Dillon’s house was slumping into itself on the edge of a hill.
Welcome! someone shouted as I stood in the street and stared.
I couldn’t see who had shouted. I looked to see if maybe they were behind me.
Over here! the same voice said.
I looked at what I thought was over there, then I looked at another there, but I didn’t see anyone.
Hello?
Come on up, someone said, and I couldn’t quite tell if it was the same voice or a different one. A tree rustled and a man jumped out of it, in a kind-of-like-falling way, and he landed on a wooden balcony on the second floor of the house. He opened the door to the balcony and went in, then came out the other side, the door at the top of the stairs I was climbing.
Are you my flyer reader? he asked.
Yes, I said, regretting it with every part of myself. He had three or four dreadlocks tailing the back of his head but the rest of his hair was cut short, shoe-polish black. A silver ring hung on one nostril and his body was put together in a way that suggested it would be easy for him to move a large piece of furniture by himself.
Are you our traveler in need?
I guess?
You guess! Ha! You’re great. You’re a great one. All right, up you come — make haste, young rabbit! Make haste!
Looking back I realize I should have pretended to be at the wrong house, to be the wrong traveler, but for some reason, I made haste. In the living room a girl in a hemp dress and an Indian boy were talking about the sadness of a certain class of arachnids, the ones that carry poisons they don’t have the ability to use. The boy was short and narrow, seemed barely fifteen. He wore a long, tan tunic trimmed with yellow embroidery. He was nodding his head and smiling and speaking lowly, intently, as if he was an incarnation of some god or saint. There were others there — Sia, the Italian girl who spoke in a voice so tiny it seemed whispered from her belly button, and Gian, who never said a word, and Marco, who said too many, and the British woman, who always kept her backpack locked shut in the corner, even while she showered or made dinner or spoke to someone about how safe she felt in New Zealand, not like the other places she had been and all the awful things that had happened.
* * *
That night I looked at the only picture I had of my husband. In it he is a baby in his mother’s arms, a crumpled, fatty lump of who he eventually became, his little mouth hanging open, his mother looking distraught, caught between a hard place and another hard place — the rest of the family stands behind them, repetitive noses, eyes, skins, hairs, like wallpaper. And as I looked at the baby version of my husband, I decided not to call the present version of my husband anymore. I had called earlier that day from a pay phone near Dillon’s house, but when he picked up it was only to thank me for calling and to ask me to not call again.
I said it was tomorrow where I was and he said, yes, he knew it was tomorrow there.
I have to go, he said, but maybe you should call again. We should talk again. We should be trying to fix this, whatever this is. I feel strange that I haven’t heard from you, but I feel strange talking to you, too. Actually, don’t call anymore. I don’t think it’s a good idea.
Okay, I said.
It will be better this way, if we just don’t speak until you can tell me you’re coming home.
The calmness in his voice wasn’t at all convincing, and after I hung up the phone I imagined my husband told me he’d convinced the people in charge of the study to give him the information they’d gotten from me — the pictures of my brain, my answers, my data — and I imagined my husband saying this as if he was announcing a job promotion or that he had unexpectedly won a portion of a class-action lawsuit and as I walked back to Dillon’s house I wondered if maybe I hadn’t imagined my husband telling me this but maybe he’d really said it, really done it, and even though I understood why my husband might go to such anxious lengths to find out what, specifically, was wrong with me, this wasn’t a nice thing to hear or imagine hearing, and the little throbbing anger under everything my husband had said reminded me of how unfair feelings could be, of how our feelings had hunched up and backed away from us, left us looking at each other like strangers.
Hours later, falling asleep on a floor, I couldn’t quite parse a difference between what I’d imagined him saying and what he had actually said and I looked at the photograph of my husband again, the baby him, the he that he was long before we met, before I had even been born, and I remembered that morning when he told me I had lost my mind.
Okay, I said. You’re probably right. Do you want tea?
The things I disagreed with the most adamantly were often the most true, so I wanted to see what would happen if I just agreed. Maybe if I agreed he would have to be wrong and maybe this was the trick of being married to my husband: agreement.
I thought, for one nice moment, that I had discovered something, and then my husband asked if I was aware that I’d lost my mind or if it was something I was managing to overlook. I couldn’t tell if he was kidding or not. He was never much of a kidder.
You know, I think I’ll make some coffee instead of tea, I said. Would you like some?
It’s a problem I’ve always had — doing the domestic things I didn’t actually want to do, but it always seemed to me that if I didn’t do them then they would never get done.
I’m asking you a question, he said. And it’s an important question. And it’s important to me that you think about it, that you think about what I’m asking you.
Okay, I said. You’re right.
Agreement.
I knew how he took his coffee, black and lukewarm, so I poured him a cup and I dropped an ice cube in.
* * *
On Dillon’s floor I tried to fall asleep by thinking of ice cubes melting in hot coffee and I thought of wild animals chewing smaller wild animals and I remembered what that nurse had said about the tubes of blood, that they always went to a safe place, and I wondered if my husband could have actually, in real life, talked to the neuroscientists from the study and I knew I didn’t want my husband to know all the facts about my blood and brain because that would give him another unfair advantage. I told myself that the neuroscientists had not, of course, told him anything, that they were trustworthy, that they kept their sides of agreements, and I remembered the tall, black-haired lab technician with the large, soft hands who had spread the cold jelly over my scalp and slid all the electrodes in between my hair, gently, like I was his child, and I believed he would never do anything wrong to me, the cold jelly on his fingers, a warm hand on my shoulder. As I fell asleep that night on a floor it didn’t matter what I feared or imagined my husband knowing or saying he knew because there was so much in me that he could never know and he would never know enough about me, and I wasn’t really certain of that, but See if I care, I whispered, to nobody, to my husband, to my own self, see if my self cares, self, see if it cares.
14
Jaye was as temporary as me — a favor to Bill, the owner of the catering company who pinched her ass and called her the hottest transsexual flight attendant in Wellington, which raised the question of how many transsexual flight attendants were presently in Wellington. After a few weeks of these catering gigs that Dillon had helped me get, Jaye was the only person I had talked to for longer than the cursory where-are-you-from-where-are-you-going conversation. Outsiders recognize outsiders, I guess, though most of what she talked to me about was how being trans doesn’t make you an outsider in Wellington because everyone here is so welcoming and tolerant and fabulous, how no one talks shit to anyone and even if someone did try to start shit, someone else would fuck that person up for even trying to start shit or talk shit in the first place. This is just what Jaye told me. I didn’t hear anyone talk shit about anyone or see anyone else fuck someone up for talking or starting shit in the first place.
A lady in a floor-length gown pointed at my platter—What is it?
I have no clue, I said, smiling like a Cheshire cat who had been drinking a stolen bottle of champagne in a broom closet.
You’re cheeky, she said with a little curl in her voice.
Someone else asked, Is this vegetarian? Is it gluten? I don’t do gluten.
It’s all poison, I said. The host is trying to poison you.
I’d expected someone to report all my sassing, but they didn’t. Sequined dresses laughed, cuff links slipped me business cards, and by the end I was invited to their afterparties because there is a certain kind of person who, when insulted, will assume you have something they need.
There will be many powerful men there, most of them at least partially eligible, a woman with too many teeth said as she scrawled an address on a soggy napkin. Understand? An ice sculpture of a sumo wrestler melted behind her; a dozen damp prawns bowed to it.
A couple times each hour Jaye would pull me into the broom closet and we’d drink straight from our stolen bottle and eat the hors d’oeuvres too ugly to pass. Jaye told me all the gossip she’d overheard at the party, how someone’s third wife had come in the same dress as the first ex-wife and the ex-wife’s second husband was having an affair with the sister of the ex-wife’s first husband and it reminded me of the soaps, the useless drama of it, how it was just the same story of who someone had fucked or wanted to no longer fuck or wanted to fuck over or had already fucked over.
Jaye said she knew I had secrets—
I can smell a good secret, sugarpie, nothing gets past me. You’re running from something and it was just a matter of what. Spill it — was it a lover? Money troubles? Caught your man with some slut?
I don’t know, I said, I had to leave, so I did. That’s all.
Jaye said, Sluts don’t judge, honey. A true slut don’t ever, ever judge. She pursed her lips for a second and said nothing because she was the truest kind of true slut. Her hands were cradling my face like a blossom.
He doesn’t know where you are, does he?
I took a slug of the champagne then tried and failed to smile.
I see people like you all the time in the air. You see them drinking too much of the little wine bottles, asking for doubles of tequila on a midday flight. There’s a spill on row seven, the girls say. Somebody’s spilled all over the place, you get me?
Jaye laughed and apologized for laughing.
I left a note saying I went to my mother’s house. I didn’t say why.
Here’s a stupid question: Why don’t you just leave the mate? I mean really leave him, not just the country he’s in.
Something is wrong with me, I said, smiling slack and champagne drunk.
What I meant was I knew I had to do something that I didn’t know how to do, which was leaving the adult way, the grown-up way, stating the problem, filling out the paperwork, doing all those adult things, but I knew that wasn’t the whole problem, that I didn’t just want a divorce from my husband, but a divorce from everything, to divorce my own history; I was being pushed by currents, by unseen things, memories and imaginations and fears swirled together — this was one of those things you figure out years later but it’s not the kind of thing you can explain to an almost-stranger in a broom closet while you’re mostly drunk and you barely know where you are or why you are there or why some people can smell secrets.
Nothing is wrong with you, sugar, Jaye said, and I knew she thought that was true, but she didn’t know about that wildebeest that lived in me and told me to leave that perfectly nice apartment and absolutely suitable job and routines and husband who didn’t do anything completely awful — and I felt that the wildebeest was right and I didn’t know why and even though a wildebeest isn’t the kind of animal that will attack, it can throw all its beastly pounds and heavy bones at anything that attacks it or stands in its way, so I took that also into account. One should never provoke or disobey a wildebeest, so I did leave, and it seems the wildebeest was what was wrong with me, but I wasn’t entirely sure of what was wrong with the wildebeest.