Morgan hasn’t blinked in minutes. “No, no, not like that. I mean, like, I was getting…sorry, this is so TMI for the dinner table…I mean, like, other, you know…it’s like, I don’t know, I was allergic to him or something, and so…it was just easier for me and my body to use condoms, but he didn’t like them…and you know, sometimes he would pay for the medication—”
“Sometimes,” Morgan says. Now he stands from the table and starts pacing. “Sometimes, he would pay?”
I sink back into the chair. “It’s really—”
“I think you were in an abusive relationship,” he says.
My neck gets hot. “That’s really not your place. To say that. That’s not what I’m saying at all. I was just giving examples, of things that I could tell you about my past, and I’m trying to explain that they’re not even as bad as other things I could have said.”
Morgan sits back down and breathes deeply. He covers his face with his napkin, then drops it back into his lap. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I’m not trying…you’re right. It’s not my place. But…it sounds like this guy…was being abusive, I’m sorry, there’s no other way around it. None of that shit should have happened to you, he should have…he was taking advantage of you. He was an asshole, like an unrepentant asshole, and that shouldn’t have happened to you, it shouldn’t happen to anybody.”
I’ve never seen Morgan express an opinion this strong, in all the weeks I’ve known him. The depth of his feeling indicates that he has to be right, but that can’t be true. Elliott was a chain-smoker, an occasional drunk, a profoundly reckless and self-involved person, but he wasn’t an abuser. Was he? No, I would have known if I was being abused. I would have known if I’d been assaulted. Surely I hadn’t been assaulted, over and over again, and not known it? The medical visits, of the times he came with me, the more frequent times he didn’t. The screaming at his sister his parents his friends his colleagues, the screaming at everyone but me that was so often still in my orbit, ringing in my ears like tinnitus, the crying that came afterward, the “this is not who I am” and the profuse apologizing. But I missed him. In the months after I left, I missed him constantly, achingly, like a phantom limb. Was that sick and perverse, to miss abuse? Was that really what it was? Morgan isn’t that much older than me, not really, how could he know so much more about my own life than I did?
“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t…thank you for telling me all that,” Morgan says. “That’s all I should have said. I’m not trying to…insert myself. Into your life and your, you know, your journey. I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay.”
“No, it’s not okay, and I know you don’t think it’s okay, you’re rattled, and you were right, we should tell each other…more stuff,” he says. “Look, I know…I know set kind of a…I don’t know, a fucked up precedent, by trying to…keep you at arms’ length, I guess. But you should feel like you can tell me these things.”
“Okay,” I say. He embraces me, and he is so strong and so solid, I think of an expression from a book I love, a wall hewn of living rock.
“And you can tell me those kinds of things, too,” I say, mostly muffled by his sweater. He doesn’t say anything back.