Modern Gods. Nick Laird
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felt her own silence working on him as punishment, and she kept it up and stared at him. Was it the fact it was a man? Did that make it better or worse? The morning after they’d first fucked, which was the morning after they’d first met, she and Joel had gone for coffee at the Moonlight Diner a block down from her apartment. Peaceably hungover, him back in his waiter’s uniform, they’d studied their respective magazines and Joel had ordered eggs—no yolks—and mentioned, offhand, that his last relationship had been with a man.
She’d just sipped her green tea and smiled and said, “In this economy you got to diversify.”
How brave, the new world. She slid the menu between the salt and pepper shakers and went back to Shouts & Murmurs, feeling the fond glow of her progressive nature.
After two months of very casual dating, Joel’s sublease in Astoria expired and he asked her could he stay at hers for a week. Some cocaine had been taken and she’d readily agreed. That was three weeks ago.
But they were having fun. She liked him being around.
But now it was not fun, and now she did not like him.
Why was one thing always followed by the other? Why did no emotion hang around for very long?
“Did you fuck him or was he fucking you?”
Joel looked disappointed in her.
This was almost enjoyable. Bring on the heteronorms. Bring on the suits and ties. These kids were too free. They were having way too much fun. Bring back standards, family values and monogamy and chaperones, modesty, lowered hemlines, the death penalty. These kids with their Tinder, their Grindr, their 3nder, their constant fucking. It was too much. Joel was nine years younger and it occurred to Liz that the difference in their races, in their nationalities, in their sexes, was irrelevant. It was really a question of where you sat in relation to time. Did she have more in common with a thirty-four-year-old anywhere in the world than with this twenty-five-year-old in front of her? Was it self-sabotage? Did she want to get married? Did she want to have children? Did she want what she was supposed to? Sometimes. Sometimes she really thought she did. But mostly she did not.
Atlantic was scratching against the cupboard under the sink, where her food was kept. Pointless fucking dog. What were you doing while this was going on? Sleeping? Watching?
Joel was sorry she’d reacted like this.
Liz was sorry he was such a total cock.
Joel was sorry she was so consistently uptight and hadn’t she discussed this with her therapist?
Liz was sorry he thought it was fine to behave like such an entitled asshole.
Joel was sorry she was so limited and bourgeois and prejudicial and narrow-minded.
Liz was sorry he was such an unbelievable fucking cock.
The door shut behind him and she sat and stared at it and felt herself collapse in stages, like a marquee.
She was picking bits of wax out of Atty’s ears and rubbing them into her sock when her phone beeped. Alison. Amazing. One of her sister’s gifts—perhaps her sister’s only gift—was to contact people at their weakest, lowest, most humiliated point. Across oceans, across time zones—no doubt across light years and galaxies and the expanding unfathomable distances of deep space—Alison could smell it. The inimicable scent of sibling disaster. She was getting married—for the second time, admittedly—but still, Liz was getting nothing, was getting shafted, left alone again … She stuffed the phone in a crevice of the duvet nest she had constructed. It was silent for a few seconds then buzzed again. She willed herself to draw it out.
Flight on time? All OK? looking 4ward to catching up x
The sun had sunk out of sight, but the glass sides of the skyscrapers downtown gave back its old lion face. A diffuse ruddy light fell on the upper stories of the brick edifice of London Terrace. Liz tightened the left strap of her rucksack and considered her circumstances. No boyfriend meant no dog sitter.
There were no cabs. She needed to take Atlantic to her cousin Marcus’s flat, if he’d take her, and then head straight to Newark. Even if the fuss Marcus caused about Atlantic was tedious—setting a tea towel on his lap before the dog sat on him, ostentatiously picking the yellow hairs off his black sofa and dropping them into the toilet bowl—there was no one else.
She flicked through her phone. Who was Jason? Who was Lesley? Who was Nicky P? Man or woman? Friend or foe? Atlantic’s charms were far from legendary. She scrolled back to MARCUS and hovered her thumb above the name. Atlantic was giving something an exploratory chew. Liz crouched and pulled an Almond Joy wrapper from her slippery and unresisting teeth. She texted Marcus—BIG DOG FUCKUP: ANY CHANCE YOU COULD TAKE FOR A FEW DAYS? RIGHT NOW?—and walked north for a block before Marcus replied. He was in Hong Kong and it was 6:00 a.m. in the morning. He hoped that nothing was wrong and that she was doing OK—the kind of text that is like a plea to end the matter there. Liz took off the rucksack and sat on it on the corner of Twenty-fifth and Tenth. It happened like this. You were fine you were fine you were fine, and then you fell apart.
The problem with zopiclone was it launched you into the ocean of sleep handily enough, but subsequently it tossed you up on the beach of 3:11 a.m., wide awake, spectacularly marooned. You came to with a jolt, alert, your mind already mid-churn.
So here we are again, the Voice said to Judith. Just you and me. Us two. Us twosome. Us all alonesome. Us gruesome duo. How do you do, so?
The vast hulk of Kenneth beside her whistled serenely, steadily steaming across his own deep.
The Voice said, You know, you never should have bought a memory foam mattress. It makes you so hot. Like lying in a slice of white bread. And you can never admit this now, of course, since it was your idea to buy it. Not just your idea. Your insistence. Nothing else would do. Oh no.
The blinds were still black but would start edging closer soon to gray, then a kind of gray-green, then forest green, deciduous green, the green of well-fed grass, of grass that grows on graves.
It was impossible not to imagine the worst at 3:11 a.m.
What did Theresa say?
Allow the feeling in, experience it, and let it go again. Let it move on. Let it float past.
The Voice said, Do you think little Michael will remember you? Sure, how could he? What age will he be when you go? You’ll be a kind of misty presence in his memory, at best, and maybe video or pictures will remind him, maybe. But you won’t be reading books to him, you won’t be watching him at football matches, you won’t be seeing him put on gang shows with the scouts …
The Voice would not shut up. It would not be outwitted or shouted down. You could not threaten it or bargain with it. The Voice just talked and talked, recounting the things that must be done, the things that never would be, mixing the probable and the possible, the hopeless and the endless and the pointless … The mind leapt from rock to rock. The only way to escape it was to get up and go into the kitchen and make the mind do what the body told it. Read a book or make some wheaten bread or pay the bills. Clean the grouting in the upstairs bathroom. Which is what she had intended to start on this afternoon and might as well tackle now. Why not.
She put her feet on the cold floor and the Voice said, Slippers, Judith, you’ll catch your death. Ha.
The Voice had a sense of humor, of course, and yet it was not funny. You could not call it funny. Kenneth was doing his best. She was doing her best. Everyone was trying hard to do their best but so what? To what end? You went through the day doing your utmost and smiling and telling everyone you were fine really you were coping and then the night came and you lay down and in the darkness were gripped by the million hands of terror. So, said the Voice, I said how are we