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Alicia says that maybe she should print out a photo of Jen’s face and tape it over her own while they have sex. “I could cut little holes in the eyes.” Remy says that would be creepy. “But I love how your mind works.”
Jake is their perfectly nice roommate. They despise him passionately. His ringtone is the sound of a baby crying.
“We used to play this game where I’d see how many pens I could stick in her bun without her noticing, and in a way that was erotic, even though it wasn’t technically sexual.”
Alicia spends an hour in front of a palette of eye shadow that seems as complex and intimidating as a pipe organ.
The stone bobs in the marsupial indent of her cleavage while Inez tells him that moss agate promises abundance in love and money.
He and Alicia both use exaggerated gestures of goodwill and surprise in order to appear casual, as if meeting her there affects them in no way and is just the sort of unremarkable accident one can expect in day-to-day urban life. It makes them both look very wild, they realize afterwards.
“When are you looking for? I’m going on a surf trip in a couple of weeks.” “August first. How much do you charge?” “It’s fine, I’ll do it for free. It’ll be fun.” Alicia adjusts the bandana she’s required to wear over her hair. “Maybe we can get a drink afterwards.” “It won’t be fun,” says Cassie. “I’m serious. You wouldn’t like me when I sweat. I’m even crankier.” “Ah. Like the Hulk!” “Excuse me?” “You know how he’s like, You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry?” Cassie is confused and says that she didn’t say she’d be angry. She talks about her Irish heritage and explains how her complexion is
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He rereads this last message several times and decides that if he contacts Jen it will be over a different platform, one without that last message hovering over their new beginning.
smiling at everyone the way a kindly older man smiles at children who might be afraid of his dog.
The woman (who had a worked-on face like a soda can crushed and then carefully uncrushed) seemed to think that calling Jen his girlfriend would belittle him.
After dinner, Horus hooks up a karaoke machine in the living room. “I’m not embarrassed to start,” he says. He sings “Toxic” by Britney Spears, sober, with a sincerity instantly available and startling. In order to get on his level, everyone drinks a lot very quickly.
“I feel like you and Remy might have been together in a past life,” says Carla to Alicia. “That’s what the energy is like.” “I feel the same way!” says Alicia. “I think you two were, like, traveling magicians around the turn of the century. Remy was the magician and you were the girl he sawed in half. Or tied up in a water tank.”
“What’s this?” says Carla. She holds up a tiny, folded piece of paper that has attained lint-like hardness. She unfolds it. There’s a name and number on it. Alicia leans back on the heels of her hands and explains that it was a therapist her parents tried to make her see. “It makes them feel like they’re looking out for me so that if I’m hospitalized again they can at least say that they tried.” There’s silence that Alicia tries to make less uncomfortable by laughing. It’s not the kind of laughter that puts people at ease.
The scotch is supposed to be good, but to Remy, it tastes like chemicals and burnt hair.
Jen comes out to the living room, a towel wrapped around her body. The towel technically covers more skin than her swimsuit does, but seeing her in a towel is much more intense. The front of her chest is red from the shower. Jen moves around in a self-conscious way. “I left the door open,” she says. Remy feels embarrassed on her behalf. He laughs. “I left it open for a reason.” Her mouth moves strangely, like a tide-pool creature.
Carla forgets to retract her arm and they sit there, like sisters, for the rest of the evening.
Remy inflicts the last bit of his scotch on himself. Neurotic is a word that applies to Alicia, not him.
“Remember what I said. You have a destiny so strong, it’s knocking on doors.”
Knock knock knock knock
“She can be as awful as she wants. She can even block us on Instagram. But we’ve had time to study her and figure her out. She can’t keep herself out of our sex life.” Both of them are pleased by this idea, to which they return often before the sun comes up: the image of this arrogant girl continuing with her life, thinking she’s free, with no idea that they can humiliate her whenever they want.
Alicia-as-Jen picks up her phone and Remy strides over to the door and knocks it out of her hand. “You’re pathetic,” she says. “Go hassle your lame-ass girlfriend.” “Do you think you’re too good for me?” “I am too good for you.” They hear the sudden blare of a YouTube ad about savings at Macy’s, and this reminder of Jake’s presence makes them go into the bedroom and shut the door. There’s a brief silence.
She stops a man in an orange vest and points at the package of screws she put in her cart. “What do you think? Are these all the screws I need?” “It depends. What do you need them for?” “I mean screws that I might need, like, in general. Just generally.” The man looks at her. Alicia-as-Jen stands up straighter, as if she’s un-kinking to allow circulation of a brilliant substance that flows throughout her body. “I’m actually an artist, you know? So I want to keep myself open. I want to know that if an idea strikes me, I’ll have enough screws.” “What type of wood are you working with?” “All
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They pass a construction site on the walk to the apartment and a man in a yellow hat raises a flag at a massive, uncategorizable machine. The man indicates they should pass over the sidewalk, and all the construction men smile or direct pleasant, polite expressions at them.
“I just hope our relationship lasts through this purge.” He says this hoping that Alicia will recognize it as a veiled ultimatum. She doesn’t react. “Me too.”
“I’m tired of listening to you talk about how oppressed you are because you’re a redhead. You don’t look bad because you’re a redhead—you look bad because you’re ugly as shit. You look like an…Irish goblin.” “You’re trying to say leprechaun, retard. You can’t even insult me right.”
Remy comes home from a brunch shift and asks Jake if Alicia has returned from work yet. This is what it’s been like lately—he asks Jake where Alicia is. It used to be Alicia he talked to as soon as he got home. Jake says no. Remy tells him that he’s considering what he said about a tropical bird. “She spends all her time in her Spod now. I think it would be good for her to have something to take care of outside of it.” “That’s a great idea! Maybe I can help you look. I could be your wingman.” Jake puts his hand on his forehead. “Dang, wingman! That pun was a total accident!”
Outside a basement room that is definitely not room 426, he sees Alicia, abandoned on one of those gurneys just like the patients upstairs. He recognizes her, even though a sheet is pulled halfway over her face. Her eyes are open, in the innocent surprise of a cartoon character whacked on the head with a frying pan. He isn’t certain what the sheet and the absence of machines indicate—is she still alive? One can’t always expect beeping machines like in the movies. Surely a real hospital isn’t cheesy enough for beeping machines. Two guys in scrubs, both with body piercings, come out and consult
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His phone doesn’t recognize her, but Remy can always recognize her. He could even when she had a sheet over her face.
Dont know about that
If Alicia’s death were real, it should alter everything else. After seeing his bloody and disfigured girlfriend on a stretcher, he should have taken a bloody and disfigured train home to a bloody and disfigured apartment. He should have entered their bedroom and discovered a pit spewing dark ash instead of Alicia’s unmatched socks in the same place they’d been that morning.
At one point, drunk, he stands up and tries to execute one of the roundhouse kicks he saw on screen. He falls on the couch and bangs his ankle on the coffee table.
Imagine a movie version of this where themonter is just in the background of this shot and many people miss it
He says he’s hungry and tells her how all the food he buys goes missing as soon as he brings it home.
Hmmmm
That night, when Jake’s making himself a quesadilla, Remy watches him cook. He waits for Jake to turn towards the stove before saying, “So. I didn’t know that your mom died.” Jake turns around, holding a spatula in his mouth like a terrier with a stick. He raises and lowers his shoulders. He says, around the spatula, “Don’t worry about it, man.”
Tony coded
“Alicia had this…way of viewing the world that I really feel I’ve lost,” says Remy. He looks around. “She would have loved that orchid over there. And…” He doesn’t receive feedback that lets him know how he should perform. “She was always pointing out things I never would have noticed otherwise. And now, there will be this whole aspect of the world that is forever invisible to me.”
I just feel like there’s a version of the life that I should be living that’s just out of reach, and it doesn’t make me as exhausted as this one does.”
He envisions them being filmed or photographed like this: Alicia’s clothes scattered on the floor, now mingled with Jen’s clothes, Jen’s freckled boobs in the red haze of Alicia’s twinkle lights, he and Jen at peace with each other, harmony restored, a happy ending. The satisfaction of seeing this picture in his mind is almost as good as actually being inside it.
