Ten years ago, she graduated from college and tried looking at the world from an adult’s perspective. The world was out of focus. For a while there, her parents thought she was still in school, so they would stubbornly wake her up for nonexistent morning classes. Her dad was a professional freeloader, and he seemed to be doing just dandy. Her mom worked at the post office, so she knew all the ins and outs of the postal system and could talk about it for hours—if anybody cared to listen, that is. In the winter, she started working at some charity foundation, but they turned out to not be very charitable when it came to paying their employees, so it’d be a bit of a stretch to call that a real job. Vadyk Salmonella, a big-time musician, brought her to the studio; they’d been dating for about a month, but Vadyk simply wouldn’t acknowledge her in public, especially after concerts, despite everything they’d done together. He’d been through the wringer—nearly deaf, pumped full of shitty booze, his vocal cords absolutely shot, like a real rock star. He’d walk right by and blatantly ignore her. She’d break down crying. Apparently he liked this whole act, and apparently she did too. You can enjoy just about anything, even hanging out with complete assholes.
She came in after him, sat down by the door, took out her cell, her anger boiling over, and started texting confidently, snubbing everyone by not even saying hello. Vadyk tossed his leather backpack at her feet and made a big show of forgetting she was there. Fair hair, a white jacket that she’d tossed on the floor just like Vadyk’s backpack, fingers burned pink by the wind, moles on her neck, a school uniform sweater exposing her sharp collarbone, a mistrustful gaze, tense movements, a childish expression on her face, filthy shoes, and pretty knees.
“That your daughter?” I said to Vadyk, nodding instead of giving him a proper greeting.
“Fucking what? Of course not,” he replied in a surly tone; then our radio show got under way.
Vadyk talked about rock ’n’ roll, the rebel’s cause, the aesthetics of freedom, protest songs, and expanding your consciousness for exactly twenty minutes, not counting the breaks for music. She was sitting in the corner, just shaking her head discontentedly. She had a plastic bracelet on her right wrist—basically, she looked like she’d borrowed her mom’s clothes for a night on the town. After the show, Vadyk and I stood out in the hallway, contemplating the glow beyond the windows. He produced some cognac; I passed—the idea of swigging from the same bottle as him was downright scary. You never know what you could pick up. “Poor girl,” I thought.
“How old is she?” I asked Vadyk.
“How the hell should I know? Ya think I checked her driver’s license?”
“Well, is she good?”
“Nah, man, she doesn’t know a thing and she doesn’t want to learn.”
“Let me know when you split up. I’ll teach ’er a thing or two.”
“You betcha,” Vadyk said with a chuckle.
I noticed how quickly he’d started aging. Burst capillaries, inflamed gums, and black teeth. “The fish rots from the head,” I thought.
But what could I actually teach her? What did I know? How to shirk my responsibilities, play it safe, talk about things I had no interest in, and socialize with people who didn’t really matter. What could he teach her? Nothing good. We’d make meaningless small talk, trying to keep up some front and acting like a bunch of cocky jerks, never really believing anyone and never really forgiving anyone. Vadyk tried killing himself a few months later, got all tangled up in the noose, and hung there for a while until some of his friends came by and brought him back down to earth.
Nine years ago, she showed up at a gallery opening with Hustav, patiently following him in and shoving her way through a thick mass of friends and casual acquaintances. A new camera dangled from Hustav’s neck; he was snapping some pictures of old girlfriends—about two dozen of the notches on his bedpost were in attendance. We hugged for quite a while and asked for a detailed update on each other’s lives, although we already knew everything there was to know—the world is small, life is short, and people tend to gossip. She’d changed her hairstyle recently, and the new one looked good on her. Her face had suddenly turned out to be much more interesting. Her features became more distinct whenever she looked away, as if a sheet of ice had cracked and water was flowing freely under her skin. She was wearing a leather jacket, bright orange stockings, and tattered ballet slippers to top off her outlandish getup. “Maybe she just walks a lot,” I thought, glancing at her footwear. She intercepted my gaze and tensed up. She didn’t recognize me, obviously, made no effort at small talk, of course, yet agreed to have a cigarette with me outside.
“Are you going to date every single one of my friends?” I asked.
No response. She was probably trying to figure out whether or not she should take offense; she decided against it.
“You have some pretty good friends. They could teach you a thing or two about manners.”
“Huh, imagine that,” I thought. “Someone who slept with Vadyk Salmonella is giving me pointers on etiquette.”
“Don’t get so defensive,” I said.
“I’m not,” she answered, and headed back in to warm up.
Hustav got some job on the mayor’s PR team. Then he got fired a little while after that and sold his camera and his apartment, too. Life robs us of more than our illusions.
Eight years ago, she started going to night school. My professor friends griped that she didn’t know the first thing about finance—not that they had a very firm grasp of the discipline they were supposed to be teaching either. “Nobody knows anything,” they griped. “Nobody really knows what they’re talking about. We’re all faking it, pretending to know something, pretending to feel something; we live by illusions. But the problem is we have to pay good money to keep it going.”
We wound up at the same concert a couple times, and we crossed paths on the metro once—she was with a pack of Hasidic Jews. As far as I could gather, she was giving them a tour of the city. They looked like a big family that had bought an apartment downtown and were disappointed to learn that it was still infested with cockroaches. She had long hair again, which made her look more experienced and grown up. Nevertheless, she was still resorting to the same mistrustful and confrontational tone, as though she were trying to prove something to the adults around her, as though she were attempting to convince all the Hasidic Jews in the whole wide world that the transaction she was facilitating was necessary and appropriate.
Seven years ago, I changed stations. This was a big step for me; it took me a while to pull the trigger. The new station could have easily tanked a few months after it went on the air, but this was a real job. It was time to make a move. I wouldn’t even have considered something like that a few years back. But then one day, out of the blue, I started asking myself some tough questions—Do you really want to keep wasting away doing something you don’t enjoy? Do you really want to keep breaking your back for some boss? How much longer can you be dependent on someone else and change yourself to accommodate them? “C’mon,” I said to myself, “go for it. You’re not some twenty-year-old punk. You’re as old as Jesus was—it’s time to work miracles and raise lepers from their graves.”