Take me on a journey. Make me feel something. Surprise me. Make me change. Okay. Okay.
A dead cat sits near a trash can in an alley in The Mission. Step away. Scream if you’re that kind of person. Stop. Wonder: did it eat poison? Did it in some strange and unexpected manner get electrocuted?
Backtrack.
Same alley, walking from point A to point B, Frida, sixteen towns in fifteen years. Retail worker, serial bad girlfriend, three green stars tattooed on her wrist that tell you she wanted to be someone who had tattoos but couldn’t fully commit to something grand and meaningful, e.g., an old-timey ship on her upper back, going nowhere or, rather, going wherever she goes.
Tell me time and place.
June 2019. Frida works at a bookstore on Valencia where two women come every Saturday to ask her things like, “We don’t want book club books, Reese Witherspoon shit, give us something better, Frida, save us,” and she always does. Sabrina Orah Mark. “Oh, what she does with a paragraph, the beautiful economy! How she tells it like it is!” the women say. Mieko Kawakami, “Oh my GOD. So precise and simple. So much there about being a goddamned woman, Frida, what’s next?”
So maybe it wasn’t odd for them, after all the Saturday conversations, to ask her if she wanted to help with their daughter, Kyle. “She’s thirteen, and she doesn’t really need someone, but we don’t want to leave her alone all day, and what’s the alternative? She hates all the classes and camps. She’s so cynical.”
“Thirteen and cynical,” the other mom said. “Imagine.”
“Well, I was thirteen and drinking peppermint Schnapps from the bottle on ski lifts while giving grown-men ski instructors hand jobs for cash,” the other mom said.
Frida, behind the barrier of the counter, watched as a customer, a man, pulled books out and slid them back into the history shelf, war after war, not looking at the books but making eye contact with Frida the whole time. His chin was sharp in a way that made her think of Ichabod Crane, but he was attractive enough. Still, she couldn’t imagine fucking him, an actual 3-dimensional man. All her recent interactions with men had been online, and it had soured her more than she wanted to admit to real life and real people.
Then first mom said, “We get it, you did things, you are very extremely interesting. Frida gets it. Right, Frida?”
Frida looked away from bookshelf man, and when she looked back, he was gone.
Second mom joke punched first mom on the shoulder, “Fuck off, I am interesting,” but she was laughing and then asked, “What do you think? Will you take the job? We will pay you better than this,” she said. Her bangles clanked on her forearm, and she gestured out around the room where the books climbed above eye level with all their castigating spines.
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Give me backstory. Let me hold this up next to something old to see why it matters.
Frida had decided early on that she would not really do relationships, monogamy, and she would not have children. It hadn’t worked for her mother, for whom the motherhood part of her identity was always afterthought. Exhibit A, by the time Frida was 11, her mother had turned their garage into a shelter, which was generous and nice, but also meant that any given morning going to their one bathroom could mean an encounter with some man who’d crashed on the garage floor and to whom the back door was always open. Or Exhibit B: her mom kept maimed animals in crates in their mudroom, feeding them with droppers meant for baby medicine. Frida could remember walking into the mudroom at 5 AM, unable to sleep, and there was the mother opossum her mom was rehabilitating in a dog crate with all the old blankets that had once been Frida’s, her tail an obscenity, consuming her own sickly and apparently never-coming-back-from-it opossum baby.
Ah, Frida thought, life.
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Did she take the job anyway? Tell me. Yes, she said yes.
The moms got her the following: a cloth wallet full of cash, a key card, their Uber account on her phone, their Netflix and Hulu passwords, a key to the back door, the garage door opener. And then, for several days, Frida and Kyle did things that were inconsequential, really, but set the stage.
On a Monday morning, they went to Ocean Beach where the only person in sight was a man dressed like Mad fucking Max of the sand dunes. There was the noise of other people, male voices somewhere in the dunes, but Frida never saw anyone else.
Even though it was cold, Kyle lounged on the sand and took pictures of a lurking V of pelicans and all their ghastly hovering. Kyle, Frida noticed, seemed to be someone who lounged without thinking of people watching her and critiquing her lounging. Kyle had long dyed silver hair, played a green electric guitar, carried one and sometimes two vintage Russian cameras around her neck (“the Fed 3 is the best,” Kyle told her), and ate multiple packages of dried seaweed every day so her teeth were often flecked with green (“I don’t give a shit about petty concerns with appearance”).
Frida had done an experiment for the last few months where she eliminated mirrors from her house by covering them with photos of very old people. The idea was, instead of being bombarded by images of the young and the beautiful or to think of the ways she didn’t feel enough of either, instead of that, to look right at the face of people who had lived through so many seemingly impassable things and were still going, who no longer had the luxury of façade, at least not in the same way.
Sometimes, during this experiment phase and at night, when she wasn’t corresponding with strangers, with men, online while intermittently staring out the window at the street below or making the zillionth bowl of pasta with butter like she was a toddler, she had embarrassingly basic philosophical thoughts, like, “What if getting through life and not stalling it or postponing it or pretending it wasn’t happening was actually the goal?” Or, in other words, what if getting old was the goal? Or, would actual blindness eliminate superficiality? Or, would she ever figure out how to love and be loved the way people in movies seemed to do so easily, that delicate drop-off with a soft landing, as if it wasn’t going to feel like two humans in giant robot suits, the clunk and crash of too-big limbs straight into a wall or off an unseen ledge? That kind of thing. Embarrassing. She fell asleep on these nights feeling childish and full of a shame.
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Get me back to the story. Where is this going?
The next day, a Tuesday, Kyle and Frida ended up at a sports bar on Lincoln that served empanadas and had games along the back wall. Through the open door to the kitchen, a man cut with a saw that looked more home improvement than cooking at a whole leg of an animal that hung from the ceiling.
Frida and Kyle each got their fortune from a fortune-telling machine by the bar where a plastic head told them things about their future. Frida’s said something about love being around the corner. The thing was, she did want to be loved, of course, who didn’t, but for the most part, she felt like she had fallen asleep in one of those breakout rooms where the theme was something 18th Century, and she knew she should really work at her escape, but she was really too inept to solve the series of puzzling mind games that would lead to her release, so she sat on the velvet fainting couch and waited, for what, she wasn’t sure.
Frida had the bartender turn two of her last twenties into ones, and she and Kyle played the basketball game endlessly, the one where the net kept moving a little farther away from you every thirty seconds while you tried frantically to make shot after shot, and she couldn’t decide if that was like life, things slipping a little more out of your grasp constantly, or if life was the opposite: things racing closer toward you in an imminent car crash kind of a way.
Regardless, Frida drank three margaritas before 4 PM and let Kyle have a little bit of each one. A man at the bar whose face she never saw paid for them, or so the server said each time he brought one to her and set it at the small table next to the basketball game. As a day, it was different.
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Everyone has sub-basements. Everyone has things they keep hidden: masturbating in the walk-in closet when everyone else is downstairs watching a movie, not paying for the toilet paper in the bottom of the Target cart, envying a friend’s success. What is that thing about Frida? Tell me that.
At night, in the room where she lived above the apartment that was ninety percent plants and one human woman, Frida looked for men online so she could talk to them about sex. If you met her, she was a little bit demure, or she was quietly matter of fact. What this means is she gave off no clear and obvious sex vibe in person, but then if you need sex to be vixen, maybe that says something about you. Online, Frida was different, and her best night was when five men in five different geographical locations, people she only knew from a handful of selfies and the occasional dick pic, would tell her how much and just how they wanted to fuck her or, mood depending, have her tell them how much and just how she wanted to fuck them.
It was easier than in-person dating, and it gave her the same satisfaction, the same feeling of being desired and then, thus, maybe, desiring. She also liked that these things ran their course, so on any given night, she might be scripting some gymnastic fucking with one man in Antigua while just small talking with a man in Seattle. At midnight or one AM, she could close her laptop and let the room go dark and again have the relief of being a person who peed with her feet up on a stool in her terrible old pajamas while wondering if the water stain on the bathroom ceiling looked more like a chicken or a parrot, which made her wonder why everything was a this or that, a comparison or dichotomy, how on these nights, for example, she didn’t know and then had to wonder if she was Frida or Frida, online or in person. It didn’t matter. Who was to say that one was any less real than the other?
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In a story of consequence, you’re riding in a car with people, and you think you’re going to location X, you’re excited about it, you’re in a passenger seat in the back on one of those long bench seats in an old car. You’re looking outside. The windows are down. The wind in the trees marks the movement of things, time passing. But then even though the ocean is coming and going like it always does, even though the troupes of pelicans are rising and falling like they always do, even though you’re expecting more of this kind of movement, its steadiness and the resulting pleasant lulling hum, the person next to you opens the door, and in an instant, you’re rolling down the sand and rough grass that make the roadside. There are voices in the dunes, male voice, shouting maybe, you can’t tell. The roll from the car hurts, but it’s something and not at all what you thought it would be, and the voices, though possibly sinister, make you want to walk toward them. Tell me that story. Okay.
The rest of the week went like this: a few hours in Kyle’s apartment where her moms had left Post-its around the kitchen alerting them to food they should and should not consume. “Please don’t eat the figs,” but “there’s fresh yogurt in the refrigerator.” Kyle tore it off the counter and threw it in the recycling.
“They literally make their own yogurt,” Kyle said.
In the moms’ bedroom on Dearborn, Frida and Kyle ate all the yogurt from the glass container, their spoons clacking. They watched all the bad TV Kyle’s moms asked her not to watch: The Bachelorette, home makeovers of various kinds, The Kardashians while Kyle stood on the bed and did her best Khloe reenactment, “We all have to start somewhere,” she said, her voice one part scratchy, one part baby. She flipped her hair and went on, “And doing something is better than doing nothing at all.”
A truck went by too quickly outside with a bump and then a howling. She and Kyle ran out the front door and down the steps where an orange cat was flipping over itself, likely dying but not dead, so it looked like a robot cat whose internal system has shorted. Frida didn’t act quickly enough, but there was Kyle, taking off her jacket, wrapping up the cat who was so suddenly leaden. A woman in a robe printed with little tacos came out of her apartment screaming and took the cat bundle from Kyle and ran back into her apartment, and that was that.
When she walked the long way home later, around the block and down the alley, Frida saw the cat on the ground by a trash can outside the woman’s back steps, the jacket cloth having fallen away, and the cat rigid. The woman was nowhere to be seen.
That night, a Wednesday, one of the men Frida had been messaging for several weeks, someone who claimed to work in IT in Montreal, a man whose cock, if the one he’d sent her several photos and even a short video of, was in fact his, looked mottled and tilted but still generally okay, told her he wanted to be waiting in her apartment when she came home, hiding in a closet or the bathroom and surprise her, fuck her with force while she’s in a blindfold, hands bound and maybe he has a weapon, that’s his fantasy. Frida knew plenty of people were into this sort of thing, so no judgment, but she wasn’t really one of them.
“Maybe I already know where you live,” he typed and followed it with a winky face, even though they had both agreed previously that emojis were tiresome and over.
In the week leading up to that Wednesday, they had talked semi-jokingly maybe about pushing, kicking, biting, pressing, and throwing, and Frida had found that pleasing because she liked to think of her Internet body, her non-body, the one she used in these conversations, as more rag-doll than real, fling-able, push-able, able to be subject to much aggression. So, her first thought was: do it. Come for me. Here I am. And she even typed that: do it. But then she unsent it before he saw it and decided she didn’t like thinking of actual Montreal IT man in her closet, that imagining him with a knife was too much, and it made her want an actual date with an actual man in an actual bar on an actual Wednesday.
Or better yet, it made her want to be entirely alone lying in her childhood bedroom overhearing her mom talk about protesting a nearby trafficway slated to plunge through a sacred wetland. She got up from the computer and checked the closet, which was only a foot from her, and then checked the bathroom, which was only a few paces away. Her place was so small, and the bed was directly on the floor, so there was nowhere else to check. She logged out of all her social media, disconnected her laptop from Wi-Fi, and unplugged it from the wall, as if any of that did anything. She put into a bag all the clothes in her small closet that were rarely worn, the patent red clog boots she’d found at a thrift store, the pink jumpsuit she got at a tag sale in someone’s open garage, the many similar-looking vintage handbags with their clanking Bakelite handles. She took the bag of the things she thought she’d be but ultimately never was and set it on the curb in front of the building where she lived, then climbed back up the three floors of steps, plugged her laptop back in, reconnected to Wi-Fi, and looked for places to move. Spokane, Bellingham, Vancouver. Where would she go? Who would she be? Tell me.
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On Friday, Frida and Kyle set out without a plan. They walk. Kyle rants about the way humans don’t deserve dogs. Frida has no idea where this is coming from, but she lets her go. Things like, “The way people train dogs to do all these ridiculous tricks, the sitting, the staying, the jumping in lakes to retrieve sticks that never needed to be thrown there in the first place. I mean, why?” And then: “It’s shocking, really, how many people take these creatures who live in their houses and apartments, these beloved friends, supposedly, how they take them with them all the time and then choose to leave them helpless in cars or tied to an object on a street where anyone could do anything to them. We should release them. Really, we should.”
Kyle’s silver hair is in a top knot, the kind Frida has never been able to achieve, and she has one of her cameras on a rainbow strap around her neck. It is so clear to her that Kyle is going to have an entirely different kind of life than the one Frida has had so far.
You know how you can look at someone a lot of times, so many times you think you know the person? You think you’ve studied that face and could even draw it for some police sketch if it came to that, but then one day you’re looking at the person and you notice something new, a freckle near an eyebrow, and maybe it wasn’t there before but probably it was. Will you tell me that thing?
When Frida was seventeen, the fall of her senior year, her mom took off with one of the men who had been sleeping in their garage to drive in a van to a community in the desert where people lived in their cars.
“The house is yours,” Frida’s mom had said, but when Frida herself left it a few weeks later, back door wide open, when she set the animals in their mudroom crates free, when she took off in the car her mother had abandoned, she didn’t think about the way raccoons would ravage the house, the way squirrels would set up shop in her bedroom, the way mice would live and die in the kitchen, the way whatever had been hers would be stripped away by so many creatures in so little time: vines, water, wind, birds flying in and panicking themselves to death against a wall or a window. People are erasable. Or, better yet, people are what we think they are at any given moment. Or if you want to get annoying about it, people are random assemblages of matter, little ticking time bombs inching at every second toward disassembly, so catch them while you can, make of them what you will.
The first dog is easy. It’s white and over-groomed and tied to a small tree in a planter. It licks Frida’s whole arm when she goes up to it, and then when untied, hovers around her shins. Frida should but doesn’t think for a second that maybe the dog loves its person, maybe it doesn’t want to go anywhere, maybe it will be worse off when it roams away.
“Be free!” Kyle says. The dog looks around, not knowing. A newspaper on the bus bench next to them is open to an article whose headline reads, “Visitor finds decapitated sea lions on California beach, discovery not as sinister as she thought.”
There’s a second where Frida swears she sees the man, the bookstore man, the bar man, Montreal IT man, maybe, though the pictures he sent were always slightly blurry and distant. She can’t fully connect the dots, but still, there it is, the sharp angle of his jaw, familiar. He waves at her. Is there the flash of something in his hand? He smiles, and she pulls Kyle closer to a building, as if, if needed, the stucco might wrap around and subsume them.
The little white dog sniffs its own ass and then trots toward a trash can where it feuds with a couple of ravens before disappearing around a corner. The man, when she looks up, is gone. Maybe she’s started conjuring whole humans through sheer imagination, and that would be its own problem.
It’s strange how we live so close to catastrophe but still function as if that is not the case. The car that almost hits us, the almost fall down the stairs, the viral illness that could go left but instead goes right. The constant pretending that sustains us, as if want or love will save us from death.
The labradoodle they find and release next is easier. It knows immediately to take off running. Then there’s an Australian Shepherd (wants petting before galloping down Haight), a Doberman mix (barks at everyone it passes), some kind of mutt that jumps up on people at random and knocks over a man in a suit who starts shouting, “Fucking hound” over and over. Yes, some people yell at Frida and Kyle as they disconnect dogs from their leashes, “What the fuck are you doing?” but just as many people ignore them completely. They lose track of how many dogs.
When they get to Stowe Lake, dogs are everywhere. Everyone is either walking a dog or petting a dog or both, and it feels like an embarrassment of riches. So many people with furry things feeling happy or generous, smiling at each other, nodding, the audacity of it.
Give me a big moment, a cymbal crash after a steam-gathering crescendo. Okay, what about this?
When Kyle kneels down to pet a Chow tied to a post with no person expressing ownership nearby, Frida doesn’t stop her. There’s no reason to think this dog will be any different, any less friendly than all the other dogs. It’s wearing a goddamned bandana. Kyle leans down, and Frida holds her breath as if they are together reaching out some collective hand, and before either of them can exhale, the dog bites nearly straight through several of Kyle’s fingers. Blood is everywhere, but Kyle isn’t screaming or crying. For a second, Frida thinks: is this blood or is this blood, like is this blood to worry about, hospital blood, or is this lesser blood that can be assuaged with a child-box Band-Aid? Blood is blood, she can imagine someone saying, and maybe that person is her mom suddenly and strangely with an opossum head or maybe it’s Montreal man as closet hologram with hands like Edward Scissorhands, and maybe she invites him forward. The mind, Frida thinks, you can’t fucking lose it.
A man in a white shirt stops running, takes the white shirt off, and wraps it around Kyle’s hand. “I’m a doctor,” he says to them, and sure, great, that’s good to have around, Frida thinks, but does he have to be so show-offy about it?
“You should definitely get this looked at,” the doctor says.
“Cool,” Kyle says. Frida expects her to cry then, but she doesn’t. She just says, “Let’s go.” The white fabric around her hand is turning slowly red, and Frida is then pretty sure this is the kind of thing that will require special shots and an ER visit and probably stitches. But she follows Kyle anyway, running first and then walking, following Kyle’s back down so many streets and past so many shops and people, stopping eventually, out of breath, at a strip of stores set back: a gas station, a nail place, a comic book shop, and a massage parlor papered over with cartoony closeups of manicured hands on backs, all of it an island surrounded by a small circle of asphalt. It’s its own little microcosm.
Why, Frida wonders, given all the options for humanity, for growth, for community, is this the world we have imagined for ourselves? They sit down on the concrete in front of the nail place.
Their phones are dinging and then ringing, but they don’t answer. Did Kyle text her moms, Frida wonders? She isn’t sure how the moms know something is wrong, but they seem like people who just know things.
How is Frida to know this winter will be the winter she’ll meet someone, an actual person, fall as much as she’s able to in love, get pregnant. She’ll become someone who bakes bread and stays home with a baby, an actual fucking living breathing human baby! She’ll stand by a window and hold the baby while waiting for something. She will think about tracking down her own mother, about wandering some desert tent cities until she finds her so wild and rough that plants are growing from under her toenails. She’ll wonder about the Internet men, all of them. She’ll think about them as the chorus in some musical, tap dancing together until the play’s central character, a hit man, a hit woman maybe, comes in and pretend takes them out, one by one: “You’re gone, and you’re gone, and you’re gone.” Disappear. Poof.
The apartment where she stands with the baby will be warm from the radiators, and the baby will be asleep and purring practically on her shoulder. It will be a good moment, a warm one, but she’ll still be herself, that won’t have gone, and so the sidewalk or the clouds or someone hugging someone out the window will still make her sad for no reason, will still make her want to run. But she will have learned to sit it out, to touch and be touched and fuck and be fucked and sleep next to another body that might roll over against her, and she could stay.
For Kyle, all of it, her whole week with Frida, will be a party trick, something interesting to tell people at some food truck festival or in a dorm room in Vermont or around the table at some dinner where they drink medicinal-seeming cocktails and eat shrimp chips from a wire basket, as in, “Once I ran all the way across San Francisco with my strange babysitter nanny person with my hand dripping blood while my moms stalked me and eventually showed up with the police.”
A police car pulls into the parking lot, and the moms in a tiny blue Smart car are right behind.
Is everything okay? Is everything going to be okay? Tell me this is pivotal. Tell me it matters. Tell me Frida will be different and better, with a brain less full of noise and better suited to post-modernity, to the make believe of current real life.
But there is nothing wrong, nothing really. Kyle and Frida are happy. A pack of dogs, racing, howling, tongues lolling, synchronized in their mania, gleeful even if we can give that to them, rounds the corner. The moms are frantic, grabbing, leaning, and there’s a beauty to it, as if in this moment they can secure Kyle, affix her to them, stop time. The sun breaks through.