“No.”
“Women’s studies.”
He takes a deep breath. “No.”
“Then what qualifies you to write a mental health blog.”
She’s alluring but dull-eyed, and her lack of affect tugs at Moses’s nerves. He feels violently white and male in her presence, and he can’t explain why. She’s white, too. He scratches his neck with both hands, multicolored fibers mushrooming up from his pores, but his scratching is insufficient. He fantasizes about taking a fork to his skin.
“Well, I exclusively chronicle my own personal mental health,” he says. “So.”
This is in fact the opposite of the blog’s intention, since it’s formatted as an advice column for anonymous help-seekers, but Moses prioritizes figurative truth over literal truth.
“Then how does that qualify as a mental health blog,” deadpans the woman.
Were you raised by robots? he decides not to ask. “Just trying to engage.”
“Your blog sounds just as navel-gazing and bereft of meaningful content as everybody else’s blog.”
“Well.” He is stung. He is itchy. “Each man is an expert on himself, so—”
“Person.”
“What?”
“Person.”
“When I say ‘man,’ I mean ‘mankind,’ ” explains Moses.
“Your speech is codified in patriarchal microaggressions.”
Moses hates himself.
“Go on,” she instructs.
He is sweating. He’s afraid he will do something drastic—he feels bad behavior coiling inside him like a wild cat. He’ll throw a lamp out the window, he’ll begin mooing or stripping, he’ll push this woman onto the floor. No, no. No. “Well, each person is an expert on him or her self. Or themself.” He downs the rest of his whiskey pickle juice. “Understanding one’s self helps one understand others.” And then, in a burst of conviction: “That’s why we have consciousness!”
He’s feeling weird, now, and it’s impossible to tell if she can tell. Can she tell? This pregnant mannequin? What is she thinking? Can she mourn or yearn? Hers is the kind of presence that registers as an absence. Motherly.
She grips a tumbler of toothpick-impaled olives. Slowly, she selects one, brings it to her mouth, and chews without breaking eye contact. Why would she do such a thing? Moses focuses on the sleeplessness that her puffy eyes betray, visible beneath her makeup, even in the candlelight.
“Oh,” she says sarcastically. “That’s why we have consciousness.”
He doesn’t know this woman. Some philanthropist wife of some has-been director. Why should the threat of her disapproval activate such extreme perspiration? He scratches his neck raw.
“If we can understand our own motives and desires,” he begins carefully, “we can better predict the motives and desires of others.” He is panting. “Predators, superiors, mates. So forth.”
“Didn’t consciousness evolve as a by-product of language.”
“The theories aren’t mutually exclusive.”
“You didn’t present yours as a theory.”
“What?”
“You presented it as a fact.”
“You say ‘oyster,’ and I say ‘erster.’ ” He grins beseechingly. He needs to leave.
“Excuse me.” She places her glass on a bookshelf stocked with encyclopedias that are still bound in their plastic membranes. “I think I’m going to throw up.”
Moses watches her waddle to the restroom, then exhales.
Misbehavior averted. He contained himself, his skin contained him, the fibers contained themselves inside his skin—what a miracle. Moses checks his phone the way a regular person would. 10:34 p.m. He thumbs a screenful of texts, voicemails, missed calls, emails, direct messages. People wishing him well, people sorry for his loss, people asking how he’s doing. And who among them cares? He has a red-eye to Chicago in a few hours, and he hasn’t packed yet. From Chicago, he’ll rent a car and drive to Vacca Vale, Indiana. He should be at home in Los Feliz right now, preparing himself. Attending this party was an untenable choice.
As he locates his blazer—sapphire velvet, a fifty-second birthday gift from Jamie, before she fucked that chubby startup fucker and—behave, breathe, behave—Moses notices a splotch of glowing neon on his hand in the shape of a tiny lung. He’ll have to be more careful.
Big
Blandine Watkins works four shifts a week at a diner called Ampersand, fielding the apologies and smiles and the Sorry to Bother You Buts and the If I Could Just Get Anothers of excessively thankful freelancers. Ampersand is the only non-chain establishment in Vacca Vale that approximates a coffeehouse. Opened by a pair of optimistic hipsters, it attracts a disproportionate number of people in berets. A vintage botanic wallpaper encloses them—a wallpaper that Blandine loves, most of the time. Today, it makes her feel murderous about deforestation. Ampersand serves avant-garde pie; that’s their thing. They donate fifty cents of each pie purchase to the women’s shelter. Blandine spends most of her shifts scowling at customers from her register, resenting their phony manners. Stacks of the Vacca Vale Gazette wilt on a chair beside the door. All morning, Blandine has watched people read the article. She tries to feel amused, or victorious, but she just feels tired.
On the morning of Tuesday, July sixteenth—the day before she exits her body—Blandine watches two oppressively polite customers negotiate seating.
The first is a woman in a baby-yellow dress with bad highlights, a good manicure, and a young daughter. The woman fidgets across from her child at the communal table, twisting a napkin. The second is a bespeckled twenty-something with a satchel slung across his chest and the radiant complexion of a vegan. What are all these people doing in Vacca Vale, Blandine wonders, and where do they live, and when will they leave? She never sees people like these outside of Ampersand, in the wild.
“Mind if I sit here?” the young man asks, touching the chair beside the woman.
“Oh,” says the woman, flustered. “Um.”
“Taken?” he asks.
“Well—the thing is—see, we’re actually waiting for someone, actually.”
“Oh okay, no problem!” With his smile, and those jeans, it’s evident to Blandine that no one has ever truly criticized this young man to his face, and that he’s a product of extreme parental love. He believes that the whole world ought to love him like that, Blandine assumes. “Is that one taken?” He gestures to the chair beside the child.
“Um.” The woman’s features crumple into panic. “He might want that chair, actually.”
“Okay.” The young man places his hand on the chair he initially requested. “So this one’s free after all, then?”
Eyes of café patrons lift from mugs and screens, intrigued.
The woman swallows. “Sorry, it’s just—it’s just that the person we’re waiting for is her dad? And he’s on the way? And he’s big. Big guy. Like, really big. So he’ll just need like a lot of space?” Her pitch has climbed, the paper napkin now shredded in her lap. She appears as collapsible as an umbrella. “He likes having lots of space.”
The young man blinks. “But . . . he’s not going to take up two chairs on opposite sides of the table, surely?”
“I just—I just don’t want you to be uncomfortable.”
“I wouldn’t be uncomfortable.”
“I want you to be comfortable.”
“Whatever’s most comfortable for you.”
They beam at each other.
“But what if—” the woman begins, “it’s just that he might—”
“I’d be happy to switch with him, if he wants this chair instead. I’d be so happy to do that.”
Wordlessly, the woman implores her child for help. The child smashes two plastic toys together, indifferent. One is a brown rabbit, and the other is a Tyrannosaurus rex; the former is three times the size of the latter.
“He’s a really big guy,” the mother insists quietly, and Blandine notices, for the first time, that the woman’s arms are stitched in cat scratches.
Finally, the young man understands that an anxiety unrelated to seating has materialized, for this woman, in the form of a seat. He took an Introduction to Psychology class at the junior college, Blandine imagines uncharitably, and now he thinks he’s an expert. “Okay.” He smiles, addressing the woman and her child as though they are the same age. “No worries. I’ll just sit right over here.”
He takes a stool by the window, tossing glances of sympathy at the woman and her child as he unpacks his satchel. Blandine hates this undemanding caricature of sympathy, which so often manifests as pity. She believes it is native to the overly loved and the never-truly-criticized.