Tilt: A Novel

by Emma Pattee

But it’s not the beginning; it’s the end. It’s just coming towards me in slow motion, so I can’t make out the shape of it.

It’s like life is this powerful river, of doing laundry and buying groceries and driving to work and scrolling on my phone, and the weekends are so short.

We’re going to die. You, Bean. Little eyelashes and fingernails. Tiny unfurled soul. All of my alternate lives, spinning out away from me like Frisbees. A playwright in Brooklyn with well-watered house plants on my windowsill. Me and your father at a party in LA, standing by a pool that is lit up by purple and pink lights. Ice cubes clinking in our glasses. Someone is laughing at a joke I made. In my backyard, on my knees, gardening in the sun. You’re right next to me, little hands in the dirt. I could have been anything. Gone anywhere.

This is the natural progression of the artist. At first you think it’s only you. Born a star! Then you get out in the world and think, alright, there’s a few of us. But just us. Meant to be! And then of course you realize it’s not just you and your friends, it’s everyone. Hundreds of thousands of millions of people. Who want to be stars. Who think they have what it takes.

We’re at that stage where we’ve learned to live with our incomprehension of each other. Where it’s easier to nod like, oh yes, I see, than it is to ask for more.

Nobody wants to be where they are, I think. So would it really matter so much if the earth swallowed us all?

Tulips and roses and little white sprigs of baby’s breath; I grind them into the asphalt beneath my feet. Nobody needs flowers at the end of the world.

On the drive home, sitting in traffic on 84, I try to talk to you. I read somewhere that babies like to hear voices, so I say out loud: “Well, we are stuck in traffic.” My voice sounds unsure in the quiet of the car, but I keep going, “Traffic is what happens when everyone is trying to get home at the same time. You’ll see.” And that makes me sad, to think that you will be born just so you can sit in traffic like the rest of us.

Your father collects little phrases like the person who picks up pennies off the sidewalk. Once he overheard a woman on the bus saying: “I love the idea of being a cheetah, because they run really fast. But it feels like a stressful life.” He loved that—it feels like a stressful life. We’d say it back and forth to each other, when we’d talk about how we should move to LA, or get more into activism, or how if we’d known then what we know now, we’d have bought a house in 2014 for sure. Three houses. Six houses. Wish we had six houses. But it feels like a stressful life.

The problem with so many years spent sitting so close to somebody is that you can tell yourself you’re being seen, but really you’ve disappeared, closed the blinds, nobody’s home.

How do you leave the party at which your child has died? I guess you just leave. The door shuts behind you and then you’re standing on the front steps. A two-foot shadow beside you. I lie awake, one hand on my stomach, imagining the parents in their driveway. An empty car seat behind them. How do you get out of the car that holds the car seat of your child who is dead? These are the things I’m trying to figure out.

There’s no way to explain to your father that some people make lists of all the ways that babies die and some people don’t.

She and I are both passengers, trapped on a train that is about to launch itself off a cliff into the great ether. Into the darkness and stars and schmear of galaxy. Nothing we can do about it now. Nothing to do except stare out the window and wait.

The ocean is a hoarder, you know. Keeping a collection of tchotchkes down there and then spitting them out, one by one, to remind us that it owns all of us.

We fall back into silence. Something like adrenaline starts beating its slow drum inside me. Maybe you’ll know this feeling one day—there’s nothing a woman hates more than walking by herself, and hearing a strange noise, or feeling the presence of an “other,” that horrible sickness all over my body, ground shifting, women are so unsafe, all of us always pretending to be safe, always avoiding any reminder that our safety is upheld only as long as the person closest to us keeps deciding not to kill us.

At the end of the world, the men with the guns make the rules. We’ve known this forever.

On my phone screen, I’ve watched her grow old. And then I looked up from my phone screen and realized that I’ve grown old, too.

I never asked her why she made birds, and how she learned how to papier-mâché, and who exactly she was making the birds for. And now I can’t ask her any of those things.

You think you’re gonna get married and be the one who lifts up the other person. You say things in your vows about unconditional support and being a rock and a lifelong cheerleader. But then you realize how heavy it is to lift someone up day after day. How much your arms burn and how much easier it would be to just rest for a while.

Around and around the block I walk, looking in people’s windows. Their TV shows. Their lasagnas pulled out of the oven. I want something more than this. That thought is like a pebble tossed inside a lake, sinking down into darkness. It’s better to forget the things you want but don’t have. The happiest people are the ones who want what they already have. This ache, this ache inside of me, I don’t know how to get rid of it.