Sydney Rende is pursuing her MFA in fiction at Syracuse University. She is working on a short story collection.
Duke had a tattoo of his dead mom on his upper thigh. I found it the first time I took his pants off. His mom was young and smiling politely at me, etched into the soft spot of his leg like fine art. I could tell that her hair had been blonde. She was wearing a turtleneck and she was prettier than me.
“It’s an old picture.”
I wanted to say, no shit, but I didn’t want to hurt his feelings.
“Cancer,” he said. “The Quick Kind.”
Then he kissed me.
Duke was a sailor, a biker, a jet skier—the sort of man who spent a lot of time wearing short shorts in a squatting position. He kept his kayak leaned against the wall beside the refrigerator of his four hundred square foot studio. His bike hung by its front wheel on the opposite wall. He was training for the New York City Triathlon. When he ran, he strapped miniature bean bags to his running shoes, and his mom peeked out from under his tiny shorts, smiling. On weekends he’d bike along the Hudson until the concrete faded to forest, park the bike beside the river, dive in, and let the current drift him down. Then he’d swim back upstream, like a salmon, every once in a while ducking down for an underwater somersault. I wondered if he was trying to outrun the cancer in his bloodline. People did that. It didn’t matter to me. I made him my boyfriend anyway. He was the first guy I’d been with who didn’t act like he had something to teach me.
“What’s the word for when you learn things best by doing them?” he asked one morning as he strapped on a pair of rollerblades. He’d gotten them on sale at Modell’s and had decided that from now on, he would blade around the city. That’s what he called it—blading.
“Kinesthetic learning,” I said. I was smarter than him. Or at least I had a better vocabulary.
“I think that’s what I have,” he said, like it was a disease. “I have to feel it. I have to go through the motions, you know? Just watch. This time tomorrow, I’ll be blading backwards.”
I had been planning to leave New York before I met him. My lease was almost up and I’d been fired from my job as a hostess at a Midtown restaurant for being too unlikeable. I have a face that’s hard to look at. I’m not ugly, but something doesn’t sit right. It’s more of a feeling than a physical trait you could point to and say, “There, that’s it. If you just moved that over and erased that little thingy, you’d be normal.” I am often jealous of people whose noses are a ripple too long or whose gums are too gummy. For those people it’s a quick fix. My issue is vague—my face sometimes made people at the restaurant wince. “What’s wrong?” they’d say, staring. And I’d have to tell them nothing was wrong, that I just had a difficult face. Then for the rest of the conversation they’d look at me funny, like at any moment I might lean over and try to bite their foreheads.
Duke didn’t look at me like that. He didn’t look at me in any particular way, and I couldn’t tell if he liked me or if he just didn’t mind having me around in a take-it-or-leave-it sort of way. I hoped his enthusiasm would rub off on me. He was the most excited person I’d ever met. He could get worked up about almost anything—sunsets, time-travel, blood scabbing over on a wound (“Isn’t it crazy how the human body just heals, all on its own?” he’d say, tapping the scab with the pad of his finger). Whenever he got excited his eyes bulged and glowed extra-green. They were beautiful. But a little off. A little creepy. I liked staring into them.
Duke sat down on the floor and adjusted his feet in the rollerblades. As his shorts scrunched up around his crotch, his mom smiled at me. She had one of those faces you smiled back at without thinking. Her eyelashes were long and her cheeks were freckled. Her skin was actually hairy, given its placement in the ambiguous zone where Duke’s pubic hair turned to leg hair, but I imagined her as someone who’d never had wrinkles, whose freckles made her look like a girl, even in middle age.
“What’s so funny?” Duke asked, unwittingly. He stretched his legs straight and tried to touch his toes. I shook the smile off my face. Even if I had been laughing at him—his feet splayed outward in the rollerblades made him look like an awkward ballerina—he wouldn’t have caught on. He was incapable of embarrassment, missing whatever gene it was that kept people from doing their private stuff in public places. He blew snot-rockets onto the sidewalk, slurped water from his hydration pack at restaurants. He wore Velcro sneakers because he thought laces were hazardous.
“Nothing,” I said. I offered him my hand and he waved it away. He sprung to his feet and jerked back and forth on the rollerblades. Then he flung his arms wide, bent his knees, and steadied himself. He stood tall with his shoulders back and put his fists on his hips.
“Superman,” he said.
“Blade Boy,” I said.
He puffed his chest out even more, which really made him look like a cartoon.
“Dope.”
Duke worked for a bike tour company in Central Park. He led tourists around the park as they wobbled behind him on tandem bikes. He held their cameras. He tightened their helmets. He taught them when to switch gears, how to raise a hand for assistance versus how to raise a hand to signal a turn. He’d written himself a whole script and liked to practice on me whenever we were together.
“Okie dokie, folks! Let’s start by making sure everyone’s helmets are good and tight,” he’d say, his eyes wide, his voice an octave higher than usual. “You’ll notice two buckles on the straps, one on the left and one on the right. Make sure you hear both buckles click. Repeat after me: these helmets are so nice, we buckle them twice!”
Sometimes he said this in an Australian accent for no reason at all. And he had notes for each landmark—every tunnel where a dead body had been found, every bridge where something romantic had occurred. “You are standing in the exact spot where the Prep School Killer strangled four teenagers!” and, “If you look to the left, you’ll see Bow Bridge. Justin Bieber once said he wanted to propose there!”
“Where is the best place to propose?” someone always asked, eyebrows raised.
“I tell them the East Meadow, since it’s close to the public restrooms,” he’d explained to me, nodding in agreement with himself. Duke didn’t pretend to know anything about romance. I liked this most about him. He thought holding hands while walking only slowed you down, that anniversaries should be saved for massive international events, like the Olympics, or a 6.5 magnitude earthquake. A bouquet of flowers didn’t make sense, biologically.
“Why would you give someone a handful of dying plants and challenge them to keep them alive?” he asked me once. He genuinely wanted to know. His apartment was stuffed with green scraggly plants, potted in empty bean cans.
“Actually, for my birthday, buy me flowers. I bet I can keep those fuckers alive for weeks.”
I liked when he made these small references to our future together. I felt secure with him. I didn’t need gifts or public displays of affection. I had a boyfriend who could, in a pickle, throw me over one shoulder and his kayak over the other, jump into the water, and paddle us both to safety. When my lease was up, I decided to move into his apartment and see if he could change my life.
“I ran out of beans. Can you bring beans?” was all he said. So I brought beans and little else. He lived in one of those massive mirrored-glass buildings overlooking the Hudson, surrounded by car dealerships and indoor sports complexes. Everything oversized and glistening. Like Duke, the building exuded self-sufficiency. Solar panels lined the roof, along with some other futuristic contraption that Duke said was “harnessing wind like a windmill” but in a “less invasive way.” Trees were growing—real, rooted trees—in a glass-enclosed terrace he referred to as “The Atrium.” I liked the sparkly newness of it all, the way it felt like a separate ecosystem within the city. I never asked how he afforded it. The apartment itself was mostly empty, except for a mattress tucked in the corner of the room and all the adventure gear hanging from the walls. I didn’t view the emptiness as a money issue. I knew Duke had moved around a lot before we met, that he saw no use in furniture that required one to sit still. He had a hard time sitting still, which was especially evident now that we lived together in a building made almost entirely out of glass.
“After my mom died, I thought there was something wrong with me,” he told me one night as he arranged himself into a wall-sit against the floor-to-ceiling window. It was the first time he’d mentioned his mom since the night we met. I wondered if my moving in had unlocked some special chamber of his brain, one that held all his honest feelings.
“You know, like a hole?” He pointed to his chest. “Turns out it’s normal. I just needed salt water.”
He’d grown up in Iowa or Kansas, somewhere without salt water. The first time he saw the ocean, he said, he drank it.
“I knew I wasn’t supposed to,” he assured me. “But I needed to drink it in order to heal the hole. And look, it worked.” He pushed himself off the window and posed with his feet spread wide, as if I was supposed to know from looking at him that the ocean had patched his moth-eaten heart.
“Which ocean?” I asked.
He pointed to the window.
“You drank the Hudson River?”
“Coney Island,” he said. “I figure they all connect.” He slowly interlaced his fingers. I imagined him squatting on the Coney Island shoreline, surrounded by empty Big Gulp cups and broken beer bottles, cigarette butts and used napkins, oversized men wading into the water to piss.
In his own way, he was sort of magical.
“You should market that strategy,” I said.
“Yeah, baby. Maybe I will.”
Often my jokes whooshed right past him. He pulled out his phone and made a note, then showed it to me. It read: Ocean water. Add to smoothies?
He loved adding things to smoothies. Most recently, he’d gotten into these supplements called Alpha Brain, which came in a stainless-steel bottle and contained something called cat claw extract. He’d toss two in the blender with juice and a banana, or sometimes swallow them dry. They were supposed to “stimulate dormant brain cells,” he explained. He wanted every organ in his body to be functioning at full throttle. Nothing about him bothered me. I was starting to love him like a pet.
. . .
Sex, though, was weird. I could tell Duke had watched a lot of porn. Boys who studied porn never did anything right the first time around. They called themselves step-daddy, begged you to play dead. Duke once asked me to pretend his dick had “caught me by surprise.” I told him that was too rape-y a request. No girl would ever be excited by a request like that. He took my critiques in stride and was excited to learn new tricks. All I had to do was tell him what I wanted, and he’d do it. I could guide his hand in mine, arrange his limbs like I would a puppet’s. Eventually I’d cut the strings. He was a quick learner, after all. But after months of practice, there was one position I still couldn’t do.
“Get on top.”
“I can’t.”
We were fully naked under the sheet, and his mom’s face was smashed up against my thigh, sticky with sweat. He lifted his chest off mine and examined me as if he were looking for signs of injury. “Why not?”
I’m not going to sit on your mom’s face, I wanted to say. My bare ass would suffocate her sweet smile like some sort of blubbery alien force. I’d be killing her all over again. I pushed him off me gently.
“We have to talk about your mom,” I said.
“Baby, this is not the best time for me to be thinking about my mom.” He got out of bed and stood over me. His dick dangled between his legs, pink and soft and jiggly, like an appendage that had somehow fallen out of his body. His mom just sat there and smiled at it, proud.
“Do you want a Muscle Milk?”
I shook my head. He walked to the fridge and tossed a Muscle Milk to the bed anyway.
“Why do you have that tattoo?” I said.
He looked down at the tattoo and smiled. “It’s my mom.”
“It’s just—it’s so lifelike.”
“That’s the whole point. It’s like she’s real.”
“And that’s what you want?”
He looked agitated. He scratched his balls. “You don’t get it. I love my mom. Your mom is like, on a yacht somewhere.”
I had no idea what he was talking about. My mom lived in Delaware. She taught gifted and talented kids how to play the recorder. I had never even brought her up.
“My mom died of cancer,” he said. Then, more slowly, as if he were teaching me the word for the first time, “Cancer.”
I didn’t like his tone.
“What does cancer have to do with it?” I asked. “If she had died of something totally ridiculous, like, been hit by a tour bus or whatever, you still would have gotten that tattoo.”
He thought about this. Then he said, “There are no tour buses in Kansas.”
I wanted to poke a little hole in him, to squeeze out some molecular explanation for his behavior, but it was as if he were made of concrete. He raised his arms above his head and did a backbend. Then he grabbed his right wrist with his left hand and stretched his torso left. He did the same thing on the other side.
“Has anybody ever asked you about it?” I poked. “Nobody has ever told you that thing might look better on your shoulder?”
For the first time, he stared at me like I’d just leaned over and bitten his forehead. The green in his eyes whirled with tears.
“My mom isn’t a thing,” he said. “She’s a person."
“Was a person.”
Our eyes were locked in a kind of laser battle. I didn’t look away. I would sit there and make him stare down at my difficult face until he admitted that he hated me. His eyes glowed. I was sure he was going to explode. Then, out of nowhere, he got down on the floor and did twenty push-ups. I watched his balls skim the ground then pop back up in time with his breath.
“Ah,” he said, when he was finished. “I feel better.”
But later I heard him crying in the bathroom. It was more like a whimper, just loud enough to hear from the other side of the door. I listened as he turned on the shower and let the water run, trying, unsuccessfully, to muffle himself.
“Everything okay?” I knocked. I felt terrible. Like a hulking pubescent bully.
“All good.”
“What’s wrong?” I asked, in my sweetest voice. “You can tell me.” He took some deep breaths.
“It’s just...we’re not going to be able to stop it. You know what I mean? Not really. In the end, the earth is so much more powerful than we are.”
“Stop what?”
I thought his alpha pills might have been making him more emotional. Recently, he had gotten upset about a range of topics: GMOs (anti), euthanasia (pro), Vitamin D-blocking sunscreen (anti), dog collars (anti), GMOs again (pro).
He sniffled. “Climate change. It’s going to hit us like a tsunami. I mean, literally, a tsunami is coming. No matter how hard I try, I’ll never be as strong as a current. I’ll never have as much energy as a storm. The earth is a giant pulsing muscle. It’s like, magic.”
“Are you happy or sad?” I couldn’t tell.
“Don’t you see?” He was sobbing now. He blew his nose into something. “How I feel is irrelevant. We are irrelevant.”
I had never heard him say the word irrelevant before. I felt proud of him and ashamed of myself. The sound of his sobs suddenly made me feel helpless, unsafe—like we were the only two left on earth. After a few minutes we were both in tears, curled into ourselves on opposite sides of the bathroom door.
Eventually Duke came out, eyes bloodshot, the skin around them puffy and wet. He bent down and scooped me off the floor and cradled me in his arms, as if I were the one in need of comforting.
“I didn’t mean to scare you,” he said. “It’s just—the hole. I’m starting to feel it again.”
I tucked my face into his neck. “Should we go to Coney Island?”
I wanted to watch him drink the ocean. I wanted to see the murky scum dribble down his chin as it healed him.
He thought about it. “I think this is a different kind of hole,” he said. “It feels so vast this time. Like a black hole.”
“Or a sinkhole.”
“Exactly, baby.”
He carried me to the bed and laid me down. I felt like a corpse, but in a sexy way. I kissed him. He slipped my shirt off, then his own. I unbuttoned my pants and pushed them down to my feet. He went for his.
“Hold on,” I said, stopping him. I held his face in my hands. If his mom got involved, I’d lose everything. “Can we just make this about me?”
He paused. Something flickered in his eyes, like a glitch. Then he shrugged, scooched himself down, down, down.
. . .
In the morning, I woke to Duke doing burpees on the carpet. He burst upward, his feet sprung from the floor, his arms stretched high above him.
“I have an idea. Do you want to hear it?”
“Sure, baby,” I yawned.
He smiled at me knowingly, like the idea was already underway, working its charm through his hollowing insides.
“I’m going to win the triathlon.”
His eyes were beaming. He ducked under the bed in search of something. “It’s the ultimate physical feat. The trick is to let Mother Earth guide you. Use her power to thrust you forward. You see, I’ve been doing it all wrong! You have to swim with the current, not against it. You have to seek her power, not fight it! I’ve been so far removed from her, up here in my ivory tower.”
He yanked a large hiking backpack out from under the bed.
“Where are you going with that?”
“The woods,” he said. “I need to harness the earth’s energy, you know? Refuel. That’s the only way I’ll be able to win.” He bounced up and down on his feet like he was holding an invisible jump rope. “Think of it as a rebirth.”
I watched his hands jitter as he spoke. The triathlon was only ten days away. Professional athletes would be competing. Olympians. Duke was durable and determined—more firefighter than Olympian. His mom peeked out at me from beneath his shorts. I wondered how many rebirths he would need in order to find the right replacement.
“But what am I supposed to do?” I said.
“I’ll need someone to drive me out there.” He transitioned to jumping jacks. “And water the plants.”
We hadn’t spent a night apart in months. I was surprised at how willing he seemed, how unbothered he was by the idea of being alone.
I nodded in agreement. Duke shot his fist into the air. “Dope.”
He bladed to REI for supplies. I felt strange and out of place, alone in the apartment. I had gotten used to navigating around his sharp forceful movements, and now I was suddenly unsure of what to do with my hands. I tried to make the bed, but the fitted sheet was actually a flat sheet, and the flat sheet was the wrong size. I hadn’t noticed before. It was the bed of someone who’d grown up without a mother, who never had anyone to teach him how to make it. I tried folding the clothes on the floor, but all of his clothes were made of spandex or nylon—sweat-proof!—and slipped right out of a fold. Eventually I sat down and held my knees to my chest, listening for the sound of the door.
Duke came home carrying two giant shopping bags filled with brand-new camping gear. I sprung from the floor and reached my arms around his neck and interlaced my fingers. I hung from him like a baby chimpanzee, and he bent his knees to keep from toppling over.
“Let me come with you,” I said. I loved him and I didn’t know what would happen to me when he left.
“With me?”
“Sure. I can help. I can build a fire.”
“You can’t build a fire.” He dropped his bags and peeled me off of him. “You can barely ride a bike. Besides, I only have one sleeping bag.”
“I’ll buy one.”
“No,” he said, more forceful than I was prepared for. I sat down on the bed, curled my body around a pillow.
“I’m sorry,” he said. He put his hand on his chest as if to signify that the hole was to blame for his outburst. “It only works if I go alone.”
. . .
Duke insisted on renting a Jeep Wrangler to drive north. The next morning, he tossed his backpack on the backseat and hopped into the passenger side.
“This way we can breathe the air,” he said, waving his arms through the empty space where the car door should have been.
“Do you have enough food?” I asked.
He pulled a butterfly knife from his pocket and fanned it out in front of his face. “I brought some beans,” he said. “And this bad boy is for fileting fish.”
There was traffic on the Westside Highway. Exhaust from the cement truck in front of us plumed in our faces. Duke unwrapped the bandana from around his neck, then reached over and tied it around my nose and mouth.
“You can keep that,” he said. “I have another.”
I suddenly wanted to cry. My bottom lip puffed out and I was grateful that Duke couldn’t see the lower half of my face. “And you know how to pitch a tent?”
I thought he was going to roll his eyes. Instead he leaned over and kissed my cheek. About an hour north of the city, the wind picked up. It blew through the car’s empty door frames and flipped the bandana up and into my eyes. I forced it back down. On the radio, a man was saying that heavy winds were to be expected throughout the night.
“This is a bad idea,” I said.
“Baby, I lived on a sailboat for three months,” Duke said. News to me. “I know wind. This isn’t wind.”
We drove in silence for about another hour. Duke kept his eyes on the road. I wondered what he was thinking about, or whether he was thinking at all. Was this the hole, taking over, draining him of all his magnificent energy? I wanted to reach over and shake him, but I kept both hands on the wheel, worried he might tumble out of the car with only a nudge. We passed a few exits for camping grounds and a handful of rest stops. The air began to feel thinner and cooler. It smelled like pine. We drove and drove until we heard the sound of rushing water.
“Here’s good,” Duke said.
I stopped the car in the middle of the road. There was nobody around, no signs nearby. Duke hopped out, hoisted his backpack onto his shoulder, and walked around to my side. He was calmer than I’d ever seen him. He wasn’t bouncing on his toes. His hands weren’t fluttering at his sides. Even his eyes focused steadily on the ground. He was still—stoic, almost—and I was scared.
“Okay, I’m off.” He reached for my hands and held them in his. He smiled.
Tears pricked the backs of my eyes. “Should I come pick you up here? In a few days?”
Duke leaned into the car and kissed the top of my head. “Don’t worry about it. I know what I’m doing.”
He turned and walked behind the car and into the woods. I watched him in the rearview mirror. A few steps in, he knelt down and touched the ground with his hands. He stayed that way for about a minute, feeling the dirt. Then he stood up, looked around, and walked out of sight.
. . .
When I got back to the apartment, I put on a pair of Duke’s running shorts and one of his slippery nylon tank tops. They smelled like sweat. I breathed them in. I got down on the floor and did one push-up. Then another, and another. The push-ups weren’t making me feel any stronger, just more tired. I did five total, then I lay down on the ground, face down, and tried not to cry. I listened for anything—a creak in the door, the click of the air conditioning. But I heard nothing at all. I watered the plants, popped two of Duke’s man pills, then got into bed and pulled the sheet over my head for the rest of the day.
The next morning, I woke up to an empty bed, an empty apartment. Sharp sunlight reflected off the mirrored building next door and beamed through the windows. I held my hands over my eyes. Without Duke forcing me up and out of bed, I was not motivated to move. I had sweat through the sheets overnight and my scalp was damp, which felt close enough to exercise. I stood up slowly, went to the bathroom, and sat on the toilet. Everything seemed to fall out of me at once. I blamed the pills. I grabbed a Muscle Milk from the refrigerator and got back into bed, cradling it like a baby. I slept through the day and night, waking up every few hours with a rumbling in my stomach. I’d crawl to the bathroom, drink another Muscle Milk, and get back into bed, feeling like I’d been carved out.
Finally, after an indeterminable amount of time, I woke up to the sound of Duke vomiting in the toilet. I knew what had happened almost immediately: he had eaten something poisonous—a berry, a mushroom, a dead squirrel—and had made himself sick. He’d hitched a ride back to the city to be sick in his own home. I still felt rotten, but I wanted to take care of him. I wanted to show him what I could do for him, why he needed me. I grabbed a Muscle Milk from the fridge and knocked on the bathroom door.
“Are you okay?” I was almost in tears. “I’m so happy you’re home.”
The vomiting got more violent.
“I can make you some broth.”
I opened the bathroom door to give him the drink.
The person hovering over the toilet was frail and thin and wearing a hospital gown that opened in the back, so I could see a spine and hip bones protruding above a very small, deflated ass. I could tell from the dimpled thighs that it was a woman. When she lifted her head out of the bowl, it was shiny and bald—almost reflective. She leaned over and flushed, then turned to face me.
“Sorry,” she said, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. “It’s the chemo. You need this?”
She pointed to the toilet. Her face was swollen and round. It looked like a balloon, her neck the measly string attaching it to her body. Because her face was so puffed up, I couldn’t determine her age, but I knew who she was. She wasn’t beautiful at all, but sickly and weak, barely human. Her eyes looked permanently wide without eyebrows or lashes to dull them. They were seafoam green, like Duke’s, and I could see in them the person she had been.
I tiptoed backwards and closed the door. I stood there for a moment with my knees bent in the ready position. There was more gagging, then the sound of the toilet flushing. I nudged the door open a crack and peered through.
She was looking right at me. She leaned against the toilet and gulped in air as if her words had dragged all her energy with them.
“Can you make tea?”
I blinked furiously. I clenched my entire face. When I unclenched, she was still there, staring. I opened the door a little wider.
“Pow!” I screamed. I waved my hands in her face. “Hoo-rah!”
She just sat there. I stood back and pointed at her, hoping to turn my finger into some kind of wand. “Be gone!”
She glanced around the bathroom, as if admiring its decor. I was out of ideas. I walked backwards to the kitchen to make tea.
We didn’t have any tea, so I poured the Muscle Milk into a mug and stuck it in the microwave for thirty seconds. I went back to the bathroom and handed it to her. I hovered over her, a little wobbly, but I didn’t want to lose the high ground.
“You’re hogging my toilet.”
“Duke’s toilet,” she said. She swished the hot milk around in her mouth. “When you think about it, technically this is my toilet. My apartment. After all, I’m the one paying for it.”
It had never occurred to me that her death was the source of Duke’s financial stability. I was suddenly annoyed with him for not sharing this information with me. Then I had another idea. I ran my hand under the sink faucet and sprinkled the water on top of her puffy head. I said, “You may now go with god.”
She put her hands on the toilet seat and hoisted herself up. Once she got to her feet, I saw how short she was: tiny, like a kid, but with all the fully formed features of an adult. I could have knocked her out in one punch. She reached out and touched the tips of my hair.
“Are you really going to kick a sick woman out of her own home?”
“Dead woman.”
She swayed a bit, then gagged on her own breath and vomited down her hospital gown. The smell of her was making me nauseous. I walked out of the bathroom and closed the door behind me, got back into bed and pulled the covers over my head.
. . .
When I woke the next morning, Duke’s mom was standing over the stove, boiling an egg.
“It’s weird,” she said, stirring the water. She looked more alive today, less gray. “You’d think the smell would bother me, but actually, they’re the only thing I can eat these days.”
I stared at her from beneath the sheet, just my eyes peeking out.
“Does the smell bother you?” she asked.
I didn’t answer her. My stomach rumbled, but I felt safe in bed and didn’t want to move. I had no idea what she might do. I watched her dip a bare hand into the boiling water and remove the egg. She didn’t wince. She lifted the egg to her dried-out lips and bit into it, shell and all. As she chewed I heard the shell crunch and grind between her teeth. A stream of warm yolk dripped down her chin. She didn’t look like a mom at all.
“I should do some spring cleaning.”
“I can do that myself,” I said, trying to sound professional, or at least capable. I was angry at her for so many reasons—for not teaching Duke how to make a bed, for breaking off a piece of him and swallowing it, for lurking above us all this time, dangling herself out of reach, just high enough for him to know something was missing.
She laughed and it sounded like a hiccup. A bit of shell got stuck in her throat and she coughed it up onto the floor.
“Are you going to pay the rent, too? You don’t have any money. You don’t have a job. You can’t even fold his clothes.” She walked over to the bed and sat down on its edge, felt the sheet with her hand. “What kind of bedding is this? Polyester? This will give me a rash.”
I didn’t think she had any right to be critical. She should have been grateful that I was even there in the first place. Morning sunlight bounced off her head and into my eyes. I yanked the sheet away from her and covered my face with it.
“You’re the one who took a chunk of him with you,” I said. “Now I have this stupid hole to deal with.”
For a while she didn’t say anything. I wondered briefly if she had died, sitting upright, head slumped over her neck. But then I felt her nails scratch my scalp.
“Do you want to hear the story I used to tell Duke when he was little?”
“Not really.”
She chewed on her egg. “I would tell him that when he was born, just like all other babies, the doctor snipped his umbilical cord with a pair of scissors. And I’d reach down and pinch his belly-button, like this.”
She pinched my stomach through the sheet and I squirmed.
“Part of the cord remained attached to him, and the other half stayed attached to me, and after a while both halves dried out, shriveled up, and fell off, because they couldn’t survive without one another. ‘This happens to all mommies and their babies,’ I’d say. Then I’d lean over like I had a secret.”
She leaned over so her lips were right next to my ear.
“My doctor made a mistake,” she whispered. “The scissors he used were dull, and they didn’t cut through the cord all the way. They left behind one thin strand, so thin he couldn’t even see it.”
She sat up, bit the egg.
“His eyes would glow. He’d say, ‘so we’re still connected?’ And I told him that no matter where he went, our souls would always be connected by the invisible cord. I’d point to his eyes and say, ‘Your soul is the thing that keeps you from disappearing. It floats just behind your eyes, like a little cloud.’”
She peeled the sheets off my head and pointed at my eyes. Really stared into them. I stared back at hers and saw the sea. I blinked.
“Duke is my son. I know him better than anyone else could,” she said. “He isn’t thinking about you. And he isn’t coming back here.”
I was burning beneath the sheets, sweating all over. Who did she think she was, plopping into my life, clouding it with her stink? She was a sneaky sort of evil, the kind who slit your throat while pretending to comb your hair. I was not afraid of her.
“And what?” I said. “You’re breaking up with me for him? That makes sense. All of this is perfectly logical and sound.”
“You should start thinking about where you’ll go.”
“Right,” I said. “I can’t wait to tell Duke about this. I can’t wait to see the look on his face when I tell him his dead mom tried to throw me out on the street. He’s going to hate you. He’s going to laser off that stupid tattoo.”
She stuffed the last bits of egg into her mouth, then patted me once, twice on the head. Her throat gurgled. She stood up, walked to the bathroom, and closed the door behind her. I knew exactly what to do. I threw the covers off and ran to the stove, grabbed the pot of steaming egg water. I would open the door and dump the hot water on her head as she hovered over the toilet bowl. Probably, she would begin to melt. Then I’d lift her stick legs into the air and push her face-first down the toilet. Once she was fully smushed inside the bowl, fetus-like, I’d flush her down, down, down. Good riddance.
I closed my eyes and burst into the bathroom, feeling a little like a superhero. I lifted the pot over my head and screamed as loud as I could, which wasn’t very loud since I hadn’t eaten in days. But when I opened my eyes, she was gone. The water in the toilet rippled.
. . .
Duke didn’t come home the next day, or the next. After four days, his plants began to wither and dry out. I took this as a sign that something terrible had happened to him and decided to go looking for him.
I bladed to Columbus Circle. When I got there, a few guys that looked like Duke were standing around in bike shorts and sunglasses. A group of tourists straddled their bikes, waiting for someone to guide them. I approached the man who looked most in charge.
“Excuse me, I’m looking for Duke,” I said. “Is he working today?”
“Duke, Duke, Duke,” he said, like he was trying to imagine his face. “I’m pretty sure he doesn’t work here anymore.”
“What do you mean? Did he quit?”
“About a week ago, I think.”
“Did he say where he was going?”
“I didn’t know him too well.” He adjusted his sunglasses. “I think he said he was headed west.”
“West? West where?”
“No idea,” the man said. He shrugged, as if his coworkers disappeared like this all the time, just came and went with whatever direction the wind was headed. “Maybe Buffalo?”
“I’m his girlfriend,” I said. I hated this man. “He never said anything about going to Buffalo.”
“Oh shit,” he said. He hopped onto a bike and adjusted the gears. “Well, if he comes back, tell him to get his ass back here. We need that enthusiasm.” Then he turned to the tour group and said in a much louder, more excited tone, “All right, all right! Who’s ready to explore the glorious pit of the Big Apple?”
I was disappointed in myself. I had been entrusted to look after a motherless child and lost him. A smarter person wouldn’t have put so much faith in Duke. A smarter person would have known he was delusional. I went home and did all the things you’re supposed to do when you’re looking for a missing person. I called Duke’s phone, which was also dead or missing.
Then I called the police and explained the situation.
“Did he say when he was coming back?” the woman on the other end of the phone asked.
“No,” I said. “He doesn’t really do that kind of thing.”
“So as far as you know, he’s either on a camping trip, or in Buffalo?”
“I have no idea where he is,” I said. “He could be anywhere.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “But I can’t categorize your boyfriend as a missing person just because he left you.”
“He hasn’t left me,” I said. “He just left.”
“Okay, ma’am. Have a good rest of your day.”
I began to come undone. I spent the next few days pacing around the apartment. I couldn’t eat and I had to concentrate very hard on breathing. A constant ache in my chest kept me up at night. Whenever I heard the toilet running, I ran to it and knelt beside it. I stuck my face in the bowl and begged it to tell me where Duke had gone, as if it were some kind of oracle. I knew I was going insane. I felt like I’d been punched with holes, and all the scraps of me had been picked up by the wind and scattered to meaningless places.
By the morning of the triathlon, it was clear to me that Duke wasn’t coming back. His bike still hung on the kitchen wall, unprepared. I bladed north along the river to the starting line anyway, a little apathetically. Somewhere in the dark dry hole of my heart, I knew he wouldn’t be there. I leaned over the railing and stared out at the rubber-capped heads along the river. It was impossible to tell who was an Olympian and who a regular person just trying to accomplish one thing. And it was impossible to tell if any of them was Duke. I watched them dive into the water and swim south. I bladed alongside them, pushing through the crowds and looking for signs of my boyfriend. I watched as the swimmers scurried out of the water over to the transition area, where, almost magically, they became bikers. Some of them didn’t even change out of their swim clothes. Some bikes had pedals with shoes already attached, so the bikers only had to slip their wet feet into the shoes and start pedaling. The one thing they all did was put on a helmet. I whispered, “These helmets are so nice, we buckle them twice!” And as if I’d just cast a spell, Duke seemed to appear, bent over a bike in tiny spandex shorts and a matching tank top, tinkering with the chain. But when he stood up straight I could see that his neck was too narrow. And he didn’t have a tattoo.
Later that day I read in the news that a Brazilian man had won the race. I didn’t care who he was. I did wonder, briefly, if Duke was disappointed in himself, wherever he was, for not trying harder. I wondered if he missed me. I hoped that he did. For awhile after that, I fantasized about Duke’s return: he’d burst through the door in tears, his skin torn and scabbing over, his face dark with dirt and sweat. He’d scoop me off the bed and cradle me in his arms.
“I’m so sorry,” he’d say. “I love you and I’ll never leave you again.” And I’d stare straight through his crazy eyes, into his soul, and know that he meant it.
. . .
A couple years later, after I’d pulled myself together and moved out of Duke’s apartment, bought a MetroCard, landed another job as a hostess at a West Village restaurant and eventually quit because I hated it, hated contorting my face to greet strangers, I flew to LA for a job interview at a casting agency in need of an assistant. I liked the idea of assigning faces to things: deciding which cheeks looked best with certain soap brands, which set of shoulders suited a Subaru commercial. I thought I would be good at it, and it was a good enough reason to leave New York. I got a hotel room in Santa Monica by the pier where they’d filmed over one hundred romantic comedies. It was one of the hotel concierge’s main talking points.
“If you want more fun facts, you should do the bus tour,” he said.
I told him thank you, but I was only there for one day and one night. I told him about the job interview, that I was nervous because I had never been to LA before. I had no idea how people behaved on this side of the country.
“Like normal,” he said. He thought about it. “A little flaky. Probably from all the sun exposure.”
At the interview, they asked me questions like, “How do you answer a phone?” and, “Which movie star would you buy this eucalyptus perfume from?” They nodded at my answers and jotted down notes.
“Thank you,” they said, when it was over. “You’ll hear from us in a few weeks. Or maybe not at all, depending.”
They all looked like they spent too much time in the sun. I left feeling okay, not great. I wasn’t sure if LA was a dependable place to start over. When I got back to the hotel, I had the rest of the day to kill, so I walked to the corner and hopped on the tour bus. I went to the top deck and sat in the back row. The people up there looked bored, like somebody was forcing them to sit on the bus. The sun pounded my face and I squinted to keep from going blind.
After a few minutes a guide popped up from the stairs near the front. He had a microphone attached to the collar of his tank top and he was wearing a pair of sunglasses that wrapped around his head like goggles. There were some tattoos on his arms that I couldn’t make out. He looked very excited and tan.
“Okie dokie, folks! Who’s ready to reach for the stars?”
His tone was high-pitched and rehearsed. My stomach twisted.
“I’m kidding, you can’t touch the stars,” he said, laughing at himself. One person in front of me sighed loudly. “They don’t like when you get too close. It’s a touchy subject.” He used air quotes when he said touchy subject.
“If you look in the seat pocket in front of you, you’ll see a pair of binoculars. You’ll be able to see every pimple with those bad boys.” He laughed and laughed, like he was the funniest person he’d ever heard. I grabbed the binoculars from the seat pocket in front of me, held them to my face, and stared at him through the lens. The tattoo on his shoulder was a bicycle, and down the opposite arm was the phrase, Live Free or Die Trying. I moved down his body towards his shorts. They were khaki, mid-length. I tried to see through them, which didn’t work. I moved up to his face and looked at every feature. The magnifier made his teeth look like giant frosty ice cubes. The pores on his cheeks were sprouting small hairs. A bead of sweat dripped from his hairline down the side of his face. And another one on the other side. He lifted his sunglasses to his forehead and I focused on his eyes. They stared right at me. They were green, and a little dead inside.
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