Ms. Never, page 24
“Long time no see,” Ethan said. He was clean-shaven and had gained yet another ten pounds, in an unbuttoned flannel and a T-shirt emblazoned It Takes Balls 2B A Daddy. “I see you brought protection.”
“I see you brought yours.”
“It keeps Carolina happy. And, anyway, she’s better at handling Jojo, the diapers and feeding and whatnot, than I am. The little bugger is getting old enough to know when he’s getting under my skin, and I think he enjoys it.”
“Sounds like your son, all right.”
“I guess if you sit around long enough, a punishment suitable to your sins will find you. If I was a less confident sponge of a man, I might even be embarrassed by the manpower, paid hours, and expenses required to have breakfast with my oldest friend,” Ethan said.
“Lucky for me, you’re just confident enough.”
“So, mama, aside from the unmentionable chapping, sagging, aching, stretching, and overall carnage of dragging another soul into our vale of tears, how have you been?”
“Aside from all that? Tired …”
“Constantly on the verge of forgetting who you are or how you got here …”
“Yeah, you get it.”
“I hate infants. No offense.”
“I’m sure there’s none taken,” Farya said, looking down into her carrier. “No, he seems fine. How have you been? How’s the gallery—the curated space?”
“It’s okay. We just finished the papers, and we’re incorporated. I don’t know how people do all of this. Partnership agreements, waivers, insurance clauses, indemnification. It’s nuts. I mean, we don’t even have the space yet or any inventory.”
“I thought you had the space all nailed down.”
“That fell through while we were doing the paperwork. Carolina’s mother is sick, and so I can’t bother her dad to move things along any faster. So, we lost that space, and I guess some bright young thing must’ve told the oligarch about ‘pop-up’ stores. Now he wants me to find a decent location with a two- to three-month lease, set it up just so, get publicity, build a following, make a big splash and enough sales to pay him back, and shut it all down to fucking square fucking one all over again.”
“Hmm. That sounds very … Buddhist? Like the sand paintings, maybe?”
“No, Farya. It is not, in fact, Buddhist. It is futile. Buddhism is an elaborate, life-changing way to cope with futility. This isn’t that. This is deliberate, sadistic futility.”
“I’m sorry. Maybe you could find another partner for it.”
“No, I’m sorry. And sorry for cussing in front of the wee one, yours anyway. Don’t want that to be his first word. But yeah. I’ve been a little depressed lately. Anyway—how are you? You sounded a little, I don’t know, distressed when you called.”
“Yeah, I wanted to check with you. Do you remember when Josef was young?”
“Of course. One doesn’t forget that kind of duress easily. What do they call it? Colic?”
“That’s not it. Do you remember when Josef had his birth eye?” Farya asked.
“Birth eye? Was that a poop thing? I mostly left the diapers to the professionals, and to Carolina.”
“No, on his face. The birth eye, or rhino flap—a big blind eye in the middle of his forehead. It closes up over the first few months.”
“Oh, do you mean the fontanel? I was white-knuckle sober through all the birthing and baby classes. I know that part.”
“No. It’s the eye in the middle of an infant’s forehead. It starts to shut and scab over about two months after they’re born.”
“Oh, the unicorn gap … no, wait, that’s a business thing. I thought I heard or saw …”
Farya watched as Ethan’s eyes widened and his mouth went slack as he realized that something he’d almost had the privilege of forgetting had not gone entirely away.
“I don’t know. I’m sorry,” Farya said. But Ethan said nothing.
He rose from the table and walked across the restaurant to where his nanny was feeding his son from a bowl of macaroni and cheese and peas. He asked in his best carefree, jocular voice how the pair was faring. He stroked the young boy’s long, loose, light brown hair as a subterfuge for examining, feeling, and pressing on the center of his forehead. Ethan asked the boy how he felt, just a little too loud.
“I do remember,” he said. “I didn’t until you said it just now. But I do, I remember that terrible ointment, and Carolina complaining about the smell, or complaining that the day nanny didn’t use enough, while the night nanny used too much. And I remember that eerie stare while he was sleeping, like he was seeing through me—like he could see me just faking it through the father thing.”
“So, you remember?” Farya asked.
“Yeah. You know me. I always remember. That’s probably half of why I’m such a fuckup. Sorry. Call it a complimentary deformity.”
Ethan looked her in the eyes longer than he had since before he’d married Carolina, raised his cup of tea in a toast, and smirked.
+
Later that day, Lourdes called. Like all her calls, this one was curt, inviting Farya to visit. A sitter watched Edouard, and an SUV carried Farya through the frigid early evening. In light traffic, it swooped across the Williamsburg Bridge, which punched a gap in the luxury towers crowding that bend in the East River. Just one car and one driver—Bryan had begun to talk about phasing out Eamonn and his team altogether.
As always with their meetings in the spherical basement room, there was a pizza waiting on a TV table. Lourdes waited behind the pizza box in a loose, gray sweater and a big, colorful, patchwork corduroy skirt.
“I know it can be hard to get away. But I was worried about you,” Lourdes said, looking older, the flesh around her mouth sagging, making her face square, stately. “How have you been?”
“I’m tired all the time. It seems like every day I catch myself saying ‘I’ve never been so tired.’ I can’t seem to focus. And Bryan’s working all the time. But I have help—a nanny and a babysitter. That gives me some time for the exercises. But it just winds up being more time to be drowsy, distracted,” Farya said, looking down into the fur collar of her jacket, whose softness accused her—spoiled rich girl.
“I was wondering—what happened the other day?”
“I meant to call you about that. I started an exercise, but my mind drifted, and the sounds in the street and my thoughts started to double into each other. I caught it as soon as I could. It seemed small, harmless, just a nuisance that disappeared.”
“It took me a minute to notice. But I try to come down here every few days,” Lourdes said, gesturing to the faces that protruded from the walls and ceiling. President next to pin-up next to physicist next to poet next to tap-dancing dictator, from photorealistic to caricature. “And I was starting to see some new faces, remembering new facets, new characters. Congratulations on Minetta Street, by the way. I like the underground stream, the partially freed slaves, the bend, and the old-time murders, too.”
“Thanks—it just happened that way.”
“I know. We live in the world and spend so much of ourselves just trying to get along. We have to spend so much time listening to the world that it’s easy to forget that we can also talk to it. You, especially, can talk to it,” Lourdes said, letting each word unfold slowly, putting Farya on the spot.
“The birth eye—it seemed like a nuisance, the kind of small thing that parents forget about by the time their baby can walk, anyway. How did you notice?”
“The faces told me. For a lot of these great personalities, the birth-eye is part of their story, especially the ones with rough upbringings. They were neglected or underfed or abused, and the birth-eye never closed right. You know what they used to call the scar from a badly healed third eye? There were a few—the urchin’s wink, the orphan’s frown. And one day, I came in here to look around, and a lot of their faces were missing a famous feature.”
“I guess it started with the ointment. It smelled, and you had to apply it just so, or else he’d start screaming. And it was the same ointment my mother used, which made me feel sad, like, all this effort, just to keep things the same. And the other moms, with their constant accusations and opinions, made it feel like I had to fight just to do the same stupid and boring and obvious thing my mom did,” Farya said. The high edge of a sob started to grip her throat as she spoke.
“I understand.”
“No, you don’t. You don’t have any children.”
The words hit Lourdes in a visible way. Farya opened her mouth to approach an apology. But Lourdes sat up, recovering herself, and spoke.
“Maybe I don’t understand, completely. And I’m sorry this is hard for you. But you need to be careful with depression—it’s not just yours.”
“I know. You’re right. But what if I just get rid of bad things? This thing, it was just a weakness for infants and a chore for mothers.”
“I hope you’re right. When you start pulling threads, you never know where they’ll stop,” Lourdes said. “The world’s smaller because of you. And no matter what’s happening, no matter how subtle or small or dangerous, there’s someone with a clever plan to make a buck out of it.”
“How could you make money off of one less birth defect?”
“Because the world’s disappearing. When that happens, the price of reality goes up. Maybe you can sell people back the reality they lost. Maybe, if they’re rich enough, you can sell them another universe.”
“What? How do you sell another universe?”
“Never mind. It’s nothing to worry about right now. Just know that the consequences of these episodes don’t stop just because you get a handle on yourself. I get that a regular job would be hard to keep at because you don’t need one. So, start a business or a charity. You need to make some kind of commitment. You say that you’re tired, but I think the real problem is that you’re not tired enough.”
“Any suggestions?” Farya asked.
“Just don’t take on anything impossible. Don’t try to solve world hunger or anything. You need to win a little, and you need to take on something in your day besides yourself.”
On the ride home, light snow fell, just enough to refresh the dirty ice banks with a little white. At home, Farya relieved the sitter and walked on the balls of her feet around the creak in the floor at the nursery door. She opened the door a crack to watch her tiny son, sleeping on his back, a few tiny, restless fingers escaping the tight swaddle.
+
It was a bad insomnia, and the mornings started earlier and earlier, quiet when Bryan least wanted quiet. He padded the travertine tile floor, pondered the kitchen, opened a cabinet, and tried to comprehend the plates, the mugs. Who’d bought them? Maybe Farya, maybe the decorator. It was, after all, so much house to fill at one go. He pondered the food processor on the counter that he didn't know how to use and the coffeemaker he didn’t know how to use. But he should know how to do it by now. These four a.m. rendezvous with the kitchen were becoming more frequent.
On the surface, everything was good. Their baby boy grew. Metacom thrived, and Farya mostly seemed to thrive on motherhood. But Bryan’s dreams grew more vivid, more awful. They scared him awake and away from the bed in the still hours before the housekeeper arrived. He gave up on the shiny silver coffee machine. These hours made no money. Any difference they made was a difference best concealed. They revealed weakness to the unacknowledged howling choruses in his head who asked, “How do you sleep at night?”
Fresh from the nightmare, there seemed no solution. But after an hour of drinking juice he wished was coffee, Bryan brightened at one prospect—a young man in the perpetual glow of a computer screen named Everick, whom Bryan had hired.
“Eradication is a tall order, even when no one’s fighting you,” Everick said later that afternoon, not looking up from his machine as he spoke. The kid was young, named for a character in a sci-fi movie series that was all the rage when Bryan was in college. Everick worked two days a week from the Metacom offices, chasing down the digital copies of Jimny Lomoigne’s musical legacy.
Everick always preferred to send a link rather than talk. But Bryan paid, and so Everick spoke, properly, with his mouth. Red-faced and blinking in an oversized sweater and ball cap, the young man seemed like a shucked clam when not staring into a screen. The process, as Everick explained it, was like chasing ghosts made by ghosts, and trying to eradicate them with legal threats. The next step was to drown out the real copies with lies posted to the message boards of those sites, or with broken counterfeits of themselves. The fresh efflorescence of phony Jimny Lomoigne and Union Skells songs commissioned by the streaming apps helped fake out the uninitiated who tried to download or stream the songs for the first time.
But killing a ghost isn’t cheap.
“The other side loses interest. That’s how you win,” said Everick. “The problem is if they know they’re on a side. Then it gets harder, especially if they’re not doing it for the money.”
A week later, after a bad night, when the dreams tinged his whole day with a seasick sensation of disgust and remorse, Bryan met again with Everick. That’s when he first learned the screen name LomoignAid1997. It would return over the coming months as LomoignAid1997 posted on message boards, social media, everywhere, hundreds of links to whole albums by the Union Skells, and Jimny Lomoigne. He (Bryan assumed it was a he, and Everick said he was probably right) seeded torrent sites of all stripes, shared singles and whole discographies across, under different names, always with masked IP addresses.
Everick said he couldn’t get a fix on the location or identity of LomoignAid1997. He knew someone who could, but it would be expensive. Bryan said do it, and called his copyright lawyer to prepare a suit, multiple suits, as many as she could think of. The expense was negligible compared to the nightmares with Jimny Lomoigne force-fed from a jukebox like a cancerous liver.
Still, months went by. And LomoignAid1997 continued to spread the songs of Bryan’s father far and wide across the web. What’s more, LomoignAid1997 haunted Bryan’s dreams. In them, he looked like a thinner, paler Everick, with long arms that reached out of the baggy sweaters he wore, subjecting all the dead of the Lomoigne clan to punishments alternately medieval and pornographic. He was the face of the multiplying homunculi wielding magnetic tape, Wurlitzers, gigantic soundboards, along with the tubes, funnels, and pumps of the force feeder’s art. The dreams carried with them a helplessness that returned Bryan, wherever he was, to an Arizona basement, where he watched impossible television shows to pass impossible time.
It was a terrible feeling. It made a day of work and a raucous toddler’s nightly demands a relief, at least at first. But as time went on, it seemed that the work made him more susceptible to nightmares, while his little boy raised the stakes of those nightmares.
+
It was a break, a moment on the way home, a late lunch alone. Lourdes was demanding—demanding that Farya take ever more responsibility. Edouard was demanding—while he ate more and slept longer, he had the attention span to insist on his desires.
Giorgio’s was an old cafe, a fixture from the days when the village was a bohemian petri dish instead of another pleasure district for people who could afford just about anything. The old Italian man took her order, as disinterested as his grandfather was in Bob Dylan. It was the eve of St. Patrick’s Day. The bar down the street was blasting Yer never gonna see no unicorn … An early warm spring took hold, and all of New York warmed up and cheered to a semi-frenzy. A breeze played through the open door.
That day’s exercises were troubling: What’s the worst image? Lourdes had asked. What would you show yourself if you desperately needed to get your own attention? If you could scream your own secret name at the top of your lungs, what form would that take?
The exercises held Farya at the threshold of a seizure, where fragments of what Farya had annihilated began to return, but in strange ways. Medicines reappeared as weapons; courtship rituals reemerged as cruel governments. Terrible wars and great civilizations, forgotten childhoods and incredible capabilities, whole species lost to some blunder started to seep in as blockbuster movies—Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, and Star Wars. Lourdes talked through the exercises, to guide Farya, remind her where she was, and what the stakes were. Eyes closed, Farya took a few of the sudden violent breaths by which she’d learned to ratchet herself away from the obliterating edge she knew so well.
Farya shook her head and picked at her BLT. She inhaled the cool air that smelled of earth, glad for the moment of freedom, aware that the nanny was waiting to be relieved, Edouard waiting to do an inarticulate negotiation for indeterminate foods and toys. Taking a big bite, she considered the effort of getting Bryan to take a night off work, of finding a babysitter, and decided to make the effort to go out to the movies. She missed the movies.
It had been easy to miss them last year. The baby was so small, and Bryan’s job seemed like a towering emergency with no end in sight. And the blockbusters all seemed the same: gunfight epics about protecting some piece of infrastructure—a train tunnel, presidential palace, cosmic gateway, or world pillar. They all seemed to say that the last hero left was a security guard someone forgot to fire, stationed outside an abandoned machine.
The old waiter asked if she wanted anything else, and before she could finish her no thank you, he’d left the check and padded back to his newspaper at the bar. She looked out the plate-glass window, the grooved topography of the restaurant’s name painted on the glass catching the sun. Tourists ambled past, half-lost with their oversized paper shopping bags, while women in futuristic exercise gear stalked past with chins up and blank expressions. One hobo wandered along, shaking a paper cup.
