Certain American States Read online

  For friends I can more easily call friends, people with a less complicated track record and a more obvious amount of empathy, I have sometimes been that crying shoulder, that good listener, and it’s true I once considered a career in psychology or social work or some form of clergy before I dropped out of college and stopped believing in God—and I don’t exactly read self-help books, but I almost do, and I’ve undergone various kinds of therapy, so my vocabulary includes attachment styles, boundaries, and emotional dysregulation. So this was what I thought of while Nathan talked about whatever he was talking about, a sudden trip she took, a lie he believed, her saying he was overreacting and him saying she was underreacting and something that he wished he could take back, something involving her mother or his mother, a wrong number called—something, I don’t know—because I was distracted by the novelty of seeing Nathan have such real expressions on his face, a rare vulnerability. He kept saying I’ll be honest with you and Truthfully and asking if he could tell me something and then telling me something, but I was tracing our history back to the weeks just before I dropped out of college, how Nathan had asked me to come home with him for Thanksgiving that year and I’d said I couldn’t, because it seemed too serious, but later I wondered if I actually wanted that seriousness, or if he did. I couldn’t get a good handle on it one way or the other, but after a few days I said I’d changed my mind and I remember trying to smile a little more than usual, trying to be a nice girl, trying to be one of those girls people take home for Thanksgiving, and he said, Maybe bring a dessert?—so I baked three pies from scratch in the dorm kitchen, overly concerned with the lattice, weaving and reweaving it until the butter melted and the dough turned loose and gummy. He introduced me to family members as his good friend Nikky but his aunt called me the girlfriend and his mother just called me Nikky, always saying my name like I’d done something wrong. Nathan and I slept in separate rooms the first night and the same room the second night and the third night we took the bus back to campus and he said, See you around, and punched me in the arm and went back to his dorm alone. He didn’t call or leave a message or come over for two weeks, during which my roommate kept saying, Nikky and Nathan, Nikky and Nathan, and I said nothing until I snapped one night—Do you have to be such a fucking college roommate all the time? She barely spoke to me during exam week, then I moved out, dropped out, went back to St. Paul for Christmas and moved to the city alone.

  The day before I left I called Nathan to tell him we needed to get a beer and he said Sure! as if it were nothing and I hated him and I wore my glasses and a sweatshirt and jeans that didn’t really fit and he told me his thesis was going to be a literary novel and I said, Sure, whatever, but what is this? What are we doing? And he said, What? And I said, My roommate keeps saying, “Nikky and Nathan, Nikky and Nathan,” trying to make him explain who Nikky and Nathan were.

  Well, duh, he said, Nikky (pointing at me) and Nathan (then himself).

  Never mind, I said, and now I know better—no one should trust the feelings that occur at nineteen or twenty. Everyone should just sit very still until they reach the calmer waters of later-young-adulthood, that promised land of lowered expectations. Even so, I still don’t get it—how so many people manage to keep asking the same person the same question every day—Is this what you want? Am I still what you want?—without going insane.

  Can I tell you something? he asked that afternoon as Echo rubbed her head against his knuckles. His face looked like a warped, worn-out version of his face ten years before and his apartment seemed like an expansion of his dorm room and our lives and everything in them a drawn-out weird-ass sequel to college, and I said, Sure you can tell me something, but I forgot whatever that something was. I was too tired to be good, to be tender, to care.

  And then there was the cat. I was familiar with the cat. We had an understanding.

  There had, however, been a series of altercations between Echo and me, years ago, while Nathan and I were in the middle of committing one of those low-grade, persistent infidelities: half-clothed and muscling against each other, we knocked over a stack of books near his bed, and Echo appeared, slashed my calf, hissed, bounded across the apartment, and later pounced on my back, howling, and whether she was trying to reclaim her territory or avenge me on behalf of his then girlfriend I do not know, but the next morning as I exited his bedroom, she was sitting in the center of the hallway, staring like a security guard. She made a low hiss, then waited on me while I was in the bathroom and when I opened the door she was all hisses and claws, forcing me to shut the door, trapping me inside.

  But once she got her head stuck in an empty Kleenex box (or maybe Nathan put it on her) and as she spasmed around the apartment Nathan laughed and filmed the struggle with his phone. I said, or maybe just thought, What is wrong with you? as I took the box off Echo’s head, and if a cat is able to express something like surprised gratitude, then this is what we experienced in our moment of eye contact before she bolted to the kitchen to hide between the refrigerator and the wall. After this she stopped barricading me in the bathroom and stared at me in a way that was notably lacking in hatred.

  * * *

  The first day I let myself into Nathan’s to feed Echo, I could hear a neighbor speaking on the phone, a woman: So can you figure this out for your own fucking self or do I have to do everything for you?… Well— … Well— … Well, if you would let me finish … Fucking hell.

  I lingered as I unlocked Nathan’s door, trying to discern what the problem was, and as I put food and water out for Echo and felt a fern’s dirt for dryness, I imagined someone else eavesdropping on the other half of this argument, also trying to discern what the problem was. I sat on the sofa with the vague impulse to read a magazine or take a nap, to make myself falsely at home, but I decided against it and as I left I heard that same neighbor say, Well, that’s what I told you, all reluctant and tired.

  When I came to feed Echo the next day I found the fern had been knocked over, dirt scattered over the rug and hardwood.

  We’ve come so far, I said to Echo as she emerged from the bathroom, surprising myself with how quickly I’d turned into one of those people who speak to cats. And now you have to go knocking over a fern. She swayed into the kitchen and ate what I’d put out.

  The vacuum was in the second closet I looked in, both of them packed with the kind of mess I remember Nathan living in—broken umbrellas, suitcases, old notebooks, coats wadded in corners, a dozen yellow highlighters and Ping-Pong balls rolling loose. It reminded me of his dorm room and his first apartment and the way this one had been before Analiese. Since then he’d lived in a sort of aesthetic calm: sofa reupholstered, shoes off at the door, art framed and hanging. He’d even repainted, correcting the smeared, patchy job he’d done when he’d first gotten this place and his first real job, at twenty-eight.

  He believed his newly painted walls meant something about him:

  I’m in the no-more-bullshit part of my life, he said.

  I asked him, Do you think people can really change? but he didn’t answer, just made us cocktails garnished with perfectly coiled lemon rinds. I’m a man who owns a zester, he said.

  After the fern was righted and the vacuum thrown back into the closet, I wondered, again, whether I should make myself at home, fix a drink maybe, or read a book. I sat on the sofa and thought of how a former therapist had said that with every trauma, we create a clone of ourselves to do the “emotional deadlifting” and I couldn’t tell if she meant your clones had to lift the “emotionally dead” or if your clone had to lift some sort of emotional barbell. Either way it sounded like a lot of work was expected of those clones, and I thought that my clones probably lacked the upper-body strength to do that lifting. I imagined all my clones sitting cross-legged on the floor of Nathan’s apartment, waiting on something from me.

  I don’t have anything for you, I said to the idea of those clones.

  Echo walked in, sat next to the sofa, and looked at where my lit
tle clone army would be, then went elsewhere. I found a book and started to read it, but I ended up just staring at the first sentence while wondering if I had a clone in me that had something to do with Nathan and maybe that’s where the confusion of what to do in his apartment was coming from, the state of being close to him without actually being close to him, which, I was realizing, was more or less all the last ten years had been and though we called each other “one of my oldest friends,” we weren’t quite friends, just old.

  My phone lit up: Nathan Cell.

  Are you busy?

  Not really, I said. It was nearing dusk.

  Because I think I need to talk. I need some advice, he said, but he didn’t really need advice; he just needed to be heard. I paced the apartment while he explained the situation, how he had defriended and blocked and unfollowed her and how that had prompted her to call him and what he had said and what she had said and so forth, but I stopped listening pretty quickly because I came across a shelf in his bedroom holding a vintage locket and a set of Russian dolls, both of which seemed to have some kind of sacred significance, and nearer to his bed I recognized a framed lithograph—and it took me a second to figure out why—it was one I’d made in college.

  And, you know, I get it. She’s only twenty-five so she’s scared of being so in love. Because what we had was fucking intense, you know? And it’s too much for her, which, you know, I understand. I’m usually the one doing what she’s doing, running—

  Yeah, I said, but he kept speaking without breaking stride. I could have been on mute, I realized, and he wouldn’t have known. Then I looked at my phone and saw I had somehow muted myself, so I unmuted myself and said, Yeah, but I knew it didn’t really make a difference. I wondered how long the print had been hanging so close to his bed. The last time I had seen it was in the old apartment and it was unframed and tacked up in a nook between the kitchen and the bathroom, somewhere it could be ignored, take up less space. All the designs I did now were on a computer, so something felt overly personal about him having one of my lithographs, a real history of something my hands had done.

  How long has my print been hanging in the bedroom, I asked, uncharacteristically interrupting him, a small jolt.

  Are you—are you at my place?

  Yeah.

  He was quiet for a long second.

  I don’t know. A few months, maybe. Analiese helped me rearrange. I think she put it there, and that got him on a rant about how much he changed for her and how happy he was to change for her but she never wanted to compromise anything—she just expected him to come and go whenever she wanted so that’s what he did and he was happy to do it, actually—and he said something about how she was closed to him or close to him and he said it a few times but I couldn’t tell which word was being said. Closed. Close. Closed … I don’t know.

  When we were younger my attention for him came so easily and I could listen to his endless opinions for hours and I suppose that meant I loved him in a way that only nineteen-year-olds can love, and though I don’t exactly feel that way anymore I do feel some baffling and unexplainable grace, some exhausted affection, though he didn’t deserve it any more than a jar of expired mustard deserves its spot in a refrigerator just by being there for so long without someone having the nerve to throw it away.

  And I realized during one of these calls, which became a regular feature of my afternoons and evenings in his apartment, the phone hot on my ear, the battery chiming its impending death, that I almost never told him anything about myself. For instance, my father had died last year, a sudden hemorrhage, and I hadn’t mentioned it. It had happened around the same time I began the celibacy thing and I had only told my closest friends because I dislike sympathy from strangers, even a postsneeze Bless you. And I guess this means Nathan really was more of a stranger than a “good friend,” or a familiar stranger or a bad friend or some cross of both. Or maybe I was just trying and failing to do something like something that Jesus might do—forgive and completely forget.

  Hey, listen, I have to go, I said, and he kept talking and I realized I’d hit mute again, so I unmuted and repeated myself.

  Right, of course. Hey, also, thanks for taking care of Echo. And for listening so much. It’s been really good to reconnect with you.

  It’s fine. I hope you—that you feel better. Soon.

  Talking to you is helping a lot.

  I wondered if I really was witnessing him change, if we were going to become sincerely friends, crying shoulders, laughing voices, people you tell about a parent’s death.

  As I unlocked the door later that week, the arguing woman was back—You’re going to ask me that right now?… I can’t believe this …

  I pretended to struggle with the keys, a performance for no one, so I could listen in longer.

  You have some fucking nerve … When does your flight get in?

  I’d been spending increasingly more time at Nathan’s apartment, bringing my laptop over, making coffee, ordering in. Echo would sit in my lap as I worked, as if she had forgotten everything that had ever happened between us. Maybe she had. Maybe I had too.

  Most days during Nathan’s regular call, I’d work on an image or e-mail. If I was feeling charitable, I’d paint my nails and mostly listen, maybe even try to find a moment where I could cut into his monologue, dispense some advice that would be almost entirely ignored. I started putting him on speaker and draping myself across the bed, his disembodied voice wafting around like a radio show trying to sound conversational.

  I started thinking, abstractly, about inviting Zach over, this man I’d recently been uncelibate with, thinking it would be funny to sleep with someone else in Nathan’s bed, but then I wondered if it said something pathetic about me, because I knew I’d be thinking of Nathan, at least a little, and then I would have to do laundry and I didn’t know where the nearest Laundromat was, and then I’d have to tell Nathan I had done his laundry because I’d brought someone back to his apartment, so I decided not to invite Zach over, except that’s not true, I actually did invite him over but he was busy.

  You’re cat-sitting for how long?

  Two weeks.

  I didn’t know you were one of those people who will be so accommodating, Zach said.

  I’m not one of those people.

  But you don’t even really like cats. And you don’t even really like him. This is the same guy with the Instagram feed that’s all selfies, right?

  That’s the one.

  He sounds insufferable.

  I knew Zach was right, that I had often suffered Nathan’s company instead of enjoyed it, but some people are just drawn to other people and the reasons or rules behind whom you are drawn to have never been completely clear to me, though I’ve noticed I’ve often been drawn to people for whom I can set the bar of expectations exceptionally low, people who can never disappoint me because I believe they are capable of so little. Maybe this is another one of those by-products of having your heart broken by the idea of Jesus, of losing the belief in a deep and mutual love with a divine entity, and of realizing it was all a long talk to an empty cloud. I suppose that therapist was right and maybe a person has to make a clone to be able to handle it all and in the meantime a person can only attempt to search for another Jesus, someone who will listen—or seem to listen—and forget.

  But I get it now, Nathan said over the phone, what really makes you happy is loving other people. That’s the only real point in life, and I know that in the past, maybe even with Analiese, I tried to protect myself from that, but I’m over it. I’m not that person anymore.

  I asked him, Do you think people can really change? and he was quiet for a little while and I could tell he was really considering it, and in his answer he brought up my religious past, telling me astoundingly accurate summaries of stories I thought he hadn’t even been listening to, like my failure to make it onto the Team Jesus Cheer Squad and the time I’d stolen Communion crackers and juice and forced them upon neighborhood dogs
and how I tacked up crayon portraits of Jesus in my room the way girls did with cutouts from Teen Bop. His voice was so tender and small, a fresh bird from an egg, and I felt moved by his little voice, or maybe just moved by his remembering things I was sure he’d forgotten or maybe just moved by the fact that I didn’t need or want anyone to listen and forget, that I was being comforted by Nathan remembering something that even I had nearly forgotten.

  The conversation ended but I stayed where I was for a while, nostalgic for the Team Jesus Cheer Squad. A lack of rhythm was what killed the audition, as my stomps and claps jutted from the other girls’ uniform beat. Back then I was afraid this failure said something about my true love for Jesus (or I was afraid about being afraid that this said something about my true love for Jesus) and I was still lying on Nathan’s bed thinking about this when the fire alarm went off—a high-pitched beeping and a computerized man’s voice saying, This is not a test. Please evacuate the building. This is not a test. But I gave myself a minute to believe this was a test. I didn’t want to get up, or stop thumbing over the past and start dealing with the present. Then I thought I smelled smoke and I knew that all you’re supposed to do in moments like these is just take care of your own bodily self and any nearby children or animals, but that is not exactly what I did. I gathered all my work materials and laptop before even remembering Echo and I tried to find something to carry her in, but I couldn’t find anything, and I tried to pick her up but she was darting around the apartment, rightly disturbed by the voice and deafening pitch and as I chased Echo I could picture the cheerleaders lifting the WHAT—WOULD—JESUS—DO? signs in perfect synchronicity, and only then did I realize what an unfair question that was because Jesus had, if the Bible is to be believed, supernatural powers, and his options—walking on water, ripping apart dead fish to make more dead fish—are not the options the rest of us have. All I could do was stuff Echo into a reusable shopping bag and take my print off the wall, which is also not what Jesus would have done, but it is what I did because I am not the Son of God—I’m just a person doing what I can.