this goes / beyond me / beyond you

short fiction no. 2

*

“This would be a beautiful place for a wedding,” Spencer says.
“You’re not wrong,” I say. The clearing is surrounded on all sides by white wooden archways wreathed in multicolored roses. A few yards away from us, a man kneels in the grass.
“Oh my God, is he proposing?” I ask. We step closer and see that he’s on both knees, bending to take Polaroids of the citronella.
“I would’ve filmed it,” Spencer says. I nod solemnly.

We walk through the roses and the herbs and arrive at what appears to be the botanical garden’s equivalent of Versailles. We sit on a railing and take in the white marbled splendor, the predators’ heads carved into the stonework, the sun shimmering against the brick-colored tile of the courtyard. Two girls who could be our children race by. The older one has her hand covering the mouth of the younger one while the parents trail behind defeatedly.

Spencer talks about a work trip he took to some tiny eastern European village where the townspeople insisted he pray at the altar of some pagan idol in return for profound wisdom. He didn’t buy into it at all, but as soon as he pressed his head to the feet of the idol, he suddenly remembered the phone number of his childhood best friend by heart. High on adrenaline, he dialed the number—his old friend’s landline—and the mother answered. Her son had died the previous spring.

Spencer was moved by the narrative arc on principle, and let the story end there. I knew that Morgan would have wanted to know more information, would have allowed the revelation of this man’s passing to spark some kind of dark night of the soul, some three-act structure through which he could pass and become more present or more compassionate or at the very least more interesting. I was troubled by the fact that I was comparing Spencer to Morgan, but at least I wasn’t comparing anyone to Elliott anymore.

**

After five days of not speaking, likely only noticed by me, I crack and send Morgan a picture of the sunrise out Vivian’s window. I hope it will carry some psychic anxiety—if it isn’t my window through which I’m watching the sunrise, then whose is it? Surely it’s a man, maybe even a taller and more well-endowed man than Morgan, whose sexual proficiency has kept me awake until the dawning of a new day—but at the very least I hope it will trigger an exchange longer than two messages. He replies right away with a picture of the sunrise out his own bedroom window—kindred spirits, he captions it, with an emoji of the sun—and I can see in the corner that his laptop is open and he’s writing, which means that neither of us is up this early due to the sexual appetites of phantom strangers.

“My new nutritionist is convinced I have leaky gut,” Vivian says. She’s still in downward dog. I’m sitting cross-legged on my mat.
“And you agree?” I ask. “I mean, that’s basically what you’ve been saying for the last six months.”
“I think so. I’m waiting to get some test results for it.”
“They can test for that?”
“Not, like. Not specifically. But there’s a bunch of bacteria that you can test for.”
“So what happens if you test positive?”
“I have to take like a gajillion antibiotics. Supposedly it makes you feel worse before you feel better, though. Because of the Herxheimer thing.”
“The what?”
“When you take antibiotics for, like, an overgrowth. When the cells die off, your symptoms get worse for a while. Because all the toxins get released into your body before they can, like, I don’t know, get purged, I guess.”
“That sucks. For how long?”
Vivian finally swings her body forward into a plank. “I don’t know. A few days? A week? Not that bad.”
“Is there anything you can do to, like, counteract it?”
“I don’t know. I think you just have to let it all die.”
Vivian lowers from the plank onto her stomach, arching her back, directing her gaze to the ceiling fan, slowly spinning.

***

I go back to the trail that Morgan showed me. It’s a preemptive reclamation of sorts, although my primary goal—move my body so I think about something else—is impeded by the memories I already assign to the brush and flora. This bush is where Morgan made me stop so he could tie my shoe. This bench is where he brushed an eyelash off my cheek. Revolting. I hike faster.

I have my phone on Do Not Disturb, which means I am checking it every fifteen minutes to see if he has disturbed me. I know his class schedule by now, and he is on an hourlong break between seminars. Sixty minutes, three apps on which we could communicate, seemingly infinite ways in which he could be asking after me but is not. I look at his profile and run my thumb longingly over his icon. A photo, in profile, that I took.

The men in front of me walk at a pace so slow I am forced to confront the possibility of their physical impairment. At every break in the weeds, they take out their phones to photograph the valley, spread out like some unruly quilt before us. There are many men, too many to be casually gathered like this. My heart in my throat, not the progressive she claims to be.

The men pause to talk to a loose, additional man. I seize the opportunity to pass them, breaking into a jog as I round a corner. I come upon the rusty staircase blanketed by fallen leaves that my father and I always used to rest when we did this loop in my childhood. There is a sign on the railing: BEWARE OF RATTLESNAKES. I slow my pace, but walk fast enough to avoid closing the gap between me and the men. I indulge the sick fantasy of a rattlesnake bite, of collapsing to the dusty earth and crying for help, of informing Morgan what has befallen me, of testing his devotion. What devotion? He hasn’t called in days.

At the end of the hike, I open one of my burner accounts to check on Elliott. In the last few weeks, his life has taken an almost improbable turn for the better. An essay he wrote for a small-time literary magazine has gone viral and has been picked up by the Atlantic. His breathless updates about his physical fitness journey have borne six-pack abs and a vastly improved mile time. He moved out of the apartment he shared with roommates and so intensely despised into a sun-drenched studio in a better neighborhood. It seems that since leaving him, everything he complained about while we were together has been resolved. His manic social media posts have become a bastion of positivity. Had I been an anchor, then? Or was I a miracle?

****

Spencer sends me a three-minute voice memo that I listen to while cooking dinner. Most of it is nervous and at times unintelligible filler. The thesis seems to be that he wants me to fly to Wyoming with him for his sister’s wedding in a month. This after two dates and one dry, tongueless kiss. I listen to the message several times trying to formulate an out, then realize the wedding is the weekend before a draft of my thesis is due. I reply with a voice memo of my own, only hitting send when I feel I’ve successfully feigned the appropriate amount of disappointment.

I text Matthew a summary of the voice message, to which he replies by calling me right away.
“I’m cooking,” I say.
“What are you cooking?”
“What I’m always cooking.”
“Boo.”
“You know it’s a habit of highly successful people to—”
“Boooooo. So you’re not going to the wedding with this guy?”
“Imagine me trying to explain that to Mom and Dad.”
“Rabbit, we’re 29. We don’t have to answer to them anymore.”
“I really hate it when you call me that.”
“Well, then maybe you should stop eating rabbit food, Rabbit.”
“It’s called being healthy.”
“It’s called having an eating dis—”
“What are you doing for dinner tonight?” I ask. Matthew sets the phone down horizontally so I can see a second set of legs. “Lulu’s cooking.”
“Hi, Lulu,” I say. She leans down and waves with an enthusiasm I do not deserve.
“She’s making eggplant parm.”
“Lucky you.”
“I can’t believe that guy tried to fly you out to white Mecca.”
“Yeah, well. Are you going home for Dad’s birthday?”
“Yeah, I got off work. Are you?”
“I think so. I just probably can’t stay all weekend, I have a meeting with my advisor early Monday morning,” I lie.
“Okay, well. See you then, I guess. Love you, Rabbit.”
“Love you, Ducky. Bye, Lulu.”

When I hang up, there’s an unread text on my phone.

Heyyyy sorry for being MIA, it was like back to back undergrad meltdowns all day. Sunday should work for dinner. I’ll cook. :)

The water on the stove boils faster. My wine lasts longer on my tongue. Under such circumstances, even Spencer could be beautiful.

*****

Vivian lives on the way to the airport. I stop by her apartment with a heating pad, a cold pack, a box of ginger tea, a bag of lemon candies. She texts me that the door is unlocked, I should let myself in. I slip my shoes off and find her on the couch, as dead-looking as I’ve ever seen a living person.

“Jesus, Viv.”
“You sure know how to make a girl feel pretty.”
I laugh despite myself. “I’m sorry.”
“No. Please. Laugh. It can’t be all death and gloom in here.”
“Isn’t the expression doom and gloom?”
“Relax, grad school,” she says. “I can’t keep my eyes open for more than ten seconds without vomiting.”
I go to her kitchen and open a bottle of water. I cradle the back of her head in my hands and feed it to her like a baby lamb.
“Thank you,” she croaks when I finish. Her eyes blink shut again.
“So this is the die-off,” I say.
“It was worse yesterday,” she says. “I couldn’t stop vomiting.”
“No more vomiting?”
“No more vomiting.”
“Well, that’s great news.”
“Still nauseous. Still seeing stars.”
“That’s less great. But still. Orifices closed for business, at least?”
“You have quite a way with words,” she says.
“Is it tiring you out to talk? Should I just sit here in silence?”
“No, no, I need to talk to someone besides my little people.”
“Your little people? Am I missing something?”
“When I woke up I wasn’t dizzy yet, like I could still look at screens,” she says. “I was playing that life simulation game. Duplicata. Have you heard of it?”
“No.”
She sits up a little on the couch, though she keeps her eyes closed. She peels the compress off her forehead, and I run to the kitchen to dampen it again. She thanks me upon my return, then continues explaining.
“It was big when we were kids. You make a fake person, give them a fake house, send them to work their fake job. Normally I just use it to do, like, landscaping and interior design, but for some reason recently I’ve been really into actually playing it.”
“What’s the point, then? How do you win?”
“Dealer’s choice, I guess,” she says. “You can try to get to the top of your career, or make a bunch of money, or have a bunch of kids, or become immortal.”
“You can become immortal in the game?”
“Yeah, but it’s, like, random chance. Like you can’t force it, your Dupe—that’s what they call the fake people in the game, the Dupes—they just have to be randomly selected to participate in a clinical trial at the hospital.”
“There’s a hospital? They can get sick?”
“Yeah, I mean, they have fake names for all the diseases. But yeah, if you make it to old age without, like, getting hit by a car or murdered or something, you usually get some kind of disease that takes you out in the end.”
“You can get murdered in this game?”
Vivian laughs. “Shit gets crazy.”
“But the kids don’t get sick, then.”
“No, the kids get spared,” she says. “Unless you cheat it.”
“There are cheats to fuck with the kids?”
“There’s all this controversy around it. The creators have tried to shut down the mods that make kids get sick, or get killed, or get beat by their parents. But people keep finding workarounds.”
“Why the fuck would you create a world, on purpose, where kids are getting sick and killed and beat by their parents?”
“I don’t know, man. Kinda sounds like a question for God.”

Vivian opens her eyes and stretches her arms out, clenching and unclenching her fingers like a toddler. I lift the water bottle and she nods. Again, I take the nape of her neck into my sweaty hands, pouring the water gently down her throat. I check my watch. If I leave now, I’ll barely make my flight.