The text read, “Do unto others, as much as you can. Just keep doing and doing and doing, until they can’t breathe. Until they stop moving.”
“Okay,” she wrote back. It didn’t sound so bad. “Where are you? Please help.”
He texted back: “The call is coming from inside the house.”
She stood on her toes, scanned the room, surveying and dismissing one disappointing face after another, but no Donny. It surprised her how much she wanted to see him. She checked room after room, but nothing, and as she started to leave, not so happy with this game, Maury barreled up, pawing some undertouched parts of her, drunk as fuck.
“Jesus, Maury, please. You’re totally groping me.”
“I know, Ida. I know I am!” He smiled in a way that wasn’t so endearing. It kind of creeped her out.
“Okay, well, stop it. Stop it. Stop it. It doesn’t feel good.”
Her voice surprised her.
“I did something terrible, Ida. I must confess.”
Must you, though? she thought. She really didn’t need to know whatever crummy deviance he’d allowed himself. Wasn’t there a service that absorbed your dirty secrets for a fee? She’d pay, for god’s sake. Did you have to test a friendship with such material?
For some reason he held up his phone. “I pretended to be someone else. I couldn’t help it. That was me, just now.”
She wanted to say, who else would it have been, when she figured out what he was trying to tell her. And then, as she was pulling herself away from him, she felt something tickle in her throat and suddenly it was too late. The pill slipped from her mouth and landed on the carpet between them, like a lost piece of bone.
“Oh my god,” she said.
Maury just blinked at her.
She grabbed the thing and made her excuses and got out of there. Fuck him, anyway. If he hadn’t been harassing her she wouldn’t have coughed the stupid thing up.
Ida was tired in some new kind of way. Cooked and done and smeared all over the road. She almost slept in her clothes. She couldn’t bear getting undressed. Her teeth and face would have to wait. She would clean them in the morning. So much washing would just happen another time, and everything would be fine. Jesus. Like a four-month bath. A retreat to an underwater cave. A vow of silence, a blood transfusion, followed by a four-year sleep. She opened a window, hoping to hear something, a bird, a siren, voices. Too much room tone in her own house, room tone that could just kill a girl. But nothing was out there. It was a perfectly quiet night.
Her phone buzzed as she crawled into bed. Another text from “Donny.”
“Mine comes out sometimes too,” the text read. “Smiley face. (Sorry, I don’t know how to make emoji symbols!)”
“Oh. Thank you. Is this Maury?”
“Hi. I’m sorry I lied. And I felt so bad when your pill came up. I hate that! Sometimes after I oil my pill I dip it in sand. I know that sounds weird. But it works! What kind of oil do you use?”
Ida snuggled into bed. It was a lot more pleasant dealing with Maury this way, or at least it wasn’t repulsive. The bar had gotten lower. “Sometimes when I cough one up,” wrote Ida, “I wonder if it’s that day’s pill, or one from before.”
“Oh my god, I have wondered that too.”
“Have you ever thought of marking the pills before you swallow them?”
“No I have not!”
“Then you could know.”
“That’s true,” wrote Maury. “You would definitely know. Tag those little guys. Name them. That way you would never lose track. I would hate to lose one. I think I would feel sad.”
Summer burned out early and a little bit of icy wind curled over the city. Ida was breathing into her hands before too long, dragging herself from work to home, work to home. She saw her parents when she could, and if they didn’t always see her, at least they felt her next to them. Or they felt someone, a body, a person, who spoke and touched them and smiled when she could.
It wasn’t a romance that started with Donny, so much as a cluster of unrelated encounters after work, usually close to silent, in which it became easier and easier to meld her body with his. Donny was lithe and graceful and so endlessly mysterious, which maybe only meant that she no longer knew what to think of anyone. He hardly spoke and they didn’t laugh together and she felt no need to reveal herself to him. But his silence made her feel good and safe, and she looked for him, more often than not, to mute some larger ruckus that seemed to be stalking her no matter where she went. She worried that when she undressed him she’d find, instead of the usual gray meat that made up a man, a small golden animal in place of his groin, or a fairy, or just some moss. In all the best ways he didn’t seem human.
“I’m not someone you want to be investing any feeling in,” he told her one day, with the brightest possible smile. “Try to look right through me. There’s someone behind me and he’s coming for you, I’m sure. I’m just in the way.”
“Okay, Donny,” she said. “I appreciate the advice.” It’s as if you’re already not here, she didn’t say. It’s as if I imagined you.
“Ida,” he said.
“Yes?” She looked at his clean, young face.
“For now, there’s nothing better than this.”
He crawled on top of her and she could feel him breathing. He was so light, so thin, so small, no more than the weight of an extra blanket or two, really.
For now, for today, for this very minute, it was certainly okay, she thought. It would do.
It was October, her father’s birthday, and she showed up on a Saturday afternoon with chocolates, the ones littered with the kind of salt that looked like shards of glass. She brought flowers for his night table, and new clothing, too, but she didn’t show it to him. It could wait in his closet, and if it vanished maybe that wasn’t so bad, as long as it ended up somewhere, covering someone, keeping them warm or dry or cozy.
“I always thought that if I worked in a think tank, I would drown,” her father said, sucking on a chocolate.
“Yes, well. That is a danger, Dad.”
“You think I don’t know what you do.”
“I don’t think that.”
“Yes you do. You think I don’t know and you think you can’t talk about it and you think I won’t understand. Don’t insult me. I’m not an idiot.”
“No, Dad, I know that.”
“You think I’ve already died. You visit me here like you’re visiting my grave. You come to sit at my grave. You even bring flowers. But here I am. Look. I’m right here.”
Her father was a beautiful man, really. Tall and fine-featured and still elegant in his nursing home bed.
“I see you. I’m very happy you’re alive.”
“This isn’t a grave, it’s a bed. There’s a window. No one has a window in their coffin. No one can look out their window at a parking lot or a hill. No one has sheets and a pillow in their coffin. You don’t get to sit up and eat a sandwich.”
“I know that.”
“Do you see a tombstone in here?”
“No.”
“Feel free to look. I’m not hiding anything. Take a look around.”
“I don’t need to, Dad. I believe you.”
“Think tank.”
“I know.”
“You don’t work at a think tank.”
“You might be right, Dad. Sometimes even I don’t know what I do. They don’t always tell us what things are for.”
“No one will ever tell you what something is for. For Christ’s sake. We don’t get that information. Don’t expect that.”
“I guess I shouldn’t. But I spend my life there. It’s okay if you don’t know. You don’t work there. But what about me? Shouldn’t I know?”