Despite having recently bathed, the first thing I did at my father’s was shower. There was neither shampoo nor conditioner. My father is bald. A single bar of mouthwash-green Irish Spring had eroded into a thumb-shaped nub.
The building was a prewar townhouse that hadn’t seen an upgrade since the 1980s. My father, I assumed, could have moved into a newer apartment with better pipes and central heating, but he refused to leave the place where my mother died. He believed that a part of her existed in the floors and walls. He meant dust particles and hair follicles, or maybe just memories. To leave would be to lose her forever.
I turned the knob to H in the hopes of being scalded, but all I got was room-temperature trickle. I wet the soap and managed to work up a lather. I washed my cat-wound and the picked scabs. I used my father’s razor to shave off a large scab on my inner right thigh. I watched as my blood mixed with suds and ran down the drain.
Out of the shower, I found athletic tape, gauze, and bacitracin in a never-before-opened emergency kit on his medicine shelf. I applied bacitracin and taped half the roll of gauze around my thigh. Because I’m sentimental, I put on a matching set of my mother’s flannel pajamas. The pajamas fit me well. In photos from before I was born, my mother gives the impression of a rare beauty, a redhead like me with broad shoulders and a lipsticked smile. I tried to keep this image in my head, but a memory replaced it, my mother in these pajamas toward the end of her illness. Bony wrist poking from a baggy flannel sleeve. Thin neck growing up from her collar like a blighted, peeling branch.
The pajamas had not been washed in nearly thirty years so as to preserve some trace of her odor, perhaps a faint scent of the perfume she overused toward the end to cover the stench from her colostomy bag. I sniffed the pajamas to achieve further memory, but all I got was mothballs.
When my father saw me in this outfit, he was speechless for maybe half a second—long enough that I noticed, but only because I know him so well—before he told me I looked beautiful. He hugged me.
We ordered Thai food from my favorite spot. I was surprised the place was still open, but my father told me they’d extended their delivery hours in order to drum up extra business. The advent of drone delivery had been hell on small restaurants, which were being pushed out due to the vast delivery zones of bigger restaurants that invested in higher-powered drones. The restaurant was called Ground, and competition aside, they made a spinach-peanut dumpling that I’ve yet to find bested.
We watched the news while we waited for our food. I’d taken two Ativan by this point, and my anxiety about Michael’s disappearance had dimmed. On NY1, Jay Devor spoke to a crowd. I hadn’t seen him in years, but he looked the same: thick hair, gray eyes, plainspoken confidence. A handsome mole sat just below his hairline.
Devor had hit on me once, at Rachel Kirshenbaum’s wedding. Michael couldn’t attend due to a work conflict and Devor had used Michael’s absence as an opportunity to continuously refill my wineglass. He’d presented his case as a logical argument. Not in a pleading way, but straightforwardly, and with great self-assurance, in much the same manner that he spoke to the protesters. Devor told me that he and his girlfriend, Sophia, were “open.” He said it with steadiness and eye contact, as if being open were an indisputably feminist act. As if Michael’s assumed possessiveness was all that held me back from guilt-free exploration.
Now he spoke of bigger things. He talked about the concept of progress, the generally accepted rhetoric that it comes at a snail’s pace. He said that this rhetoric was what the establishment wanted us to believe. That the establishment used this rhetoric to keep us complacent. He said that now was not the time to wait, and that, in fact, by waiting, by working within the slow system, we were making things worse. Now was not the time for patience, but for action.
Devor said we could not, in good conscience, allow the UBI to fail. He said that this was our opportunity to change the system. We had voices, and they had to be heard. This was still a democracy. Our senator was someone we’d elected with our votes. We needed to let him know, needed to scream so loudly he’d be forced to hear. We needed to let him know that if he didn’t hear—and if the rest of the Senate didn’t hear—then we would not accept their verdict of progress stalled, would not wait patiently until the next battle for incremental justice might be fought. No, we would take action. And we had to make them understand that that action would have consequences.
The crowd was in a frenzy. Devor knew to wait until the cheering died down. He may have urged for chaos, but he was in control. He claimed to want people to think for themselves, but his smooth talk masked the dogmatic nature of his own stance.
“He speaks well,” my father said. I assumed he supported the UBI. A lifelong lefty, he did pro-bono work for the Transit Workers Union. He rarely spoke of Michael’s work, but I knew he disapproved.
And yet, wasn’t my father in the very demographic I’d been tasked with convincing? I wondered if he had a secret heart. A heart that didn’t want to pay tax on this apartment after finally paying off a thirty-year mortgage.
NY1 cut away to the steps of the statehouse in Albany where Senator Breem pushed through a crowd of reporters to a waiting car. Breem looked tired. I pictured him shaving in a hotel bathroom, staring into the mirror at his own strange face.
The drone pulled up to the window and placed our order on the sill. After my father had emptied our takeout containers onto ceramic plates—I knew he usually ate straight out of the containers, and I found it sweet that he took out dishware just for me—and after he’d tested the temperature of his soup and taken a few hesitant sips, my father reached across the table and took hold of my hand. His fingers felt dry. I wondered if he’d once bought moisturizer since my mother had passed.