I’m also sending emails.
Over the last three weeks, certain memories have already lodged in his brain, expanding and contracting. Walking to the train with an angry ringing in his ears from the shock of their last interaction. Waiting for her to call and apologize. Hearing nothing.
For a few days, he hadn’t spoken to another person. Hadn’t gone outside. He’d just sat on the sofa with his slowly dissipating fury, like an inflatable mattress with the tiniest leak—every fucking thing in the apartment reminding him of some stupid thing Ari had said or done.
Bill Evans’s “Peace Piece” plays over the sound system, its two chords repeating like a meditation. Sometimes melancholy music has the inverse emotional impact. It’s a strange form of masochism. Can you take this plaintive piano melody? You can? Then how about this Miles Davis solo, bitch?
Tues, March 14, 6:03 p.m.
Briar: Excited for tonight?
Remember your POSITIVE talking points.
I peeped her IG and determined that she’s like five ten.
A lot of people have that size kink thing where the woman is tiny and the man is a tree, but I think two people who are roughly the same height are VERY aesthetically pleasing.
Btw let’s talk photo filters soon.
You need a better selfie strategy.
Speaking of masochism.
He taps the link to the woman’s Instagram. Beach vacation pictures. Elaborate restaurant dishes. She’s been a bridesmaid three times this year and it’s only March.
Josh absentmindedly taps the home icon, refreshing his feed.
At the top of the screen is a ghost. A face he hasn’t seen in months.
Thanks to this fucking algorithm that knows exactly how to toy with his brain, Ari is staring back at him, smiling.
Josh quickly shoves the phone into his pocket, as if it doesn’t obey the principle of object permanence.
“The tracks on this extend past the very idea of beginnings and endings,” Manbun opines from a few feet away, his voice projecting like he’s on a stage. “There’s just one aural frame.”
The piano melody seems to get louder over the sound system—complicated and flourishing over the constancy of those two chords.
Josh puts the record down and retrieves his phone again, holding it with both hands, reopening Ari’s post. He swipes through the four photos, each one sending a completely different message. It’s a post specifically devised to confuse him.
He slides the carousel of photos back and forth, looking at all of them, letting his brain memorize the slightly new angle of her face in each photo. Being careful not to accidentally tap the heart icon with the pad of his thumb.
The caption reads, “Enjoying the nation’s #1 erect phallus.” Does it have some meaning beyond a mere dick joke? Has she met someone? Is it code?
He’s been skipping therapy. Some topics are just too big to explain in a fifty-minute session. Better to go without and wait until he gets a handle on the narrative.
He doesn’t want the fucking help right now, anyway.
“Peace Piece” dissolves into discordant notes, the song almost breaking apart.
It would probably feel good to unfollow her. Or maybe he could post a selection of his own photos that suggest a productive and exciting new life. Let her be the one to check her phone too often.
But when has he ever let himself feel good?
Josh puts his phone away again. He pretends to leaf through the bins a bit more. Maybe this is a form of anchoring, too.
The melody slowly reconciles with the bass, easing into a gentle resolution.
His breathing slows.
The moment he’s mentally out of the woods, his phone buzzes again in his pocket.
Tues, March 14, 6:12 p.m.
Radhya: Hello “Chef.” I have your pasta machine.
24
JOSH ISN’T HERE TO ASK any questions about Ari. He wants his goddamn pasta machine, whether or not he uses it. That’s why he’s finally dragged himself to Brooklyn.
He wipes his boots on the welcome mat as the door swings open.
Radhya’s wearing a pair of jeans with holes at the knees. Her hair is down and it’s longer than he would have assumed. It must be the first time he’s seen her without her kitchen armor: no chef’s whites, no hair pulled tight into a bun.
Her apartment smells like Sichuan food. From somewhere beyond the foyer, there are sounds of low music and cans being placed directly on a table without coasters underneath.
“Is this a bad time?” he asks, eager for any excuse to make a quick exit.
“No. Come in.” She gestures at a slightly tilting stack of cardboard boxes at the end of the hallway flanked by a black trash bag. His dad’s pasta machine sits on top of a bulging Crown Royal box.
Josh lifts it up. His dad never actually used it for pasta—just an unsuccessful experiment with pierogi dough. Maybe it’s cursed. Strange how this innocuous piece of cooking equipment has come to symbolize his misguided belief that he mattered to Ari.
There’s something bright red poking out of the top of the trash bag. He bends down and grabs the wrinkled Soundgarden T-shirt.
“This is her stuff?” he can’t help but ask.
Radhya nods. “I’m storing some of her things.” She nudges the trash bag with her foot. “But this is going to Buffalo Exchange. I guess Cass’s old gym shirt is another person’s vintage ‘statement piece,’?” she says.
It doesn’t really mean anything. Maybe she’s purchased new shirts. Maybe she’s sleeping naked.
He’s itching to open the boxes. To examine her stuff and recapture a little bit of that feeling of knowing her.
He admonishes himself, wiping that thought away almost as quickly as it appears.
That kind of urge should have dissipated by now.
To be fair, it’s fading a bit. Ari occupies less space in his brain. He’s no longer agonizing over her, waiting for a call, or deciphering each social media post like it’s composed of Egyptian hieroglyphics.
Or he’s limiting himself to only doing that in used record stores.
“Have you talked to her?” Radhya is staring at him.
“Who?” he forces himself to ask.
“Really, Kestenberg?”
“No.” I’m giving it space, or whatever the fuck you said, so…
Radhya lets out an enormous sigh. “She’s—” He braces himself for her to drop a momentous piece of Ari information. Seeing someone else. Marrying Gabe. Joining a cult in British Columbia. “—fine. According to her.”
Josh doesn’t respond. It always happens this way: Just as his feelings tip over from anger into acceptance, something reshuffles the whole fucking deck. He clenches his jaw, willing his face to maintain a neutral affect.
“Did you eat dinner?” Radhya asks.
“No.” Josh shakes his head once. He must really look pained. Pathetic. Friendless. “But I should get going.”
“I ordered Chuan Tian Xia,” she says. “Don’t pretend you don’t want it.”
And then a way-too-familiar voice from the other room: “He can’t resist Chengdu noodles.”
He glances at Radhya and then follows the sound around the corner to the small living room, where his sister (traitor!) is sitting on the floor in front of a coffee table, every inch covered by containers, dishes, napkins, lids, and beer cans.
If Briar was capable of shame, she’d be staring up at him with wide, apologetic eyes, but instead her face is calm, even pleased. Best to maintain power position since this is an obvious trap of some sort.
“What is this?” he asks, whipping his head between them. “An intervention?”
Radhya narrows her eyes and takes a seat. She’s always been good at maintaining a facial expression that simply dares people to question her further. She pushes the fortune pepper fish an inch in his direction—the Radhya equivalent of an olive branch. “This isn’t about Ari.”
“It’s business,” Briar adds. “I had an idea.”