“What can I do for you?” asked my assistant.
I gave her the destination. She arranged a journey to my beloved sloths and held my hand on my plane as she wept. I told her to pull herself together. I told her I wanted an American flag in the room where I would die. Billowing white veil. I told her things I never told anyone: I confessed that the supporting roles I took after the lupus were existential pool noodles. I never quit smoking. Rehab, by some measures, was the best time of my life. I am still haunted by what my son said to me on the balcony, during my sixtieth birthday party: Here you are with your five-hundred-dollar cake, and still you want to jump. I left the party to box an angel oak tree and cry. I love best in snow, and I sing best in stairwells, and I pee best on trains. Sometimes I make a pile of Himalayan pink salt on my palm and lick it, just lick it. When I wear socks to bed, I have the most erotic and transporting dreams. Half my life, I have been waiting for someone to yell: Action. The other half, I have been waiting for someone to yell: Cut. All my life, I have been cute. These conditions make you selfish, and America knows them well.
Then one day you find yourself in a boutique of terminal illness, forced to purchase something in order to use the bathroom, and from then on, you have nothing to think about except a catalogue of the instances you took when you could have given.
My assistant said, “You are not alone.”
“There is no time to update my software,” I snapped at her the next day, from my deathbed. “Who in God’s name cares if my cursor’s disappeared?”
“What can I do for you?” she asked. That dreadful refrain. She offered me a cottage, a precious director, a bottomless brunch. The window was open, and the breeze was hot, and the pain was totalizing.
“Blamelessness,” I told her. “Doctor my biography.”
“A pillow,” my assistant said. “I’ll get you the world’s best pillow.”
My son is the first call I make in the morning and my last call at night. He knows that I will not live forever, but I want to tell him that he will not live forever. I want to tell him that everyone—everyone—is wrong about mortality. Across every season of every year, I nursed on summer, but now its milk is dry. I want to tell my son that I am so sorry. Death is in the room with me now, doing squats beside the air conditioner. We wear identical socks. Socks embroidered with white rabbits. While I wait, I Command F my life for mentions of my son, details that might justify his absence. Or maybe I’m looking for a contradiction, a counterargument, proof that I wasn’t such a bad mother, after all. No matches. I shut the screen, inconsolable because my cursor is gone.
Do Not Read This Unless You Have Read the Absolutely True Story:
In Rock Paper Scissors, pick rock first. Most people choose scissors. This is my most painful tip to relinquish, as its advantage is dependent upon its secrecy, which is why I offer it as reward.
Concluding Remarks on Fame and Death:
They’re both so lonely and boring.
Bisous,
Elsie Jane McLoughlin Blitz
Hear Me Out
The animal sacrificing began when we all fell in love with Blandine. This past winter, in the Rabbit Hutch. Six months ago. Maybe it’s her golden leg hair. Maybe it’s because she’s the only girl. Maybe we were just bored.
One thing for sure is that we all hate her phony name, still do, and not even love cured that.
We’d been living together for five months when the love hit. We moved into the Rabbit Hutch last summer, and we didn’t think much of Blandine at first. She avoided us, and we avoided her. She was weird from the start, either ignoring us completely or unloading a speech about the end of the world. She carried around enormous, freaky books and used annoying words. I don’t think I ever saw her consume anything other than spicy ramen, spicy chips, spicy seaweed, and big green leaves. Plus a lot of pot and sweet tea. When all four of us were home at the same time, it was like she didn’t even see us. Sometimes I’d hear her walking around the kitchen in the middle of the night—we were both pretty nocturnal—and I’d think about leaving my room to talk with her, but something always held me back. She was beautiful, but in a spooky way. Eyes too far apart. Skin and hair as white as the walls. Graveyard clothes.
I didn’t spend much time with Todd or Malik at first, either. We had our own lives and jobs, or at least we pretended to. In retrospect, I think the seeds of everything—the love, the sacrificing, this—were planted last September, during the flood. We’d been living together for a month. Everyone in the Rabbit Hutch was supposed to evacuate the building, but we lived on an upper floor, and none of us had anywhere else to go, so we just locked the door and drew the curtains and stayed. When the power went out, Blandine brought some candles out of her room and lit them for us. Her lighter had the Virgin Mary on it. Todd made everybody tomato sandwiches. Malik brought out a pack of cards and a bottle of whiskey. It was awkward at first, and we all resisted playing, but before long, we were three rounds deep, howling with laughter. We didn’t even notice that the doorframes were flooding—sort of weeping—until the water touched us. It was coming from the roof, I think. I caught Blandine looking at me, then, her face flushed from the drink and her eyes all twinkly, and I felt something. Like waking up.
But I didn’t feel it again until four months later. That’s when the love attacked me, Todd, and Malik for real. All at once. Synchronized. We were three teenage guys hot out of the Vacca Vale foster system, living on our own for the first time, and we believed we were free until that winter morning. I think Malik fell for Blandine the hardest, and Todd the softest, and me in the middle. Seemed to me that Todd fell more for Malik than he did for Blandine, but he wanted to fit in, so he started to drool at the sound of her hiccups like the rest of us.
It happened in January. Fresh snow outside. New year. She got up late that morning, walked into the kitchen, squinting. Malik was making chocolate chip pancakes, like a douchebag. Blandine doesn’t really walk—she slinks. Cattish. It was a Saturday and none of us had to work, which was rare. The hair on Blandine’s head was bleached white, the hair on her arms golden, her zits out and about, nipples poking through her shirt. Most people are beautiful because they look like the average of everybody else, but Blandine is beautiful because she looks bizarre. Asymmetrical. Scrawny limbs. Something alien about her. A beauty that should be ugly but isn’t. She yawned and said, “Fucking mattress.”
And we fell in love.
I know it seems implausible that it happened like that, all at once. But Todd, Malik, and I have been over it again and again. It’s the truth for me, and I believe that it’s the truth for them, too.
If Blandine knew that we had fallen in love with her, she was too smart to show it. In hindsight, it’s clear that the dynamic was fucked in one way or another from the start, and nothing could be done to save it. Three nineteen-year-old guys lusting after the same eighteen-year-old girl in one hot apartment, running low on pot, jobs minimum-wagey and back-achey, independence a sham. On top of that, getting snubbed by the girl, who hates attention, hates being close to anybody who wants anything from her. We hardly knew Blandine, but that much about her was clear.
The four of us met in an “Independence Workshop” that prepared foster kids to transition out of the system. We would’ve aged out of it at eighteen anyway, but if you completed the workshop, they helped you find a place, a job, healthcare. They give you a little money for a security deposit and a stipend in your first year. You just have to pass a monthly drug test and prove you haven’t spent the money on immoral things. In class, I liked Blandine’s white-blond hair. It scared me.