Several days passed before I could write to Constant. The longer I waited, the more impossible it became to say anything at all. I wanted to thank him for the map, and respond to his dream. I tried to dream something clever and funny to describe to him, but I became so anxious trying to dream that I barely slept at all. Then I was so tired I slept through most of the next day. When I woke up it was early afternoon. I read his message thirteen more times, until I had most of it memorized. I read the line about me—the bit about Ariadne—so many times my eyes blurred. At first I was flattered, and it made my chest feel fluttery. But the more I read it, the less convinced I was that it was a compliment. It was accessory to the rest of the message, the way Ariadne was accessory to Theseus. I got caught up on the words left behind and read them again and again. What did that mean, left behind? Could it mean that he didn’t want me to respond at all—that his note was just an accompaniment to the map I had asked for?
You can fix a map, but a map can’t fix a system. This sounded final, like it was the proper conclusion to draw from his dream. But I thought he was saying something else entirely. I thought the dream, like most dreams, was about losing yourself. It was about sitting still for so long you began to dissolve: face, self, memory, pulling pith from flesh, until you lost something essential. I felt unreasonably upset that we seemed to disagree on this.
I slept for fourteen hours. I woke again in a fit of panic—like I had missed some deadline to respond, and every minute made it worse. I opened the document and stared at the blinking cursor and couldn’t think of a single thing to say. I closed the document.
I was running out of money. Nothing was cheap. Utilities were expensive and the train was expensive and food was astronomical. During the summers before I moved to New York, I had worked at a bookstore in the mall, a job at which I was thoroughly incompetent. Every summer I had to learn the alphabet again, and when I shelved new arrivals I had to sing the whole sequence under my breath. Despite all this I had saved up nearly eight thousand dollars, which I had hoped to stretch for five or six months—or at least until I could find a job here. But after only a month, half of it had disappeared. I had no idea how much money it took to stay alive. It had cost several grand just to move into an apartment, and train fare was at least a hundred every month, and even a coffee could soar into the double digits.
My card was declined again when Georgie and I went to get bagels. Georgie didn’t think it was a big deal; she paid for my bagel and started talking about Tashya. But I was close to a panic attack. At the rate I was spending, I only had a month or so left until my bank account was completely empty. What was I going to do if I couldn’t pay rent next month? I’d have to ask my mother for help, and explain how I was not at college but bumming around in Brooklyn, that I had wasted all of my own money and was locked in a lease I couldn’t afford.
“You’re not eating,” Georgie observed. She herself was barely a quarter of the way through her bagel. Between every bite she used the side of her pinky to sweep up the sesame and poppy seeds that fell off her bagel and sprinkle them back on top of her lox. It was time-consuming work, especially because her head was buried in her phone. “Anyway, do you think Tashya liked my friends the other night? She seemed grumpy, didn’t she? I know it was kind of a weird group.”
Before she dropped out to be a comedian, Georgie had gone to art school, and her art school friends were as colorful as she was. All the girls had enormous eyes and nose piercings, and all of the boys wore tiny beanies with their ears sticking out. Georgie had introduced me to people with names like Iggy and Willoughby and Seb. The theme had indeed been communism, and by the end of the night we were talking about the means of production, and Iggy had offered to lend me his copy of Das Kapital.
Georgie slammed her phone on the table, sending poppy seeds flying. “She just literally never texts me back. Do you think she’s ignoring me? Why would she ignore me? I’m hilarious.”
I was wary. “Isn’t she in class?”
“So?” demanded Georgie.
I wasn’t sure what else to say. It was true that Tashya was atrocious at texting. Two days before, I’d texted her asking if I could borrow some toothpaste, and this morning she had texted back to say help myself.
“Hmmm,” said Georgie, and then, “You’ve been out of it, too.”
Her jaw was set in a way that meant I couldn’t just shrug off the comment. Georgie was in a combative mood, waspish and itching for a fight. Georgie was at her worst when left alone with her thoughts: she was always on her phone, switching between apps, texting ten people at once. I watched her pinch up more seeds from her bagel and redistribute them on top. I didn’t want to tell her I was worried about money, because saying out loud made it more real, and more dire.
“I’m just tired,” I said.
“You sleep more than anyone I know,” Georgie said, though she herself probably slept as much as I did. Then suddenly she brightened. This was something I liked about Georgie, except when I didn’t: her moods were like the weather in the upper Midwest, where you had to dress for snow and summer on the same day. “Oh, before I forget—my parents invited us for dinner tomorrow night. They’re excited that I finally have friends without food restrictions. They can’t believe both you and Tashya eat meat and lactose and gluten and nuts.”
In fact I was lactose intolerant, but it was already too late to mention it. I was relieved to not have to pay for dinner. I had been skipping meals to save money, and my pants were starting to get loose. I definitely didn’t have money for new pants.
That night I opened Constant’s document again. Two things had changed. Until now, the document had no name and was labeled UNTITLED DOCUMENT in small gray letters in one corner. Now it said UNTITLED DOCUMENT in bold—Constant had changed it. I didn’t know what he meant by it. Did he want me to come up with a title? Did he want the document to be called UNTITLED DOCUMENT?
And he had added something. After his paragraph, set apart to call attention to itself, he had written:
I was wondering about your name.
I felt like I had swallowed a lungful of helium. I stood up and sat back down, and stood up again. I held my hands out to check if they were shaking; they weren’t, though I felt full of ants, or like I had been shot through with electricity. I kept jumping to my feet. I checked the editing history in the document. Constant had made one change at 12:39 p.m., and another at 12:43 p.m. I marveled at the time stamps. We had just missed each other. I had been reading his messages at the bagel shop ten minutes before that.
I could write about my name, I thought. I started typing, before I could change my mind.
No one could pronounce my Chinese name on the attendance sheet, and so one of three things must have happened: my mother translated my name to English—Ocean—in consideration of my teachers, or my teachers asked what my name meant and changed it in consideration to themselves, or I translated it personally, to make my own life easier. This last one is the most likely, I think, since Ocean is actually an abysmal translation.
I have this idea that I am two different people under these two different names. Names matter, I think: the bouba/kiki effect shows us the naming of objects is not completely arbitrary. The funny thing is, my name in English is the opposite of my name in Chinese. In one language my name means shadow on the ocean, and in the other my name is Ocean Sun. Probably Ocean Sun and Sun Haiying are two different people, and people would have treated them differently. No one wants to talk to you if they are shy about saying your name out loud. Ocean, it seems, at least prompts people to wonder.
There must have been a time I answered to both, and then a tipping point, when I started thinking of myself more as Ocean and less as Sun Haiying. I thought this was what your dream was about—the way you are always losing yourself. Shedding skin cells and recollection like bread crumbs in a forest, only to turn around to find that they’ve disappeared, and you are lost in the dark.
It was at once too intimate and too scattered; I had said both too much and too little. I wanted to delete it, but it wouldn’t have mattered. Constant could go into the edit history and see what the document looked like at any given moment, could see every letter I had typed or deleted, could follow my cursor back and forth across his screen just as it had moved across mine.
I printed out thirty copies of my résumé and walked around Manhattan trying to drop them off. Literally no one wanted one. I went to several coffee shops and got flatly dismissed because I had no experience. The restaurants said the same thing. One place, apparently, was quite famous, and the hostess laughed in my face. “Do you know how many people want to work here?” I didn’t.
By noon I was drenched in sweat. It poured off my nose and temples. Seeing me in such a state, people wanted my résumé even less. I happened across a used bookstore, where an employee around my age wrinkled her nose as she looked down at my slightly damp résumé. “We don’t have any open positions,” she told me, “but we only take online applications anyway.” The bookseller and I stared at each other, not knowing what to say. In the end I bought a copy of The Little Prince, which was on display at the counter, just to have something to do with my hands. It cost two or three times more than I expected it to, and then I descended into an atrocious mood at having spent so much money.
The heat quickly became unbearable. I went to see Tashya. By the time I walked to the conservatory, I was light-headed and seeing purple hues in the haze, like the world had been dipped in dye. Tashya was alarmed when she came to retrieve me from the sidewalk. Inside, the air-conditioning was so strong it made me dizzy, and I broke out head to toe in goose bumps. I had to sit on a long bench in the lobby for several minutes before I could climb the two flights of stairs to the practice room Tashya had claimed for the day.
She was trying to relearn a fingering pattern on a Ravel concerto and told me to occupy myself for another hour. I opened The Little Prince. It was the first book I had ever read in English, and I had adored it so much that I’d read my secondhand copy to tatters and never bought another, until now. I couldn’t believe how little I really remembered. My impression of the book had faded to colors and caricatures: the surly rose, the Sahara desert, the little planet where the sun rose and set all day. I had forgotten all the funny adults on their dismal planets. The lamplighter, in particular, seemed to speak to me intimately. He too behaved like someone whose life was constantly on the brink of disaster.
Eventually I picked up my phone. Tashya was playing the same seven or eight notes again and again. Once every twenty iterations she said something vulgar in Slovenian and started again. I checked the UNTITLED DOCUMENT. I didn’t expect anything new; Constant would probably take two or three or four days to respond, if ever. But when I scrolled down past the map, a great chunk of text was missing, most of it mine.
I panicked. Had I deleted it accidentally? I went into the edit history. At 3 p.m., an hour earlier, Constant had logged into the document, highlighted the whole thing, and deleted it. My blood rushed to my head and I felt my cheeks go bright red. Why would Constant delete what I had written?
I read what remained.
Another time I will tell you about my name
It was a different paragraph. He’d deleted everything we had written and started again. I scanned the rest of the history: there, recovered, were his paragraphs about Theseus, and mine about names. I was relieved, then embarrassed by how relieved I felt. The near-blank document had made me feel full of loss, but now that I stared at it, recovered, I felt childish.
I thought again of Theseus and his train. I wondered if Constant was making a point. He wrote:
Another time I will tell you about my name, because it is not an interesting story. I think you’re right that translation is a little like the train scenario: you replace this piece and that piece and at the end you say, Look, nothing has changed. But of course everything has changed. For this reason I don’t believe much in the value of translation.
I took a sharp breath; it seemed to jab me between the ribs. I wondered if he had read what I had written, and if he had, why he would say my name and my selfhood weren’t valuable.
I’ve been thinking more about the afterlife. I’ve read about people who have had a near-death experience, wherein they experience physical death—their heart stops, brain activity ceases—and yet, when they are resuscitated, they report remarkable experiences, and insist their consciousness continued even though they showed all the signs of biological death.
Sisyphus is perhaps our best example of the near-death experience. In fact he cheated death twice. First he betrayed the river nymph Aegina, who was hiding from her father. When the god of death, Thanatos, tried to punish him by chaining him in hell, Sisyphus managed to chain Thanatos instead. Then no one living could die, and the old and the sick suffered. The gods came together to force Sisyphus back to hell. But before he died again, he told his wife to trash his body, so in the Underworld he could plead with their bureaucrats: “Look how this woman has maligned me! At least allow me to leave the Underworld for a proper burial.” Accordingly they let him out, and the gods had to be dispatched again to drag him off, and to trap him behind the Styx with a large boulder and a steep hill.
Say, when you die, or get very close to dying, you fall into a lengthy dream—lengthy because you lose your physical relationship to time and space. You dream and dream. Is this the same thing as afterlife? I think so. Any difference is semantic. Sisyphus had the worst dream of all, but was the monotony so much worse than life? Now I understand why you were so baffled to see me in the train station, undead. When we are dreaming, we think we are awake. We rely on our senses to distinguish reality from simulation, but clearly they are not always up to the task; we could be dead right now, both of us, dead and dreaming. And so when you asked me if I was dead, you were really asking if we shared the same delusion, to which I say: yes.
“Ocean. Ocean.”
I blinked. I looked up. Tashya had turned around on the piano bench. I felt warm from my toes all the way to my hairline. You were really asking if we shared the same delusion, to which I say: yes. The line played in my head like a prayer circle; I was light-headed and dizzy, and couldn’t seem to stop smiling. Tashya saw the book beside me and wrinkled her nose.
“Is that Le Petit Prince?”
Tashya had read the book in the original French, and hated it. Because she was Slovene, Tashya spoke Slovenian, French, German, and English fluently, Spanish and Italian and Russian passably, and Hungarian and Czech rudimentarily. When she liked a book, she always read it in more than one language. She had barely read The Little Prince once.
“It’s sort of a—what’s the word? Fraternité book, no?”
“What do you mean?”
She shrugged. There was a little frown scrunching her nose. “Boys teaching boys philosophical things, marveling at their own wit. The only female character is a self-obsessed rose, who, you know, was based on Saint-Exupéry’s estranged Salvadoran wife. It dismally fails the Bechdel test and exoticizes and objectifies. Let them all die in the desert, I say.”
It was hard to argue with her. Tashya was sure of herself, though in a different way than Georgie. Georgie held her opinion before her like a gun, paving the way. Tashya just had fewer qualms about subjectivity of experience: she thought of truth as a precise, mathematical thing. She had an idea of things and she stood up for it; she had an opinion. Tashya said this was the reason she was able to do so well in America, and I agreed. I was sure it was also the reason I seemed to do so badly in America, or anywhere. I thought opinions were difficult. I was baffled that everyone else seemed to have so many—how they preferred their coffee and which politician was the stupidest, what was wrong or right or pointless in the world. I felt like I didn’t know enough about anything to have an opinion.
Tashya showed me around the conservatory. Down a long hall, I heard the strains of an orchestra starting and stopping, interrupted time and time again by an impatient voice and a wayward bassoon. There were two floors of practice rooms, and every single one was occupied. Tashya pointed out a corner room. “Thomas Sato is in there,” she said. “That’s the best piano room in the school, except for the ones upstairs for the grad students. It has a huge window that looks over Lincoln Center and the only baby grand. Somehow Thomas Sato gets it almost every single day. Once I made it up here at seven in the morning and he was already in there running scales.” She sighed. “I’ve literally only practiced there twice, in all three years I’ve been here. I wish him carpal tunnel.”
We ended up in the nosebleeds of the concert hall, where it was dim and quiet and smelled pleasantly of wood. On the stage was a full concert grand, nine feet long, though from where we sat it looked as small as a toy. Tashya told me that one day when she was rich, she was going to buy an unbleached Bösendorfer Imperial. “The Bösendorfer Imperial has ninety-seven keys, a full eight octaves. That’s ten notes more than a regular piano. The extra notes are all on the bass end, and all of them are black. I wonder what they sound like. I can’t imagine it; it’s like imagining colors at the beginning of the rainbow, before red. I know they must exist. But I can’t imagine it.”
I admired her, her head lolling back against the seat, the closest I’d seen her to slouching in the whole time I’d known her. I thought of Tashya’s face as something that protected her, unlike mine, which revealed me, and made me vulnerable.
“Kim Kardashian has an unbleached Steinway,” she said. “But better her than Thomas Sato.”
We were quiet for so long I thought Tashya had fallen asleep, or I had. It was impossible to tell how much time had passed. There were no windows in the concert hall, and all sound was muted. I was itching for my phone, to check the UNTITLED DOCUMENT, to reread what Constant had written. I was worried I was developing a compulsive habit—I couldn’t seem to set my phone down for more than five or ten minutes. But every time I thought about his last line, You were really asking me if we shared the same delusion, to which I say: yes, I felt a thrill go through me.
When I reread it, though, I wasn’t sure that Constantine’s response was encouraging. Why was he so concerned with Sisyphus? Was he confirming that I was dead or refuting it? Was the delusion we shared life or hell? What did mythology have to do with my anxiety that it was too late, that I had already killed myself and ended up in this strange limbo where all my circumstances were so expensive and so punitive?
When Tashya spoke it seemed unnaturally loud, and startled me.
“Do you think Georgie thinks I’m . . . I don’t know.” She paused for so long I wasn’t sure it was going to be a conversation. “Did Georgie say anything about me at all?”
I glanced at her. “Well,” I said, “she said she was trying to text you.”
Tashya stared determinedly at her hands. Then she let out a sharp breath. “The thing is,” she said, “I don’t really have service in the practice rooms. Doesn’t she know that? Her other friends, from the party. What did you think?”
I thought they were wild, in a Sendak way, like we had passed a bend in the river and found them dancing with their arms in the sky. I didn’t think this was exactly what Tashya was asking me.
“Do you think they’re all texting each other?” she asked. “All day long, every day?”
It seemed to take a great effort for Tash to ask. I admired the crease between her eyebrows, and then I was ashamed. I said, “I can’t imagine that they’re texting all day.”
“I can’t either,” she said, “but yesterday she sent me sixty-nine texts. Did she do that on purpose? I just—” She took another sharp breath, like someone was punching her in the chest. “What is there to say over text? Why can’t we wait to say it face-to-face? Shouldn’t we want more context with communication, not less?”
Then it was my turn to feel punched in the chest. I itched for my phone, to read what Constant had written. On one hand I agreed with Tashya—but I also thought of communication as something that happened despite context, not because of it, and maybe that was why I liked the untitled document. Our conversations had almost no context at all. They seemed to float in space, suspended.
“Communication is impossible,” I agreed.
“And now she’s angry,” sighed Tashya. “Ocean, I wish someone had read me Much Ado About Nothing instead of fairy tales when I was little. No one tells you love is mostly miscommunication. Or that life is. I don’t know what to do.”
I had a horrible vision of sharing an apartment with Georgie and Tashya while they fell out of love with each other: Georgie, who was prone to shouting, and Tashya, who would avoid the apartment more and more until she was sleeping at the conservatory, finally disappearing from our lives altogether. “Are you two breaking up?” I asked, dreading the answer.
“I don’t even think we’re together,” she said. “Are we? We’ve never talked about it. Yesterday Georgie sent me a meme about commitment issues. But why? Why can’t we just say what we mean?”
If only things were so simple, I thought.
Tashya allowed herself to mope for another moment, and then drew herself up severely. “I know it’s silly,” she said. “I know everything is fine. I don’t know why we never talk about anything serious. We kiss, and we make each other laugh, and everything feels fine, like hammering out the details is extraneous, and only what we feel is real. Then we leave each other, and nothing in the world feels right.”
I felt a rush of tenderness for her. When I first met her, I thought that being Tashya must feel entirely different than being me. Even now, she looked only beautiful and severe, her long thick hair falling in soft waves down her stern spine. Georgie was so different. Her eyes were always full of emotion, and her desire to be loved was plain on her face. I could see where their tension came from, but I couldn’t explain it to either of them; I couldn’t put it in words. Georgie felt things as deeply as I did, but Tashya would always tell me the truth.
“Do you think her parents will like me?” Tashya said, after a long time.
“Of course they will.”
“How can you know?”
I was almost overwhelmed by my desire to reach out and hold her hand. Her sharp angles had melted, and she looked so forlorn I didn’t know what else to do. My hand twitched; then I felt shy. I didn’t reach for her.
“Oh, Tash,” I said. “How could they not?”
Georgie met us in the station. She was dressed more conservatively than I’d ever seen her, in plain jeans and a floral blouse. She kept fidgeting with her collar.
“My dads don’t know about my tattoos,” Georgie explained to me, before she turned to Tashya and they began to bicker. Georgie couldn’t believe Tashya had ignored Georgie all day. Tashya reminded her that she didn’t have service at the conservatory. Georgie thought this was an awfully convenient excuse. Tashya said it was just a consistent one—she never had service at the conservatory. I fell a few steps behind them. Even when they were fighting, they had no time for anything but each other.
The townhouse was only two blocks from the subway, on a quiet street that was completely unlike Brooklyn, even the nicer parts. The townhouses here were taller, somehow European, old and imperial. I fought the urge to dig at my ears. We stopped before a house that looked like all the others, but as we climbed the shale steps it seemed to grow taller, and wider, which is to say I felt smaller and smaller.
Both of Georgie’s dads opened the door. Behind them stood a very small dog and an extremely large dog. The dogs were equally delighted to see Georgie, but while the small one could only paw at her ankles, the large one rose on its hind legs and towered over her. It put both front paws on her shoulders and looked solemnly into her face for several moments before his weight became too great and both girl and dog collapsed to the floor.
“Dos, you fatass, get off me,” said Georgie, muffled, from beneath what looked remarkably like a black shag carpet. She conducted all the introductions like this, hidden from view. “Tash and Ocean, this is Dostoyevsky, and the useless one there is Pushkin. Dos is a Great Pyrenees and Pushkin is a toy spaniel. They are both ridiculous. Oh, and these are my dads, Harold Tanaka and Harold Szabo. Harolds, this is Ocean, my friend, and Tashya, my girlfriend.”
Tashya went bright red but for the rest of the night couldn’t stop beaming. I shook Harold Tanaka’s hand, then Harold Szabo’s, which involved some acrobatics in the tiny foyer whose square footage was primarily occupied by Georgie and Dostoyevsky. I petted Pushkin, then Dostoyevsky, who, after covering Georgie’s face with his enormous tongue, obliged to rise. Georgie reappeared, gasping and wet.
“Don’t just stand there,” she said to us cheerfully. “Take off your shoes and come in.”
The house was wider inside than it was outside; in fact it was two townhouses, the wall between them torn down. I hadn’t known it was possible to own one property in the city, much less two. I marveled at the chandelier and brooded about my bank account while one of the Harolds showed us into the parlor for cocktails. He really said parlor. It was the first time I’d ever heard the word in real life.
The parlor was dark and formal, with a whole wall of books and forest-green armchairs. I seemed to be sinking deeper and deeper into mine, until my knees were at my chin. I couldn’t stop looking around. We drank something complicated containing grapefruit juice, except for Harold Szabo, the lawyer, who was drinking a deep red wine from a dusty bottle. I sipped my drink slowly, dreary about the way that alcohol could ruin just about anything.
Harold Tanaka, the neurosurgeon, wanted to know all about Tashya and Georgie, and he seemed positively giddy. This left me free to squint at the gilded titles on the rows and rows of beautifully bound books and at the fine, dim light fixtures, the huge and heavy Persian rugs. I had always loved American homes, since real estate was so essentially American. I liked brokers’ websites and home improvement shows, and the couches that stayed spotless though they weren’t wrapped in squeaky plastic, and I was fascinated by the way everything from dinnerware to bath towels came in matched and monogrammed sets.
I couldn’t believe people lived their whole lives in such houses, where the kitchen didn’t stink of cooking oil. Nothing in my house matched; everything smelled like cooking oil. My life in my mother’s house had been defined by a certain lack of control: loose papers and stacks of mail, old furnishings and an inadequate number of chairs. But Georgie’s house was a different world entirely, though she too identified as middle-class. The chandelier light ricocheted and fractured off every surface until I was sure I was going blind.
“You don’t like your drink,” said Harold the lawyer. It took me several beats to realize he was talking to me. “Here,” he said, before I could protest, or lie. Out of apparently nowhere, he produced another enormous wineglass and filled it halfway with his heavy red wine. Then he reached behind his armchair—into which he was sinking far less urgently than I seemed to be in mine—and came up with something that looked like a fire extinguisher, which he inserted directly into my wineglass. Something hissed and filled the glass to the brim, and when Harold handed it to me, I held it gingerly, like one might hold an angry, bristling cat.
“It’s seltzer,” he said, and then, “It’s Hungarian.” The whole interaction felt nonsensical. But I drank, and somehow it tasted like neither wine nor seltzer but both earthy and airy, almost pleasant.
Harold raised his glass to me, and we both drank deeply.
“By the way,” said Georgie, “I’ve gone vegan again.”
Georgie was forever trying to quit meat. She thought of all morality as a matter of willpower. Unfortunately, she was also the most carnivorous person I knew, and was always watching DiCaprio documentaries to convince herself otherwise. It was a delicate balance of opposing forces, like everything good in life, she explained to me one afternoon in our kitchen while gnawing on a chicken wing.
Both of the Harolds were deeply disappointed by Georgie’s renewed veganism, as though she had told them she had recently been arrested, or decided to pierce her tongue. Harold the neurosurgeon looked genuinely pained as he turned back to his conversation with Tashya.
Tashya said, somewhat tiredly, that she was Slovenian, “like Donald Trump’s wife.” Harold the lawyer learned that his hometown was near Tashya’s, and even knew that Tashya’s town had quite a nice art festival. This perked Tashya up considerably, and they came to chat about this. Unfortunately, this meant the other Harold’s attention fell to me. “So, Ocean, are you in school?
“She’s on a gap year, Dad,” said Georgie. “I told you.”
“Ah, of course,” said Harold, becoming animated, and for the next ten minutes he told us about how the other Harold had done his graduate degree at the same school I ought to have been attending. He got misty as he recounted the visits he would pay from California, where he was slogging through his own graduate degree, while Georgie rolled her eyes at me and picked at her cuticles. “But the campus will still be there in a year, of course. It’s always good to take time to explore when you’re young. The classrooms will keep.”
He beamed at me. I tried to smile back. I couldn’t think of a thing to say. Parents made me nervous.
“So why the gap year?” he asked. “An internship in the city?”
“Jesus, Dad,” said Georgie. I was surprised by how angry she sounded, and how tense she got around her parents. “She’s just taking a year off, okay? People are allowed to do that. There’s no proper timeline for life, and not everyone has to go to school.”
I felt a rush of affection for her and her anger. “I’m just taking some time,” I ventured. What else could I say? That I had seen the undergrad suicide rates? That my neurology felt too fragile? “I’m looking for a job, though. Or an internship.”
Georgie glanced at me, surprised. I hadn’t told her yet about my humiliating résumé trek.
Harold the neurosurgeon frowned. “I hope Georgie hasn’t been a bad influence on you. The college will still be there, of course, but it only matters if you do return to it.”
For a second I was sure Georgie would snap. Instead she chugged her drink and went to make another. Harold looked like he was going to stop her, so I said quickly, “No, it’s only a deferment. But in the meantime, I think it’d be good to get some real-world experience.”
The real-world experience part seemed to please him. “What sort of work are you looking for?”
Georgie returned with a drink. She too looked at me expectantly.
“Well,” I said, hesitant, “I used to work in a bookstore. But it seems like those are pretty in-demand jobs here. Everything is, really.”
“You should tutor,” said Georgie. “Everybody is always looking for a tutor. Dad, don’t the Rothmans have a kid who’s doing standardized testing soon? Did you know Ocean got perfect scores on all her tests?”
“That’s very impressive, Ocean,” said Harold approvingly. “I’ll pass your number to the Rothmans, if that’s something you’re interested in. Georgie, I hope Ocean is a good influence on you.”
“Of course,” Georgie said sweetly.
While Harold was preoccupied taking down my contact information, she turned to me and stuck her middle finger up her nose.
At dinner we had clam pasta, which Georgie acquiesced to eat after a heated exchange with Harold the neurosurgeon that ended with Harold the lawyer slamming another bottle of dusty wine on the table and roaring, “Your father has been cooking all afternoon!”
Harold the neurosurgeon served the pasta with lemon that we had to juice with a ceramic knob Georgie had made in high school. It was hideous and extremely difficult to use, especially because as we passed it around the table Georgie kept trying to snatch it and throw it in the trash, which excited the dogs. I squirted lemon juice directly into my left eye. Both dogs seemed to think this was the funniest thing in the world. Harold the neurosurgeon scolded them while I stumbled, one-eyed, to the bathroom. Both dogs followed me and were difficult to discourage, especially Dostoyevsky.
After I’d cleaned my face as best I could with the fluffy bath towels, I checked the UNTITLED DOCUMENT. I had promised myself I wouldn’t. I didn’t want to seem rude in front of Georgie’s parents.
I wasn’t the only one in the document.
I stared in horror at the blinker, a different color than mine, coming in and out of the document in sync with my heartbeat. I nearly threw my phone in the toilet. But before I could, the blinker began to move.
Ocean?
I didn’t know what to do. I sat down on the closed toilet seat, stood up, sat again, stood again, and paced around the bathroom.
Constantine?
I sat down on the edge of the bathtub. He began typing back immediately.
Are you around?
Around where? In the amorphous cloud of the document? Here, still, on earth, or hell?
UWS, I wrote eventually.
Aha. Then there was a pause for such a long moment I thought the conversation was over. Finally he typed, Me too.
I worried for my heart, which seemed to be teetering on cardiac arrest. What did that mean? I wanted it to mean that he wanted to meet up somewhere; I wanted him to say that more than I’d ever wanted anything in my life. I felt this yearning for the document, like I had to physically lean into it. I felt foolish with hope, almost sick with it. The clam pasta was not sitting well.
There was a knock on the door that nearly startled me backward into the bathtub. “Ocean?” said Georgie. “Are you okay? I’ve been dispatched to offer you eye drops. Or antacids.”
“I’m okay,” I managed.
“Are you sure? You sound like you’re being strangled.”
That was exactly how I felt. “I’m not being strangled.”
“If you say so.”
She kept talking. I stopped listening. Constant was typing.
Will you meet me at the park?
Where? I wrote immediately. There was only one park he could mean, but how would I find him inside it, before the coyotes and rats found me?
72nd entrance. Can you be there in an hour?
I looked it up. I couldn’t believe it was a real place, where I was going to meet him. My anxiety was jagged in my chest, but I didn’t know why I should be so nervous, or why I could barely type because even my fingertips were clammy. Who was Constant, to make me so nervous? I looked at the document. And so when you asked me if I was dead, you were really asking if we shared the same delusion, to which I say: yes.
Be brave, I told myself, like Constant.
I think so.
I felt flimsy, like debris on a gale, at once curious and terrified as to where it would take me.
At the table, the dishes had been cleared and replaced with a tiramisu. The conversation had turned to consciousness. “But how do you know clams aren’t conscious?” Georgie was saying. “Obviously a clam prefers to be left alone instead of harvested and poked at—you can tell when you prepare them, because you have to make sure they close up when you bother them. Doesn’t that show, behaviorally, they prefer to be left alone?”
Tashya and I were both amazed. “When have you ever made clams?” Tashya asked.
Georgie ignored this. She waved her fork, splattering us in mascarpone. The dogs looked so hopeful.
“Indeed, what is it like to be a bat?” Harold the lawyer ruminated. “But, Georgie, we weren’t really talking about consciousness. We were talking about your attention span, and how your dad and I need you to make some kind of commitment to your future.”
“What future?” Georgie cried. “The Arctic is gone. The corporations own everything and you’re protecting their rights! I don’t want your dirty money, or Dad’s. I don’t want this ridiculous house, either. I want to live on a farm in Wyoming, and be a beekeeper, and make people laugh, and live with sixteen giant dogs.”
Pushkin, improbably, whined at that very moment.
Georgie glanced at him. “Sorry, Push. But you’ll probably be dead by then. Anyway, it’s late, and the trains are stopping early tonight.” This, for all I knew, might even be true. “We have to run, right now.”
She glared at Tashya and me and grabbed the dish of tiramisu. We both jumped up.
“And who exactly is financing this Wyoming ranch?” Harold called after us.
“My world-renowned, highly in-demand, piano-soloist wife!” Georgie screamed, already heading for the door.
Tashya and I muttered our thanks to the Harolds and hurried after her. In the dim light, the two men looked exhausted, and very old. The dogs were fast on our heels, intent on keeping us from leaving. Georgie had to physically push Dostoyevsky out of the foyer. Somewhere along the way Tashya had become burdened with the tiramisu. Georgie, muttering expletives under her breath, ushered us into our coats and out the door.
Outside, it was chilly and silent. Georgie sat down hard on the top step of the stoop, took a deep breath, and screamed, “Fuck!” at the top of her lungs. Inside, the dogs started barking; and then all down the street, inside all the other townhouses, other dogs came to their windows until the whole block was agitated, and the barking reverberated off the buildings.
“Georgie,” Tashya said faintly, clutching the tiramisu.
But Georgie was already back on her feet and tugging us along. “Come on, now we have to run. The Harolds will come out to yell at me.”
She dragged us toward the train. My heart was in my throat. I had to go in the other direction, toward the park. I stopped. I didn’t know what to say.
“Well?” Georgie said impatiently, looking back at me. “Come on.”
“I—I actually . . . I actually have to go somewhere else.”
“What?” cried Georgie. “Where are you going? Where do you have to go? Can we come? I’ve just been disowned, probably. Aren’t we invited?”
Suddenly I felt helpless, and tired. My stomach was twisting tighter by the minute at the prospect of seeing Constant: I couldn’t imagine it, and I couldn’t imagine life after it. I felt like everything was about to change in some fundamental way. Georgie, who at first looked outraged, began to look concerned.
Tashya was considering my face so carefully I was sure she knew exactly what I was up to, and why. I thought she would try to stop me, but instead she tugged gently on Georgie’s coat. “We have to get this tiramisu home,” she said. “Stop bullying Ocean. She’s put up with you enough for one night.” Tashya leaned close and pecked me on the cheek. My chest suddenly contracted, and I felt close to crying. “Safe adventuring, Ocean. We’ll see you in the morning,” she said, like a blessing, and towed Georgie away.
I watched them until they turned the corner. Tashya directed Georgie along swiftly, but Georgie kept craning her neck back to stick out her tongue in my direction. At the intersection I heard them laughing; then they were gone.