The Pisces(70)

“But you were forced to give him up, right? You didn’t choose to do it. I mean, he got a restraining order?”

“What does a restraining order mean to people like us? In the face of our kind of obsession? But I guess, technically, yes, I was forbidden from being with him. I didn’t make the choice.”

So there it was. She hadn’t so much recovered as she was stopped by the law. I pictured her like a marionette, a marionette of obsessive love, with a judge pulling the strings. She was running in place, like a boxer, but could not move toward what she thought she loved.

“But what if you could be with him? If you could be with him again, wouldn’t you do it in a heartbeat?”

“No, I wouldn’t,” she said quickly.

“Come on. What if he was standing right here on the sidewalk?”

She thought about it for a second and the corners of her mouth twitched downward.

“Do I still miss him? Yes, I do. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t. But I don’t miss what being with him took away from me.”

“Like what?”

“Everything,” she said. “Dignity, sanity. My life.”

“What was the restraining order for anyway?” I said.

“It’s embarrassing.”

“Come on. I’m in child’s pose on the sidewalk.”

She laughed. I’d never seen her laugh before.

“Fine,” she said. “One day I saw his wife out walking. I’d never met her, only stalked her on the Internet. But there she was, power walking down Montana right in front of me. And I thought about how unfair it was that I knew so much about her, from the stalking, and she didn’t even know I existed. I just felt livid about it. And I sort of chased her down…with my Prius.”



“No!”

“It’s true.”

“You chased her down! Like tried to run her over?”

“I wouldn’t have said that at the time. But yes, that’s what I was doing.”

“My God, that’s amazing.” I laughed.

“It’s not,” she said. “It’s pretty disgusting.”

“I suddenly like you so much more,” I said.

“You shouldn’t. None of it was her fault. It was her husband’s fault. Really it was my fault.”

“Huh,” I said.

We were silent for a little while.

“Do you want to come back inside?” she asked.

“I’ll be back in a minute. I just need a little more air.”

But I didn’t have the strength to go back in. And I knew that if I tried to walk home I wouldn’t make it. Laughing had given me vertigo and now the sidewalk was spinning. I felt the cement with my palm and it was cooler than the afternoon air. I wondered if perhaps I should just lie down right there. Should I just lie down with my cheek against the sidewalk, just lie down and go to sleep? If I die in that sleep I think I would be okay. But I didn’t want to die there in public in front of whoever could walk by. Suddenly I was afraid again. I took out my phone and pressed the buttons to get a car to take me home. This was just what people did now. We went from emotion to phone. This was how you didn’t die in the twenty-first century.

The driver, whose name was Chase, pulled up in a silver Honda. He was cute, with a gap in his front two teeth—maybe age twenty-six at most. He looked like he was trying to grow a mustache, and his brown hair was past his ears under a baseball cap that read FML. He babbled that he was an actor, or was trying to become one. His favorite philosophy about acting was Uta Hagen’s, something about being a student of humanity. Well, for a student of humanity he was shitty at reading people. In my head I just kept saying, Shut up, shut up! I wanted to say, Don’t you know I am dying?



But even in my dying I couldn’t be mean to him for fear that he would think I was a bitch. Why did I even care what he thought? Was my death that unimportant? How could I prioritize the feelings of this vacant, mustached kid over my own—me, who was probably dying?

I repeated, “That’s nice” and “Oh, interesting,” and lay down in the backseat. I didn’t announce that I would be lying down, I just did it. He wasn’t paying any attention to what I was doing, instead going on about an upcoming audition for a prescription allergy medication where he would play the son-in-law of a woman with adult allergies. He said he had mixed feelings about it, because he didn’t want to limit his range to pharmaceuticals. The part he really wanted was at an audition for Samsung next week. He was trying out to play the phone.

“It’s not easy to make it in this town. I’m going up against two hundred other potential phones, at least,” he said, looking in the mirror at the traffic behind him.

I noticed he had green eyes. He really was cute. I waited for him to comment on me lying supine in his backseat, but he didn’t ask if I was okay. I suppose this was normal behavior in California. I closed my eyes and concentrated on my breathing. I wasn’t dead. I was breathing in the back of this cute idiot’s car.

When we pulled up at Annika’s house, he stopped and said, “Okay, we’re here. Wish me luck with Samsung!”

I opened my eyes and squinted at him. I wanted to tell him that I hoped he never got a part.

“Wanna fuck?” I said instead.