Nestlings

by Nat Cassidy

No, the better analogy was … life was like Joni Mitchell’s entire catalog. Increasingly complex and difficult to understand but still full of face-smacking beauty if you were willing to forgo expectations and listen.

Among his many day jobs over the years, he’d even worked at Keats & Yeats, a bookstore in the Village, in his early twenties, but he’d been so obviously useless there, it was one of the only gigs he’d ever been straight fired from.

There was a word Reid’s mom used whenever she spoke of the early days, when she first met his dad—the happier times, before he’d revealed himself as a selfish, cowardly piece of shit capable of abandoning his family, never to be seen again. Bashert. In a romantic context, it meant “soulmate.” More generally, it meant fate. Destiny. God’s plan.

It was just there. Flipped through by how many hands, ignored by how many browsers? Great condition. Only a dollar. They didn’t even charge him tax. Bashert. He was hit by a sudden impulse to call his mom, tell her everything.

His mood began to deflate—too much bitter creeping into the sweet.

They had the scars (Ana put the knife down) (What were you doing?!) to prove they had made it through the worst years of their lives. But only survivors have scars in the first place.

Then when he got home, he would kiss his wife and his daughter—the two jewels of his life (and were they bittersweet sometimes? Sure. But he could push those feelings all the way down, press those grapes into holy wine, baby)—and he was going to write a new song.

It was a single-occupant WhisperRoom—kind of like a heavily fortified black phone booth. Inside was just enough room for a shelf containing Ana’s laptop, mic, and preamp, as well as a ratty old rolling desk chair. Definitely not ideal for a wheelchair user.

The audiobooks for Blood Rink were narrated by a woman named Kay Dalton—a woman who’d been narrating erotica for a few years now and who’d begun to amass a pretty good portfolio of titles under her no doubt lacy belt. “You asshole!” Ana whisper-yelled. “How long have you known that was me?” “Honestly? Not until this exact moment for sure. Your narrator voice is just different enough, Kay. How many other fake names are you using?”

“So, there was this stewardess in Russia in the 1970s, and someone put a bomb on her plane. There was some war going on, or terrorism, or I dunno. Anyway, the bomb ripped open the plane, everyone died either in the explosion or in the crash. Except for…” “This stewardess?” Georgia nodded. “She got sucked outta the plane midair and fell six miles down to the ground.”

“And survived?” Ana didn’t want to be interested, but she couldn’t help herself. “Pretty sure it’s still the longest free fall with no parachute anyone’s ever walked away from. Because, here’s the thing. Apparently, she had a history of really low blood pressure, so when the cabin depressurized so fast, she passed right out, right as she was sucked through. She was just a rag doll. And that’s the reason they say she survived the fall.” “You said ‘walked away’—wasn’t she—?” “Oh, no, she was all kinds of messed up. Broke everything. Sorry, dumb figure of speech. That’s not my point. I’m just saying: the only reason she survived in the first place is because … she stayed loose. I mean, sure, she was unconscious, but—sometimes bracing for impact, being all tense and holding on tight, hurts you more than just … staying loose. You get me?” “I get you.”

What do you do when you’ve lost faith in everything? Even your own body?

She didn’t know. They weren’t that demonstrable about their religion. They’d each been raised relatively observant, by two very different single moms, but these days considered themselves more culturally Jewish than anything (although Reid had become more stubborn in his Jewish identity post-Trump). They didn’t practice most holidays. They didn’t hang mezuzot. They had their own, nebulous, ever-changing

ideas of God. But they’d had their ketubah displayed prominently on a wall inside, and Frank had been in dozens of times to check this pipe or that window. Sure, he probably didn’t know what a Hebrew marriage contract looked like, but even he probably could recognize the foreign squiggles for what they were.

Suddenly, Ana would’ve given anything to take back every choice that had led here, all of it, to spare herself and to spare those around her from her monstrosity, because the nighttime is the right time to cruise the Panic Attack Expressway, baby, keep your useless foot on the gas and let’s crash into that wall at the very end, the one where you start thinking of that awful night, you know the one, when you were so exhausted you grabbed a knife and came so very, very close to—

No more exit ramps, so she did the only thing she could; yank the wheel and pull over on the shoulder.

“I want to be grateful, Reid. I want to stay grateful. I really do. I don’t want to be like her. Like Cathy. I’m so sorry I’m such a bummer all the time.” “You’re not a bummer—” “I’m such a bummer. I bum myself out. I’m sad. I’m angry. I’m embarrassed. I’m … scared. All the time. And I hate it.” “I know.”

“Maybe you should talk to someone, too? There are groups for partners. I don’t want you, like, repressing anything or burying resentments because I’m such a mess.”

“If things were different, it wouldn’t be us. I like us.” “I like us, too.” Something in her voice changed. Like she was hearing herself for the first time. “I just want us to be happy,” she whispered.

For the rest of the day, she felt that maddening itch of something she needed to remember but couldn’t.

Ana and Reid had no at-home care in their insurance plan and, by that point, their premiums would have been through the roof if they’d signed up for some. They also made just enough money to not qualify for subsidies. It was one of those catch-22s that only something as cruel as the American insurance system could conjure: if Reid or Ana quit working, maybe they’d be able to get some financial assistance … while also not being able to afford anything else in their lives.

Something else kept her from truly, fully committing, too. Something inchoate and hard to articulate: as long as she kept the promise of improvement just a bit further off in the future, it couldn’t devastate her if it never actually happened.

They had a variety of other baby carriers—the chest carriers, the ring sling—but Ana liked the LapBaby best for her days alone in the apartment with Charlie. It was quicker and easier to use (she often even forgot she was wearing it), and also … she didn’t feel quite so suffocated by baby.

Her life, as she knew it, had just changed in ways she had not signed up for. A garden of resentment was sown that day. Its hideous plants bloomed at irregular, unpredictable intervals. A sprig of hate. A blossom of blame. Entire teeming hedgerows of depression and alienation.

Bad luck to register for knives, they’d been told, so they got the knife set themselves, laughing at the superstition.

But mothers can handle a lot of sensations at once, can’t they? It’s part of the job: to be torn open and persevere.

“Well,” Reid said, coming over to help clean up Charlie, “as my mom used to say, kaynahora, peh-peh-peh.” He mimed spitting onto the floor three times.

Yiddish superstitions notwithstanding, though, the mood felt distinctly sour.

Curtis Mayfield. “So in Love.”

Sometimes people don’t get better.” “You’re totally right! And maybe you won’t! That’s okay! What’s not okay is that you’re not trying. Which means you’re stuck in this in-between space. That space is awful … but it’s also kinda comfy, right? The problem is, that place’ll suck you dry if you let it. I think the reason you started crying yesterday wasn’t because the exercises were hard. They weren’t hard. They haven’t been

hard for a while. I think you’re holding on to something too tight and—you gotta be like that stewardess, girl! I need you to stop giving me excuses and see where trying takes you! So!”

How much pain is caused by hiding pain from others? Wait, why the hell am I thinking I’m about to be in pain?! Then, suddenly, the staircase stopped. No more steps.

Adulthood was all about compromises, wasn’t it? You decide what you need, what you want, and shift your priorities around until you find the least bad combination. Each compromise was a link in a chain, and if that chain dragged you down to the bottom of the East River? Well … at least you

had Netflix and Spotify to distract you while you sank.

“Know your home. Where you belong, you know? This moment.”

Know your home. Know you’re home.

Ana noticed as he explained to them the wonders of diatomaceous earth, had only three fingers on his left hand. “It’s not actually dirt, you know,” Sammy’d said. “It’s ground up bits of skeleton. Little fossilized plants called diatoms. You wouldn’t know it to feel it, but this stuff’s razor sharp for the buggies. It gets all caught in their exoskeletons and slices ’em up something nasty. And, if that weren’t enough, it sucks all the moisture outta them, too. Cuts ’em up and sucks ’em dry. What a way to go, huh? Can you believe some people eat this stuff?!”

“You don’t have to make light of it, Reid.” That surprised him. “I’m not—” “Yes, you are. You laugh, you make your little parentheticals. Believe me, I understand humor as a defense, but do you not think what you’ve gone through merits seriousness?” “I … no, I’m, I just, it’s absurd, right? To have that many bad things happen all at the same time like that?” “So you’re an absurdist? Like a Camus or a Beckett?” she asked this with a genuine curiosity, not any judgment, cataloging him in a mental index. “They, too, responded to a propitious amount of simultaneous suffering.”

“Yeah, I guess so.” He’d never put a label on it before. She indicated the bookcases. “I’m a fan, of course. I did several productions of theirs, of Ionesco’s, of Pirandello’s. There’s so much suffering in the world. So much pain. You get to be a certain age and you gain a collector’s appreciation of it. But, my Reid, are you protecting yourself? Or are you protecting your misery?”

“Be careful you don’t get taken advantage of. One problem with absurdists is they don’t always know when something stops being funny and starts being corrosive.”

Reid chuckled at the memory. A gang of black-suited Hasids had knocked on the office door and asked if there were any Jews working there. Reid’s response had been: “Is that a trick question? Because real Jews know not to answer that whenever strangers are at the door. Especially ones in matching suits.”

“Very special,” Poppy Loudon agreed. She had a much harsher Eastern European accent than Camilla’s. “Being a year old is when you really start listening, don’t you think? When you begin hearing the music all around you.” “Good lord,” Sterling groaned, pouring himself another drink, “that’s twee.” The gymnast waved him away. “You always act like sentimentality is some mortal sin. There’s nothing wrong with twee!”

He remembered a catered event he’d been dragged to as a kid—Rosh Hashanah dinner or maybe a funeral—where his mom had kvelled over some chopped liver. He’d tried it, and it was the most disgusting thing he’d ever had. Eventually, when he got older, he found a taste for it and was just as likely to kvell when given the opportunity.

“Lupara bianca,” Sterling said. “A hit with no discoverable body.

She played back what she’d recorded so far, and it wasn’t as awful as she thought it’d be. She might be able to stitch it onto the stuff she’d already recorded. She’d have to run it through a noise filter first, so it wouldn’t be a perfect match, but people weren’t listening to these books for her audio quality.

Something about the ambient hiss of the room tone, though … She raised the gain on the file, listened again. Something was there. A distinct, rhythmic noise buried in the hiss of the room. Faint, moving enough to be noticeable. Like a snake under a blanket.

Ana fiddled with the EQ until she isolated the noise. It was a mixture of high and low frequencies—she had to turn the EQ meter into something resembling two mountain peaks, or bunny ears. Or a pair of upside-down fangs, she thought and shivered.

When she’d told him she’d never listened to Sgt. Pepper, he balked and made her sit through it. During the fade-out of that final piano chord in “A Day in the Life,” he told her that at the very end of the

album, the band, as a practical joke, stuck a high-tone frequency specifically designed to make a person’s dog go nuts. When he was a kid, Reid said, he’d always been able to hear that frequency, too. Then one day, he just couldn’t hear it anymore. Children can hear frequencies adult ears can’t.

Next, he pulled their cheap little tool kit from under the sink and hammered the cloves to the side of the door like a mezuzah. Maybe that would keep them from coming into the apartment? Stupid, stupid.