Six days after the Night, James chews the plants his wife left in the fridge but tastes very little. He pictures himself as a Brachiosaurus, munching the forest canopy, irrelevant and doomed, wrinkles everywhere, his contemporaries extinct already. He has spent the week washing every sheet, pillowcase, duvet, quilt, throw blanket, and bath mat in the house; it felt too murderous to exclusively launder the bedding in which he fucked his student. Now, as he eats, he listens to the hum of the washing machine and makes a list of tasks to complete, knowing that he will not complete them. After clearing his plate, James cancels his therapy session by text message. The death of his mother had prompted the revelation that therapy was indispensable to his health, which made him wonder how he had survived for so long without it. It was like discovering fruit at the age of thirty. He doesn’t know anyone else in Vacca Vale with a therapist.
In the afternoon, Meg FaceTimes from Florida. “There’s a hurricane that will obliterate all of this next week,” she monotones in the dazzling sunlight, showing him the house her parents are renting. “So we got here just in time.”
That evening, as the tub fills with water, James rummages in the cabinets until he finds a jar of bath milk. He had given it to Meg as a birthday gift a couple years ago. For far too long, he deliberated at the farmers market stand, asking the vendor outrageously specific questions until he decided that Meg would prefer the eucalyptus spruce over the chamomile rose. Now, the jar is dusty and unopened. Restore, energize, uplift, reads its label. He pours a third of it into the tub and lies in the fragrant water until it surrenders its heat to the clock. He does not feel restored, energized, or uplifted.
In one of the guest rooms, James sleeps on his back, hands folded over his navel like a corpse at a viewing. Across from the bed, Meg fastened a print of The Unicorn in Captivity, which makes him want to eat his own hands. He wakes before dawn in a museum of his wife’s magnificent stuff and spends the day shuffling from room to room, curiously unable to go outside. The cats make themselves scarce. He avoids the Zorn Family Hallway, which has always given him the creeps, and now also gives him esophageal spasms. He doesn’t believe in ghosts, but he accepted their presence in this house long ago. They dress him in cold wet blankets. They fuck with the electricity and the cellular service and the Wi-Fi. They call him Farm Trash. They know what he’s done. He tries to kindle a fire, prods and reconstructs, uses all the newspaper in the house, but the wood refuses to light.
On Saturday, he eats nothing but a bag of venison jerky that he hid from Meg months ago and stares at the television for many minutes before remembering to turn it on. He spends the evening crunching ice between his molars and gazing into a digital clock as its numbers shimmy. He pours himself a large mug of gin and apple juice—the drink that he and his brother favored when they were teenagers, secretly getting drunk in the abandoned corncrib on their parents’ property, discussing quantum physics as if they understood it. Now, he sips his drink in the girls’ room, mentally archiving their books and toys as though he might have to flee the country in the middle of the night, falling asleep on the sheepskin rug to the distant wail of a car alarm.
If Tiffany believes that she is the only one they injured, she is even younger than he thought.
Sunday arrives—the seventh day after the Night. Spring break is over. Tomorrow, Tiffany and James must return to school.
In preparation for the sluggish psychological brutality that Monday is sure to inflict, Tiffany has forced herself out of Wayne and Stella’s dark, low-ceilinged house and into the world. She’s three pounds lighter than she was a week ago; she can feel herself minimizing. She stops at the gas station and purchases a blue slushee to cheer herself up. Now she stands in the Valley, the only place she’s ever loved, inhaling the pollen and dirt of a forest too wild for the town it inhabits, dyeing her tongue blue and trying to circumvent a brain freeze. It’s the first warmish day after a relentless winter, and this is the Valley’s most public meadow. It seems the whole town is there. Attached to a fence, a banner advertises the condominiums that will sprout in the hills and demolish this park in the summer—Phase One of an urban revitalization plan that makes Tiffany want to unvitalize. The day breathes sanguine and gray, melting the last ice, and the scent of petrichor is so lovely it makes her eyes water. Lines from the play fire through Tiffany’s brain on an irrepressible loop, and she’s trying to stop them when her phone rings.
She jumps. Gasps. He’s never called her before.
“Hello?”
“Hi.”
“Hey.”
Their hearts pound on separate acres. This wasn’t his idea, and he wasn’t hers, but here he is, in a cliché he especially hates, and there she is, in a cliché she especially hates, and what can you do.
James stands in his kitchen, shaking from a third espresso, aware that he has no reason to be so tyrannically awake at 4:14 in the afternoon. His wife is returning in a few hours. They got into a fight on the phone earlier—a fight that had nothing to do with anything. A fight about time.
In the meadow, Tiffany trembles in white cotton, aware that she’s suitably dressed for her role as disposable ingénue.
Neither of them feels capable of change, this month.
He waits for her to speak, like she was the one who called. Finally, he asks, “What’s up?”
“Good.”
“How are you?”
“Nothing.” She flushes. “I mean—”
“Yeah.” He smiles. She hears it. It hurts her. “I know.”
Have you mentioned me to your therapist? Tiffany wants to ask. Either way, she’d be offended. Instead, she chews the straw of her Chug Big and stares at a pink tree to prove that good is, indeed, what’s up. James is a child but different, both of them children but different, so in the static they say nothing. Tiffany wants to exit her body. James wants to stay rooted in his. It’s why a lot of people fuck—there’s nothing to see here—Tiffany wants to scream.
Beneath the tree, a young woman cuffs her jeans and laughs into her phone. Tiffany studies her like an anthropologist. Unlike Tiffany, the laughing woman is real. Whomever she’s speaking to speaks back like they want to, and Tiffany envies her. She wonders if there’s a word for the opposite of solipsism, wonders if such a term could accurately describe her psychological disorder. It’s Sunday but it feels like Wednesday. It’s spring but it feels like fall. It’s warm but Tiffany shivers. She feels drunk.
Tiffany thought she just wanted James’s voice until he said Hi like he had to, and now she revises—now she just wants his voice if it’ll hold her name like it did that Night.
“I should’ve called sooner,” James says.
“You don’t owe me anything.”
But neither of them means it.
Up until James, Tiffany had led a small life in dark rooms, and she was hoping to expand, but this bright empty space embarrasses her. In the grass, she sees a piece of trash and relates to it. Tiffany is not designed for a big life—she does not meet the height requirement. She is seventeen; she feels seventy. She is seventeen; she feels seven.
“Still, I’m sorry,” he says.
“What for?”
“Well.” He sighs. “Pretty much all of it.”
He is trying to do the right thing, but instead he is pulverizing her.
Here’s what they wanted—it is what they always want: Tiffany wanted to preserve James’s sadness like an endangered species because she thought it made them both more interesting. James wanted to preserve his youth in hers. He is forty-two, but he never made it past fifteen. He didn’t want her to interview him, but he needed her to ask him questions. They weren’t sure if they wanted to have sex, per se, but they wanted to know what would happen next. He is forty-two and he is terrified. She didn’t need a future-inclusive tense, but she needed him to wring the pleasure from her voice just once. Once he did, she did not know what she wanted. What she ever wanted.
“Listen,” he says on the phone, but discards the rest.
Observing how open and spacious the Valley is, Tiffany’s eyes water. Not far off, someone uncorks a bottle of wine. A very human man approaches the very human woman beneath the pink tree. Their flesh looks soft and packed with organs. He carries a metal pipe.
“Excuse me,” he says, pointing to the branches. “I gotta get that down.”
The woman looks up, irritated, then crosses the grass. “Sorry,” she says to the other end of the line. “There was a drone. Go on.”
The very human man hurls the pipe again and again at the tree, shedding branches and blossoms. A dog barks, children scream, someone plays a harmonica, and Tiffany sips until she has sucked all the blue out of the ice. “WE ARE LIVING WITH THE ENEMY!” bellows a child, pitching a branch at her brother.
“Jesus,” says James, sounding annoyed. “Where are you?”
“At the park. I was reading.” She did bring a book, but she wasn’t reading it, just bullying the ink into sense. “It’s pretty good,” she says. “It would be brilliant if it weren’t the literary equivalent of a shirtless mirror selfie, you know, like, if the author only flexed when he had to lift something. But I guess no one is spared the primal dispossession of psychosexual pressures. Not even the geniuses.”
She blushes. All she meant to communicate was that James is not her only story, but now she’s gone and revealed precisely what she vowed to conceal. This always happens with him.