We Are All Alone Here And We Are Dead — Devyn Defoe

Those were the eight months I spent being massively unhelpful, immune to common sense, a void in my head whenever a question was posed to me, such as: if I go up a band size, and down a cup, does that even out to the same size, such as the cost of a thing—I knew nothing, and I loved my friends, who were my coworkers, and who also knew nothing of any use in the walls of that department store, because they were children, eighteen or nineteen or twenty, unable to drink legally or rent a car, most of whom couldn’t drive anyway, accessing the mall via the bus lines, the irrational trains, who had a sense of doom about them, even then, a cruel inconsequence, who flinched at the sound of the first bullet but not the second or the third the day we thought we might die, pointlessly, for merchandise, who pierced everything on their bodies, who drove hours for boys, those that could drive, for their mystical hands, for a love in the throat, who didn’t know their power and so had none, who spent their money in the department store that paid us the minimum dollar and would walk, resignedly, into a black hole, who knew the ins and outs of hospitals due to ailing relatives and could sympathize, if I ever told them of Sid Julius, but I told them nothing, those dazzling girls, who still thought everything was love, who gaped at the suicide from the roof of the parking garage to the asphalt below, and found no rhyme in it, who were still thinking of their own deaths, the ones that could have happened but didn’t, for they had no sense of fate, and conceived of every disturbance as sudden, and random, who looked to me like an oracle or a sister as if I might know something about the death that persisted in that department store and yapped at our ankles but I knew only what was given to me, which was all Sid Julius, flung from a high tree in his last tantrum of the soul to the weeds of a forest, split open like a hard seed.

If they knew of that heart, full of terminal despair, they would want it for themselves! So I wouldn’t poison their minds. They were all good and too new and had mad ideas in their hair. They thought a car was meant every so often to crash into the side wall of a pharmacy, and they would be right! (Those that could drive, rarely made it far.) I couldn’t get enough of their brains. In a kinder world, they would be the ones to ruin me. I was twenty-six but they all thought I was eighteen, desperate to be shot through the other side of the world.

I took them to Fingers where they pretended to be older and I pretended to pretend to be older. Those that were mothers rested their aching feet and watched us dance and listened to us whine in our dark voices. Why, why does it go so wrong, why does it hurt, boys are so empty, they say one good thing and then the worst things, there was nothing in them. We were all so sad, so thrilled by our wild pain. Carmen—her poor car—drinking an elephant’s death to forget the drive to Stockton to meet a man nothing like the pictures he sent, the mildewed sheets, the look of confusion when she faked a burst ovarian cyst to get out of there. And then he didn’t even pay for gas! Enough of our complaining could make our pain beautiful, a little polished treasure that we could admire while the mothers, twenty years older, forty years older than us, laughed at our little dramas. They had none of our cloudiness, those moms. Everything for them had the hard kick of life. A sense that despite our happy fantasies, we were all underground, scratching around in the dirt. They wanted me to settle down with Sid Julius, remembering when I started that I’d mentioned something about having a boyfriend but knowing nothing about him, not his name nor the fact, by then, that he was gone, for a husband would balance my hostile temperaments and a child (a child, always also a child) would crack open the love so missing in my soul. They thought my stupidity was hilarious and willful and if I would just look up and around and wake to that smothering dirt I too could have the brutal happiness that was theirs! And then I would look at the raw desolation of Fingers with its peeling seats and undrinkable whiskey with their same pity and think, how did I fall so far into emptiness? But those dance clubs were the only place I could accept that one day I would die and keep that day’s breath off my neck.

I wasn’t sure why they came to those places, the mothers. Why extend the hours, as we did, when their hearts waited for them at home? So I knew it was a lie. Their love was too strong; it couldn’t be reciprocated, no matter what secret bargains they slipped into their prayers. They didn’t want it any more than I did, and couldn’t think of anything better to do than to drag me into their suffocation. Somewhere down the line it had changed them—never again could they not be mothers. That swollen love, they were constantly pouring it into other things. They wanted to mother us. Suspecting, maybe rightly, we hadn’t been properly mothered in the past. My sleepy teenage friends wondered what was going on with the moon when the chaos of the day cooked their blood to a frenzy, and the moms made them drink water and fill their empty stomachs with soggy tacos. Sometimes they paid our tabs, though the costs of their lives were surely larger than ours, with their real children. But we were theirs, too. We couldn’t be trusted with ourselves and they fed us the kindness only owed to delicate lost puppies.

And those teenagers? They didn’t care at all! The scars of meanness hadn’t reached them yet; meanness amazed them, these girls, more than kindness, it was the thrill of revulsion, the same reason they danced on those sticky floors and suffered drinks that tasted like an acid bath and pulled the knives from their backs to slit a cruel throat when one opened, senselessly, like a barnacle. Why did we have to endure daily lectures about customer appreciation and path to growth for they wouldn’t take an unkind word from anyone without dealing one back? We were messy with distrust, always ruining days, a little mutinous army. We drank about that too and how our lives meant nothing, not really, in the scheme of anything, and all we could do was make our little mistakes and churn out with the rest of the world into the endless distraction. It was a blessing, at the end of the day, to know we’d find no sympathy here. 

***

How different the first months were from the months that followed. At the beginning, his stupidity was the great luck of his life. I’d just started at the mall when an angel, benevolent enough to usher a lost insect to the bushes, plucked Sid Julius from the terror of himself and placed a cool hand on his forehead and fed him soft eggs. When the doctors let him go I was there with his humble car and food from the outside and prepared to take him anywhere he wanted to go, but even then, he was a different man. His arms didn’t work on anything. He struggled with the door handle, the window crank. Machines glared with their rational confusions and it was almost too much for him to bear. He gave me a look like a train hurtling into a ravine and fell asleep in the shotgun seat, ignoring the white skies and auto dealerships and pestilence in the air of that place.

Sleep, I’d learn, had become his favorite thing to do. Sleep was all there was to do in the hospital. Falling asleep felt warm and elastic and if he did it enough, he could wake up not sure of which side the dream was on. He was just like any other boy in his twenties, suffering the delusion that there was a jewel out there in the wilds waiting with his name on it. It was the culture to hate boys and their entitlement, but I loved the ways they moved through the world, following their dicks around like thermometers, seeking the dark warmth that would shake them from themselves. Boys like that were happy with everything. Until they were sad! Then their lives would crumble in their hands. And they’d have no idea what to do, and needed you to help them. They were newly born all the time, helpless and spitting into the roads.

I loved Sid Julius because he was all of them, bundled into some specious burning mistake. He flopped around in the wind. He always looked malnourished. My whole hand could fit in the hollow knot where his chest caved inward. He was naive enough to believe I was the best version of myself, which I supposed was because I was always nicer to him than anyone else ever had been. Those weeks he was gone, I fed his evil fish and brought his mail in. The mail was nothing—mailers from the grocery store, coupons for medicinal Chinese herbs. The fish were always composing themselves into complex geometric arrangements and I had a theory that this had been what tipped Sid Julius over the edge on at least one occasion; the better me would have let them die, eradicating one corner of madness, but I was always trying to save the things he loved, and he never would have forgiven me. 

They were swimming in a circle, the fish, when I took Sid Julius back to his apartment, and he said once again how they looked like an eye, and through the hole their bodies made we were being watched by something, an entity, a void, a forgotten projection in the back of space with hands that could slip through the fish and the knot where his ribs bent away and touch him with the deep reality that seethed behind all things, including us—a nightmare to think about and, once he did, an obsession, for why couldn’t just we be pure, just us, the truth of the darkness could consume the whole world if we could just have ourselves, and when he talked like this I didn’t know what to say, so I said we were good people, Sid Julius and me, and we did our best with what we had. Bullshit, he said to that. He was worthless; it was worthless, the struggle, which wasn’t a struggle but a long, treeless road to nowhere, but that was the struggle, the long nowhere road. And he looked off into the distance in the wall across from us and said I wouldn’t understand anyway, I hadn’t the foggiest idea about the traps in his head or the traps that kept the other traps at bay.

Later, he realized he did want to talk to me. Or maybe the mood shifted, or there was no “me” about it—he wanted to talk, and I could have been anyone, the fish or the hole in the fish or the things he wanted to say required no audience, and we all just happened to be there, witnesses to an emergent and implacable energy. He talked about the bland food in the hospital. How the first meal—a lunch—in that place was served on a little tray, and he’d tried to take the tray back to his room to eat, but a nurse yelled at him—he had to eat in the common areas, where he could be monitored. There were no knives or forks, or for that matter shoelaces, sweatshirt strings, belts, razors, tweezers, which begged the question: how could he kill himself with food? He could choke, he supposed, or he could not eat at all. But the latter would take quite a while and the former a ridiculous effort and he couldn’t express how little energy he had for any of that, and he couldn’t explain to the nurses how despite it all, he wanted to live, so he took his tray to a room with a little TV and family movies on VHS about dogs playing sports. Every meal he spent watching the dogs, gaining purchase on a novelty that pried the world further from its hinges; how the dogs, novices at first, made incredible strides in both athleticism and the ability to conceptualize the rules of a human game; how his sanity grew increasingly dependent upon these dogs, their success, the unlikely triumph in a human world. How the doctors fed him pills that replaced the bitter cloud with a gray one and muffled the sounds of his fellow inmates as if their voices were emanating from out of a far-off pasture, a place depleted of rebellion, a zen community of livestock numbed by green apples. How the Home Depot across the way grimaced at him through the window of his little asylum room. 

***

I worked in the intimates department with Roxanna, where we struggled to explain anything about bras to customers with questions—I didn’t even wear bras, not requiring the support, and Roxanna’s excuse was that we were never trained how to do fittings or educated whatsoever about the merchandise. Both of us were hired in the pandemic frenzy and trained on register during the busiest Sunday. We weren’t serious about life; we predicted societal calamity, the collapse of the retail space, and thought we could collect unemployment when we lost our jobs to systemic faults not our own. 

Roxanna’s boyfriend worked the security cameras and showed us tapes of the shoplifters that evaded capture under our negligent watch. There were dozens every day. Neither Roxanna or I gave a shit, though we were supposed to, because we could earn bonuses for reporting them. Doing this, I reasoned, would suggest a grim allegiance to our employer, who paid us so minimally that we should be shoplifting ourselves; spiritually, we were aligned with the thieves, in the great unfolding cosmic drama. We appreciated too the distance they kept from us, how happily they hid their faces.

Because the paying customers were our enemies. The first death was merely the threat of it: naked breath from their mouths when the masks slid down, flapped off carelessly. The virus could be in any of them, or in any of us, lurking revelations of how permeable we really were. Our shifts consisted of reminding customers to wear masks, asking nicely when they weren’t compliant, shirking behind our plexiglas barriers when the ordeal became a headache. We didn’t care enough about our health, but we were angry at the dynamics at play. How dare these people—these strangers—disregard our lives, for their personal freedoms! Which they weren’t allotted in any case in a private business, as we weren’t, but nothing stopped their stupid egos like our nonchalance: wear a mask or fucking leave, we don’t care; the jerks made halfhearted remarks about taking their business elsewhere, which were met with a wall—as if Roxanna or I earned commission on our sales.

But no amount of assertion lessened the feeling that the regulations we clung to were empty theater; the plexiglas barriers were a facade, we had to round them after each transaction to wipe down the credit readers; we were always in each other’s space, taking off our own masks to drink water, to eat in the break room, or when our faces were hot, or when it didn’t seem to matter since no one else cared, why should we, what a drag to put up with any of it!

“Why are we even here,” Roxanna would say philosophically, every time the thought rose up again, a bizarre little buoy around hour five, hour six. “Everyone can just shop online.”

Or, once, when she thought no one was listening: “Why was I even born.”

By the end of the day our exposure was a joke, and our health at Fingers a careless afterthought. I drove the teens in my shitty Buick and they all gave me twenties for gas; it was a second job, my taxi service to Fingers. They bought my drinks too, and spent too much picking pop songs off the jukebox; money made no sense to them, they didn’t believe it was real, everything was an energetic exchange, Isabel explained, the more you give the more you receive. No reality could crack that logic! But what did I know over them? After a long day, my brain sank from my head into my veins and zipped around my bloodstream and I could believe we were all energy, the haze off the back of a buzzing star, and that buzzing was in us whipping up a divine reason for why we were all poor. Our realities could shift upward, if only we were better aligned to prosperity; their generosity was a spiritual practice, being happy and grateful for everything, giving when they had none to give—the nothing would return to them tenfold, blessings upon blessings. It didn’t work out well but it made them nice people to be around. After enough time with the young philosophers I didn’t care who was sick or what I was breathing in; if I were to die I’d die, by a stranger’s air or a friend’s, did it really matter which? My peace came from a newfound lukewarm stoicism. The bars never complied with the state ordinances, no laws were enforced, we accepted the surreal order of a frontier capitalism. 

There was a week that Roxanna was gone. No one knew where she was, her absence grew into a hole where we threw all our fears—something must have happened, maybe she had the virus, and we all were next, until one night we spotted her at Fingers with her hands busy on someone who wasn’t in loss prevention and the next day she was back with us undisturbed. She’d had a cold, or allergies, something sudden and passing.

My paranoia was fun those first months, until that dulled like everything, a slot machine giving out only wins. I’d call Sid Julius at the hospital, amazed by my good luck, the marvel it felt to be alive and well in the dark sea, the pleasure despite my miseries to be surviving against the odds.

“That’s my girl,” he said, like he was proud of me.

***

His roommate was a man who was four hundred years old. Paul Slaughter was his name. He looked to be about forty-seven and had kept himself alive so long by a series of complicated breathing techniques. Sid Julius told me all about him on our calls from the hospital, which ranged anywhere from five to forty-five minutes, the maximum time patients could use the little booth phone by the reception desk, depending on how he was feeling any given day. 

I could visit during the designated visiting hours if I submitted a negative viral test, but Sid Julius didn’t like this as much. He felt ashamed when I saw him in the hospital socks with their rubber soles, hair growing down his neck and over his ears in the ways I knew he didn’t like. Whenever I dropped by I sensed his embarrassment and felt embarrassed myself; he was distant, he didn’t want to see me, and eventually I stopped coming, we relied on the calls.

Paul Slaughter’s coworkers at the almond packaging plant couldn’t believe that he was four hundred years old (give or take some years—at a certain point, according to Paul Slaughter, you stop counting) and that the reason for his pronounced age was a regimen of specific, complex lung exercises, and reported him to their superiors, who placed him on a psychiatric leave and that’s how he ended up in the same room as Sid Julius enduring the leers of that taunting Home Depot. He had no other friends. He told Sid Julius that a hundred years ago, two hundred years ago he’d married one of the day nurses and one of the night nurses in their past lives as nurses; he recognized his former wives by particular markings in their eyes.

Paul Slaughter was so unusual even for the asylum that Sid Julius thought he could tell him the secret he’d told hardly anyone else, only me one time which he afterward regretted. “Sometimes when I sleep, I go to a different place where I’m also alive. But I’m a different person there. It’s another life I’m living at the same time as this one here, and sometimes the timelines cross and I can reach it when I dream. Does that ever happen to you?”

“No,” Paul Slaughter said. “No, that’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard.”

A response that sent Sid Julius further into the pit of his mind. How difficult it was to be understood—even by those who knew the difficulty all too well themselves. But Paul Slaughter was intrigued by these dreams, even if he had no idea what they could possibly mean. “What do you do there?” he asked. “What’s the world like? Who are you?”

The dog on the TV launched a flawless three-pointer using just its nose. “I don’t know,” Sid Julius said. “I’m only ever in one place. It’s the second floor of a house. A bedroom, an office. The buildings outside look like the future. It might be on a different planet.”

Paul Slaughter merely nodded; this all made as much sense to him as anything.

They played card games, they swapped books, they dragged their feet down the halls. They watched movies meant for children and distanced themselves as much as possible from group activities. Other than that, there wasn’t much to do. Most of the time, Sid Julius fell asleep to stories of Paul Slaughter’s nonsense. He would win them back, Paul told him, his nurse-wives; he’d treated them badly in the past but women are full of forgiveness. “It’s the purpose of their lives. It gives them something to do. Most of the time, they’re just sitting at the phone, waiting to pick you up off the floor.”

***

After Sid Julius was gone my first thought was I should be gone as well, if gone were a magazine, I’d subscribe, I’d give it all up for nothing, if gone were a place, it was very much the place to be. My chance almost came on Black Friday. The first bullet whizzed past Cheryl Cheryl’s head and struck a mannequin in the third eye. What a zing! Then the second, the third—all shot off in wild directions. None were meant for us but the girls went nuts anyway, flinching like raptured animals. For a thrilling moment, we thought we were going to die! And the teens and the mothers mourned their precious lives and I thought of Sid Julius and the mercy that a stray bullet would be, what simpler way to end my grief, but the thought of dying in that horrible place depressed me too much and I ducked the same as the rest of them.

The mall closed early. We were in no state to be anywhere—certainly not home, with the quiet waiting for us there—so we went to Fingers and bought Cheryl Cheryl the syrupy cherry drinks she liked. Cheryl Cheryl, the girl so nice they named her twice. She was sobbing over the nachos (the ordeal, for reasons I couldn’t find, made the girls ravenous) and we were all understanding; if it were our near-missed head, we’d feel much the same way, but it wasn’t that at all, Cheryl Cheryl said; that was adrenaline, it happened so fast, Cheryl Cheryl said, it was like it didn’t happen at all, that’s already the past, I could laugh about it now, and Cheryl Cheryl did laugh, into the group nachos, which Roxanna thought was tasteless given the dead still probably on the floor back in the women’s department and said so; we all were there too, Cheryl, we saw the blood, the prom dresses are all bloody, it’s disgusting and sad, we were all texting our families goodbye, we didn’t know if we’d live, we didn’t know what it was, we didn’t know if it was a mass shooting, or a regular one, we thought we would die, and you’re laughing, you’re sick, we’re all shaken, we’re traumatized, we never thought we’d leave the women’s department, and Roxanna said, You’re laughing, Cheryl, it’s sick, and I kept my thoughts to myself—sick Cheryl was the most fun I’d had in weeks.

“Well shit,” Cheryl Cheryl said, “I just think it’s funny how bad everything is all the time,” and Carmen thought that was funny, too, and so did Mariela, and Liliana and Roxanna and Ellen the mom, though Isabel did not, and I abstained.

Soon after that Roxanna left and Cheryl Cheryl was crying into our nachos again. We were beginning to tire of her hysterics. It couldn’t have been that bad; our days were the same days we all had. 

But Cheryl wasn’t crying about the shooting. “It’s my ex,” she said, “I feel insane, I can still feel him, I feel like it’s not over, his energy is all mixed up in mine.”

Liliana asked her what she meant (Liliana: too young to know!). “It’s a feeling in my body,” Cheryl Cheryl said, “it’s in my chest sometimes and in my stomach sometimes and it’s him, it’s his energy, not mine, I can tell the difference. It’s like he’s not done with me.” 

“Like a ghost,” I said. 

“Maybe it’s like that,” Cheryl Cheryl said, “but he’s alive, and he’s thinking about me, and I can feel it, and I can feel his feelings in my body better than he can in his.” 

“Twin flame connections are like that,” Isabel said knowingly. She followed psychics on the internet; she knew everything about soulmates and karmic partners and divine counterparts. “It’s when one soul is split into two different bodies. One half is one person and the other half is another.”

“My soul is my soul,” Cheryl Cheryl said, just the one of her.

“Well it’s yours, but it’s his too,” Isabel said. “It’s only on the 3D plane that you’re differentiated.”

“Are you saying I’m not complete in myself?”

“Maybe Cheryl Cheryl feels his feelings because she’s an empath,” Mariela offered generously. That thought was also disastrous enough to get a good laugh from Cheryl Cheryl.

“I don’t get any of it,” Carmen said. “If you feel the feelings, then they’re your feelings.”

Then Cheryl was on the floor laughing. She was out of her mind! We had her wild with different miseries, sprouting from a single devastation. I watched her writhe in pain like a faraway god and I was very happy there were other people like me. 

“I want that man like I want a hole in my head,” Cheryl Cheryl finally said, which was to say, very much.

***

“I’ll tell you the little trick,” Paul Slaughter said to him one of those days, maybe the second week or the third; it could have been any day, after a long enough time, there was no way to tell the difference between them.

“You gotta build somatic resistance,” he’d said. “The oxygen—it’s gotta go deep into the nerves. Once you’re there, the light switches on.”

“What light,” Sid Julius had said.

“The light of God,” Paul Slaughter said. He grinned. He had no teeth.

The more I learned about Paul Slaughter, the less I liked him. I told Sid Julius not to listen to his crazy talk, and Sid Julius told me not to use that word. “It’s offensive to crazy people like me,” he said.

“You’re not like that,” I told him. He went quieter after that, tolerated my mall stories for a while, and then he wanted to get off the phone; he didn’t like it when I lied.

It didn’t matter, though; Sid Julius didn’t want the light of God, to extend those already unfathomable years—what would he fill them with?

The hospital was like a university. He could walk to different rooms and listen to inflated theories about the importance of life and it cost a suicidal amount of money. Most baffling was that he was expected to be something of an artist in this place—each therapy group involved diagramming his innermost feelings into a paltry collage or a mandala. Doing so was meant to tap into some deep human capacity for creation, but left him only feeling like some marred alchemic experiment. Above all, the shrinks seemed to think what was lacking in him (and lacking in everyone there; the idea was they were the same, all the crazy people you could lock into one building, one psychosis the dream or the echo of the next) was gratitude, for his circumstances, for having a roof over his head (a true luxury, Paul Slaughter agreed), for the wheel of fate, for the people who loved him. And how ungrateful would he be if he told them that blessings were just another weight? It seemed to Sid Julius that creativity was the laziest way to approach the existential, and his aversion to living remained as inscrutable as ever, but the counselors looked proud of themselves and he didn’t have the heart to tell them what was peering from just over the fence, that millennial nothingness, that suspicion that the best times were already had, before we’d had our go, that we were spinning in a leftover dance that had nothing to do with us. 

And so the only thing to do was sleep, where if he was lucky, he could access that other world, and inhabit his other self, the one that luxuriated in solitude and the problems (or comforts) of the future, the comfortable problems of an unearthly place, for they were far removed from the ache of reality and he had no sense of their full scope, as if a dream, even if it was a life, could only extend so far in one direction before it faded. And this wouldn’t be a comfort anywhere but a hospital—that life could fade, that the mind could shake free, a swarm of birds leaving one tree for the next. And this was the reason he spent three months in the asylum, far surpassing the three days required of him by the law: asleep was when he was happiest, though nothing else made him look more depressed. And when Paul Slaughter pulled himself away from flirting with his nurse-wives and found Sid Julius rolled into a ball, his head down near his knees and his feet pulled in and his eyes flickering in and out of sleep he said you keep that up, they’ll never let you leave. And most of the time, Sid Julius didn’t much care. And Paul Slaughter was breathing more years into his body and Sid Julius asked him why he did that. What was it worth being alive, beyond when your friends and family were alive, how was that not the bleakest fate in the world. And Paul Slaughter looked out their window, at the trees and the little jogging track they took walks around whenever the nurses unlocked the doors and the Home Depot and its inner mind scattered with humans, and he said, Oh, it’s not as bad as that—there’s always people to love.

***

A tarot reader told me I might find him again in birds; birds were a sign particular to me, given explicitly by one of the cards in the spread, though I imagined her saying this to everyone—were there really people out there who could see a bird and nothing in it? Maybe birds were the vehicles for everyone’s dead, and Sid Julius was nothing special, but from then on I was plagued by the sight of them: doves lining the telephone wire across the street from my apartment, peering down for worms. I bought a little house for them and set it beside my window should one decide it wanted to visit, but none did; all were happily paired, knitting their nests in the dogwood trees. If Sid Julius was among them, here was another life he had that I didn’t. I told you, I thought at nothing, I can give you the space you need. 

I stopped going to Fingers. When I needed to be alone, when I couldn’t deal with birds ignoring me in my own home, I drove thirty miles to the Thunder Valley Casino. Casinos in California are the same as casinos in Nevada; they don’t tell you that, whoever the people are that are supposed to tell you about casinos. The games are the same, the stale smells and cartoon sounds, the glittery membrane around the void; every one of them was fueled by the same burning engine. I needed to be there. I wanted the secondhand smoke to kill me, I wanted to lose all my money, I needed a machine to make a fool out of me, to take me out back and shoot me between the eyes like the sick dog I was. I wanted to feel time slip from my hands into the void and for the void to spit out nothing in return, no desperate consolations. I thought of the mothers one night I parked in the lot and discovered, upon opening my door, human shit, a loose puddle glistening a foot from my tire—here I was, getting a dose of that glorious domesticity! No one could trick me anymore.

I picked up more shifts. I needed to, because I was losing all my money. By the holidays, I was working seven days a week, and all seven nights I fed my grocery cash to impenetrable slots. It worked out well enough because I had no appetite for food. If I didn’t sleep at all, I could reach beyond exhaustion to something else, the grotesque clarity of the world, the reality you had glimpsed behind your fish that had terrified you so, but to me felt like nothing—I paid my piper, I stumbled around the evil dream without snagging in its currents, I’d found the strings that divined the forces at work in my life and, when I desired, could pluck them back. My thoughts drifted far from my brain, did lazy loops through my arteries. I was the arbiter of my own fate, a student to example: if someone walked in front of me, I could walk; if Roxanna pitched a low-income family a shiny credit card, I stole the script, I made off like a villain. I was an empty vessel, and in my place, I could be anyone. I was cool, calm Roxanna and Cheryl Cheryl in her frantic distress; I was any mother with her feminine pain, too much love to give and no one to take it off my hands. A drunk man swaying in the children’s department one late Sunday night, picking up onesies and laughing, dropping them on the floor—I was him too, deep in my soul. What a beautiful thing to watch! I followed him for a while, pretending I was doing my due diligence, monitoring anyone acting in a bizarre way toward merchandise, but purely I loved the show he put on, the casual disregard. Why onesies? I had infinite questions. Then I had to return to my register post and left him to wander, wondering every so often what distant mischief was happening until I heard Liliana’s shriek from the parking garage exit.

We would watch the replay later on the monitors, crowding over Roxanna’s boyfriend’s shoulders, maneuvering around his shoulders so we could see the stumbling man rolling over his feet to the exit and the bridge to the parking garage and twirl over the edge and the spot, Roxanna’s boyfriend pointed out, because it was kind of blurry, where his legs snapped at new angles, and he rewound the tape so we could see it again and the few seconds before the twist off the garage where it was unclear whether it was the man’s intention to fall the three stories down or an accident so we watched and couldn’t tell and Roxanna’s boyfriend rewound the tape again and we watched another time but the man’s face was blurred and whatever was in it was lost in the dark grain but his hands did something strange in those seconds, they were raised over his head, that swaying weathervane man with his arms up like trembling wires seeking a plug to source, and his mute words lost forever, though Mariela swore she’d heard him preach something about being the earth’s dark angel, that we were all dark angels on earth, and the planet was sinking under our feet, we would fall farther than we knew, and angel, I could say back, I know how far we can fall; I know what the falling does. 

Judging by the sound of horns, the cars trying to exit the lot were annoyed by the obstacle a body made.

***

So it was useless, you said to me, all of it, the doctors, the meds, the group sessions, the lectures, people looking at me and judging me like I’m nuts even though they certainly were. And none of them knew anything that I didn’t already know. Do you think it helped a little bit? I asked, and you said no, not at all, I still don’t know what there is, and I asked what there is what, and you said what there is, with the voice of someone who wanted to do something with their life, but not just something, a large and consequential thing, pluck that jewel from the horizon and keep it for yourself, and you looked at me like a train barreling through an aquatic apocalypse, a dense oceanic blur, the fish or the void in the middle of the fish had possessed your mind again, and I said it must feel good to be home though, and you looked around the room, at the books you’d read and the books you hadn’t, the fan in the corner stirring dust, the fish in their tank scattering into flinty triangles, and you said it’s the same everywhere, no better and no worse, and it’s always going to be like this, like how when you wash a soft t-shirt enough, it gets coarser, and when you wash a coarse t-shirt enough, it gets softer, good, bad, heaven, hell, life only has one direction and it’s towards the eternal medium, and I said Sid, for the life of me I don’t know what you mean, let’s go to sleep, we can go to that place you go in your dreams, and you looked out the window at the unconscious sky and the room seemed to fill with a menacing plasma I couldn’t taste or see but felt dense on my skin and you said well I can go, but you can’t, and I said well if you’re there, I must be somewhere there, too; we were anchored to the sea floor like the bleariest stones, and you wouldn’t look at me when you said no, you’re not there, wherever I am I’m alone.

***

“Have you ever been in love, Delilah?” sweet Carmen asked me, her eyes big like a baby’s, while we were straightening the panty tables for no reason; they would just get mussed up again. The question was serious; the answer was important to her in some way I felt too old to understand.

“Yes,” I said, “but it’s not worth it anymore.”

“Delilah, why don’t you ever come to Fingers anymore?” Carmen asked, as if I didn’t say any of that. I envied how easily she could just move on to the next thing. “They put in a digital jukebox, last time we played all the Taylor Swift, you should have seen it. Everyone was so mad at us!”

“Excuse me, miss?” I turned. A woman, mask blessedly hitched to her ears, was trying to flag me down.

“Can I help you with something?”

“I thought you should know—there’s a bird inside—maybe someone can help it?”

“What are you talking about?” I said rudely, wanting her to go away.

“There’s a bird—see? Over there.” She pointed to the ceiling near the fitting rooms. Sure enough, there was a bird—a dove, I realized, like the ones always outside my house. It was screeching an anxious song meant for other birds to hear. “It must be trapped,” she went on, as if there were any other reason a bird would be inside a department store.

It’s you, I thought, knowing the thought was stupid but I couldn’t help it; my heart would rip through my throat and splat onto the table Carmen and I were lazily picking at; the next body in that cursed mall would be mine, just the thought was enough to destroy, and yet I felt heavenly—it’s you, I knew it with my soul, you couldn’t hide from me anymore. “We’ll get right on it,” I told the woman, but I stayed with Carmen at the table for a while, not sure what I was supposed to do about the bird. Eventually a manager came by and I relayed the bird information, pointing out the bird, still by the fitting rooms, it hadn’t moved much. It was still singing its manic birdspeak to all the birds that weren’t there, and I could have cried for hours hearing it, but it was you and you were here; hadn’t that been all I’d ever prayed for?

“What bird?” my manager said, as rude as I had been. It was a busy Saturday; there were problems besides birds.

“Maybe someone can call animal control,” I suggested.

She said something low I didn’t hear and walked off to another mess. I felt proud that I’d done what I could. Even after your death, I was serving you. My simple helpfulness, I could never admit out loud, was my way of bringing you back. You flew somewhere else and I even looked for you, and it could be worth it, I thought, if we both were birds, though the next day my manager pulled me aside and told me they found the bird; it died sometime in the day or the night or the day when no one was watching.

***

You asked me to tell you I missed you when I missed you; it helped you believe, you said, that your life was worthwhile, that you were wanted and beloved, that your good outweighed your bad, that the love I felt for you was love, things you found so hard to believe, so how could you have known? It was all the time; every second you were there and not here. I miss you, I told you, from then on every day; I’d tell you however long you would hear it, I’d tell you forever.

“I miss you,” I said through the phone. You would be getting out in a few days; the doctors were satisfied with your progress. You weren’t happy but you weren’t sad in a way that concerned them anymore.

“Huh,” you said. “That’s nice to hear.”

Your words—you meant all of them; you were always so careful not to lie. 

“Do you miss me?” I asked.

You thought about that for a long time. “I miss you,” you said finally, deciding on a truth. “But you miss me more than I miss you.”

***

Then Carmen came in with the fever and left early to go to the hospital, making a pit stop along the way to sleep with her ex, who texted her out of the blue—he was sorry for everything, he’d be better this time around—and the next day Isabel had the cough, and Roxanna’s throat itched,  Mariela couldn’t get out of bed, Cheryl was fine but her grandmother was on a vent within the week, Ellen the mom lost a leg at the knee.

And then I had to wonder—was I the common denominator? Was the world crumbling beyond our capacity for repair, or did I suck the life from everyone I knew? 

Before I quit that place, leaving those girls in the dust, no sentimental goodbyes or last calls, I visited Paul Slaughter in the asylum and saw for myself that you had been right about everything: the anger of those doddering nurses, the power they kept tightly balled in their fists behind their little station, the fear in their eyes that masqueraded as boredom, bending only to Paul, who had the place whipped by then—how he’d done it, I had no idea, but they caved to that man like a king, the nurses and doctors and the other patients, his insane brethren following behind us as we walked through the halls like he was their messiah, and they his sheepish disciples, and the nurses and doctors something even below, the fleas on the disciples or the fleas on the sheep of the disciples, letting Paul Slaughter walk a visitor past the common area into the room the two of you shared, though now someone else lived there, a little boy dizzy with ghosts, who saw the dead behind and beyond us, who spoke in a chilling whisper voice I never want to hear again in my life, though let me, at Paul Slaughter’s directive, sit on his (your) bed, the hard mattress where you lost yourself, so that Paul Slaughter and I could talk finally, Paul who had heard almost nothing about me, though that didn’t mean anything, Paul said, you always kept so much close to your chest, Paul said, you slept half the time, three-fourths of the time, you had so much inside it was hard for you, Paul theorized, to remember who you were, or what mattered, or that there was movement always, that a thought was just one noise, and another would come along, there was a pulse to the general disorder that conspired to order, or at least rhythm, and he showed me the books you’d left behind for him and the view of the lawn out the window by then covered with leaves and the people marching in and out of that Home Depot like neurons in a vicious brain, and the boy whose room it now was, who was really a lamb of sorts, who couldn’t be long for this world himself, stared at us like we were imposters of his parents, some new freaks he was saddled with who would ruin his life with the quietest catastrophe.

And when he talked of you with the words from his lungs, and when I listened with the mind in my blood, he had a look in his eye like the catastrophe between us was ancient history: another lifetime where we fucked everything up, where we tore up our hearts, ruined the simple good things as we clung too hard to our anger, refusing forgiveness and blighting the chance of anything to grow from what we left dead—it was there in his tantric eye and sliced through me in a way that pinned my soul to the back of my head. In Paul Slaughter, I saw for the first time that I could love somebody again. But it wouldn’t be him. We were ran-through people, those of us who saw the world as a dream, a beautiful dream shutting the door on us dreamers, but how we loved it! How we were exactly what we wanted. 

***

Devyn Defoe was a Stegner Fellow in fiction at Stanford University from 2018–2020. Her fiction has appeared in Best American Experimental Fiction 2020 and was shortlisted for The White Review Short Story Prize.