Roommates were going through a rebrand. No longer were they just companions for the lonely, the infirm, the elderly. Now, a Roommate was perfect for anyone needing that spark in their life, or who wanted to change something about themselves or their relationship. For couples, they were an attractive escape from the drudgery of being stuck with one person for the rest of your life, a way to reconnect with each other, a child for the childless. And of course they always did the dishes.

It was Jill who insisted we order one. She said that living with me had become heavy; a Roommate would take the burden off of her, breathe some air into things. Jill worked for a non-profit, and I wrote freelance articles for companies while I tried and failed to write my book. As she described it one day when we were sitting at the brewery along the river after one of our long walks through our Midwestern city, the trouble was not that I hadn’t accomplished anything, but that I was a friendless person. Everything I did, she said, had become a kind of performance, and it kept me from others. Which was true enough, I conceded, though I thought friendless person was the wrong term to apply to my case—too general. I was a friendless man, in the way that some men are bound to be, the kind who, if they weren’t careful, found themselves shut in the house, or else embarrassingly acting out their loneliness in public, purposefully knocking over the displays in convenience stores just to linger a bit longer in the company of the workers. Jill rolled her eyes—Enough with the jokes—and I relented. But still, I said, I didn’t see the need for a Roommate. Perhaps we were going through a rough patch, but it was too soon to say what would become of us. Jill and I were barely in our thirties—we had a rescue pit-bull, a good dutch oven, and a Subaru. Of course we had had our share of problems, but also plenty of time to solve them, and I didn’t see how a Roommate would change things one way or another. Wasn’t what we had enough? What would be the purpose, I said, of sharing it all with a stranger in our home?

But Jill had made up her mind. From the list of options on the website, Jill chose Siena, and three days later the Roommate showed up at our front door with dyed pink hair and an old Ford Ranger parked across the street. The Roommate didn’t come in a box, but rather arrived unpackaged, ready to live with you. It had a temp job in a medical lab, sending and receiving tumor samples that came in to be tested for cancer. She was broke, she told us, no health insurance, but she might be getting a promotion soon, which would give her enough money to live on her own. We learned this during one of her long phone sessions (I never knew who with), when she walked through the house in her boots, speaking loudly enough for the whole room to hear, dropping crumbs on the floor that the pit-bull sniffed at and left alone. Siena was always too loud on the phone, one of the crass habits we discovered early on in our cohabitation. She also chewed with her mouth open, showing her cigarette-stained teeth, drank too much, and ignored other people when they were talking, either out of willfulness or an inability to focus.

Life with Siena quickly assumed the quotidian rhythms of a daily pain in one’s back—it became dull and manageable. Siena and Jill worked at their respective offices downtown and I worked from our place, often spending much of the workday on elaborate cooking projects that sometimes produced restaurant quality food and just as often had one or two glaring errors that ruined the entire dish. There was a milk-braised pork tenderloin in which the milk broke, resulting in a dry log of pork sitting in hunks of cottage cheese. Though there was also a sublime agnolotti stuffed with lamb and rosemary that Jill had thirds of.

When I actually tried to write my book, I never got far. I would get stuck on the same page every time, unable to make anything happen, and the only thing I could do that felt productive was to re-read an article I had written years before, a how-to guide for making Christmas cookies that had appeared on the blog of a cookware company. It didn’t have particularly many views online, nor had anyone I knew ever talked about it. I had barely even been paid for it, but something about it was just perfect. The way the sentences came together, so effortlessly, and the balance of irony and sentimentality as I described how to stir dough and dust the little kidney-shaped almond rounds with powdered sugar. Whatever it was, whenever I read that article, I knew what I sounded like.

During the day while I cooked, I sent Jill general internet dross—videos of Korean pop stars speaking in broken English, shark attacks caught on underwater cameras, long monologues by comic personalities in cars—that she took hours to respond to. I’m working, she always texted back, followed by a haha or another joke video. She mentioned Siena sometimes, mostly out of concern. She wanted to know what Siena was up to, to keep a mental note of her safety. It was in her nature to nurture others, to try to solve their problems. Jill took Siena’s shortcomings personally, while I was, for the most part, content to keep my distance, to merely notice when Siena often came home late, smelling of beer and cigarettes, a little wobbly, but happy.

It was on one of those occasions that Siena found me in the kitchen. I was alone, putting pinto beans into a bowl to soak for the next day, when she appeared at the counter beside me and asked what I was doing.

I’m soaking them overnight, I said. It will help them cook faster tomorrow.

Why not just boil them more tomorrow? she asked. Wouldn’t that do the same thing?

I looked up at her then, a little annoyed. I had never known why one had to soak beans overnight, and I was annoyed to be caught in the act of doing something fastidious and unnecessary, as if I had nothing better to do. I noticed her staring at the bowl, her gaze fixed on brown, freckled beans magnified and shimmering under the water. When she was really paying attention, she had a way of looking that was bug-eyed, even a little manic.

So what do you do all day? she said, turning her stare to me now.

I added a handful of salt to the bowl and then went to put the box away in the cupboard. I said that I was a writer.

What have you written?

I said that I had barely written anything serious in years, but that I had once written a screenplay that almost sold to a Hollywood studio. It was technically true, though it felt a little like lying. A near success had occurred long ago, but I perhaps embellished just how close I had come. Still, I supposed I preferred this version of events, false as it was, to the one in which I had never come close.

Siena was staring at me with those manic eyes while I occupied myself with storing the beans above the microwave. Failure isn’t the opposite of success, she said. It’s a part of it.

There were times when you could hear the script, little self-help missives that were programmed by some technical writer, who was likely cautioned against anything that might make the product undesirable to the user. This phrase in particular was one of the ones that they had used in the commercial for Roommates, and its repetition now was enough to break any spell I was under that made her appear fully human. And yet, she seemed to struggle with the phrase in that moment, turning her neck and pursing her lips, I wondered about her inner life. There was something melancholy in her repetition of it, as if she were hearing its hollowness herself for the first time.

I wanted to ask her what that meant by it, whether she was serious or if she was just saying what she had been programmed to say. But the beans had spilled onto the counter, and when I turned back to Siena, she was gone.

Of all the things about her that irked me, I said to Jill that night as we lay in bed, this was her most memorable quality, her propensity to leave a room unceremoniously, as if someone had flipped a switch and all that remained of her were the muddy footprints from her boots. I had started to wonder if Jill meant to order one with so many defects, that perhaps our Roommate was an intentionally imperfect model, a kind of fixer-upper that was supposed to give the user a sense of purpose. Or maybe this was their way of encouraging you to upgrade.

Have you thought about it? I said. We could find one that didn’t always have cigarette stains on their teeth.

I don’t mind her teeth, said Jill.

Or maybe one that doesn’t drink quite so much, I said.

Jill sighed. You don’t have to upgrade to appreciate it, she said. Not everything is broken just because you don’t like it.

What does that mean? I said.

You only know how to see fault in things, she said. It’s like nothing can ever be good enough for you.

That’s not true, I said. I don’t see any fault in you.

Yes you do, she said. You think I’m unable to communicate. You say it all the time. You tell me that I need to work on expressing myself.

It was true, sort of. I knew the occasion she was referring to, an afternoon that summer when we had walked to our favorite brewery along the river. Though what I had actually said that day was that she talked to other people differently from the way she talked to me. Publicly, I said, she was almost aggressively agreeable, overly interested in the banal events in the lives of her family and coworkers, what to make for dinner, when to go for a run—and privately, she despaired and went quiet. That I brought up this bifurcation in her personality drew her further into herself that day, and as we sat there at the brewery, not speaking to each other, her looking at her phone while I stared at the river, we were at an impasse: her thinking that she could not speak for fear of criticism, and me suddenly too self-aware to speak every time I opened my mouth. The result was silence.

At least I’m talking about it, I said. That’s what people have to do to solve their problems. They have to talk them through, not pretend they don’t exist and expect them to be magically solved.

I don’t pretend they don’t exist, she said. I just don’t think that the way you talk about it, going over and over and over the same details, does any good.

That’s probably true, I said. But what do you propose instead?

I don’t know, she said.

It was pointless to argue. Jill would never upgrade. She was stubborn like that. At least to me she was.

◆

One night, Jill suggested we all eat dinner in the backyard together. It would be good for us to sit around a table, the two of us and Siena, and spend time getting to know one another. I didn’t want to invite Siena to eat with us, but I felt bad about what I had said to Jill the other night, and I also wanted to show her that I was trying to make things better, so I said that it was a good idea. I could stand to be more open-minded anyway. I would even try out a new recipe I had been wanting to cook.

It was a warm evening, the perennials shining dark green under the string lights that hung over the patio, and the garden was bursting with vegetables to be harvested. I had plucked tomatoes for salad, prepared a beef Wellington, and brought out three bottles of wine for us all to drink. Before we sat down to eat, I stood and admired the way it all looked in the late summer evening. The garden, which was guarded by a fence from the rat-infested alley we lived on, was as safe, nourishing, even idyllic as one could have in our Midwestern city. I could see the life I had always envisioned for us—a writer and his wife, a dog, a Subaru, a bursting garden in their urban backyard. And if I looked at it just right, I didn’t even see Siena.

As we ate the beef Wellington, Siena said that she had been told by her boss that day that her job as a tumor mailer would never be more than temporary work. There was no promotion coming.

I’m fed up with that place, she said. They don’t reward talent.

Jill and I nodded sympathetically. It’s a shame, I said.

Fuck them, said Jill.

Siena sighed. It’s frustrating, she said, pouring herself more wine. But you know what? This might be for the best, because I had an idea today. Have you ever seen how much people pay for eggs?

Do they pay a lot? I said. I usually buy the factory-farmed ones.

Not those eggs, said Siena. I mean—and here she pointed to her stomach—my eggs.

Jill and I looked at each other. Had either of us considered the possibility of Roommate procreation? Surely the technology was not that advanced. Maybe we had missed that bit of innovation—it was so hard to keep up—but I didn’t think so. As it turned out, Siena had already scheduled a consultation at a fertility clinic. She was set on this plan. She would make enough from the sale, she said, to cover her expenses for a whole year. And after that, she could figure out what she wanted to do for work.

We shouldn’t have encouraged it, but as Jill opened another bottle of wine and Siena drank heartily from her second glass, finishing in time to be served again, I could see Jill softening around the mouth the way she did when she saw something sad and pitiable. I had seen it just that week when showing her a video of a rabbit caught in the jaws of a wolf on my phone, and I caught her eye now and shook my head ever so slightly. But she looked past me, ignoring this nonverbal plea.

If you need a ride to the clinic, Jill said, I can take you.

Siena laughed a bit and put her hand on Jill’s arm. That’s kind, she said, but no thank you.

The clinic was close to her office, she explained. She would go after work that week. Anyway, she wanted to do this alone. She needed to learn to rely on herself. As a child, she had been too close to a mother whose behavior alternated between domination and neglect, she said. It had drawn her too close to others at times. It would do her some good to learn to be independent.

I agreed, and raised my glass to meet Siena’s in the air. To independence, I said.

I thought that was a rather neat way to tie up a subject that had a potential to unravel. As I poked at the Wellington—the pastry was less than crispy, but the filet inside was a perfect medium rare—I changed the subject, and we began to talk about the nature of work itself. I had drunk perhaps a little too much wine and began to wax on about my own career struggles, my inability so far to produce work that I believed in.

Why do you think you’ve been stagnant? said Siena.

I thought for a moment, then said that the way I saw it, I simply had an artist’s temperament and would never be satisfied with myself or my surroundings.

Siena nodded, though I could see Jill quickly growing disinterested. She thought that I was a whiner when it came to matters of work, that I had unrealistic expectations of success, and that I thought I endured hardship, when really I spent long periods of the day procrastinating instead of doing my actually-very-short and fairly-well-paid writing assignments.

But Siena liked griping too. She picked up where I had left off, sighing that she didn’t know what she would do if she didn’t have to work, but that she knew it would be better than what she did now. She hated her job, the endless boxing and unboxing of tumors, labeling and relabeling, the smoke of dry ice in her eyes, the plastic gloves sticking to the skin on her sweat-puckered hands after a long day. The worst part, though, she said, was that it kept her from self-actualizing.

All I’ve ever wanted, said Siena, is to be myself.

I felt a twinge of tenderness then for Siena. It wasn’t as if she had to work as a tumor mailer. She could have been anything, really. That was kind of the beauty of her situation: she was infinitely adaptable, or at least more than we were. Where Jill and I were stuck in our own selves, only marginally capable of the change that Siena described, she could be reprogrammed. We could have released her from work if we wanted, just called the company and told them to give her something else to do. Yet this had never occurred to us.

There was a pause then. Siena’s lips were still open, seemingly on the verge of saying something else, but she had stopped talking. Her face slackened, and she dropped her wine glass onto the grass with a soft thud as she slumped over in her chair.

Darn, said Jill. I’ve heard of this happening. It’s some kind of bug.

Does she need a reboot? I said.

Probably, said Jill, standing up. She put her hand on Siena’s shoulder, looking for a button on the back of her neck.

But suddenly Siena was back, her face tightening, smiling as we stood over her with our hands outstretched, ready to help. As we watched her regain awareness of her surroundings, she turned to me and said that she had read some of my old writing on the internet, including the article about Christmas cookies.

It was good, she said. So honest.

I knew it was a glitch, a programmed thing deployed at the wrong time by some algorithmic misfire, but still, it stirred something in me, and a warm tingling feeling spread through my chest, settling in the back of my neck. The fact that she was a Roommate didn’t take anything from it. In fact, it felt nice, almost entirely objective, better than hearing a compliment from another person, which always felt motivated in some way or another. How had she known?

◆

Later that night in bed, I reached out for Jill’s leg and ran my finger up and down between her hip and her knee. She responded by inching closer to me with her back, pressing her ass into me. We were both tipsy from all the wine, and she giggled a little as I put my nose into the crook of her neck and blew warm air onto her skin. Then she put her hand on the back of my head, pulling me closer, and I kissed her shoulder until she turned around to face me, drawing our lips together.

I knew you would like her, Jill said, pulling away to catch her breath. It was hot that night, and we didn’t have air conditioning. Her cheeks were flushed and I could feel sweat sticking the backs of my legs to the sheets.

What do you mean by that? I said.

Nothing, she said. Just that you’re in a good mood.

Of course I’m in a good mood, I said. I’m in bed with you after a lovely meal.

Don’t get me wrong, she said. I think it’s sweet that you’re coming on to me, but don’t pretend that it’s not because someone gave you an ego boost.

I looked at her, trying to figure out if she was kidding or not, but her mouth stayed still. I hadn’t suspected that Jill would be the one to get jealous of the Roommate. After all, it had been her idea, hadn’t it?

You think that’s what’s turning me on? I said. Being praised by a Roommate?

Is it? she said.

I rolled onto my back and sighed.

I don’t really know what you want from me, I said. You say you want me to have a friend, but now you’re upset that I’m enjoying her company. If I don’t like her, what is the point?

She turned over too, poking her leg out from under the comforter and separating her skin from mine.

I just wanted you to try something new, she said. Not blush because someone gives you a compliment.

I tried to reassure her that while, yes, that warm feeling had spread through my chest when Siena complimented me, it wasn’t anything other than an appreciation that I had broken through to someone. That was all. I said, if it was sex I wanted, I could have just gone out and gotten a Fuccmate. They were cheap, way easier than it would be with a Roommate. Men did it all the time. She could watch if she wanted—

Okay, she said, turning over to face the wall, laughing now. I get it, I get it. Forget it.

What? I said.

Nothing, she said. I’ve had a lot to drink. Just ignore whatever I say.

I lay back down and sighed.

Do we need to talk about this? I said.

No, she said, burying her head under a pillow and groaning. Why do you always have to talk about everything?

Sometimes I looked at my Jill and wondered who she was. Up close, she was so unfamiliar, her lips and her skin, which was faintly freckled, the tiny blond hairs that sprouted on her arms—they were all disassembled, unrecognizable as the person I had married. In moments like this, she stopped being my wife and became like a stranger to me, one who I had an unusually thorough knowledge of, and toward whom I felt no warmth. Instead, I saw her objectively, a set of features and behaviors tied to a body. And in these moments, I was mystified as to why I had chosen her. Or her me.

◆

Jill went to visit her parents in Connecticut that week. She needed space, she said. While she was gone, I called a friend from college whom I hadn’t seen in years. We met at a restaurant that sold only pizza, toast, and beer, served by waiters wearing tight blue pants. It was called Yeasted Blunt, and my friend arrived late, wearing a leather jacket and a pair of pristinely white Jordan high-tops. My friend was a nice guy; he worked as a video producer for a marketing company and seemed to buy a lot of men’s products that I saw ads for on the train. These things seemed to make him content, and he spoke effusively about his work, his loft apartment, and showed me pictures on his phone of the purebred bulldog in Kentucky he was thinking of buying. I nodded at the photos and said I was happy for him. But it was exhausting, bearing witness to all the work that went into his appearing happy to the world, and after two beers, I grew tired of trying to match his enthusiasm. I asked him how he was so happy, given the state of things, that he too was getting older, marching toward death, never having done anything of real importance, just as I was. No offense.

None taken, he said. You’re totally right. I probably have no right to be this happy. It’s just…

He blushed then, turning away for a second, then he leaned in close across the table.

Can I tell you something? he said.

Sure, I said.

The truth is that I’ve met someone.

It turned out that he had a Roommate too, an investment banker named Seth. He had thought he just wanted a gym partner, and was still online dating when Seth moved into his loft downtown. But relating his dating misadventures to Seth while they took turns spotting each other on the squat rack had blossomed into something more. Spurred on by watching Seth’s broad back struggling under the weight of the barbell threaded neatly between his neck and shoulder muscles, he had taken a chance and been rewarded. Now they were planning a trip to Oaxaca together for the winter.

It’s strange to say, he said. But it’s wonderful being with a Roommate. Have you thought about getting one?

I told him that we had a Roommate already, and he lit up at this.

Jonathan, that’s amazing, he said. There’s no shame in it, you know. Many people are doing it now, getting a Roommate and then falling in love. It’s becoming common.

I told him that I didn’t think I was falling in love with Siena, that Siena was Jill’s idea, that that wasn’t the point of our having a Roommate. But he was looking hungrily at our waiter, who was arriving at the next table with a new round of bread and beer, and seemed not to hear me.

I’m really happy for you, he said, turning back to me. It takes real courage.

Drinking with this friend reminded me of how far I was from the person I had once been, how lonely I was now. Our lives had diverged significantly since the last time I had seen him, and where we had once enjoyed each other’s company, now there seemed a kind of un-closeable gap between my current self and the former self who had taken him into my confidence. When we had paid the bill, he invited us all—me, Jill, and Siena—to join him and Seth in Oaxaca that winter. I said that I would ask Jill what she thought. He clapped me on the back, smiling and giddy. We hugged, and as he was getting into the car that would take him back downtown to his loft, I thought it unlikely that I would ever see this friend again.

◆

It was still light out when I got home that evening. Siena was sitting on the couch, beer in hand, looking at the ceiling. On the coffee table there was a little square of tinfoil that had been folded and opened slightly to reveal one small paper tab, perforated at the edges.

I just took some acid, she said.

I looked at the single square left in the tinfoil, a dose perhaps meant for someone else. I wondered if her evening had been as disappointing as mine.

Do you want some? she said.

No thanks, I said, sitting down in the armchair across from her. I didn’t know why I always said no to things. Maybe that was why it was so hard to connect with people—I laughed at anything anyone did to change themselves. I thought about Jill, away in Connecticut, needing to be gone from here. Then I looked at Siena, who was quiet, still looking at the ceiling as if I were not there. She rarely had time to hang out on the couch alone, and seeing her there by herself, eyes on the ceiling, unmoored me somehow. It was like when you walk into a room to find that it is not how you left it.

On second thought, I said. Maybe I will do some acid.

It’s better to not second guess yourself when it comes to acid, she said. Go with your gut.

My gut is usually wrong, I said, taking the tab from the foil envelope and placing it on my tongue.

As the little paper went down my throat, I felt the chill of having done something irreversible, followed by a new feeling—the lightness of having done something irreversible. Once the little tab was inside of me, I was able to accept the inevitability of what would happen without any anxiety, to step boldly toward this new reality, whatever it was. I stared at the ceiling along with Siena, noticing for the first time the little spirals that were shaped into the plaster, how they were interconnected, each one attached to all through the others in a dizzying network of surface grooves.

It was then that our pit bull trotted into the room and crawled up onto my lap, and soon Siena and I were really talking. It was pretty weak acid, but I liked the feeling of clarity that emerged after an hour or so. There was a sense of the pieces finally coming together, like the spirals patterned in the ceiling, that anything could happen and I would be able to fit it into the narrative of my life and the world around me, to understand that it was all part of something larger.

Siena started telling a story about her mother, how when she was a child, she would find her sitting in the kitchen some mornings, mouth stained red with merlot, criticizing the clothes Siena wore to school. Childhood had been terrible for her, she said, and she hated her mother as a result. But as she had gotten older, she had started to see her mother in herself, in her drinking, in her self-involvement and self-destruction. She said she finally understood that her mother had been angrier than even she knew, and she had had good reason to despair. Siena said she had a lot of empathy for her mother now.

In turn, I told her about the time I had a crush on a professor in graduate school, and had written a story exactly like her novel and submitted it for her class. I hadn’t thought about this period in my life for a long time, and when I told this to Siena, it too fit into the greater narrative of my life. It spoke to the urgency with which I wanted to be taken seriously, as if this need were even a sexual desire, as throbbing within me as much as the need to penetrate another, to take over their body. This act was indeed penetrative, and it had provoked the exact intention I had wanted, but hadn’t then realized that I wanted—that by proving myself able to steal the professor’s voice, I could prove my superiority and win the unspoken battle I didn’t even know I was waging. In the end, I wrote the professor a letter asking her to meet me for a drink and slipped it under her office door. The next day I was summoned by the department chair and was asked to leave the class.

Siena thought this story hilarious, laughed with her full body until she had tired herself out.

You’re such a little arrogant man, she said. Like, that’s truly psycho behavior.

I laughed too. I know, I said. I can’t really believe I did that.

Maybe it was the acid, which gave everything clarity, or the weight of the pit bull, whose warmth softened everything. Or maybe it was that she was listening to me, but I was finding it easy to let go of things. Siena’s presence was soothing to me.

It’s hard to make friends, I said.

Oh my god, that’s so true, she said. She pulled her knees to her chest and rocked backward, laughing. It was true—it was funny how true it was. I started laughing too—uncontrollable, stuck in the throat, tearing-up laughter. Then Siena stopped laughing, lay down on the couch, and rolled her head back so she was staring at the ceiling, her eyes not moving.

Shit, I said.

I stood up to look for her reboot button. The pit bull trotted off and I approached the couch, where Siena lay with her neck stretched over the back. The skin on the back of her neck was so smooth, and when I got close, I could smell her shampoo, a cheap fruity one from the supermarket. But as I reached out toward her, Siena turned to me.

What are you doing? she said.

Oh, I said. I thought…

I didn’t remove my hand. I stayed standing over her, looking down into her eyes. She looked back, holding my gaze, until finally she said, I’m not viable.

Oh, I said.

Like for donating my eggs, she said, though I knew what she had meant. I hadn’t responded because I was thinking about the word viable, how it came from life, and how in common parlance it was usually deployed to mean profitable, but in this case was being employed in its literal meaning. She was not able to germinate. Not viable.

Then she sat up and smelled her armpit.

I smell like a hospital, she said. I need a shower.

She went first to her room, then appeared in a towel and went to the bathroom. It was dark by then. We had forgotten to turn on the lights by the couch, and when she turned on the bathroom light, it was the only thing illuminated in the house. I could see a yellow slice of the bathroom from where I was sitting, surrounded completely by a frame of darkness, and I heard the water turn on with a clank, then a steady stream, and then the sound of the shower curtain opening and closing.

After a few minutes, the water shut off and the curtain slid back. The door was still open, and from where I was sitting on the couch, I saw Siena get out of the shower, take a towel, and raise her arm to dry. Her body was pale and smooth, her pink hair dark wet as she bent over to let it fall straight. She stood there in the lighted frame of the bathroom door, never once looking at me, while I watched her, the outline of her breasts, small pointed nipples, a faint trace of a hump at her belly, and an unkempt patch of dark hair between her legs. She looked at herself in the mirror, pressing the water out of her hair, while I sat there in the dark on the couch, watching.

I went to our bedroom and called Jill. She answered, groggy. I had forgotten that she was an hour ahead. It was late where she was.

What’s going on? she said.

I wanted to tell her everything that I now understood from this evening, the realizations I had had, how it was all connected—my narrative and hers, and how we could be better for each other. I understood that this was what she had wanted all along, for us to break free from the pattern that we were in, for me to become something other than what I was, a friendless man, needing to be seen all the time. And it had worked. I was being something else now. I was surprising myself. And if I could still surprise myself, I could still surprise her.

What are you talking about? she said.

I’m on acid, I said.

She sighed. That’s wonderful, Jonathan. Can I go back to sleep now?

Yes, of course, I said. Go back to sleep. We’ll discuss this in the morning.

Good night, Jonathan.

Hey Jilly Bean?

What?

Things are all going to change.

Okay then, she said.

I hung up and thought about the consequences of what I was about to do. I told myself that in the long run it was for the better. Jill could come around, be a party to my transformation—that was the whole point. It had been her that wanted me to take a risk, to change my life, to reconnect with the world by reconnecting with myself. I thought about it a while, going over it in my head while I lay on top of our bed, turning the pieces over and over and over. I would go out there and just see where things led. That was the only thing to do. There was no way to control the direction of my life. I had to simply be present, to allow it to take me where it wanted, to trust myself.

But when I opened the door to our room, the lights were off, and Siena was already in her bedroom, on the phone again. Someone must have called while I was psyching myself up. I tiptoed down the hall to her door and stood there, still, listening to her conversation, the words of which I couldn’t make out. She was giggling with whoever she was talking to, a kind of muffled laugh that sounded conspiratorial, like maybe she was telling this person about me, how I had nearly come on to her, and how she had let me watch her through the crack in the bathroom door. I felt a pang of embarrassment, the feeling of losing all resolve and thinking myself foolish for having had it in the first place. Though it quickly floated past me and was replaced with a serene calm and a memory of a time when Jill and I had once spoken to each other on the phone just as she was talking now, as if we were the only two people in the world. Siena was happy, her voice lowered to a rich and quiet mutter, suggesting that even though she and this person were far away from each other, they were in on something, a new life that only existed in the space between her voice and the one coming from somewhere else.

◆

Siena had to work the next day, and Jill came back from her parents’ the day after that. We went on a long walk that weekend through the city, just the two of us. It had rained the night before, and the ground was still shimmering wet, a smattering of leaves soaking in the pools left in the various potholes and clogged sewers. Walking around our Midwestern city, it was as if everything had changed in an instant, the trees suddenly colorful, the first step toward disintegrating. Summer was always followed inevitably by fall, yet it was always a surprise when a season changed into another, sometimes with only a gust of wind to announce its transformation. Since the acid had worn off, I had been disappointed with everything. What a letdown it all was once you had seen yourself and your life in harmony with all things. How foolish to have ever thought them harmonious in the first place.

We stopped for a drink at our brewery by the river and ordered beers and a plate of French fries. It was chilly, and I drank the first beer quickly to warm myself, then ordered another which I sipped slowly while watching the water inch further south, carrying with it the leaves and sticks and other natural detritus toward the outline of downtown.

That was when I noticed Jill texting someone, her greasy and salty fingers tapping on the screen glass, absorbed by the conversation. She smirked, shook her head.

Who’s that? I said.

She didn’t hear me, so I asked again.

How I knew that it was Siena on the other end of the phone: I didn’t know. But I knew. I looked around at the other people in the brewery while Jill texted quickly, her face inches from the screen. Then I looked at my wife and wondered what had been the moment that had unmoored Siena, from what angle she had seen my Jill and found her viable. I tried to see it too, knew that I had once seen it. Or perhaps I hadn’t.

What’s she saying? I said.

Nothing much, said Jill.

We sat there for a while until the air cooled a little and the sun dropped in the sky. I had worn only a thin sweater, and when the cold of the glass in my hand and the wooden bench on my legs started to seep into me, I pulled my arms around myself, tugging at my elbows.

Should we keep walking? said Jill.

We walked the twenty blocks or so back home, stopping again for dinner at a Georgian restaurant near our place. The restaurant was always empty. We had walked by it many times and had never gone inside, but there was a first time for everything, after which anything could become as normal as if you’d been doing it your entire life. It wasn’t so bad, watching your plans fail, to be replaced by arbitrary things that are the result of no decision you’ve ever made, and which fold themselves into the world around you until you cannot distinguish between you and the accident that has occurred. It could even be kind of comforting.

That’s why, I’ve reasoned, I haven’t changed in all these years, that it is a comfort to remain exactly the same, wondering if things should be different. I still do the same work, writing the cholesterol that clogs the arteries of the internet. I live in the same place. I think about moving sometimes—a change of scenery could make a real difference, to live in a loft with white walls and an entire wall of books—like a real artist. But there’s so much space in this apartment, I’d be kidding myself if I said I was serious about leaving.

Now I go to that empty Georgian restaurant a lot, even though it’s probably going to go out of business soon. I like the lagman and the manty. I wonder if I should get another Roommate. Or another pit bull. Sometimes I think about Jill and Siena. I still get their mail.