In the long shadow of a bad breakup with my dad, I was trying to become a more appealing and spontaneous person. It was difficult. For one thing, there was nobody to appeal to. In the desert, summer was winter. You had to stay inside because the weather was so extreme. The heat thinned out the air so much planes couldn’t fly. Often, by the time I lugged the groceries inside, the milk and eggs were already spoiled. In the Arizona summer, sunset was dawn. Only then did people stiff from central air lurch outside into the baked evening. Road crews worked at night, in the dark, setting up mazes of reflective cones; they laid sticky tar that never set.
One night in July, after barely a week of silence, my dad broke his promise to never speak to me again. I picked up the phone and it was him, whispering angrily, making me ask him for more. “Please, speak up,” I said. He had to set the record straight. Firstly, he said, my selfishness was off the charts. He was so predictable. The second step was: he would deny his predictability. “Who do you think you are? You think you have some kind of crystal ball up there? You’re arrogant,” he said. Next he was going to tell me to shut up, but I didn’t say so. I listened to him talk while I microwaved my dinner. Thirdly, he said, I had a real taste for melodrama, and for everyone’s sake I should learn to shut up about it.
“You make some valid points,” I admitted. I hung up and deleted his phone number. It was a matter of principle; it was a symbolic act; it made no difference to me. I lived in the middle of the desert. Who knew where he was. Appraising failing supermarkets, sucking some young girl’s thumb. He would call back next week. I could always feel it coming—the phone emitted some sinister vibration.
“It sounds like you’re doing really well, Liana,” my therapist told me the next morning. The 10:30 am call woke me.
“I really am,” I said. My saliva was cummy with sleep. My therapist was very insightful. I snacked on some Cheetos in bed while I tried to think of something new to say to her. Every day for the last two years I’d spent sitting naked at my dining room table curled around a spreadsheet. After two years in Tempe I still didn’t know anybody. I evolved algorithms all day out of my half-furnished apartment, a second story unit in a duplex at the butt end of a dead-end road.The doorbell and the sound of a sputtering truck would announce the groceries had been delivered. I only ever heard the truck after it was gone.
In this case, remembering and opening the door to the morning heat to retrieve the groceries, I found, instead of curdled milk, my downstairs neighbor, Moira-Mackenna. “Woah there,” she said, backing into a defensive stance. Moira-Mackenna was an enthusiastic and diminutive butch lesbian who liked to corner me when I took out the garbage. She’d talk to me about water rights while I stood there in my pajamas picking the dirt from under my fingernails, pretending to listen. Groundwater blah blah blah. Actually our relationship was very intimate for neighbors. I think she loved me. In return, I loved that she loved me.
“Blah blah,” Moira-Makenna was saying. “Liquid gold.” She wasn’t trying to be annoying; she just authentically was. I spent my whole life in that apartment tiptoeing around her aural sensitivities, but there was no relief. She was always home. I’d never even seen her leave the property. Moira-Mackenna didn’t go out; people came to her. They drove their cars right up to the front door at all hours, flashing their headlights into my bedroom, letting their engines run like a taximeter as if to brag that they weren’t staying long. I was reasonably certain that she was a prostitute who sold drugs. I had the prostitute thought first, and the drug dealer idea appeared later and stuck. I’ve always been the kind of person who is incapable of replacing one idea with another. Once a hypothesis forms in my mind it is permanently fixed; the best I seem capable of is to keep adding on top of it, like a college freshman in an art class, a bride at a dress fitting, corporate management.
“Whatever happened in the recycling bin wasn’t me,” I said. “Talk to 1L.” Lying to Moira-Mackenna was my only social life.
“First in time, first in right, my behind! Not a peep about subflow. Well, who cares as long as nobody minds wastewater filling up my aquifers. My aquifers. Your aquifers.” Behind her in the round bulb of the cul-de-sac two electric rental scooters lay mangled on the asphalt, erotically entangled. She waved a sheet of paper in my face. “No one will sign!”
The first time I heard her speak I thought she was mocking someone else. Her vowels made me want to kill myself. “Maybe you could try being a little less authentic,” I suggested.
She squinted at me like she was an AI trying to recognize the human features in a landscape photograph. I thought about kicking her in the shin, but thinking about it ruined it.
Instead I slammed the door in her face. I wasn’t angry; I just felt like doing it, so I did. It could be that simple. Anything could. I changed my clothes, got in my car and drove in a direction. Everything inside the car burned to the touch. It was high noon. At a red light I searched “improvisational hikes” on my phone and found reviews for a gentle five star climb—two point five miles, an hour and a half at most—with to-die-for views. It was in the opposite direction. I eased likeably into the turn lane. M-M would forgive me. We were neighbors. You don’t pretend with your neighbors. It’s easy the first time, but then you have to keep going until one of you moves away or dies of exhaustion.
The heat on the mountain was blistering and indiscriminate. The air hurt to breathe. All my water was gone within minutes. I followed the blue trail markers, distracting myself by imagining that the few other people on the path were members of abusive sex cults who fucked each other’s mothers. A leathery man holding a snooty Dalmatian on a red leash became a politician about to suffer a cult-adjacent blowjob scandal. The Dalmatian figured prominently in the scandal; the newspapers mentioned it by name.
I wished he could be real, this cultish Dalmatian owner; even worse, I knew that he was real. I can’t tell you how I knew; some things, you just can’t help but see coming. I followed the politician and his perverted dog at a distance, trying to eavesdrop on the guilty conversation he was having with his Bluetooth. The first thing he did was he shouted a name I didn’t understand. Second he ordered a salad, forcefully. When he turned off onto the yellow trail I did too.
I walked on and the trail turned rocky and steep. The sun gloated. My throat turned to dust. My skin burned to the color of a stop sign. I stumbled along the trail, whetting my tongue with visions of forceful salad. I lost the man and never found him again. I don’t know how long it took me to summit. I’m sure the view was terrific: red mountains and the cracked red earth and one ditzy cloud. I don’t remember any of it. When I got home I stretched out flat on a sheet and lay there for three weeks, glistening with lidocaine.
I was roasted. To pass those three weeks I stared at the computer screen and my phone screen and ate pain-killers and watched the shadows of the vertical blinds slowly rotate across the ceiling. The telemedicine service I consulted over videochat advised me not to participate in any activity that might cause skin to chafe. “I’m a dancer!” I wailed and wished, but she said that didn’t affect the prognosis. I hung up and regretted myself. The dead parts of me peeled away from the ruddy pulpous flesh like white glue. I didn’t see another human for almost a month.
In that sense, things went on as normal. Fresh groceries spoiled outside the front door. I had Cheetos for dinner and talked to no one.
I mean, it was life. Some things were bound to change. A monsoon blew its load. From my bed I thumped with my broom handle on the floor as a kind of apology to M-M, hello, hello, hello? No one replied. I’d been wrong about Dad calling. My therapist informed me via email that she had left for a month-long vacation on an Arctic cruise liner. I imagined her lounging on an iceberg in a bikini and a big sunhat. One of us deserved to be happy.
August happened in that way. Then one day it was September and I got out of bed. I hobbled around the apartment with defiant, meaningless purpose. On Tuesday I made frivolous online purchases I couldn’t afford. On Thursday I devised feverish plans for the empathetic and forgiving eulogy I imagined someday giving at my dad’s funeral.
“Firstly, he would have wanted to apologize to you all,” I said, gesturing to the sparse, imaginary crowd as I lounged in a cold bath, “if only he’d had the capacity for regret.” It was difficult to get the intonation right.
“The capacity for regret,” I opined to my lunch of fried eggs and black beans. A roach hopped onto the carpet.
“The capacity for regret,” I whispered lovingly, pressing its hard shell slowly under the heel of an old boot.
The bug shell cracked and the phone rang. I’d never doubted him.
No.
It was a New Jersey woman I knew from back home named Carolee Wen, saying she was in town for a conference on schematics. Carolee was a user interface designer with a childish voice and a compelling drug habit.
“Save me from these people,” she complained. “They’re so good at their jobs!” She had a senior position at a company she loved. It’s embarrassing to look up to anyone your own age, so I admired her in spite of myself.
The dying roach wiggled its left leg to get my attention. “The conference gets out late tonight. Meet me after for dinner,” Carolee commanded. Her voice pitched into a whine. “I need to get away from these respectable people or I’ll go to Walmart and buy a gun and shoot them.” I could hear her smoking through the phone. She didn’t want to hear about the sunburn. “Don’t be depressing, Liana,” she said. The restaurant at her hotel served humongous cocktails on a patio overlooking a terrific fountain. Afterwards we could take ecstasy in her room and go swimming in a pool shaped like an internal organ.
“What makes a fountain terrific?” I asked. She told me to meet her at eight and hung up. I left the roach on the carpet, waving goodbye.
With a tantalizing event on that evening’s dusky horizon, time slurred by in even slower motion. Lying on my back, I watched impatiently for the shadows of the vertical blinds to move across the ceiling and onto the far wall. I urged them forward like racehorses at the track. I looked up the weather forecast, forgot it, and looked it up again. A month’s worth of unspent energy pulsed impatiently on my newly tender surface. I tried on some old party pants unearthed from the back of my closet. It was not a flattering experience. That’s what you get for blistering in your own filth all summer, I thought. Carolee always looked very glamorous, like an anorexic at a rave. I wondered if I could sweat out some of the bloat before dinner.
The phone rang a second time.
“Hello?” said my dad. “What did you do with your sister’s old telephone?”
“Dad,” I said. “This is Liana. You called Liana.”
“You’re doing well,” he said, finally, ending a pause I hoped would go on not being sound forever.
“Ok,” I said. “Except for the burns.” I wanted to say something nice, too. I tried to tell him about Carolee.
“Who?”
“Her parents had the trailer?”
“Be quiet,” he said. “No, not you. Everyone’s arriving, my lovely, I’m coming—!”
Then it was over. Immediately I felt terrible. I hadn’t even tried to appeal. Next time I would try harder. For now I was alone, rudely burdened with an excess of resolve. It would violate the teledoctor’s rules to exercise. So what? Was she even a real doctor? Probably she was. I didn’t care. I covered my privates with thin cotton shorts. I lubed up my inner thighs with silicone cream.
The neighborhood was still and quiet that evening. A tepid wind set all my skin’s weak spots pulsing; otherwise, the world was even more still than before. Every absence assumed ominous proportions. No skateboarders and obvious drug addicts draped over the halfpipe in the dusty park, no dad jogging in tandem with his infant daughter, no nurse pushing the wheelchair of the cross-eyed guy who didn’t know not to stare at my tits as I jogged by. On this run, on that night, I saw only three men.
The first man appeared on the horizon as a small dark blot marking the sidewalk’s vanishing point. As I got closer the blot resolved into the shape of a man on a bicycle hurtling straight for me. Typical male entitlement, I thought to myself, preparing to move my body into the road. I wondered if he knew his presence on the empty street opened up a tiny parallel universe inside my chest where I was always getting what I deserved.
Instead he hopped off the sidewalk and swerved to the other side of the street. It was the most gentlemanly thing I’d ever seen. There’s no greater act of chivalry than a wide berth, I mused. I spun around to see what kind of man he was: blue plaid, dark hair, long brown neck, a smudge of tattoo. He could have been anyone. If the man on the bike was ordained my soulmate by Fate herself I still would never recognize him at the supermarket. I imagined he was an out-of-state transplant working the register at a used firearm shop. I imagined his greatest dream in life was to open his own custom hosiery boutique. I saw him, my soulmate, lovingly stocking next year’s thigh-high styles. I worried that he might have a foot fetish.
Love can surprise you, I thought, surprised at myself.
The second man drove a slick red sedan. It came up behind me as I ran past the empty park and slowed to an oily crawl. I looked straight ahead and concentrated on my stride, playing a tense game of pretend. He leaned over and shouted through the passenger window. “I’d like to turn you inside out,” he leered. I ran fast and he drove slow. From the corner of my eye I could see him leaning over the passenger seat to the window, flicking his gaze back and forth between my face and the road, trying to force eye contact. His skin was so pink it made his hair look yellow. He looked like a sweaty piece of candy. He just drove slowly, smiling. Rob, let’s say. A bail bondsman, a brutal drinker, an amateur ballroom dancer. Rob was killing time by hunting for wild trim while his wife was around the corner at the fertility clinic with her legs up in stirrups.
Harrumph. The car revved and stomped away. Up above the big sky was pale blue, but down on the small road it was dark. Palm leaves scraped against each other. Under a low-hanging tree a swarm of gnats pelted my face like rain. I wanted to be inside out, too.
I thought about turning around. I turned around and turned around. I kept on running.
At the end of the block the slick red car was idling by the yield sign. Its taillights reflected red, like the eyes of a wild animal. I dropped off the sidewalk and into the road, skirting the back of the sedan, giving it a wide berth. Sweaty eyes followed me in the rear-view mirror. The eyes made me feel very tired and very impatient. I could see just what kind of man he was. I ran up to the car and shouted through the driver’s open window.
“Congratulations on your baby!” I said with real enthusiasm.
The car sprang forward. Then it jerked, reversed, and smashed backwards into a curbside pile of wooden furniture. A car alarm screamed like it was being born. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do. “My best wishes to you and yours,” I yelled, then sprinted into the sunset. My heart was beating very fast. It didn’t feel so bad.
I crossed under the highway and, instead of turning back, I kept on going, away from home. I ran toward the hotel. I didn’t want to stop. I would run right to Carolee. I was going to run right through the lobby and cannonball into the pool.
I rounded the halfway point and kept on running. The sky was pastel and calming as a screensaver. The moon was huge. The air was body-temperature. I felt suspended, like I was floating in a sensory deprivation tank while high on ecstasy. For a few minutes I slowed my pace to a walk so I could look at the flowers, gaudy, withered things struggling to bloom in the heat. I thought of picking one. I thought of bringing it with me to the supermarket, to the hosiery store. This pair, my soulmate said as he knelt before me on the floor, holding open a delicately rolled sock, has reinforced toes.
The third man I saw that evening and I got caught together on an unlit traffic island in the middle of a volatile crosswalk. A pack of low cars roared by, their headlights dark, one after the other, gunning their engines, from out of nowhere blasting past us and away into the dark. The drag racing was incessant. Turning to me, tipping his hat, he reached past to press the pedestrian walk button. M-M defensive instincts kicked right in: I flinched, my hands went up; in the same moment he snatched my hand in his and squeezed. Oh.
I hadn’t touched another human in months. His hand was very dry and hard and warm, like a stone sitting in the sun. He wouldn’t look at me. His eyes were in love with the ground. Oh, oh. I couldn’t speak. I was sinking. The sticky black island beneath us was slowly bruising, going soft; my shoes were sticking. “Please help,” I cried, trying to extricate myself, “I have somewhere to be!” Did my assertive tone startle him? He lifted his head. An intimate moment congealed between us.
His face launched at mine. Clarence! I jerked backward. Free too quickly, I was tumbling backwards into the road. Sounds of gunning engines gathering speed collided with my imagination; in reality the road was quiet. I was lying on my back in the middle of the road. The sound had only been called to mind by the feeling of fresh skin tearing on cracked asphalt. The walk/don’t walk sign said: WALK. No one tells me what to do!
I limped away. Somewhere back there Clarence was probably twirling the ends of his mustache and peering with jealousy at my soulmate through the mannequin leg display in the sock shop window. Maybe Clarence owned the building and wasn’t above making business personal. Liana, he said, you can make all his problems go away. Just leave him and come away with me.
I limped and ran. The sound of an engine tore open the sky: the airplanes were taking off again! The sight of all those blinking LEDs upstaging the stars made me want to do something celebratory, like buy a sheet cake orgo shopping for groceries in bulk. In the winter of summer, time stretched out endlessly. Now we were through the worst of the heat; summer would be over soon. I was going to fit into an old pair of party pants and Carolee Wen was going to buy me a blue drink the color of a chlorinated pool shaped like a kidney. We would fill up on drinks, skip dinner, climb into that terrific fountain and splash each other with the cool water. No one would ask us to leave. How refreshing, our fellow diners would say. They would climb in too. All of us soaked and fully dressed. I ran fast and then faster. The long silhouette of the neighborhood streamed by. In the home stretch I could see the blue lights of the hotel ahead. The dry air stung my raw skin. It felt good. I took a deep breath, I looked up at the moon. I didn’t see the fourth man.