The Guest

by Emma Cline

People like Helen loved to display the artifacts of creativity as if that implicated her in the process.

She smiled at him. The thrill was familiar. The giddy anxiety of watching yourself and waiting to see what you would do next.

A headache winked in and out but didn’t fully announce itself.

They were house-share people, Alex figured, fifteen or twenty people crowding into a flimsy new spec house, bottles of tequila bought cheaply in the city and transported wrapped in beach towels. They would leave here Monday night, imagining they had gotten close to something, had some rarefied experience. The truth was that the world they were imagining would never include them.

Alex did not know what time it was. The music was loud, endless. Could you live like this forever, in some alternate universe ruled by immediacy?

She wore a maroon sweater with lime green cuffs over a stiff white button-down, red lipstick, and kept her purse on the chair next to her, its teeth zipped in a sharp smile.

Somewhere on the property, she heard someone operating a leaf blower, then the sound of a lawnmower. Occasionally a man in long sleeves and a baseball hat walked past the pool carrying a garbage can filled with weeds. When she nodded and waved, he just looked at the ground. So much effort and noise required to cultivate this landscape, a landscape meant to invoke peace and quiet. The appearance of calm demanded an endless campaign of violent intervention.

But maybe some things could never be erased. Maybe they tinted some cellular level of your experience, and even if you scraped away whatever part was on the surface, the rot had already gotten beneath.