The Visit

“Drink this,” he says, holding out the yellow liquid in the plastic bottle.

“What is it?” she asks, hair tussled, obscuring her blood shot eyes.

“What is it?” he looks back at the bottle, confused. “It’s Gatorade.”

“Oh.”

She takes it without looking up but can’t manage to twist off the cap.

“Can you open this for me? I’m useless.”

After a few sips, she cringes.

“Ugh, it’s so sweet.”

“It’s good. Electrolytes.”

She tries once more and then throws herself back on the bed, arms flaying to her sides as if caught in some slow-motion movie fall, the billow of Medusa strands extending out towards the camera poised at the top.

He shakes his head at her silently, interrupting the dramatic internal-narration, and walks out of the room, towards the kitchen.

“Where are you going?” she tries yelling, her voice hitting a little hiccup of fuzzy tonality that squeaks after him.

“Do you have any eggs?” he calls to her, simultaneously opening the fridge.

“I call you to come help me and all you can think about-” she gulps at the air “is making yourself breakfast.”

She’s hitting her moody stride.

“You suck.”

It comes out more aggressively after a night of drinking.

“I’m making them for you Kat,” he says back towards her room as he pulls out a carton. Surprisingly, he finds four unused eggs. “Wow, you have something in your fridge other than ketchup and Diet Coke!”

“What?”

“Don’t worry about it.”

He starts the eggs on the skillet and the sizzle and smell quickly rush into the air. He pops back to check in on her and finds her body twisted, face pressed against the pillow, looking towards the window. Outside he sees the sparkle hanging off the buildings across the river, over in Hoboken. Down by the water a few people are already out for morning jogs, some pulling along disgruntled dogs or pushing massive strollers with bicycle wheels. He catches the small, red-gloved hand of a child spinning its way down the pedestrian-laned promenade before disappearing from his line of sight behind a warehouse.

It’s this apartment that makes him consider moving to this part of town. But then he remembers the three-avenue walk through pot-holed and cobbled nothingness, all the way over from the A/C/E, and he can’t appreciate it as much. Even the artsy-types that ooze onto the streets during the summer months don’t make any of it feel any more homely. They’re temporary installations, hyper-trendy phantoms that slip in and out of galleries featuring the art world’s obscurities. The galleries themselves smile too brightly, sinister pearly white-washed dry-wall paneling obscuring rusted piping and decaying wooden beams that whisper from the corners.

He still remembers when Kat first moved here right out of college, back when, photography degree in hand, she was going to “show them.” It was never exactly clear who “them” was, but it made sense, in a Kat-like sort of way. The apartment, positioned right at the edge of one of Chelsea’s primary cobblestoned walking strips, was a perfect underline to her aspirations.

“It’s exactly what I need,” she said at the time. “On my way home, I pass art. On the weekends, I see art. I’m around it all day, all the people and the ideas. There’s just always this, like, energy there. It’s kind of amazing.”

The original space was a share with two other girls she graduated with. Both had since moved out and on, in life and in their selected fields of pursuit, and Kat had gone through several more flatmates. Some had been artists, some had been compromises of financial or business types who, although not arriving with the requisite level of creativity Kat would liked to have highlighted, were acceptable nonetheless for their ability to pay the bills on time and not leave a mess of hair products on the ceramic lid of the toilet tank. It was Kat who was the constant fixture, possessor of the lease and arbiter of the apartment’s fate and occupants. In many ways, this had become the place where she belonged, and it seemed odd to imagine her anywhere else.

Glancing at her walls, he sees the various projects generated through the years. There’s the series from a visit to Haiti, small children playing near leaky sewer pipes and peeking out from behind their mothers’ hips. There are the shots of monolithic New York buildings during the early morning hours of eerie absence, with miniature people, heads bowed, passing silently in front of them, sentinels on a repetitive, endless march. To the side of her bed, just above and to the left, locked between frames of other bright faces, he sees his own, an image taken what is now probably seven years ago, around the time he met Kat. In it his head is turned slightly, away from the camera, and his eyes glance up mischievously, a sarcastic, confident smirk curling at the edges of his mouth, coming at a time when nothing had yet been firmly established and all was in the realm of the possible. He can’t remember anymore whether he was posed that way or the shot came naturally, when he didn’t expect it, perhaps while the two of them were just sitting around in her dorm room and she was being annoying about playing with her camera, aiming it at random things in the room while all he wanted for her to do was put it away and focus on what they were talking about for a moment.

“Hello?” she asks, breaking his survey of the walls. “Are you hearing me?”

“What?”

“Is something burning?”

He leaps back towards the kitchen and finds the eggs aching to be removed from the flame, slightly overdone but not damaged. Finding no clean dishes and a sink full of used ones, he moves quickly to rinse off the etchings of dried food as best as he can from one of them, and then transfers the eggs from the skillet. Shoving the skillet into an open corner of the sink, he pauses a moment before releasing the cold water on it. It hisses on the teflon, a cloud of light white steam escapes before quieting, leaving just the sound of the water gliding into open crevices and pooling in the stacked plates before dribbling down to the bottom.

“See. Eggs.” He says to her as he hands her the plate with an equally shoddily cleaned fork.

“Oh boy. I can’t eat this now. I’m going to throw up.”

“So critical of my cooking without even trying it?”

“I just don’t think I can hold anything down! And why eggs? Seems like the worst possible thing to eat right now. Maybe some dry cereal? A slice of toast? Couldn’t you have made me a slice of toast?”

“Trust me, eggs are the best thing at a time like this. They suck the alcohol right out of you.”

“How do you know that?”

“I know a lot of things.” He edges his way towards her dresser and flips over a snowglobe, one of the many trinkets she piles onto the flat surfaces of her room. On its bottom he finds a little metal dial that he twists in a full circle and releases. A distant metallic melody echoes from the plastic base, the sound of “Rock-A-Bye Baby” trickles into the room. “And if you really need to know,” he adds, “I heard it on a morning radio show. Those people know more about drinking than most.”

She eyes him skeptically but takes a couple of bites from the eggs before surrendering with a groan and putting the plate off to the side. “That’s enough for now. I’ll try again later.”

He looks at her silently, her body stretched out under the blanket, and for a moment it feels like he’s the only one she has. She can make you feel like that, he thinks to himself. It’s the way she unfolds herself and becomes helpless and needy, and then asks for you because, you imagine, that while the rest of the universe is going about its daily business and spinning off towards some new, dreamy, previously unoccupied place, you’re the only one who’s here while she’s unkempt and lost and sad, stumbling about all by herself. He’s made the mistake before, of believing it to be her vulnerability, but he still lets himself do it every time.

She notices his eyes and meets them, she smiles before looking away quickly, reassigning her attention to flattening out the creases in the sheet where it drapes over her legs.

“I really shouldn’t have drank so much,” she admits, reaching for a bottle of blue pills by the side of her bed. She takes one and swallows it down with the help of the Gatorade. “Welcome to the Matrix.”

“What?”

“The Matrix. Red pill, blue pill. Blue pill you enter the Matrix…Come on, you’re a boy, you like movies, you should know this.”

“Yeah. Sorry.” He shakes his head, looking back towards the pills. “Should you be taking those while drinking?”

“Well, sir, I’m not drinking anymore. Nothing other than this guy juice you brought me.” She motions to the Gatorade, then laughs at herself. “Oh wow, that sounded really bad.” She lets herself sink into a little fit of giggling before stopping abruptly and tightly sealing her eyes. “Headache. Headache.” She lies back down and brings her fingertips to her temples. “So not good. I’m dying.”

“This is where you say,” he lifts his left hand in mock pronouncement and brings the other one to his heart, “I will never, ever, drink again.”

She glances out from her cocoon. “OK, let’s not get crazy here.”

“Was Rob there?” He asks, without thinking.

“No,” she answers matter-of-factly. “I haven’t seen him for about three weeks.” She acts as if she’s brushed it off completely. “Didn’t you know that?”

“You never told me. I don’t even remember when we had our last real conversation. Chatting online doesn’t count.”

“Well, regardless, yeah, that’s done.”

“What happened?” He asks but doesn’t need to ask. He has his own judgments of the men she’s dated, dates, will date, maybe marry one day.

“Creative differences.” She’s proud of herself for coming up with the assessment. “He was a film-maker, right? So he was into all of these crappy directors and movies and he just thought they were the greatest things. At first it’s cute, you know, someone’s all excited about this stuff, they’re into it. But eventually it got old and I was like, ‘dude, this is boring,’ and he took it really personally, said I had no taste. Blah, blah, blah. Told me what a crappy artist I was, how crappy I, in general, was, how I’ll never amount to anything.” She reports it simply, without any emotion, as if it has all fallen away from her, as if nothing is really ever absorbed, processed, pondered upon, internalized. This is what he said, this is what happened, and that’s that. The facts are just details, they don’t mean anything, they can’t mean anything. We’re safer, better off, if we don’t actually listen to what people say. “In any case, he was a jerk.”

“Seems that way.”

She muses on it for a second, looking up towards another part of her room where she has a photograph, all off on its own, hanging on a narrow sliver of wall that protrudes from the rest of it, a white pillar that incases the vent system climbing through the interior of the building. It’s a black and white shot of her mother sitting at one side of the family’s dinner table, consumed in light that seems to be coming in from the doorway behind her. Her head is thrown back slightly and she has a massive smile on her face, as if she’s on the down-shift from laughing one of those real laughs, the pure kind that inject themselves into you and take over, make your entire body convulse endlessly. You can’t see any of Kat’s other family members in the photo and they might as well not be there except that, on the lower edge, you see a hand that stretches into the frame and delicately lets its pinky and ring fingers lean against her mother’s hand. It’s Kat’s father, or so she had told him when he asked about the detail.
He had never seen the photo before she hung it on the wall in her dorm room during junior year, even as she claimed it was from a few years earlier, from just before she went off to college.

She looks down at her body under the covers again and bites at her lower lip, chapped from the dehydration. A little fleck of skin detaches between her teeth, peeling off and exposing a renewed pink fleshiness.

“Everything just feels weird sometimes, you know?”

He knows, he understands the way in which life takes its own shape despite, or in spite of, your best efforts. It’s this whole mid-20s thing, of being in a place you don’t always know how you came to. You set one thing in motion and it builds momentum and then one day you’re just suddenly taking heed of it all, shaking your head at yourself.

He wonders about this girl he has known for much of the beginning of his adult life, the one he accidentally sat down next to at some party during sophomore year while she gripped a red plastic drink cup between both hands so tightly that it looked like she was going to crush it. The weight of him collapsing next to her made her body tilt in his direction and she laughed, finding an excuse to put the plastic cup down so that she could correct herself.

“Sorry,” he had said, and then, “so do you know anyone here?”

And she laughed again.

He wonders about the kids from that party who have since disappeared into various corners of the world, who didn’t seem to know what to do with themselves while off on their own, in college, in the City, miles away from parents and home and accountability. He wonders about who they have become and where they are now and whether any of them found anything that made them happy. Sometimes he passes them on the street, or the grown-up-looking people he thinks are them. They carry thick, brown leather briefcases, or walk dogs that have been trained not to acknowledge the existence of pedestrians. They wear black boots with skinny, tights-clad legs sticking out of them. They stare down, straight down at their feet as they slap at the spots of petrified gum on the sidewalk, and inch them forward towards work or home. But if there’s ever a locking of eyes, a second where there might be recognition – “yes! It’s me! We once might have known each other!” – it quickly dissipates, and he’s just passing the same strangers they have always been.

“Fuck,” she says, licking at her lower lip and dabbing at it with the side of her hand. She holds it up for him to see the red stain along the outside of her thumb. “I’m bleeding.”

She’s laughing now, in her room in Chelsea, years removed from that day they met. The laugh cuts deep into her face, revealing the lines that have slowly taken root in her skin. The deepest scars run below both eyes, revealing a darkness that has began pooling underneath them. Somewhere, on the fringes of the exposed map, he can see the person she is to become.

She turns over on her side once more. She pulls her legs up to her chest and stares out the window, the same window she has stared out of every morning that she has woken up in this apartment.

“Can you lie down with me?” she asks.

He moves over to the bed and places himself next to her, pulling his legs up so that they make contact with the underside of her thighs. He passes his arm across her body and drops it next to her hand. She takes it and notches her fingers into his.

The sounds from outside creep in through the silence. A car door opens and closes, an engine starts. Rollerblades cut into pavement and toss aside loose pellets of blacktop that ricochet into thin shrubs. He dissects the details and builds the stories in his mind.

Meanwhile, in their repose, she pulls his hand up to her mouth and lets his fingers glide along the surface of her rough lips. She pulls it still higher and lets them rest against her warm cheek and her shallow breathing.

They stay like this long enough for him to think that this is how it should be, and for her, perhaps, to agree with him.

But then there’s also that light movement that he begins to feel somewhere nearby. He tries ignoring it but it grows more pronounced, a shaking and accompanying sound of a hollow and quick knocking against a wooden surface. On her nightstand he recognizes her cell phone doing an eerie dance and flashing dramatically.

“Leave it alone,” he wants to say. “Let it go. Just this once.”

But she’s already releasing his fingers from the lock and reaching for it. She flips open the phone and reads the new message.

“It’s this guy I met last night,” she tells him as she sits up, a renewed smile forming on her face. “I didn’t think he’d text me back so quickly.”

He looks up at her from the pillow, and doesn’t say anything.