New Life from Dead Things
Holly Schickler, 32
“He said he loved me from the first. Pete. Said his life was a quote vacuous hole of despair until he saw me on the steps of the hotel entrance, rolling my luggage into a rental car. On our third date he said he wanted to father my children, buy his parents’ house in North Conway, build a small but luxurious ski resort in the Whites. He said all of this. I was twenty-seven, he was thirty. Handsome. My mother wanted grandchildren. He had a sizable inheritance from a great-uncle who died when he was a child. Very quickly, we moved in together, too quickly probably. I had two service jobs, the worst of which was a bartending gig on the Upper East Side. Pete was a stay at home painter, a believer in the ten-thousand-hour rule. I loved him in my own way. I had dated so many duds up to that point that it was just nice to come home to someone quiet, someone who didn’t probe or need to be probed, you know? He was charming, I guess, sweet, said all the right things. I don’t know what else to tell you. We grew apart in the usual way. Have you ever lived with someone only to later realize you knew almost nothing about them? Their internal clockwork, what made them tick? Pete was that: an enigma. He woke at ten and looked at Twitter until it was painting time, which usually consisted of a brief twenty-minute session before he grew tired and took an Ambien and watched some obscure Brakhage film with the blinds drawn. He even stopped painting for a few months, said he was creatively stymied, so all day he sat staring into his phone watching abstract films and taking pills, acting like nothing outside of himself mattered. Things finally came to a head when I got into a landscape architecture program in Chicago and said that yes, I was going, and no, I didn’t want him to come with me. I knew he would take it hard, but I had no way of knowing he would do what he did. How was I supposed to know? How is this at all my fault? I needed to get out of there. And I grieved. I’m not saying I didn’t grieve. I did. I still am. You think it’s easy to go on like this? It’s not—I’m afraid I’ll never not be alone now. But I don’t regret a thing. Not a single thing. His love was not love. It was not. It never was. It never could have been.”
Aldon Mankin, 26
“I wore a tinfoil hat. She wore a white motorcycle helmet. The party theme was Intergalactic Love. In order to kiss her, I had to take off her helmet and put it in the bathtub. Did I not mention we were in a bathroom? We were in a bathroom. Her entire body was painted green, everything except her eyes. She was seated on the toilet’s upper rack. My knees straddled the rim as we kissed. The door was locked and every so often there were knocks and drunken calls to open up. I was very aroused. Turned on? We were making out. Her fingers toyed with my zipper. ‘Greetings from Planet Zyborg, Spaceman,’ she whispered, ‘what galaxy are you from?’ I took this as some mistimed humor and laughed, sliding her straps down her shoulders. ‘What say you, Mr. Astronaut, from Planet Porthogon, about copulating in this intergalactic stronghold?’ Her dress was now folded at her waist. Even her nipples were green. I put my hands on her breasts. She giggled, her voice going back to normal. ‘Aldon, wait, stop. I have something important to ask you.’ I took a step back, an erection pressed against my jeans. ‘Did Minister Scolubus send you here to defeat the Meglamacs?’ I wondered if I was being setup. Were there cameras in the ceiling? Did her friends dare her to do this? I barely knew her. We had Orgo together and randomly ran into each other at this party and after several beers entered the bathroom together and it had all felt like destiny or fate or—and so I glared at her atop the toilet and waited for her to stop. ‘Bee-boop-bop,’ she said, psychotically. ‘This is our Alien Love Language, Aldon. You must learn to speak it.’ I stared at her for a long moment. ‘Bee-boop-bop, bee-boop-bop. Don’t be shy, Spaceman!’ And that’s when I hightailed it from the bathroom, the party, and walked home, green lipstick smeared across my mouth, trembling from head to toe. Don’t laugh. What happened to her afterward does not weigh on my conscious, no. But I somewhat feel as if that moment in the bathroom was a turning point in both of our lives. And no, I will not elaborate.”
Edgar Auty, 38
“Maureen thinks Evan has what she calls clinical depression and you know what I tell her, I tell her depression’s much too big a word for such a small kid who doesn’t know how to fry an egg or use a screwdriver or jerk off or doing anything worth anything. When I was his age I killed squirrels with a handmade slingshot and chugged those big bottles of Coke until I got so dizzy I couldn’t stand. You want to talk about depression, let’s talk about depression. I once saw my daddy strangle a Mexican with one hand. I once saw my brother fire a handgun into an empty school bus. Look what I made of myself, I tell Maureen. I say Maureen look how I turned out, pretty okay all things considering. But she stands firm on this whole depression thing, so later that night I have no choice but to go to Evan and say, Look here Ev, your mom thinks you’re depressed and I just need to let her know you’re fine—you’re fine, right? Later, when I relay this little talk to Maureen, she slaps me like a whip across the face and takes a smoke break on the patio even though she’s been trying to quit since I met her. When she comes back inside, she slides her back against the door and says, ‘Christ, Edgar, what’s wrong with you?’ And I of course explain myself but she cuts me off and says, ‘You even know anything about depression?’ And I say sure but she just goes and cuts me off again and says, ‘This is not the old days. We have ways to deal with this stuff now.’ And I say, ‘What stuff?’ And she says, ‘Stuff you should’ve dealt with a long time ago. Stuff that’s made you and me miserable both. Stuff that makes you mean and unapologetic and unable to talk about how you feel. And what’s sad is it’s much too late for you to change. You never will. You’re stuck in yourself, forever.’”
Lillian Scaricca, 35
“God told me to break my phone. A directive from the heavens, I guess. At a silent prayer retreat in Northern California. The region is plagued with gray. High winds and rainfall. Below fifty in August. Hemp robes, wooden rosaries, metal trays of rice and lentils. This was after Brian had the affair. I needed something to stop from sleeping eighteen hours a day. At the retreat we prayed three hours in the morning and three hours at night, alone in our robes, cross-legged on the floors of our stone hut. This lasted ten days. It was excruciating. I couldn’t keep my eyes shut. Whenever I clasped my hands and imagined Jesus in the desert, all I saw was Brian fucking his secretary, holding her hair back, pulling up her pleated skirt. Still I prayed. It was all I could do. To take a break from praying we listened to Father Orion’s sermons, these long talks about bloodshed and angel wings and other symbolic shit I could not make sense of. After supper one evening we gathered in the high grass by the chapel and listened to Father shout against the wind, waving his arms like something possessed. When his sermon ended, a stout man in street clothes approached Father Orion on the platform and handed him a loin cloth bag heavy with what I now know were cell phones—our cell phones. We had forfeited them at check-in. Father reached into the sack and fumbled around until he withdrew a big silver iPhone, one of the new ones that you unlock with your face. It could have been anybody’s. He turned it over in his hand and stared at it tenderly. Then his face went cold. ‘Lillian Scaricca!’ he shouted. ‘Approach the pulpit!’ I did so, head bowed. He placed my phone on a wooden stool beside him. The wind roared around us. ‘God has asked us to shed ourselves here this week, to be reborn into Jesus’ hands.’ The man who had brought the cloth sack now handed Father a hammer. For a moment I thought he was going to strike me with it. With the thought, I closed my eyes and cried. Very softly. I can’t tell you why. I wish I could. Although I refuse to acknowledge that this retreat was in any way an avenue toward healing. It was so cold and gray and I hated every fucking second of it. My robes flapped loose against my body. Father lifted my chin with his knuckles and bestowed upon me the hammer, which he folded my fist around. ‘God has called upon you to sacrifice yourself, Ms. Scaricca.’ He was pronouncing my name wrong, using a hard C. He motioned for me to stand, pointing toward my phone, which lay dead on the stool. ‘Strike it!’ he yelled. I gazed into the crowd of robed retreaters. Their faces were black holes below their hooded robes. I looked at Father. ‘Strike the child, Abraham! Strike him!’ I figured he had lost his mind. Scared, I softly dropped the hammer onto the screen. It cracked, barely. ‘Again! Again!’ I shut my eyes. I considered Brian’s fat face, his receding hairline, the skin tags on his eyelids. I brought the hammer down and my phone unmagnificently broke, slightly diagonaling itself in two. Father Orion clapped. ‘You are free!’ he proclaimed. ‘Free from the chains of the secular world! Join us in heaven, Lillian Scarrica, join us!’ If you held a gun to my head and forced me to conjure up some bullshit about what this little show meant, I’d say this: the symbolism was that by breaking the phone I broke its control over me. Or maybe the symbolism was that God called me to sacrifice something I coveted for the greater good of Him. Or maybe it was in breaking something material I shattered something in myself in need of mending. Or maybe I wasted two-grand on this bullshit retreat and God is just an idea you turn to only when you need it. I haven’t been to church since, but I have been to the Verizon store. What else was I to do?”
Samuel Winters, 33
“When I get home from work I sit on the sofa and open a beer and lean my head back against the headrest and think: Finally, the day is done. Calmly, I observe the late day light slashing and cutting past the living room blinds and folding across the carpet. Do you like that? Light that slashes and cuts and folds? That’s an MFA for you. You might work at a restaurant in your thirties but at least—and but yes I do not go outside after work. Mid-sixties or not, it’s generally more pleasant inside. I sit on the sofa and drink my beer and check my phone and wait for Mandy to text me, but she won’t text me today or any day because of all those things I said to her that were not very cool, not very affirming or convincing on the please-take-me-back front. If I look out the window at the right moment, I notice how the shadows recede from the grass, as if being sucked backward—you should write that down. A young couple always walks their black-spotted dog at 6:09 p.m. The poem I’m writing is not very good but I will work on it for half an hour before Colton, my roommate, returns home with a case of Miller High Life and two packs of Silvers and a desire to watch all nine innings of a nationally televised baseball game, all in an effort to subsume that deep-down thing that makes me so neutral and unmoved and tired. You can probably tell I’ve written about this. All because of Mandy. It was the best eight months of my life. We initially bonded over our love of Ashbery and British motorcycles. Rather impulsively I bought us tickets to Paris with three-quarters of my savings. We spent two weeks in France tolling around on motor bikes and drinking Grenache from the bottle and eating white clumpy cheese and shaved meats and chatting in bed until dusk enveloped the bedroom and we awoke to walk the streets, in love. Yes, I know, blah. But it was the best two weeks of my life. On the final days of the trip, I resolved to marry Mandy, formulating a plan to propose to her upon our return to Oakland. I’m 33. I want kids. I’m ready. But the night we got home we sat out on her front porch and she told me, in no uncertain terms, that I was quote unambitious and that she quote couldn’t imagine forming any sort of life with me. She said my casual interest in literature was a sorry excuse to not engage in the world, develop any sort of idiosyncratic moral code. This is when I said those pretty terrible and unforgivable things that likely squashed any possibility of convincing her to stick with me. I didn’t mean to get into this. Let me continue. I’m home from work and the beer is empty and the day is a crepuscular purple and Colton should be home and the poem is in my bedroom waiting to be revised for the hundredth time. Crepuscular meaning of or relating to twilight. I once heard a quote that said your life is evaluated by the quality of your days. And considering this I don’t feel so good about life, not with Mandy in L.A. and me here, in Oakland, waiting for something to fucking happen. None of this is exciting. I’ll stop, I’m sorry. I’m going into frenetic detail about pedantic shit. Pedantic meaning—”
Ken Budenholzer, 28
“Have you ever meditated before? My sister insists it will change my life. She says, ‘Ken, meditation will change your life.’ She didn’t say there was this religiosity behind it. You know like throat chakras and lotus legs and you can see why I’m out, right? I stopped believing in that shit a long time ago. I went to church as a kid. Roman Catholic. The whole knees on the pew and everything. Wine and bread as blood and flesh. I gave that up as soon as I left the house. For Sarah to call and tell me to meditate and find a yoga studio where I can do a savasana, like—that’s what I said, I said, ‘Sarah, this will not help me get over Janice.’ It won’t. Nothing will. But Sarah cites neuroscience and peer-reviewed studies about meditation’s health benefits and I think: this is how they get you. They say this here is backed by Science and if we all start ohming to the Buddha all of our fucking problems will disappear, right? But that’s always been Sarah’s problem. I would call her critical faculties stunted. That’s not an insult. Like as a child—this is the best example—as a child she stopped wearing Nike because of the sweatshops. We were like, I don’t know, twelve and ten, maybe a bit older, and Sarah is in the Foot Locker at the Fox Run Mall refusing to try on Nike. I pick out this pair of high-top Air Jordans and I’m jumping around the store pretending to take step-back three’s like Ray Allen. Meanwhile Sarah is only trying on New Balance sneakers because, get this, they’re Made in America. Dad is indulging Sarah’s lunacy because he only sees us every other weekend. But then Sarah—and this is crazy—refuses to leave the Foot Locker if I buy the Air Jordan’s, as they are technically Nike’s. She says buy any other brand you want, just not Nike. And Dad’s obviously like, Sarah, come on. But she insists. She says fine leave me here at the Foot Locker if you want but I am not leaving this store until Kenny takes off those damn shoes. So, right, I’m on the phone with Sarah and she says, ‘Ken, listen to yourself. You’re suffering.’ To which I sigh and say, Sarah, I need to get back to work. But she persists. ‘You’ve never had to fight for your life. You’ve never been oppressed. You don’t know what it means to suffer.’ Can you believe that? I don’t know what it means to suffer? Then why should I meditate if I got it all figured out, huh? By this point she’s not listening, just spewing her Be Here Now bullshit. She says, ‘Do you know how easy it is for you to act like nothing matters? That being alive is all fun and leisurely and predicated upon chumming it up with your buddies? Do you know how rare and obscene this version of life is?’ I say, Sarah, please, what does this have to do with meditating? Get this—she says, ‘You have no sense of you, Ken, no sense of who you are outside of the limits of your ego.’ To which I say—wait, let me grab another beer.”
Pete Wistler, 35
“Last weekend I visited a friend from Princeton, Nick, who recently moved to a suburb outside of Dallas. He had quit his tech gig in Austin to work fulltime on his wife’s cooking and lifestyle blog, which was, and still is, incredibly lucrative. Look at their Instagram: it’s just these photos of Karyn, his wife, smiling in a sunhat and holding a bottle of Chenin. Or look: these little bite-sized shots of zucchini marinating in a cast-iron. As a rule, they don’t post pictures of their daughter. Nick says it only takes one Crazy. Which makes sense—they have a huge following. Fifty thousand people or whatever. So it’s not totally unprecedented when they get a letter from a guy saying he’s going to murder Nick in cold blood and imprison Karyn in his basement until the zombies come and the sun explodes. The letter’s typed on a typewriter and doesn’t have a return address and so the police say, ‘Not much we can do here, guys.’
“Well, one night their front door gets blown open by a shotgun. This is in Hyde Park, off Avenue G. When the gun goes off, Nick and Karyn jump out of bed and grab their sleeping daughter, hurrying to hide themselves in the guest room closet. They know pretty well it’s the typewriter guy. Nick says the dude’s just fucking screaming at the top of his lungs. Karyn calls 911 and says, ‘Come quick, we’re all going to die.’ Meanwhile, the guy is downstairs firing shotgun shells into the ceiling. Their daughter is curled into Karyn’s lap, whimpering. Nick holds her head in his hands and says he’s so afraid he can’t take it, says he would rather die than be this afraid, to have his daughter be this afraid.
“The guy is climbing the stairs. Nick says his footsteps sound like cinderblocks being picked up and dropped. His gun erupts through a door down the hall, likely their daughter’s bedroom. The shot is so loud it sounds like he’s in the closet with them, firing. Nick’s daughter yelps into his palm and he holds her with great resolve, his eyes burning wet. The closet is pitch black and smells, he says, like an old baseball mitt. After the gunshot, silence falls over the house. No footsteps, no screaming. Nick can’t tell if the silence is real or imagined. He’s sitting there holding his daughter’s head in his hands and leaning his forehead against Karyn’s and thinking about these big abstract things without wanting to. Like what did he do anything for if it was all to end here, at the hand of a psychotic gunman? How was his life leading toward this moment? What did it say about him that he was presently bereft with fear and weakness? How could he die gracefully, honorably, for his wife and daughter?
“This is when Karyn sits up and puts her hand on Nick’s cheek. Their eyes find each other in the black closet, as if they were wearing night vision goggles. This prolonged eye contact is what they think is their goodbye to each other. But amazingly, Karyn appears unafraid. Nick says her face is not tense and tight and scared like his, but strong and calm and knowing. Nick returns her stare and feels an ineffable connection to her, knows that no matter what happens he has loved her deeply, as much as he could ever love anyone, and that despite all of the petty things they often fought about—cleaning, child-rearing, Nick’s marijuana use—their love was real beyond any available metric; no madman could kill it, ever. Karyn leans down and kisses their daughter on the head, squeezes Nick’s hand with hers. They all bring their heads together and Nick says when they do so, something magical happens; he feels a force field come over them. Nothing can kill them, he knows. This life is not it—there’s more, he says, there’s layers to living. Nick strokes his daughter’s hair and knows that no matter what happens, he has lived a meaningful life through her. He says that what he felt for her in that moment was something he had never felt before, not at her birth or any of her birthdays—what he felt for her then was love, the type of love that stretched way behind the closet or themselves or the guy with the shotgun.
“This is when Nick pauses his story and dips his head into his palms and says, ‘I am so grateful for that guy, Pete. I feel thoroughly changed, like I’ve been wiped clean, alive for the first time.’ Naturally, I ask what happened to the gunman. Nick nods all pensively and says, ‘Cops came in and gunned him down in the upstairs hallway.’
“And there we were, Nick and I, on his porch in north Texas, unsure of what to say. Nick was smiling. He said, ‘Do you want to share now? I know it’s been a hard few months. I’m here, ready to listen.’ But I could not stand to stay another moment. I abruptly said goodnight and drove the four-hour drive back to Austin. At home I couldn’t sleep. I laid in bed and looked absently into the ceiling fan, the blades turning so fast they looked invisible. That was the first time, lying in bed after leaving Nick’s house, that I realized how absolutely alone I was, how I knew I never loved, not like that, and I felt myself drift into dreams, the heaviness of sleep, and I myself drifted away, became weightless, became nothing, not a thing, nothing.”