ROMANS AND REVELATIONS
This one was influenced (more than usual) by Goya's brilliant works and especially his series called "The Black Paintings," in which he conveyed his fear of his own insanity. But the idea originally came to me when I was listening to You Were Meant For Me by Jewel, a beautiful song about loss and regret and our inability to move on when someone so necessary to our lives leaves us, irreversibly. I thought, "What if the guy in the song left her, but not in the way she thinks? What if the story she's telling were not about regret but denial?"
The tale which then manifested is about a middle-aged woman who undergoes a VR simulation on her "one-year anniversary" session with her psychologist as a part of his last ditch efforts to help her accept the tragedy in her life - the loss of her loved. To help put and end to her denial and heal her dissociative amnesia, her fugue state.
Though I'd like to consider it a literary work, it takes place in the near future, when Virtual Reality technology is used as therapy; combining mapped-out synapses, scanned images and our own subconscious to recreate simulated experiences that are indistinguishable from the real world. No more polygons. No more geometry. As Hilly says in the story that's "sooo Millenial."
Pores and flesh. Sight, sound and smell. VR as a therapeutic tool which reflects a consistent, lucid reality that feels not at all like a simulation. Born from the raw ego of the subconscious, just as it is in our dreams and nightmares. The first 20 pages are pasted below.
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ROMANS AND REVELATIONS
The line between memory and imagination gets blurry after forty-eight hours - for most people. That’s what Doc Keilani says. That means when you remember any given experience you had two days ago, you start adding to it with your imagination without even knowing. Changing details, deleting others. What was said and heard. Swapping it out for what you wish you’d said. What you wanted to hear. Just two days and that’s for normal people. You have to modify those numbers when you’ve been drinking steadily for thirteen years.
The drive down to Lake Forest to see my therapist is full of distractions. Grass-stained folding chairs worn as backpacks. Fathers and sons and soccer moms waiting at crosswalks. Their hands on their kids’ shoulders after scrimmages, sticky Gatorade bottles clutched within scraped knuckles.
I see them in my peripherals but try not to look. If I look I’ll stare. I’ll look for the expectation in their Sunday morning faces, of tossing the car keys up on the butcher block, settling down to NFL highlights and afternoon dollar-beers from Costco as their lakefront condos return to the comfortable static of pre-adolescent noise. If I look, I’ll covet their expectation of that noise – the background hubbub they take for granted or perhaps even resent.
If I don’t look I don’t have to resent them as I picture my own residence - silent when I arrive and silent when I leave - and that’s better, because these petty resentments make me feel like a small green troll under a bridge.
So keep it in the peripheral. Why torment yourself with details? Better to watch the segmented digits on my Tesla’s interface inch towards noon, when I’ll allow myself the first drink of the day. It used to be 4pm and before that sunset when I’d take the first sip. Not sure when that changed.
Keilani, my therapist, a man whose engaging green eyes can be distracting for a woman who is only married according to her own opinion, asked me to move our session up an hour for this special occasion at his home office situated in a quiet retirement community where sandbar-sized speed bumps discourage you from driving over ten miles an hour every thirty feet.
When I asked him the reason for the change – why we had to meet earlier, he said in a how-could-you-forget tone: “Because it’s our anniversary!”
Not just a non-sequitur but a ludicrous answer. Anniversary? I’ve met with him nine times, once a week since Roman and the girls left me. Since Kaiser let me go. Nine weeks of psychiatric progress is nothing to celebrate. I can’t imagine what kind of breakthrough he thinks we’ve achieved and using the word in reference to my estranged marriage to Roman would only be cruel. I remember the exact date I got married. I remember the hour. It wasn’t today.
The raw-faced octogenarian at the security post beside the drop-bar gate hands me my waste-of-paper permit that nobody’s going to check for, one which allows me to park for an hour in a complex wherein most residents don’t authorize guests save for once a year.
But Keilani does. With his IKEA-bought serenity fountains out-front, his Miyagi-like succulents in the garden he tends religiously. K always has someone coming or going into the office off his back patio.
And as we cross paths, trampling our doctor’s grass, one client leaving as another arrives, we mental cases nod at each other with equal parts suspicion and empathy: What happened to you and who in the hell said you could meet with my therapist? Did nobody tell you this is my therapist?!
Do we both feel possessive as we pass each other or is it just me? This young man with the patchy stubble, loose ponytail, open-toe sandals - we wouldn’t dare communicate, but I doubt it. More likely, the only patients who get possessive about their therapist are the ones who don’t socialize with anyone but their therapist during the week.
Usually when I pull up, he’s either watering or primping his eggshell-fed roses, his small olive lips pursed in concentration. But not today. Which means he’ll be waiting inside, Joni Mitchell accompanying the gurgle of his little misting fountain and bonsai tree, the Tao Te Ching open on his lap.
I pull the screen open.
Fountain, yes. Mitchell, yes. Incense crumbling into a scent of cedar. Let’s take a moment to breathe in the perfection of this sight, sound and smell combo and picture a grandfather clock droning the hour bell at noon. But no Keilani. Instead, a noisemaker twitches across the threshold of the open doorway to the living room like a paper hot dog, with a honk.
The adorable little man follows into frame, his dorky golf polo tucked loosely into his cargo shorts with the safari belt. Is dressing awkward intentionally disarming or would he be wearing this on his day off?
My cappuccino steams in his free hand. “Happy Anniversary.”
“Thanks.” I hook an index finger into the porcelain. “But what does that mean?”
“It’s been a year, my dear - lotsa progress.”
“It’s been nine weeks.”
A humble shake of the head. “Nah. I’ll explain.” He ushers me through the door. “Follow me into the living room. Gotta surprise for ya.”
More incense burns on little pentagon platforms in an otherwise empty living room. Pine. Marigold. Lavender.
“What is this? Where’s your furniture - are you moving?”
“No, this is just for today. Just for you.”
In two corners of the room’s ceiling, tiny flat screen tv’s - little monitors no bigger than Rubik’s Cubes - blink green lights, angled down in my direction. In the middle of the tile floor: two parts of a black leather wireless headset - big headphones and the other looks like it goes over your eyes.
“You moved out your furniture for this...surround sound?”
“It’s a virtual reality sim - the best, in fact. Sit down.”
He assumes the lotus position on a yoga mat and I follow suit across from him, Indian style, sipping. Immediately
I can feel pressure in my chest building from the caffeine. Beginning of heart palpitations. How long I’ve been in this pattern? Cappuccino as my uppers, Pinot Noir as my downers. “VR, huh? We gonna play some video games to celebrate our ‘anniversary’? A little Donkey Kong?”
My tight-lipped smile delights him, as if he knows it only appears once a week. “Not Donkey Kong, no. In fact, I don’t think anyone outside of this old folks home remembers what a ‘Donkey Kong’ is.”
“Come on, what’s goin’ on?”
“It’s a simulation. There’s been some recent success in Norway using VR as a therapeutic tool. Phobias and such. This machine…” I follow his gaze to the little monitors. “It’s connected by Bluetooth to the computer in the bedroom. Tracks your movements without any wires. It’s called the HTC Enigma X9.”
“Sounds like a car. So you bought this gadget and moved out your furniture for me - for this one session?”
“That and to play video games.” Another white smile crinkles his green eyes. “For Maritza, when she comes over.”
Maritza is his granddaughter - the only family he speaks of without his gaze dropping to the floor.
“So I put it on and what happens?”
“In a minute. We have all the time in the world.”
K doesn’t look at the clock during our sessions. In fact he can’t because he keeps no timepieces visible in the room and asks that I leave my phone in my car. Sometimes our hour together bleeds into ninety minutes, sometimes more. This feels marvelously liberating in my own session and infuriating when I’m waiting in my Tesla for open-toed Ponyboy Curtis to finish up his own allotted “hour.”
“So any calls this week?”
“Just Mom. 3pm every day, same time. Always asks the same - ‘have you gone outside?’”
“Have you?”
“To check the mail.”
“Good.”
My mood sours and I want him to know it before the pressure builds up behind my eyes again. I set my jaw and focus on the grout between the tiles, communicating my resentment at being placated. There’s nothing “good” about a thirty-eight-year-old woman who buys groceries online and only leaves the condo once a day to check the mail. One of his neighbors, clicking out an inch at a time on a walker to the mailbox, sure, but not -
“I don’t like this, K. What is this horseshit about anniversaries?”
“It’s been a year. You should feel -”
“It’s been nine weeks. Nine sessions.”
“No, Natalie. You started seeing me once a week exactly one year ago today. And that was exactly four days after Roman and the girls…. ‘left’ you.”
“Now why’d you say it like that? Like I’m wrong, is that it? I’m wrong about how long I’ve been in therapy and wrong about Roman and the girls leaving?”
“Roman and the girls did leave you, just not in the way you think.”
K’s been at this game a long time. He’s careful not to let his eyes crease with pity.
The client who walks through the door. That’s how he puts it. If I don’t initiate further, he’ll let our pregnant pause pass and ask how I spent my days this week. What books I’m reading. Are they the same yellowed, crispy pages of the paperbacks Roman left, dogeared and warped from the watery acid of his fingerprints? The novels my great big lug of a husband read over and over the way other men watch a favorite movie? How did I burn up my daylight this week?
The client who walks through the door means Keilani doesn’t ‘pick up where we left off.’ He keeps the continuity of our sessions in his head but doesn’t stipulate a goal for the next episode. He knows I haven’t socialized with anyone but him since I got fired and Roman drove off with the girls, frustrated by a companion whose answer to every problem was to pull a cork. Fixing that is his agenda but I set the pace. I determine the speed of progress.
“Then ‘how’ did they leave me? I mean, driving off in his Jetta and communicating through text isn’t really something I could misinterpret, is it?”
“What does it feel like? When you picture that moment - memory or imagination? For myself, older I get, the more they feel like the same thing. When I look back on my son’s graduation ceremonies, twenty-something years ago, it seems very much like the images in the dream I had last night. You wanna know what the dream was?”
“Go ahead.”
“I was sitting in the cafeteria, back at Wagner Jr. High - eighth grade. At a table by myself. There was a lot of noise. All the other tables were filled with kids. And I looked down and saw this oily slice of square pizza on my tray - the kind with little pools of orange grease on it - next to some tater tots and ketchup. As I started to eat it, little pepperoni discs came flying in from one direction. ‘Pizza-face,’ I heard some of the boys and girls saying under cupped hands. Like they were throwing their voice. I told you I had terrible acne, right?”
“Kids are cruel.”
Coming from anyone else this story would sound like an After School Special. Hell, it probably was a Lifetime Original and somebody had that line: Kids are cruel, Janice. Cue the pan flute. I stare at the deep pockmarks along both of K’s cheek bones. No reason for me to feel embarrassed, since he’s signaling for me to do so.
“When I woke up, I knew it couldn’t have happened like that. Nothing so dramatic but something like that did happen. I blocked out the exact transcript of events. I’ve done that with most memories of Jr. High. So the dream was a mix of memory and imagination.”
The fast track to getting your client to trust you is the casual admission of your own shameful truths - your own failings and humiliations. The unspoken value of these unsolicited admissions is that while Keilani is sworn to keep my secrets, I don’t have to keep any of his.
A disarming confidence game intended to give me the feeling that not only is it safe for me to be honest, but that I actually have the advantage when confiding in him. It’s occurred to me of course that he could be making it all up.
“So, Roman leaving - when you picture it, does it feel like something that happened, or something you fabricated?”
The last word infuriates me. I nearly spill my cappuccino. “Obviously if I ‘fabricated’ it, I wouldn’t be sitting here on the floor with you this morning. I’d be making French toast for Miranda and Hilly while telling my husband about the ‘really weird dream’ I had last night where he drove off with the kids, never to be seen again!”
“That one’s really clear for you, isn’t it? The French toast. You made that for breakfast every Sunday, right?”
“Eleven years, since Hilly was two. It’s her favorite.”
“Can you compare the two, side by side in your mind? Try it. Picture the French toast in a little Microsoft window in your mind on the left, and the Jetta driving away in another window on the right. See if there are any differences.”
I close my eyes, not surprised that the black is tinted an angry red. If I stay here too long, without distraction in the dark, what I see will become texture and the pressure behind my eyes will burst forward.
The Jetta driving away happened, I know it did, but Keilani’s entrapped me here because we both know it’s not something I saw but something I envisioned the first time I got Roman’s text that said he wasn’t coming back. But the other window. The one on the left.
Oh god.
I can feel the spatula’s half-melted plastic handle in my grip as I press soft bread into the bubbling pan, the tool permanently warped from Milly’s first try making her favorite Sunday breakfast.
I can hear the girls chatting away at the stools of the butcher block behind me. Miranda tapping her tablet. Hilly studying her latest Rick Riordan while she picks at her toenail polish.
“Hey Mom. Did you know the weak spot when you’re trying to slay a Chimera is not the snake?”
“Hey Mom. Did you know there’s an island in real life (insert Miranda’s inevitable smirky glance to bookworm younger sister here) called Snake Island and if you go there it’s covered in snakes and that’s why nobody goes there except other snakes?”
Hey Mom. Mom, hey Mom.
I’ve answered Hey Moms eagerly and with a delight that warms my heart like apricot brandy at least a hundred thousand times. And another hundred thousand with the slightest hint of frazzled impatience. They are without a doubt the two words I’ve missed most in the silence since.
I can see Roman in the kitchen as well of course. Feel him so much more than see him. Feel the tortoise-like lines of age on his weathered contractor’s nape. My great big lug, head and shoulders taller than me, cooling his mocha with a whispering breath, leaning against my hip at the stovetop, running one giant hand affectionately under my Steelers jersey. Calloused fingertips on the crevice in the small of my back like he was petting a small, exotic rodent. Sunday morning texture.
“Goddammit. Why are we doing this?”
“It has its purpose. The two windows. Do they seem any different?”
“The Jetta driving off but you know that’s only because I wasn’t there when it happened. The car obviously drove off and probably looked pretty much the way I pictured it the first time Roman texted me from his hotel.”
“The texts which - all of which - you’ve deleted, right?”
“And why would I keep ‘em? Does that sound like progress, to you - Mr. lotsa progress? Why would I keep such a miserable record of communication?”
“It certainly wouldn’t be healthy, no. If those texts had indeed been sent, it would not be healthy for you to obsess over them. But the point of the exercise is that you might see the disparity between your memories and your imagination.”
“The only despair is that thinking about either of them is depressing. So are you gonna tell me what we’re doing today?”
“Sure. Leave your coffee.”
Keilani stands and motions me to the center of the room. He picks up the headset and the headphones. The former, up close, reminds me of Star Trek, where the alien’s entire upper face can’t be identified because it’s covered by such an accessory. K cradles this piece like an infant in one arm.
“The reason we meet every Sunday is because you don’t believe we’ve met every Sunday for a year. Because you remember Roman and the girls differently from what actually happened. That’s why you’re still in therapy.”
“Because I’m not getting better.”
“Because I’ve failed you so far, which is why I chose today - our one-year anniversary - to do something very different.”
“You didn’t fail, all right? This isn’t the Olympics. I don’t need anybody to play the victim for me or make it your fault that I want a drink right now.”
“I’m just being honest. I feel that I’ve failed to help you commit to the truth of what happened and you continuously revert to your version of why Roman and the girls are gone.”
“And you call this ‘lotsa progress’?”
“The progress is that in the past few months you’ve accepted the truth longer than you did in the past - before reverting back to the fiction.”
“And your gadget is going to show me...what?”
“It’s a simulation which, after merging with your subconscious, might help with that clarity.”
“In other words it’ll show me things I don’t want to look at.”
“Yes. But you can take it off at any time.”
I roll my eyes at this. A bit patronizing. The elastic strap fits snug around my head as I pull the headset on.
The machine chirps into life. On a black screen, the words UPLOADING. PLEASE WAIT… appear green over black.
“What is it uploading?”
“It’s mapping out your synapses. The connections your mind has strung together in the past twenty minutes.”
Fade in. The onscreen image so clear my breath hitches. I expected polygons - some sort of geometry, but that’s apparently “sooooo Millennial” as Hilly used to say.
I’m standing in front of the sun-bleached square of mailbox cubes and slots at the base of the stairs below my condo in Newport. Where I moved after Roman left. The overcast sky so real I can nearly feel mist on my pores.
A deep conscious breath, and the inhale is a shock. A scent of the ocean diluted by the sickly sweet stink of the dumpster to my right. And I do mean my dumpster - exactly the one I use. It even has the graffiti - ANTYFA DEAD O.C. - scrawled across the NO APPLIANCES sign.
This is more than a simulation and the black plastic fitted over my nose more than a sheath. It feels like I’ve just been transported right back home.
Except for Joni Mitchell singing Coyote. She doesn’t do that at my place.
“K? You gonna put the earmuffs on?”
“Headphones. Nat, you hear me?”
“Just you and Joni.”
“So there’s an old joke about a guy on a therapist’s couch who says: ‘I can’t remember if my wife left me because I started drinking, or if I started drinking because my wife left me. You ever hear that one?”
“Yeah.”
“Mean anything to you?”
“Besides the fact that it’s not very funny?”
Plastic clasps snap into place on my wrists and ankles, one at a time.
“Oh, what’s this now? Are we about to get Fifty Shades Darker?”
“Motion controllers. This is fully immersive.”
“How can this thing see my condo? Is it a satellite - like Google Earth?”
“No, the HTC uses a combination of scanned images and memories to carry out its narrative. The one I’ve commanded it to improvise.”
“What scanned images? You don’t have any pictures of me.”
“I have one. Your ID tag, the icon that comes up when you call me is a family portrait and that was enough. Now, once I connect the headphones the sim will react to your every movement as well as your thoughts. But you’ll still have the option at any time -”
“Of taking it off - yes I know - you said that already.”
“Nat. I wouldn’t put you through this if I didn’t think it would help. But it’s also going to hurt. You ready for that?”
Looking up from the mailbox to my virtual landing at the top of my virtual stairs, I can see four beach towels draped over the railing next to the battered Coleman cooler. That’s four more towels than there should be.
“Go ahead.”
When it feels so good to hurt so bad, Elton John said. Thirty-eight years old and sometimes it still feels good to get hurt. Not injured, just hurt. The first time my pal Heather and I snuck a drink from the wetbar when her parents left us alone, Bacardi 151 burning our throats. She spit it up but I brought it back to the couch. I wanted to feel that burning again and again.
Keilani seals me inside with the headphones.
Overfed seagulls circling overhead. I can’t see them but I hear them calling in an oval pattern. I mount the paint-chipped stairs two at a time, each one squeaking defensively as they’re supposed to, and count the sand-littered towels draped over the railing again. Still four towels and only one woman lives here.
Inside, behind the cracked open door I can smell frying butter and eggs, hear Canola oil bubbles snapping in a saucepan, and muffled music - someone destroying their eardrums with their headphones because she listens too loud no matter how many times Mom pulls the plug and gives her a ration of shit about it.
Ration of Shit is my most commonly used parental colloquialism. One I’ve kept alive, passed down from my father and his father before him. I often warn my children they will receive such a ration when they misbehave, and I complain irritably about said ration when it is given to me.
Sorry, Roman used to respond from the Peanut Gallery with a smirk, cupped hands outstretched. This is your ration. We just don’t have enough to go around.
But as I push the door open now, what I see doesn’t make sense. Miranda’s never been in my condo - in fact no one but me and the realtor has ever set foot in here since I moved in. Roman and the girls are on the other side of the country yet here she sits on a stool at the butcher block, Bluetooth headphones in, tapping her Tablet.
She flicks her chin in my direction - talking too loud as only headphoned people do. “Mom, you gotta flip it.”
“What?” My own voice, surround sound in my vacuum-sealed virtual world a jolting reminder that I’m also wearing headphones, though I doubt that Virtual Miranda - who looks exactly like Real Miranda down to the straightener-burned bangs and foundation that doesn’t match her neckline - can see the headset I’m wearing.
Another flick of the chin, this one pointed behind me, and I turn to Hilly’s French Toast sizzling on the stovetop and flip the triangles.
“Hilly likes the bottom well done, the top regular, remember?”
I nod, my breath hitching. But not for long. I have to turn back, brandishing my greasy warped spatula.
“Why are you here?”
Miranda pulls out one Bluetooth plug. Gives me that patented “you really want me to answer that?” look that seventeen-year-olds have exclusive rights to. “Regular day, Mom. First period starts eight-o’-five. Be outta your hair in twenty.”
“No, no.” Blurting before I can think. “You stay here. You stay with me.”
Rand, as her father calls her, straightens her slouch, arches an overdrawn eyebrow and curls her lip gloss. “A ditch day? Did I forget my own birthday - what is this?”
Before I can respond, Roman - who also shouldn’t be in my two-bedroom condo - shuffles down the stairs, his latest Lee Childs gripped in a three-finger prong beside him, steaming mocha in his other hand. “Hey, what time am I home today?”
This question should be familiar but it’s not because he shouldn’t be here. Roman is asking, as he always does, how long he can stay at the gym after work, but all that escapes me is: “This is your home.”
He nods, barely listening, and swings around the butcher block. “Just text me, babe.”
As I turn back to the stovetop I feel him behind me. So tall he actually eclipses the canned lighting overhead like a Totem Pole. The scent of Crest Ultra White mingling with mocha on a breath that flutters the little hairs on the back of my neck. Honey, why do you brush your teeth before your morning coffee?
Roman wraps his arms around my waist from behind as I’m cooking, as he so often does, cradling his thick forearms just under my breasts and presses his stubbly face - five o’clock shadow appearing magically the moment he’s done shaving - against the nape of my neck. He squeezes, and two tears squeeze out from the corners of my eyes that I know still live within a mask in some remote corner of my mind that I don’t want to hear from.
Does he know what he’s doing to me? Does he know this squeeze, after going more than a year without being touched, is more toxic, more intoxicating than anything I’ve ever hidden in the garage? Is he trying to torture me into thinking this is real?
Three quick kisses down my nape. My stomach flutters. I feel my cheeks flush. Then he’s pulled away and gone to the Keurig next to the fridge.
“Gonna make one for the road - you want another one?”
I shake my head which feels heavier than usual with the weight of the visor headset. One for the road. As if you’re returning here at the end of your work day. As if -
A bass drum thump from the stairs as Hilly gallops down them in her socks, two at a time.
Thu-dump! Thu-dump! Thu-dump!
My thirteen-year-old social media debutante wanna-be who calls her father Patriarch and me Hausfrau on the rare occasion she doesn’t get her way - always with her sitcom smirk - shuffles up behind me, singing and grinding against my back like a snake. She hooks her thumbs through my belt loops.
“I want your ugly. I want your disease. I want your everything as long as it’s free.
I want - “
“Sit down, Hilly. Drink your juice. Almost ready.”
She complies and I glance back at them over my shoulder. Miranda tapping, Hilly reading Riordan. Jesus, how many books did that guy write?
Without looking up, Miranda says: “Wanna thank you for yet again leaving your spit up toothpaste in the sink, Hill. After I specifically asked.”
Also without looking up, from Always Ready, Always Witty Hilly: ““You think that’s bad, Peanut Brittle Bangs, try cleaning out the Emo-dyed black hair that clogs the drain every time I have to follow you in the shower.”
Still not looking up. “Start cleaning your petri dish and I’ll clean mine, Foundation Doesn’t Match and Flakes At Points of Acne.”
Roman sips mocha, looking on, studying them. “God that was really clunky, Rand.”
Hilly turns a page. “Seriously.”
Rand glares up at her Dad. “She went there.”
“Ladies,” I drone. As usual the only one bothered by the good-natured vitriol at breakfast. “It’s still early.”
The speed-reader flips another page. “Sorry, Mom.”
“Not to me, to your sister. You went there.”
Hilly leans against her sister’s shoulder. “Pardonne moi, mon amour.”
I turn back to the stove, crumbling cinnamon sticks over the triangles. “Rand?”
“I’m sorry you feel you need an apology, Hill.”
“That’s not me, it’s Mom. I don’t concern myself much with what Emo’s think of me.”
Roman’s teaspoon clinks at the Keurig. “Now, Hilly. Everyone goes through their Emo streak. It’s just a phase.”
“Really. Mom, Dad had an Emo phase when you met him? Black fingernails and eyeliner? Listened to Morrison?”
“Morris-ey. Yes, he did.”
“That’s right. See how she straightened me out?”
“He’s come a long way. Behind every good man there’s a strong woman who straightens out his Emo.”
Only Roman chuckles but I can feel the other two smiling behind me. God, how I’ve missed this. The workday morning banter before we all drive away in our separate cars. Trading zingers to determine who’s got the slowest wit - who got the least amount of sleep last night. I take a moment to glance back at the glossy granite of the butcher block, recalling how it actually looks with the headset off. Nothing quite so still and silent as a table for one.
“Hey Mom.” It’s Rand. One Bluetooth suspended in her hand beside her ear. “My plugs just gave out. Did I leave my backups charging in your car after dinner?”
“I’ll check. Honey, could you finish this up?” How long since I’ve called Roman Honey? How long since we’ve used any term of endearment?
Roman takes my place at the stove and I head into the garage, the door closing behind me. I put an ear to it, confirming they’re still inside. Muffled voices. Keurig whirring. Don’t go anywhere. Any of you. Just stay in the kitchen.
But it’s silent in here and uncomfortably familiar. Exactly the same as the garage looks with the headset off. Mumbling under my breath for distraction. “I want your love and I want your revenge. I want your love, I don’t wanna be friends.”
I could write lame greeting cards in my head. How You Know You’re Approaching Middle Age: You Walk Out Into the Garage Singing the Wrong Lyrics to Your Kids’ Songs and Then Forget Why You Went In There.
Jesus, don’t you hate that? Why did I come in here?
How many times this past decade have I found myself in some room in the house, my hands occupied with something unexpected - no I idea why I came in there.
So I open the Tesla’s trunk, lift up the portable soccer goal posts to reveal the sealed tool compartment.
Rand needed something but why would she put it in the tool compartment with the socket wrench and the tire gauge and…
I found my father once, leaning against his pool table, choking the neck of Jack Daniels in one fist, gripping the potato peeler and a Double-A battery in the other. I was just tall enough to reach up and tug on his pinky.
What’s wrong, I asked.
His mouth hung open, lips looked dry. I forgot what I was supposed to be worrying about.
I waved his pinky, locked in mine, as if to wake him. Isn’t that a good thing?
He glanced at me but his mouth didn’t change. What you were supposed to be worrying about. What a magnificent thing to forget. As if we’re all supposed to be worrying about something. All the time.
The trunk blurs back into focus. Whatever Rand asked me to get she wouldn’t have put it in the Tesla’s tool compartment because you’d only put something in there you were trying to hide from other people.
But when your husband’s a Clothes Horse and a Neat Freak there just aren’t that many places to hide a bottle of Bacardi 151 that hurts so good and the peanut butter and spearmint gum next to it that masks the scent on your breath.
Turn the latch, open the panel in the commercial carpet. One hundred and fifty-one degrees. When it feels so good to hurt so bad and suffer just enough. One quick nip - one more for the road and don’t give me a ration of shit, honey, because you have your vices for coping, too.
Just a ration, sorry. I only have so much to go around.
Twirl the cap back on, seal it with the latch but that’s not why I came in here.
“Bluetooth. Cigarette lighter.”
Ah yes, the headphones. That’s where she left them charging. Does anyone even call it a cigarette lighter anymore?
But when I open the driver’s side door and grab Rand’s back up Blu’s, something very wrong happens. Black soot spreads across my fingers as they crumble into ash in my grip.
Standing now. Just me and the Tesla’s open-door nasal droning. Deep-deep. Deep-deep.
Shutup for a second and let me think.
Disintegrated Bluetooth slides off my palm in a black smear. Rest the other hand on the car’s side mirror for balance and it crumbles like charred kindling. My hand passes right through, black ash tumbling to the burnished grey cement.
Oh god no.
What’s that smell from the kitchen because I don’t hear anyone in there now. Is that French Toast burning or the entire stove charred to a crisp and ready to break apart like a sand castle at the slightest touch?
Turn the brass knob at the entry door which of course breaks into ash, leaving me with an empty dirty fist again. But the door swings open. All silent now and only Hilly sits at the butcher block. Head cocked, one hand holding Riordan down on the block, open to the last ten pages. God she reads fast.
Silent like a two-bedroom apartment for one after you get home and toss your keys on the counter. Silent as it stands when you venture out into the world once a day to check the mail and close the door behind you.
“Hill?”
No answer because Hilly, the only one left, is no longer animated. Still as a mannequin, but one with pores and foundation that flakes at points of acne. Unmoving not because she’s ignoring me, not because I’m an annoying Hausfrau but because she’s no longer real. A 3-D print on an artificial stage, a glossy ad in a Parenting magazine for misdiagnosed autism.
“Hilly?”
I reach my black, sooty hand towards Riordan’s latest. Page 373. Don’t cut the snake when fighting a Chimera.
“God please no. Not my baby girl. Stay with me, Hill.”
But the pages crumble into gray dust at my touch. So do three of Hilly’s fingers.
---
(Please contact me if you'd like to see the rest.)
The tale which then manifested is about a middle-aged woman who undergoes a VR simulation on her "one-year anniversary" session with her psychologist as a part of his last ditch efforts to help her accept the tragedy in her life - the loss of her loved. To help put and end to her denial and heal her dissociative amnesia, her fugue state.
Though I'd like to consider it a literary work, it takes place in the near future, when Virtual Reality technology is used as therapy; combining mapped-out synapses, scanned images and our own subconscious to recreate simulated experiences that are indistinguishable from the real world. No more polygons. No more geometry. As Hilly says in the story that's "sooo Millenial."
Pores and flesh. Sight, sound and smell. VR as a therapeutic tool which reflects a consistent, lucid reality that feels not at all like a simulation. Born from the raw ego of the subconscious, just as it is in our dreams and nightmares. The first 20 pages are pasted below.
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ROMANS AND REVELATIONS
The line between memory and imagination gets blurry after forty-eight hours - for most people. That’s what Doc Keilani says. That means when you remember any given experience you had two days ago, you start adding to it with your imagination without even knowing. Changing details, deleting others. What was said and heard. Swapping it out for what you wish you’d said. What you wanted to hear. Just two days and that’s for normal people. You have to modify those numbers when you’ve been drinking steadily for thirteen years.
The drive down to Lake Forest to see my therapist is full of distractions. Grass-stained folding chairs worn as backpacks. Fathers and sons and soccer moms waiting at crosswalks. Their hands on their kids’ shoulders after scrimmages, sticky Gatorade bottles clutched within scraped knuckles.
I see them in my peripherals but try not to look. If I look I’ll stare. I’ll look for the expectation in their Sunday morning faces, of tossing the car keys up on the butcher block, settling down to NFL highlights and afternoon dollar-beers from Costco as their lakefront condos return to the comfortable static of pre-adolescent noise. If I look, I’ll covet their expectation of that noise – the background hubbub they take for granted or perhaps even resent.
If I don’t look I don’t have to resent them as I picture my own residence - silent when I arrive and silent when I leave - and that’s better, because these petty resentments make me feel like a small green troll under a bridge.
So keep it in the peripheral. Why torment yourself with details? Better to watch the segmented digits on my Tesla’s interface inch towards noon, when I’ll allow myself the first drink of the day. It used to be 4pm and before that sunset when I’d take the first sip. Not sure when that changed.
Keilani, my therapist, a man whose engaging green eyes can be distracting for a woman who is only married according to her own opinion, asked me to move our session up an hour for this special occasion at his home office situated in a quiet retirement community where sandbar-sized speed bumps discourage you from driving over ten miles an hour every thirty feet.
When I asked him the reason for the change – why we had to meet earlier, he said in a how-could-you-forget tone: “Because it’s our anniversary!”
Not just a non-sequitur but a ludicrous answer. Anniversary? I’ve met with him nine times, once a week since Roman and the girls left me. Since Kaiser let me go. Nine weeks of psychiatric progress is nothing to celebrate. I can’t imagine what kind of breakthrough he thinks we’ve achieved and using the word in reference to my estranged marriage to Roman would only be cruel. I remember the exact date I got married. I remember the hour. It wasn’t today.
The raw-faced octogenarian at the security post beside the drop-bar gate hands me my waste-of-paper permit that nobody’s going to check for, one which allows me to park for an hour in a complex wherein most residents don’t authorize guests save for once a year.
But Keilani does. With his IKEA-bought serenity fountains out-front, his Miyagi-like succulents in the garden he tends religiously. K always has someone coming or going into the office off his back patio.
And as we cross paths, trampling our doctor’s grass, one client leaving as another arrives, we mental cases nod at each other with equal parts suspicion and empathy: What happened to you and who in the hell said you could meet with my therapist? Did nobody tell you this is my therapist?!
Do we both feel possessive as we pass each other or is it just me? This young man with the patchy stubble, loose ponytail, open-toe sandals - we wouldn’t dare communicate, but I doubt it. More likely, the only patients who get possessive about their therapist are the ones who don’t socialize with anyone but their therapist during the week.
Usually when I pull up, he’s either watering or primping his eggshell-fed roses, his small olive lips pursed in concentration. But not today. Which means he’ll be waiting inside, Joni Mitchell accompanying the gurgle of his little misting fountain and bonsai tree, the Tao Te Ching open on his lap.
I pull the screen open.
Fountain, yes. Mitchell, yes. Incense crumbling into a scent of cedar. Let’s take a moment to breathe in the perfection of this sight, sound and smell combo and picture a grandfather clock droning the hour bell at noon. But no Keilani. Instead, a noisemaker twitches across the threshold of the open doorway to the living room like a paper hot dog, with a honk.
The adorable little man follows into frame, his dorky golf polo tucked loosely into his cargo shorts with the safari belt. Is dressing awkward intentionally disarming or would he be wearing this on his day off?
My cappuccino steams in his free hand. “Happy Anniversary.”
“Thanks.” I hook an index finger into the porcelain. “But what does that mean?”
“It’s been a year, my dear - lotsa progress.”
“It’s been nine weeks.”
A humble shake of the head. “Nah. I’ll explain.” He ushers me through the door. “Follow me into the living room. Gotta surprise for ya.”
More incense burns on little pentagon platforms in an otherwise empty living room. Pine. Marigold. Lavender.
“What is this? Where’s your furniture - are you moving?”
“No, this is just for today. Just for you.”
In two corners of the room’s ceiling, tiny flat screen tv’s - little monitors no bigger than Rubik’s Cubes - blink green lights, angled down in my direction. In the middle of the tile floor: two parts of a black leather wireless headset - big headphones and the other looks like it goes over your eyes.
“You moved out your furniture for this...surround sound?”
“It’s a virtual reality sim - the best, in fact. Sit down.”
He assumes the lotus position on a yoga mat and I follow suit across from him, Indian style, sipping. Immediately
I can feel pressure in my chest building from the caffeine. Beginning of heart palpitations. How long I’ve been in this pattern? Cappuccino as my uppers, Pinot Noir as my downers. “VR, huh? We gonna play some video games to celebrate our ‘anniversary’? A little Donkey Kong?”
My tight-lipped smile delights him, as if he knows it only appears once a week. “Not Donkey Kong, no. In fact, I don’t think anyone outside of this old folks home remembers what a ‘Donkey Kong’ is.”
“Come on, what’s goin’ on?”
“It’s a simulation. There’s been some recent success in Norway using VR as a therapeutic tool. Phobias and such. This machine…” I follow his gaze to the little monitors. “It’s connected by Bluetooth to the computer in the bedroom. Tracks your movements without any wires. It’s called the HTC Enigma X9.”
“Sounds like a car. So you bought this gadget and moved out your furniture for me - for this one session?”
“That and to play video games.” Another white smile crinkles his green eyes. “For Maritza, when she comes over.”
Maritza is his granddaughter - the only family he speaks of without his gaze dropping to the floor.
“So I put it on and what happens?”
“In a minute. We have all the time in the world.”
K doesn’t look at the clock during our sessions. In fact he can’t because he keeps no timepieces visible in the room and asks that I leave my phone in my car. Sometimes our hour together bleeds into ninety minutes, sometimes more. This feels marvelously liberating in my own session and infuriating when I’m waiting in my Tesla for open-toed Ponyboy Curtis to finish up his own allotted “hour.”
“So any calls this week?”
“Just Mom. 3pm every day, same time. Always asks the same - ‘have you gone outside?’”
“Have you?”
“To check the mail.”
“Good.”
My mood sours and I want him to know it before the pressure builds up behind my eyes again. I set my jaw and focus on the grout between the tiles, communicating my resentment at being placated. There’s nothing “good” about a thirty-eight-year-old woman who buys groceries online and only leaves the condo once a day to check the mail. One of his neighbors, clicking out an inch at a time on a walker to the mailbox, sure, but not -
“I don’t like this, K. What is this horseshit about anniversaries?”
“It’s been a year. You should feel -”
“It’s been nine weeks. Nine sessions.”
“No, Natalie. You started seeing me once a week exactly one year ago today. And that was exactly four days after Roman and the girls…. ‘left’ you.”
“Now why’d you say it like that? Like I’m wrong, is that it? I’m wrong about how long I’ve been in therapy and wrong about Roman and the girls leaving?”
“Roman and the girls did leave you, just not in the way you think.”
K’s been at this game a long time. He’s careful not to let his eyes crease with pity.
The client who walks through the door. That’s how he puts it. If I don’t initiate further, he’ll let our pregnant pause pass and ask how I spent my days this week. What books I’m reading. Are they the same yellowed, crispy pages of the paperbacks Roman left, dogeared and warped from the watery acid of his fingerprints? The novels my great big lug of a husband read over and over the way other men watch a favorite movie? How did I burn up my daylight this week?
The client who walks through the door means Keilani doesn’t ‘pick up where we left off.’ He keeps the continuity of our sessions in his head but doesn’t stipulate a goal for the next episode. He knows I haven’t socialized with anyone but him since I got fired and Roman drove off with the girls, frustrated by a companion whose answer to every problem was to pull a cork. Fixing that is his agenda but I set the pace. I determine the speed of progress.
“Then ‘how’ did they leave me? I mean, driving off in his Jetta and communicating through text isn’t really something I could misinterpret, is it?”
“What does it feel like? When you picture that moment - memory or imagination? For myself, older I get, the more they feel like the same thing. When I look back on my son’s graduation ceremonies, twenty-something years ago, it seems very much like the images in the dream I had last night. You wanna know what the dream was?”
“Go ahead.”
“I was sitting in the cafeteria, back at Wagner Jr. High - eighth grade. At a table by myself. There was a lot of noise. All the other tables were filled with kids. And I looked down and saw this oily slice of square pizza on my tray - the kind with little pools of orange grease on it - next to some tater tots and ketchup. As I started to eat it, little pepperoni discs came flying in from one direction. ‘Pizza-face,’ I heard some of the boys and girls saying under cupped hands. Like they were throwing their voice. I told you I had terrible acne, right?”
“Kids are cruel.”
Coming from anyone else this story would sound like an After School Special. Hell, it probably was a Lifetime Original and somebody had that line: Kids are cruel, Janice. Cue the pan flute. I stare at the deep pockmarks along both of K’s cheek bones. No reason for me to feel embarrassed, since he’s signaling for me to do so.
“When I woke up, I knew it couldn’t have happened like that. Nothing so dramatic but something like that did happen. I blocked out the exact transcript of events. I’ve done that with most memories of Jr. High. So the dream was a mix of memory and imagination.”
The fast track to getting your client to trust you is the casual admission of your own shameful truths - your own failings and humiliations. The unspoken value of these unsolicited admissions is that while Keilani is sworn to keep my secrets, I don’t have to keep any of his.
A disarming confidence game intended to give me the feeling that not only is it safe for me to be honest, but that I actually have the advantage when confiding in him. It’s occurred to me of course that he could be making it all up.
“So, Roman leaving - when you picture it, does it feel like something that happened, or something you fabricated?”
The last word infuriates me. I nearly spill my cappuccino. “Obviously if I ‘fabricated’ it, I wouldn’t be sitting here on the floor with you this morning. I’d be making French toast for Miranda and Hilly while telling my husband about the ‘really weird dream’ I had last night where he drove off with the kids, never to be seen again!”
“That one’s really clear for you, isn’t it? The French toast. You made that for breakfast every Sunday, right?”
“Eleven years, since Hilly was two. It’s her favorite.”
“Can you compare the two, side by side in your mind? Try it. Picture the French toast in a little Microsoft window in your mind on the left, and the Jetta driving away in another window on the right. See if there are any differences.”
I close my eyes, not surprised that the black is tinted an angry red. If I stay here too long, without distraction in the dark, what I see will become texture and the pressure behind my eyes will burst forward.
The Jetta driving away happened, I know it did, but Keilani’s entrapped me here because we both know it’s not something I saw but something I envisioned the first time I got Roman’s text that said he wasn’t coming back. But the other window. The one on the left.
Oh god.
I can feel the spatula’s half-melted plastic handle in my grip as I press soft bread into the bubbling pan, the tool permanently warped from Milly’s first try making her favorite Sunday breakfast.
I can hear the girls chatting away at the stools of the butcher block behind me. Miranda tapping her tablet. Hilly studying her latest Rick Riordan while she picks at her toenail polish.
“Hey Mom. Did you know the weak spot when you’re trying to slay a Chimera is not the snake?”
“Hey Mom. Did you know there’s an island in real life (insert Miranda’s inevitable smirky glance to bookworm younger sister here) called Snake Island and if you go there it’s covered in snakes and that’s why nobody goes there except other snakes?”
Hey Mom. Mom, hey Mom.
I’ve answered Hey Moms eagerly and with a delight that warms my heart like apricot brandy at least a hundred thousand times. And another hundred thousand with the slightest hint of frazzled impatience. They are without a doubt the two words I’ve missed most in the silence since.
I can see Roman in the kitchen as well of course. Feel him so much more than see him. Feel the tortoise-like lines of age on his weathered contractor’s nape. My great big lug, head and shoulders taller than me, cooling his mocha with a whispering breath, leaning against my hip at the stovetop, running one giant hand affectionately under my Steelers jersey. Calloused fingertips on the crevice in the small of my back like he was petting a small, exotic rodent. Sunday morning texture.
“Goddammit. Why are we doing this?”
“It has its purpose. The two windows. Do they seem any different?”
“The Jetta driving off but you know that’s only because I wasn’t there when it happened. The car obviously drove off and probably looked pretty much the way I pictured it the first time Roman texted me from his hotel.”
“The texts which - all of which - you’ve deleted, right?”
“And why would I keep ‘em? Does that sound like progress, to you - Mr. lotsa progress? Why would I keep such a miserable record of communication?”
“It certainly wouldn’t be healthy, no. If those texts had indeed been sent, it would not be healthy for you to obsess over them. But the point of the exercise is that you might see the disparity between your memories and your imagination.”
“The only despair is that thinking about either of them is depressing. So are you gonna tell me what we’re doing today?”
“Sure. Leave your coffee.”
Keilani stands and motions me to the center of the room. He picks up the headset and the headphones. The former, up close, reminds me of Star Trek, where the alien’s entire upper face can’t be identified because it’s covered by such an accessory. K cradles this piece like an infant in one arm.
“The reason we meet every Sunday is because you don’t believe we’ve met every Sunday for a year. Because you remember Roman and the girls differently from what actually happened. That’s why you’re still in therapy.”
“Because I’m not getting better.”
“Because I’ve failed you so far, which is why I chose today - our one-year anniversary - to do something very different.”
“You didn’t fail, all right? This isn’t the Olympics. I don’t need anybody to play the victim for me or make it your fault that I want a drink right now.”
“I’m just being honest. I feel that I’ve failed to help you commit to the truth of what happened and you continuously revert to your version of why Roman and the girls are gone.”
“And you call this ‘lotsa progress’?”
“The progress is that in the past few months you’ve accepted the truth longer than you did in the past - before reverting back to the fiction.”
“And your gadget is going to show me...what?”
“It’s a simulation which, after merging with your subconscious, might help with that clarity.”
“In other words it’ll show me things I don’t want to look at.”
“Yes. But you can take it off at any time.”
I roll my eyes at this. A bit patronizing. The elastic strap fits snug around my head as I pull the headset on.
The machine chirps into life. On a black screen, the words UPLOADING. PLEASE WAIT… appear green over black.
“What is it uploading?”
“It’s mapping out your synapses. The connections your mind has strung together in the past twenty minutes.”
Fade in. The onscreen image so clear my breath hitches. I expected polygons - some sort of geometry, but that’s apparently “sooooo Millennial” as Hilly used to say.
I’m standing in front of the sun-bleached square of mailbox cubes and slots at the base of the stairs below my condo in Newport. Where I moved after Roman left. The overcast sky so real I can nearly feel mist on my pores.
A deep conscious breath, and the inhale is a shock. A scent of the ocean diluted by the sickly sweet stink of the dumpster to my right. And I do mean my dumpster - exactly the one I use. It even has the graffiti - ANTYFA DEAD O.C. - scrawled across the NO APPLIANCES sign.
This is more than a simulation and the black plastic fitted over my nose more than a sheath. It feels like I’ve just been transported right back home.
Except for Joni Mitchell singing Coyote. She doesn’t do that at my place.
“K? You gonna put the earmuffs on?”
“Headphones. Nat, you hear me?”
“Just you and Joni.”
“So there’s an old joke about a guy on a therapist’s couch who says: ‘I can’t remember if my wife left me because I started drinking, or if I started drinking because my wife left me. You ever hear that one?”
“Yeah.”
“Mean anything to you?”
“Besides the fact that it’s not very funny?”
Plastic clasps snap into place on my wrists and ankles, one at a time.
“Oh, what’s this now? Are we about to get Fifty Shades Darker?”
“Motion controllers. This is fully immersive.”
“How can this thing see my condo? Is it a satellite - like Google Earth?”
“No, the HTC uses a combination of scanned images and memories to carry out its narrative. The one I’ve commanded it to improvise.”
“What scanned images? You don’t have any pictures of me.”
“I have one. Your ID tag, the icon that comes up when you call me is a family portrait and that was enough. Now, once I connect the headphones the sim will react to your every movement as well as your thoughts. But you’ll still have the option at any time -”
“Of taking it off - yes I know - you said that already.”
“Nat. I wouldn’t put you through this if I didn’t think it would help. But it’s also going to hurt. You ready for that?”
Looking up from the mailbox to my virtual landing at the top of my virtual stairs, I can see four beach towels draped over the railing next to the battered Coleman cooler. That’s four more towels than there should be.
“Go ahead.”
When it feels so good to hurt so bad, Elton John said. Thirty-eight years old and sometimes it still feels good to get hurt. Not injured, just hurt. The first time my pal Heather and I snuck a drink from the wetbar when her parents left us alone, Bacardi 151 burning our throats. She spit it up but I brought it back to the couch. I wanted to feel that burning again and again.
Keilani seals me inside with the headphones.
Overfed seagulls circling overhead. I can’t see them but I hear them calling in an oval pattern. I mount the paint-chipped stairs two at a time, each one squeaking defensively as they’re supposed to, and count the sand-littered towels draped over the railing again. Still four towels and only one woman lives here.
Inside, behind the cracked open door I can smell frying butter and eggs, hear Canola oil bubbles snapping in a saucepan, and muffled music - someone destroying their eardrums with their headphones because she listens too loud no matter how many times Mom pulls the plug and gives her a ration of shit about it.
Ration of Shit is my most commonly used parental colloquialism. One I’ve kept alive, passed down from my father and his father before him. I often warn my children they will receive such a ration when they misbehave, and I complain irritably about said ration when it is given to me.
Sorry, Roman used to respond from the Peanut Gallery with a smirk, cupped hands outstretched. This is your ration. We just don’t have enough to go around.
But as I push the door open now, what I see doesn’t make sense. Miranda’s never been in my condo - in fact no one but me and the realtor has ever set foot in here since I moved in. Roman and the girls are on the other side of the country yet here she sits on a stool at the butcher block, Bluetooth headphones in, tapping her Tablet.
She flicks her chin in my direction - talking too loud as only headphoned people do. “Mom, you gotta flip it.”
“What?” My own voice, surround sound in my vacuum-sealed virtual world a jolting reminder that I’m also wearing headphones, though I doubt that Virtual Miranda - who looks exactly like Real Miranda down to the straightener-burned bangs and foundation that doesn’t match her neckline - can see the headset I’m wearing.
Another flick of the chin, this one pointed behind me, and I turn to Hilly’s French Toast sizzling on the stovetop and flip the triangles.
“Hilly likes the bottom well done, the top regular, remember?”
I nod, my breath hitching. But not for long. I have to turn back, brandishing my greasy warped spatula.
“Why are you here?”
Miranda pulls out one Bluetooth plug. Gives me that patented “you really want me to answer that?” look that seventeen-year-olds have exclusive rights to. “Regular day, Mom. First period starts eight-o’-five. Be outta your hair in twenty.”
“No, no.” Blurting before I can think. “You stay here. You stay with me.”
Rand, as her father calls her, straightens her slouch, arches an overdrawn eyebrow and curls her lip gloss. “A ditch day? Did I forget my own birthday - what is this?”
Before I can respond, Roman - who also shouldn’t be in my two-bedroom condo - shuffles down the stairs, his latest Lee Childs gripped in a three-finger prong beside him, steaming mocha in his other hand. “Hey, what time am I home today?”
This question should be familiar but it’s not because he shouldn’t be here. Roman is asking, as he always does, how long he can stay at the gym after work, but all that escapes me is: “This is your home.”
He nods, barely listening, and swings around the butcher block. “Just text me, babe.”
As I turn back to the stovetop I feel him behind me. So tall he actually eclipses the canned lighting overhead like a Totem Pole. The scent of Crest Ultra White mingling with mocha on a breath that flutters the little hairs on the back of my neck. Honey, why do you brush your teeth before your morning coffee?
Roman wraps his arms around my waist from behind as I’m cooking, as he so often does, cradling his thick forearms just under my breasts and presses his stubbly face - five o’clock shadow appearing magically the moment he’s done shaving - against the nape of my neck. He squeezes, and two tears squeeze out from the corners of my eyes that I know still live within a mask in some remote corner of my mind that I don’t want to hear from.
Does he know what he’s doing to me? Does he know this squeeze, after going more than a year without being touched, is more toxic, more intoxicating than anything I’ve ever hidden in the garage? Is he trying to torture me into thinking this is real?
Three quick kisses down my nape. My stomach flutters. I feel my cheeks flush. Then he’s pulled away and gone to the Keurig next to the fridge.
“Gonna make one for the road - you want another one?”
I shake my head which feels heavier than usual with the weight of the visor headset. One for the road. As if you’re returning here at the end of your work day. As if -
A bass drum thump from the stairs as Hilly gallops down them in her socks, two at a time.
Thu-dump! Thu-dump! Thu-dump!
My thirteen-year-old social media debutante wanna-be who calls her father Patriarch and me Hausfrau on the rare occasion she doesn’t get her way - always with her sitcom smirk - shuffles up behind me, singing and grinding against my back like a snake. She hooks her thumbs through my belt loops.
“I want your ugly. I want your disease. I want your everything as long as it’s free.
I want - “
“Sit down, Hilly. Drink your juice. Almost ready.”
She complies and I glance back at them over my shoulder. Miranda tapping, Hilly reading Riordan. Jesus, how many books did that guy write?
Without looking up, Miranda says: “Wanna thank you for yet again leaving your spit up toothpaste in the sink, Hill. After I specifically asked.”
Also without looking up, from Always Ready, Always Witty Hilly: ““You think that’s bad, Peanut Brittle Bangs, try cleaning out the Emo-dyed black hair that clogs the drain every time I have to follow you in the shower.”
Still not looking up. “Start cleaning your petri dish and I’ll clean mine, Foundation Doesn’t Match and Flakes At Points of Acne.”
Roman sips mocha, looking on, studying them. “God that was really clunky, Rand.”
Hilly turns a page. “Seriously.”
Rand glares up at her Dad. “She went there.”
“Ladies,” I drone. As usual the only one bothered by the good-natured vitriol at breakfast. “It’s still early.”
The speed-reader flips another page. “Sorry, Mom.”
“Not to me, to your sister. You went there.”
Hilly leans against her sister’s shoulder. “Pardonne moi, mon amour.”
I turn back to the stove, crumbling cinnamon sticks over the triangles. “Rand?”
“I’m sorry you feel you need an apology, Hill.”
“That’s not me, it’s Mom. I don’t concern myself much with what Emo’s think of me.”
Roman’s teaspoon clinks at the Keurig. “Now, Hilly. Everyone goes through their Emo streak. It’s just a phase.”
“Really. Mom, Dad had an Emo phase when you met him? Black fingernails and eyeliner? Listened to Morrison?”
“Morris-ey. Yes, he did.”
“That’s right. See how she straightened me out?”
“He’s come a long way. Behind every good man there’s a strong woman who straightens out his Emo.”
Only Roman chuckles but I can feel the other two smiling behind me. God, how I’ve missed this. The workday morning banter before we all drive away in our separate cars. Trading zingers to determine who’s got the slowest wit - who got the least amount of sleep last night. I take a moment to glance back at the glossy granite of the butcher block, recalling how it actually looks with the headset off. Nothing quite so still and silent as a table for one.
“Hey Mom.” It’s Rand. One Bluetooth suspended in her hand beside her ear. “My plugs just gave out. Did I leave my backups charging in your car after dinner?”
“I’ll check. Honey, could you finish this up?” How long since I’ve called Roman Honey? How long since we’ve used any term of endearment?
Roman takes my place at the stove and I head into the garage, the door closing behind me. I put an ear to it, confirming they’re still inside. Muffled voices. Keurig whirring. Don’t go anywhere. Any of you. Just stay in the kitchen.
But it’s silent in here and uncomfortably familiar. Exactly the same as the garage looks with the headset off. Mumbling under my breath for distraction. “I want your love and I want your revenge. I want your love, I don’t wanna be friends.”
I could write lame greeting cards in my head. How You Know You’re Approaching Middle Age: You Walk Out Into the Garage Singing the Wrong Lyrics to Your Kids’ Songs and Then Forget Why You Went In There.
Jesus, don’t you hate that? Why did I come in here?
How many times this past decade have I found myself in some room in the house, my hands occupied with something unexpected - no I idea why I came in there.
So I open the Tesla’s trunk, lift up the portable soccer goal posts to reveal the sealed tool compartment.
Rand needed something but why would she put it in the tool compartment with the socket wrench and the tire gauge and…
I found my father once, leaning against his pool table, choking the neck of Jack Daniels in one fist, gripping the potato peeler and a Double-A battery in the other. I was just tall enough to reach up and tug on his pinky.
What’s wrong, I asked.
His mouth hung open, lips looked dry. I forgot what I was supposed to be worrying about.
I waved his pinky, locked in mine, as if to wake him. Isn’t that a good thing?
He glanced at me but his mouth didn’t change. What you were supposed to be worrying about. What a magnificent thing to forget. As if we’re all supposed to be worrying about something. All the time.
The trunk blurs back into focus. Whatever Rand asked me to get she wouldn’t have put it in the Tesla’s tool compartment because you’d only put something in there you were trying to hide from other people.
But when your husband’s a Clothes Horse and a Neat Freak there just aren’t that many places to hide a bottle of Bacardi 151 that hurts so good and the peanut butter and spearmint gum next to it that masks the scent on your breath.
Turn the latch, open the panel in the commercial carpet. One hundred and fifty-one degrees. When it feels so good to hurt so bad and suffer just enough. One quick nip - one more for the road and don’t give me a ration of shit, honey, because you have your vices for coping, too.
Just a ration, sorry. I only have so much to go around.
Twirl the cap back on, seal it with the latch but that’s not why I came in here.
“Bluetooth. Cigarette lighter.”
Ah yes, the headphones. That’s where she left them charging. Does anyone even call it a cigarette lighter anymore?
But when I open the driver’s side door and grab Rand’s back up Blu’s, something very wrong happens. Black soot spreads across my fingers as they crumble into ash in my grip.
Standing now. Just me and the Tesla’s open-door nasal droning. Deep-deep. Deep-deep.
Shutup for a second and let me think.
Disintegrated Bluetooth slides off my palm in a black smear. Rest the other hand on the car’s side mirror for balance and it crumbles like charred kindling. My hand passes right through, black ash tumbling to the burnished grey cement.
Oh god no.
What’s that smell from the kitchen because I don’t hear anyone in there now. Is that French Toast burning or the entire stove charred to a crisp and ready to break apart like a sand castle at the slightest touch?
Turn the brass knob at the entry door which of course breaks into ash, leaving me with an empty dirty fist again. But the door swings open. All silent now and only Hilly sits at the butcher block. Head cocked, one hand holding Riordan down on the block, open to the last ten pages. God she reads fast.
Silent like a two-bedroom apartment for one after you get home and toss your keys on the counter. Silent as it stands when you venture out into the world once a day to check the mail and close the door behind you.
“Hill?”
No answer because Hilly, the only one left, is no longer animated. Still as a mannequin, but one with pores and foundation that flakes at points of acne. Unmoving not because she’s ignoring me, not because I’m an annoying Hausfrau but because she’s no longer real. A 3-D print on an artificial stage, a glossy ad in a Parenting magazine for misdiagnosed autism.
“Hilly?”
I reach my black, sooty hand towards Riordan’s latest. Page 373. Don’t cut the snake when fighting a Chimera.
“God please no. Not my baby girl. Stay with me, Hill.”
But the pages crumble into gray dust at my touch. So do three of Hilly’s fingers.
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(Please contact me if you'd like to see the rest.)