Euphoria

by Lily King

A cry cut short. Laughing. Daylight and he was yelling.

We were standing very still in the water then and I would have liked to hold him.

It is a bit of a dance we three are in.

I don’t know. Too tired to think it through any further. Maybe it’s just we’re both a little in love with Andrew Bankson.

I believed if I could do that twenty more times I might be able to flush Nell Stone entirely out of my system.

She was squinting. I knew she had terrible eyesight, but I’d never wondered where her specs were, or once thought to offer her Martin’s.

I was having my own small euphoria.

‘The sound of that fucking machine is the sound of your fucking brain.’ He slammed his fist onto the keys.

But she had needed a brother, it turned out. She had needed one with the Mumbanyo. She might still have her baby if she’d had a brother there.

She was scared he’d come back.

Alone was when your thinking turned to evil.

If I could have any picture of her at all, it would be then, at the moment she saw me that day.

The impulse to touch her and all the life in her was something I had to check regularly.

I could not see what he was doing or whom he was with. ‘What was going on back there?’ I asked him on the path home. ‘Nothing.’

We were giddy with her iconoclasm, her courage, her ambition.

it occurred to me that the Dobu sounded a lot like him: his paranoid streak, his dark humor, his distrust of pleasure, his secrecy.

And just these few words in my notebook made many things feel possible.

tradition could turn psychopathic.

We’re trying to piece this culture together, and I’ve got a partner who withholds information.’

I felt how exhilarating it would be to work in the field with this woman.

He didn’t like what he saw, the two of us alone together, working on Helen’s book,

I have thought a great deal about why I do not answer. Partly it is shame—though that word hardly captures the depth of it—that

When Nell tried to align one of Jung’s functions of consciousness to each quadrant, Fen slapped her pencil away from the page. ‘You don’t understand a thing about it.’ ‘Explain it to me then.’

‘What are they?’ But he wouldn’t tell her.

‘Stop it, Fen.’ ‘Sorry I’m not a sensitive little prat who can pick up on your every thought and tend to every nick and bug bite.’ ‘This is not about us, Fen.’ ‘The hell it isn’t.’

For long stretches of time it felt like we were crawling around in each other’s brain.

Nell said opposites worked best, and I hastened to agree, though I didn’t believe it, and hoped she didn’t either.

When Fen was there I was able to contain my attraction to her, but whenever he left I felt it fill the room.

‘Have you ever felt that, the impulse to possess someone?’ ‘Yes.’ But I could hardly tell her how recently.

‘Was she wine or bread to you?’ ‘What do you mean?’ ‘It’s from an Amy Lowell poem we all loved in college. Wine is sort of thrilling and sensual, and bread is familiar and essential.’

‘Helen and I were lovers,’ she said. ‘Ah.’ This explained a few things.

‘People are always wine to me, never bread.’

He leaned back, deeply satisfied by my shock.

Nell was pregnant. She and Fen had made a baby. When I was with them it was easy to convince myself that she hadn’t fully made her choice yet. She played her part in that.

I felt in some ways we’d had some sort of sex, sex of the mind, sex of ideas, sex of words, hundreds and thousands of words,

But his kind of sex with her produced a baby. Mine was useless.

It had been Xambun. And for those few steps he’d taken toward me, he’d thought I was Fen.

‘I can see it, Nell. I can see it right in front of me and I can hear it in your voice and I can feel it under my skin. I’m not inventing anything.’

I knew the break in her ankle and scars on her skin and her short round toes.

‘That’s funny,’ I said. ‘It’s absurd,’ he said. But neither of us was laughing.

She would be safer, I concluded, if I were not around to enrage him.

And stupidly, selfishly, I agreed.

I only know that when F leaves and B and I talk I feel like I am saying—and hearing—the first wholly honest words of my life.

‘I’m such a dope not to have seen this coming,’ she said. ‘He’s been lying to me for weeks.’

‘Stay here. Please.’ They were hours ahead of me. This was the only time I would have with her alone. I sat back down.

She always made me feel that the work was important.

‘Certain people bring out certain traits in each other. Don’t you think?

If I had a husband, for example, who said, “Your typing makes my brain work better,” I would not be so ashamed of my impulse to work. You don’t always see how much other people are shaping you.

I followed. Of course I followed.

I try not to return to these moments very often, for I end up lacerating my young self for not simply kissing the girl. I thought we had time. Despite everything, I believed somehow there was time. Love’s first mistake. Perhaps love’s only mistake.