The first thing the surgeon asks when he sees my scan is: when was the accident? I haven’t been in an accident. Earlier this morning, I stepped into the shower and turned my head to adjust the water temperature. That’s when my neck popped. The pain jolted me like a hot wire.
This is whiplash, the surgeon explains, pointing to a white mass on the scan: a disc between two vertebrae has slipped and ruptured its encasing tissue sac. The disc now throbs against my spinal cord and the nerve that tunnels through my right arm. Which accounts for the burning core of my drawing hand. I flex my fingers and a flicker of an emergency pulses down my limb. The surgeon asks me to rate the pain. Ten, everything is a ten. Describe the pain. The prick of soda bubbles inside the meat of my thumbpad.
I understand your silence around the accident, the surgeon says, with insurance and liability and whatnot, but you shouldn’t lie to your surgeon.
Truth, I manage to say. I laugh. It hurts.
◆
I spend the summer in a neck brace. An inner tube of fat swells around my middle because I can’t jog. I imagine taking a peeler to my torso and slicing off strips of bacon. Acne bubbles along my jawline. The painkillers wear thin. I swallow more. By the time the August humidity blooms through the screens, I want to kill the vegan.
The vegan and I have signed a lease we can’t afford and the lease is the only thing we talk about. We bicker over neighborhood car alarms that holler on after the bars have closed. One night, the vegan loses his cool and bolts down the block with a crowbar in his fist. I hobble after him in my neck brace, cradling my numb arm with my good hand. We turn a corner and the siren goes quiet, as if it knows we’re there. Then it calls out from beyond another row of brownstones.
◆
Reason is the stiff-necked adversary of thought, the philosopher quotes in response to my neck brace selfie. I like his reply. Laughing-smiling emoji. Although he lives in another time zone, both of us are online. If I were a sculptor, he dms me, I’d carve you a soapstone bust of Martin Heidegger. You wouldn’t thank me for it.
You think I’m ungrateful, I say.
He sends me a selfie of him cradling his face with his hand. He looks as if he’s about to say, aspirin. He and his hand are now in my kitchen. I press my hips into my countertop granite, wishing I were licking his cheek instead of waiting for the vegan to cool off. Outside, the car alarm wails. That’s when the philosopher says he’ll soon unveil his great work.
The bust I would’ve carved had I been a sculptor, he says. He says he’s serious. He says he wants to pull away the cotton napkin life has draped over him.
I type a Top Four List of Things the Philosopher Might Say Upon Revealing the Martin Heidegger Statue:
Okay
Oh…
It’s a paperweight?
This took effort
…and tweet it at him. He hearts it.
◆
Events with the vegan escalate. I’m in bed, reading Colette with my neck brace on, when he straddles me. Cruel Adonis, soft curls and hollow abs. He pinches my shoulders between his knees. Tell me how you pick your fighter, the vegan says as he touches himself. He hooks a finger into my damp neck brace, my body rigid like a clothespin doll. He squints his eyes, cums in my hair. His groan is almost an expression of compassion. It’s how I know he’ll help me move. I’m heroic in a neck brace and when I capitulate to the injury’s tragedy, my vulnerability turns him on. I’ll wait until I have my own place to roll out the break-up. After he hefts my boxes, my mattress, my bed frame, up a new set of stairs, I’ll finish him.
◆
The philosopher shares grainy photos of the soapstone he’s chosen for carving. He posts charcoal sketches of his hero’s face. He uploads a new profile avatar. I examine the work as best I can, given the circumstances; I dm him that if we were to meet, by chance or with intent, in the supermarket or on the subway, I wouldn’t mistake him for his portraits. Men appreciate it when you separate them from their work. From what I can see in the webcam shot, his face isn’t fully developed. There are curves that indicate youth in their smoothness; there are cuts and crosshatched shades that betray frenetic processes. No hairline wrinkles or major cracks, not enough definition, or lack thereof, to register as a definitive aesthetic statement. The artifact, I mean, not the artist, not the subject.
I dm the philosopher: We’ll pass each other in the produce aisle, you with your incomplete soapstone bust in the small items compartment of your cart, me with an actual fat baby named Martin. You’ll cast me a sideways look, as though I’m blocking traffic, but I know you’ll be eyeing my cart.
Should I Google you, the philosopher replies.
Top Two Things You Might Say to Me in the Grocery Aisle, I tweet @hiddenking:
[nothing]
Out of my way, bitchass
◆
The weekend arrives and the vegan and I leave the city for the suburbs to house-sit for my parents. We sleep like children and graze at the seasonal burger stand. The vegan makes ideological exceptions for burgers and ice cream from kitschy stands and fried clams from beach shacks. He was, in fact, a freegan in college, but revised his stance after contracting E. Coli from mustard prosciutto left out on a communal table at Whole Foods.
I pop a painkiller on the deck. Unwrap my neck brace. The air soothes my pasty skin. It’s the first time I’ve ever truly felt the forest’s cool green light.
The vegan asks if I’m okay to drive.
I drove all the way here, didn’t I?
Just doesn’t seem cool to drive with an expired license, he shrugs, as wasps shuttle into the cracks between the wood slats of the deck. I don’t know, feels dishonest.
◆
Elmo’s Burgers was built by Elmo, a local man, shortly before the Great Depression, a decadent time when weekenders would drive out from the city to party. By the time the vegan and I arrive that afternoon, the shore’s hurricane-wrecked cabins have been rebuilt as shingled vacation homes and the wilderness has been shaved into boxed plots of McMansions. Elmo’s parking lot is crammed with soccer mom minivans and dusty Cadillacs, the latter shuttling seniors from The Harvest, a care community founded by a silent film star back in the 1950s.
The vegan fetches food from Elmo’s and we eat in the car with the windows rolled down. I loosen the Velcro of my neck brace. Tip the seat back. Close my eyes, exhale. Such comfort, so far from the city. The ocean roars, or maybe it’s the expressway. A seagull. A child’s squeal. The crack of a baseball. My eyes roll back in my head.
Then a bad feeling swells. The kind of bullseye you feel on your back before you turn down your headphones and see that someone’s followed you.
Beside us, a member of the Greatest Generation peers out from her gold Oldsmobile. Her lips are pursed as though she’s bit into a lemon. At the wheel, a shrunken man shakes with palsy. He’s parked so close to my car that the woman could reach through my window and steal a curly fry.
You! she says, jabbing a finger into my space. I won’t let you get away with it!
Get away with what? I ask. I wipe my mouth with the back of my hand, smearing the strand of drool connecting my lip to my neck brace.
Hooking children on your drugs.
I laugh.
The vegan unfastens his seat belt and leans forward.
Fuck you, old lady, the vegan says.
Shut up, I say. To both of them.
I crank the engine and roll up the windows. The shrunken man revs his engine and guns the old boat out of their spot, spraying a family of four with gravel.
◆
Back at the house, the vegan showers and I connect to iLibrary. The philosopher and I roleplay: he’s a professor who assigns us articles that can’t be accessed on JSTOR and studies that haven’t been e-pubbed and novels where only certain parts of the whole are accessible on Google Books. He and I have agreed on a history: I graduated a year ago and continue to meet him on iLibrary to climb out of the cold clean sheets of my parents’ house and find new facts to bury. Then he’s applying to graduate school, again, and again, and I’m considering west coast sculpture MFAs but the GRE and the applications cost nearly as much as rent. The philosopher says he’ll gladly pay for them if only I’ll accept his gift of a Martin Heidegger statue, and I say I already nanny for two different families four days a week whose sinewy mothers, one Republican, one Democrat, pound identical tennis balls into identical clay courts beside a monstrous copper statue of Martin Heidegger. He says his modest soapstone bust of Martin Heidegger was accepted into four fully-funded PhD’s by four potential mentors with direct lineage to Martin Heidegger and that his statue reads and comments on and revises his essays and has even published a literary tract of its own, a scholarly lyric essay on floral imagery in “Twin Peaks” and the necessary evils of institutional symbology in establishing post-Soviet national identity in Eastern European countries.
The philosopher once worked part-time for a florist, part-time for a landscaper, and finds significance in the choices people make when they cultivate flowers and shrubs and monoculture greenways.
We focus: I read a book and he reads a book and we explain them to each other as we’re reading.
I tell him: You are in graduate school. You are 5’8”, which you consider to be too short, but I don’t care.
He says: Are you a permanent resident of 99 Moon Beam Lane?
◆
The doorbell rings. I never answer the door at my parents’ house; I never even answer the phone or check the mail. No one but my parents know that the vegan and I are here. I pull on a tank top. Leave my neck brace at my bedside. Unlock the front door.
A policeman lifts his badge to the storm glass. A line of riot police behind him. Over their shoulders, flashing cars on the lawn are tearing up my mother’s azaleas. Sirens howl over the receding trees. Blue and white vans. Black Suburbans.
M’am, are you a resident here?
My parents are in Florida, I say.
Is this your silver Toyota parked in the driveway?
Yes, I say. That’s my car.
M’am, I’m going to have to ask you to come with me.
I depress the storm door lock.
Not until you tell me what this is about, I say.
We have a report of elder harassment and heroin possession with intent to sell.
The vegan appears behind me in a towel.
What’s going on? he demands. He looks at the cop and says: You have no right to be here without a reason and a warrant.
What did you say to me? the cop says.
You have no right to be here without a warrant, the vegan says. Get going.
Listen, you little prick, says the cop, palm on his pistol. I will stick this gun so far up your ass you’ll puke it out in solitary and I will make sure your sorry ass bleeds from both ends, you ignorant shit, and I will—
I slam the wood paneled door. The vegan and I exchange wild looks.
Get the back door, I say, and the vegan says, I’ll get the garage. And we hurry, locking every entry. I hook a bike lock around the twin French handles of an exit leading out onto a sunroom crammed with yucca plants. Flashing red and blue lights silhouette the swords of the leaves.
◆
Upstairs, the vegan and I gaze down from a window onto the ruined grass. Police unload a battering ram from the rear doors of a van. I hold my neck ache in my hands.
Dude, this is impossible, the vegan whispers.
My phone pings. I dismiss the notification.
I dial 9-1-1 on the landline. The landline is dead. I dial 9-1-1 on my cell phone. The cell phone refuses to connect.
I wonder if they have a signal silencer, the vegan says.
Up here, I say, wincing in pain as I yank down the attic’s accordion staircase.
In the attic, I disable wifi and connect to 3G. The signal is thin and it fluctuates between 3G and 1X. My battery is at two percent. I type HELP into the field where the philosopher lives. He responds with a jpeg of Martin Heidegger’s Basic Writings.
We can’t stay up here, the vegan insists.
In the corner of the attic, near the fan vent, a wasp nest hovers, large as a watermelon.
I send a photo of the battering ram, of police kneeling with rifles in the mud. SEND HELP, I beg the philosopher. 9-1-1.
The philosopher sends a laughing-crying emoji. He sends a pixelated zoomed-in pencil sketch of Martin Heidegger’s frown.
I send a photo of the wasp nest, wasps beginning to swarm.
He sends a stone.