I. Novel of Ideas
In this novel, which I would never ask you to read, which once you used to prop open the window during the heatwave in December that gave us cause for dread, there are three brothers. Can I talk about it, just a little? Coats buttoned to their chins, stifled by woolen scarves, they tread carefully on the ice, carrying messages across town to women who, for all their verve, faint too often from hysterics. One might consider Alexei, saintly Alyosha, to be heroic, like when he asks Lise if she’s fallen in love with chaos, aiming to steer her back to the divine. Ah, she sighs, contemplating arson, it’s such a bore, and I understand that I could fall for any woman here.
With the brothers, though, I arbitrate my affections more distrustfully. Alexei, I have heard, was the man whom Dostoevsky wished to be. In this chapter, the one I was telling you about, the devil wears a topcoat, and—why aren’t you listening? In this chapter, the devil is described as a “well-bred parasite,” and I hope you will listen, I beg you, actually, because all I want in life is to find someone who likes my words, and then to suck their blood. So forgive me, now, but I have to ask: Those things you told me, did you mean them? Remember that day? You were talking with your eyes. You glanced at me over your shoulder and I saw a whole book there, a whole novel of ideas. So why do you turn from me now? [Name Redacted], what are you doing with that knife?
II. A Dispatch from the Trenches
What must be said first is that I thought she was beautiful, the cutest girl on the internet, so I paid a dollar to message her on OkCupid. Her inbox was full. Why wouldn’t it be? She was the cutest girl on the internet. In one message, if I remember correctly, I said something about dinosaurs, but you can’t expect infallibility here. My god, my god, it was practically the analog age, I had an iPhone 3 that couldn’t even support Tinder. On my ProBoards forum, Scums, I pasted her picture into a thread I’d made months ago, POST HERE WHEN YOU YEARN FOR LOVE, and my invisible friends said, “Is that you?”
I adored my invisible friends, who hailed from all across my own country, the UK, and New Zealand. We called ourselves scum and had met in 2007 on Neopets, where we went to mourn the deaths of our childhoods and talk about our eating disorders. “How could you think that’s me?” I demanded of the gang. “She’s a thousand times cuter than me! Are you all morons or what?” And they said, No, we are scum, just like you, and they told me to carry myself with confidence on my date.
It was a tall order. I’d been on—three dates that year? Or four. The first two ghosted, I remember that, how at home, I’d lapped up my own blood and wondered where I’d gone wrong. With the tiny blonde who’d worn a men’s Hawaiian shirt and Docs, had I talked too inanely about baseball? Who on earth cared about baseball? Not me. Not anymore. I was done with baseball. What had that been about? Or perhaps I had forgotten to mention The Brothers Karamazov, the time I’d read it in high school to be smart, and now, look at me, I was so smart, I was smart enough to know the hazards of making eye contact with a pretty girl, to evade my own doom. Within a week, I gave up on waiting to hear from her. I sighed, plugged in my iPhone 3 to charge, and went to bed.
But I wasn’t deterred. Actually, I was deterred, brutally so, but I’d grown stupid from desire, emboldened by my newfound brazen stupidity, so I kept taking stupid chances. The second girl, a lapsed Jew with dark, curly hair, talked sadly of her weight, her lifelong battle with her body, and I understood that we were at war, every one of us, we who prowled the dating apps for other women to love. This girl didn’t want to love me. She lied, at ten o’clock, that she needed to leave to walk her dog, but I was too eager to trust and just followed her home. She lived in a crooked apartment with a stained beige carpet and housemates. Who knows how many? This was San Francisco, the Mission District, in the digital age! She had plenty of housemates, I can tell you that much. Because I tailed her, she had to walk the dog for real, and not until she ditched me at the bus stop did I feel certain I would die on this battlefield.
My third date—there were only three, not four—got me stoned right away, blitzed off my ass, so I couldn’t even drink the beer she bought me. I felt like a monster, but this time I didn’t like her, which turned out to be just as embarrassing as being despised. Who was I to have aspirations in San Francisco in the age of information? Confidence? I replied to my invisible friends on the internet. Isn’t there an easier option?
III. Bad Ideas
Keith wanted a dick to suck and I wanted company, so I promised to be his guardian. He’d just arrived from New York and I’d been leaving monstrous voicemails to a girl I knew, describing my wounds, because she’d stabbed me in the groin and I couldn’t stop tracing the gash with my finger. The worst part was, I’d loved every second of it, the thrill of mutilation and the messy aftermath, and absently, earlier, I’d pulled out my intestines. Now, outside QBar, I twined them around my fingers to make gorgeous and exciting new shapes. I showed them to Keith, but he wasn’t very interested. He said, Can you find us cocaine? and I thought that sounded like a good idea.
It means something, loyalty! Virtue matters, even in these times, especially in these times. I’d known this boy for twenty minutes and was determined, already, to be the best friend he’d ever had, so I dashed up and down Castro Street, touching the arms of strange women to ask what they could sell me. Now, even their creased foreheads and bemused stares did not leave me humiliated, their screaming eyes did not deafen me, because I’d been granted purpose, and my stomach leapt when one of them smiled. She had exactly what I wanted, and she wasn’t even perturbed when more guts leaked out at that moment. Probably she’d been wounded before too; perhaps she was pleased to see her impact on me. We slid into an alleyway to make the transaction, and her fingers were so nimble I thought she must play an instrument, I thought her music must be so beautiful it could reach into the depths of history.
In St. Petersburg, ten years ago, I traversed the Neva by boat, sweetly anesthetized by the rhythm of water sloshing against the stern. I came here to discover how, in the lives of Russians, suffering informs even happiness, enhances it, gives it weight and grace. It seemed romantic, I guess, from afar, but all I could notice were the haircuts of the boys who milled around storefronts. All I could think about was my own country, in love, I believed, with suffering myself. Why did these boys have mullets? Why, in our century, did they cut their hair like that? For the first time in my life I was a foreigner, a role for which I’d been rehearsing, practicing loneliness at the school library, so in St. Petersburg, I shone. No speak English, I’d inform the vendors of matryoshka dolls and magnets with Lenin’s likeness, because here I was too free to want their junk. And as for the man who grabbed my wrist and dragged me across the produce market to his stall? I don’t like strawberries, but how easy, too easy, to become another person, to impersonate a woman who loves them! No one could be any the wiser. Yet when I told him they looked delicious, so firm and fresh, he said, No speak English, and for some reason, then, I had to keep talking, explaining the whole of myself, how I read a book that made me come here and now I didn’t know who I was. In this city, one could snort up the void like something ecstatic.
IV. A Dispatch from the Gold Mines
Lise’s mother, Mrs. Khokhlakov, suggests it to Dmitry just before the murder: make your fortune in the gold mines, young man, and with a fistful of hundred-ruble notes, win the heart of your lady love! All this while her daughter, fifteen years old, sits alone in her room, fantasizing about setting fire to the house. Elsewhere in town, Alexei, our saint, visits the disgraced officer Snegirev, whose oldest girl has left for Petersburg to fight for women’s emancipation. But not much is said about her. I’m left wondering. Elsewhere in my life, in the world beyond my overstuffed mind, I go on a good date! At least, I think so, but I’m too hungover in the morning to assemble a picture from such scant and shining details. We must have combed the mines together, I decide, we must have gone deep.
“What do you like to read?” I’d asked her as we trekked to the crest of Tank Hill, trading off taking swigs from a bottle of whiskey, this I remember at least. From such heights, the city sprawled in every direction, splashes of light and color to the east, the dark, mammoth gloom of Golden Gate Park to the west. I drank so much that I wasn’t even horrified by her answer, that she liked the silliest novels in print, about teen girls chosen to save the world, as if such a thing could happen in the world, as if heroines in real life could ever do more than sit in their mothers’ homes and imagine flames.
“My favorite book?” I asked when she shot back the same question. “Oh god, who knows? When I was young, I guess, I really loved The Brothers Karamazov.” She told me she hadn’t read it, casually, as though it were a book that people read, and I felt oddly glad for her lack of interest, how she turned the conversation to gardening or astrology, something normal, because what else could be said? I’d read them all, those books about men who feel lost, my heart clenching like a tectonic plate as I underlined, recklessly, in pen. Ah! I would think, I too have felt lost! So it was fine, really, I swear it was, and on my first good date, I couldn’t think of anything more to say about it, at least not aloud. Instead, with my eyes, I said: Look at me, I have survived until now. This thing that we share, is it worth something to you?
V. Hits One High
Right away, I wanted to worship her. Then, I didn’t know how, and she didn’t want to hear about The Brothers Karamazov. I had nothing to do, not a thing in the world, so years ago I read the western canon. “Will this make me human?” I would ask Mr. Gordon in fourth period English, hopefully, thumbing the pages of some paperback like a deck of cards, but he would say, “No, I’m sorry, nothing will make you human.” So I took Statistics senior year, deciding to spurn literature, when it became a source of shame, all that looking around for God-knows-what. Then, I spent class trying to make my handwriting look interesting, I wanted cramped handwriting that conveyed an enticing sort of desperation, I was working hard, I swear, just at the wrong things. I had just discovered that what traps me most is when a woman’s eyes are very dark but don’t hide anything, like if the night could talk, tell you all’s well. How could you not be human if you like to look at stars? A girl’s eyes might ask while she speaks of something entirely different.
That same spring, I got into baseball. Last Saturn’s return, someone asked about it, and I shrugged and blushed and said it was really about a girl, how it mattered that she was watching too when Renteria came to bat in Texas. The stars had been sucked out of the sky that night, as though they'd harnessed the power of the sky to light the field, and her heart must have jumped too when the announcer boomed, Hits one high, hits one deep! We couldn’t believe it. All this guy ever did was knock grounders to short, but now he’d sucked the stars out of a whole sky and loaded them into his pockets. He tossed stars in the air like confetti as he jogged around the bases. Had a poem ever done that? I read poetry between innings. So: to say it was about a girl is to dodge how I learned, at the end of my childhood, about faith. Late summer, leaving home, caught in brutal turbulence, I said, Baseball Gods, you who have given so much, please don’t let us crash! And we didn’t.
VI. A Dispatch from the Dugout
Recently, it dawned on me that I’ve never had a truly heterosexual thought in my life. In Montreal, where I moved after high school, mainly to drink at eighteen and manufacture a romantic sense of displacement—also for college, I was always forgetting that part—in this place, where a gloomy steel crucifix refracted snow-light from the top of Mont Royal, I brainstormed reasons why I couldn’t sleep with Emil. He had a weird face, for starters, like the squashed version of some doomed French poet. As a teen, he’d made YouTube videos of himself weeping, and as a child, he’d roamed the docks near his family’s summer home near the North Sea, pretending to be a “mongoloid,” his words, to startle the neighbors. That night, I wanted to watch TV instead, to find out if Sam would finally win over Diane in an ancient episode of Cheers. I was always getting mad when he messed things up, but I knew this man wanted to sleep with me and I knew that meant I should want to sleep with him too. I wanted to know why I was supposed to want this. I thought, Maybe if I sleep with him, I’ll find out! This was my experiment with men, every time, the hypothesis I tested during all sorts of strange adventures. In his bed, finally, I decided that I hated him, and thus the mystery was tidily solved. I hadn’t wanted to sleep with him because of hatred, which had surged up seemingly out of nowhere, but surely it had been there all along! And I felt glad that his penis was small, both out of vengefulness, because I knew that was supposed to matter, and disappointment, because I couldn’t figure out what difference it made. “Ah, The Brothers Karamazov!” he had said on our first date, when I’d brought it up. “Yes, I’ve read it too.” Then he patted me on the head and called me cute. Leaving his apartment, I congratulated myself for my hustle, like a benchwarmer hurtling to first on some measly grounder to short, the easiest of outs, on the off chance that the inevitable does not occur.
After I ditched him, which was an ordeal, he hadn’t wanted to be ditched, I started taking Ritalin to salvage my pitiful grades. Finals were approaching, and I was learning something-or-other about this-or-that. I’d been here over a year and I still didn’t know how to declare a major. On my Islam exam for Religious Studies, I exhibited bad taste and poor study habits in comparing the Sunnis and Shiites to Sam and Diane: will those two ever work it out? On my English exam, I argued that Sam Malone was comparable to the Arthurian Fisher King. If the pitcher can be called “sovereign” over the game of baseball, we might see Sam’s role in his bar as an extension of this idea, for he is charged with bringing order and prosperity to Cheers, I reported to my invisible friends on the internet, who liked the idea more than my professor had. The frustration that Diane instills in him emerges because he cannot control her, or control his desire for her, and he is thus rendered metaphorically impotent as he attempts to simultaneously exist in two irreconcilable domains.
Irreconcilable: adjective, representing findings or points of view that are so different from each other that they cannot be made compatible. When he slid back into my Facebook messages with the spine-rattling words, “I want you,” I said, “Listen, Emil—you like Bukowski, so this really can’t be, and that’s why I’ve been blowing you off.” Finally, thanks to Intro to Women’s Studies, I had given up one of my male writers and was even weaponizing my disdain against another male! Earlier that week, also thanks to Intro to Women’s Studies, in regards to a third male, I had posted a board on Scums called “Question about consent,” to which my invisible friends replied, “Well, yes, that’s technically rape, but you can think about it however you want.” Disconcerted, I didn’t want to think about it at all anymore, so I went to my board “Stoned thoughts on Cheers” and wrote, “Look at Diane! I wish I looked like her. If Sam doesn’t marry her, I might have to!”
VI. To the Dogs
“This is the worst camping trip in the world!” I screamed in all-caps to my invisible friends from my new iPhone 4, huddled in a sleeping bag, eating graham crackers. My girlfriend, at that time, was fishing with her friend Dan, the Australian tech bro who’d been too much of a drunk to help us on New Years.’ We’d lost him in the night somehow, which was why I’d asked my parents to chip in towards this phone. “What’s wrong with yours?” they wanted to know, and I’d explained, bitterly, how I couldn’t do anything with it. I might as well have a brick, which would be comparable in weight and an upgrade in stylishness. I couldn’t order Pad Thai from GrubHub, I couldn’t swipe right to collide with sane women on Tinder, I was entangled with a lunatic thanks to my phone, not that I didn’t love her, but what’s love anyway? On our first date, she’d told me that her father taught her to fish; moments later she amended, “Actually, that’s not the story. I don’t think you’ll be weird about this?” So it’s true that I loved her, how she made statements with the lilt of questions, like when she carried on, “He took us into the woods? My sister and me? With some fishing poles, and then he wandered off to do meth. So, we taught ourselves to fish?” I didn’t know how to touch her then, when it would have been easy, when it would have made sense, but now, six months had passed, and I was great at touching her. The soft, downy back of her neck. The soft curl of her hip. The soft heat of her inner thigh. All softness, all warmth, but did it really make sense anymore? It seemed unfair for the question to emerge after so much struggle to get here, to this place where I could bury my nose in the crook of her neck, in public, which could prompt even applause! These men who cheered and whistled—they weren’t really clapping for me or my triumphs, over murky shame and fear. Rather, they congratulated themselves for bearing witness to beauty, for their own boldness in evading what lay beyond their comprehension, for their blessed ignorance of the pain that goes into the making of beauty. But here, there were no onlookers. I was in the wilderness, without a single book to read, and my girlfriend was off fishing, and I wasn’t sure I wanted her to come back.
The crux of the phone issue: I needed a rideshare app, Uber or Lyft, after the debacle of New Years’ Eve, not that I spilled every detail to my parents. “Why couldn’t your girlfriend just call the car?” they’d asked when I’d described us stranded on Potrero Avenue, revelers staggering past without even glancing our way, without the bandwidth for anyone else’s chaos, not at this turning point, this dog-eat-dog time of night. I told my parents that her phone was dead, not that she’d been trying to run into traffic the whole time, that I’d been holding her back while waving for taxis, and tacked on, “It’s about safety, understand? Cab drivers were trying to charge us a hundred bucks to take us a mile home. You’re the ones who told me to live a little, so don’t you want me to survive the life I got?”
This was true, the living thing. They were very happy for me! No qualms about the whole lesbian awakening, as long as I stopped reading dusty old books in my room alone, as long as I did nothing too stupid, so I didn’t mention how we’d gotten here in the first place, how she’d wanted to see her apartment for a last time before the landlord changed the locks. An illegal rent hike and eviction, since the unit was rent controlled, but when I broached it, this thing that had seemed obvious, she turned to me in anger: Why didn’t you tell me? And I couldn’t remember, not exactly. Had she described the situation with confidence that diminished my doubts, made me think I was missing some key detail? Had I assumed she knew, already, and hadn’t wanted to fight a complicated battle? She was homeless now. How could I have thought any of this? Had I simply not cared? In the unit, where once she’d cooked me tomato soup on a hotplate, for $1200 a month she had a room but no kitchen, she collapsed on the bed, facedown, and couldn’t get up. “Hey, you don’t live here,” I tried to tell her, but she wouldn’t budge, and the more I persisted, as my voice rose in octave and volume, as I pulled on her arm, then yanked, then wrenched, I felt suddenly, inexpressibly cruel.
VII. Dispatch from Outer Space
Hey, invisible friends, my fellow scum! So, here’s the deal. I think my girlfriend is, like, an alcoholic? At the very least, she’s definitely an asshole, and I don’t know what to do. So! I am drinking her whiskey, as revenge! Ha! Ha! It makes her a mean drunk, you see, whereas champagne makes her gentler, funnier, so that’s what she drinks in the morning, to face the day, and whiskey at night. Bitter as I feel, I want to say that she has turned me into an outlaw, but in truth, this is not my first heist. Remember that boy? The one in Montreal? Not the copywriter who looked like a toad crossed with a French poet, but the first boy, Brian, whom I met when I was still imagining I’d have a normal freshman year, doing drugs with other people instead of by myself. I liked him because he kept a journal and read Dostoevsky, so I wanted him to be my boyfriend, but I never wrote that down, not even in my own Moleskine notebook. Rather, I wrote, “Why doesn’t Brian want to be my friend anymore?” I wanted him to be my boyfriend without ever giving thought to how it might look, which was easy, he lost interest so fast, the main thing that kept me interested.
Here was how it went: he was a snob and I was a snob, so the night we met, we got sloshed and held hands, jaunting down Rue Prince Arthur like some dynamic duo. I don’t remember what he looked like, though it hasn’t been long. I remember feeling flattered, like I was holding not a man’s hand but a piece of evidence, proof that I wasn’t ugly after all, and I remember a thrill seizing me when Leanne pulled me aside, close, her fingers brushing my shoulder, her stringy blonde curls hanging in her face, to conspire. “Are you gonna hook up?” she asked, and I leaned towards her, and what did it matter, how could it matter if we were both girls? Leaning towards her, into her scent, I said, “I don’t know, I don’t know,” thinking I’d try a new experiment with this boy, a waiting game, to see if it changed things, the problems that always erupted and lay roiling beyond my grasp, the disgust I felt towards myself and the men when I ceded too soon. Why? I wasn’t against sex, which was important, witness testimony of my worth! Yet the pride I felt in seduction always diminished into—not shame, but revulsion, a sense of something being off, a sense that worth was not worth obtaining, the sudden and terrifying conviction that I could be like this, a total weirdo, a lone reader of books, if I wanted, if it made me happy. The shock of asking myself: What is happiness, how do I get it?
So, in Montreal, a few years back, I got mad at Brian and stole his whiskey. I met him our first night in town, and I guess, later, he found other girls he liked more, or maybe he just didn’t like my experiment, he wanted things quick and soon, he felt he deserved that. Who can blame him? I have known terrible urgency myself, like when I wanted a boyfriend so I could say, finally, that I had a boyfriend. Now I have a girlfriend, and I can’t decide whether I hate her. So I stole her whiskey. We were walking to campus together, Brian and me, for a start-of-term festival of decadence, complete with free pizza, a real coming-of-age experience, and he hid his Jack Daniels in the bushes before entering the quad. When he ditched me with curling lips, cool as outer space, I circled back and drank alone, like I’m doing right now. Do I dump her, you guys? I don’t know how to fly like that, to say those words. The moon, does it ever get bored, doing what it does, circling and circling the same globe?
VIII. Pro and Contra
“You’re a snob,” my girlfriend told me all the time, it was her choicest piece of ammo and she was so dumb, she didn’t even know it was my favorite word. That night, staying up to send her off—she was going to Mexico, alone, to find the Zapatistas—I had been trying to describe a passage from The Brothers Karamazov, which comes just after Ivan speaks of justice and its lack. Yet I love the sticky leaves as they open in spring, he says, and I love the blue sky, and I love some people. Whom one loves, you know sometimes without knowing why. I couldn’t find the passage, though, so I was left wondering how even this, a search for such pretty words, drawn out, perhaps, since the book was so long, since I had no clue where the lines were and was hellbent on tracking them down—how did even this turn into a fight? I’d been trying to convince her that there was true sublimity in the world, and she’d taken the opposite stance, that art lived within and not outside the realm of the political. Maybe I’d tossed out, scornfully, “Well, if the only book I’d ever read was The Hunger Games, I might feel the same as you,” and so maybe I deserved to be called a snob, maybe I was disgusting after all. She, I maintain, deserved to be snubbed, because she didn’t know me after so much time, in attempting cruelty she had only made me feel pleased with myself. “Shut up!” I hissed later that night as I helped her down the stairs, wondering how on earth she’d get on her bus to the airport, let alone her flight, she was drunk as hell and going to wake everyone up. “Shut up, you have such problems, I hate you, and you’re never going to find the Zapatistas, and I hope you don’t!” She wouldn’t remember, I reasoned, which was why I was spilling everything, truths and fictions at once, because in fact I didn’t care whether she found what she was looking for. She could walk the whole length of Mexico, north to south, up jagged mountains or through sprawling canyons, and find nothing, no whiff of maize nor avocado, not the twang of a guitar, not the thrum of a harp, and it wouldn’t make an iota of difference.
A few days later, she texted, “Hey, I found the Zapatistas, and they’re totally dope. Also, I’m wondering: did you not break up with me because I was leaving and you weren’t sure I’d come back? ‘Cos if so, let’s break up.” Heart sailing into my throat, lighter than air all of a sudden, I texted back, “Yeah!” and I wouldn’t hear from her again for three years, when she called from rehab to make amends. “And what have you been up to?” she wanted to know when she’d finished up business, so I lied that I was reading a book.
IX. Postmortem: A Voicemail From QBar, Transcribed
[Name Redacted]! You won’t believe what’s happened to my intestines thanks to you, and yes, I’m slurring my words, but all that means is that I mean all I say. I should have known from the start you were trouble, because the day we met, you spoke right away of my enemy, literature. I didn’t want to tell you that I’ve read the western canon, because isn’t it a little sad? To have looked for myself in such a place?
To determine the cause of Fyodor Pavlovich’s death, an investigation was conducted, but of course the detectives botched the case, thrusting blame where it was easiest. I ask you now to listen for once, to listen carefully. I confide in you, too late, but the truth is, I couldn’t stomach your awful questions until everything started leaking out on its own. We all deserve to carry out the crimes of which we dream, to seize for ourselves and not leave for others. We forget to give people chances. The word postmortem means, literally, after death, so it can also describe the analysis of a failure, like when I told you that I’m sort of a writer. Sort of? What’s that mean? It means I can talk for hours, ‘til I run out of air, ‘til I die, but I never believe what I say.
Sara Brody is a writer from San Francisco, presently at work on a novel. Her stories have appeared in Narrative Magazine, the Masters Review, the Adroit Journal, Fourteen Hills, and elsewhere, and she holds an MFA in Fiction from San Francisco State University. She is represented by Akin Akinwumi at Willenfield Literary Agency and can be followed on Twitter, @sbbrody, or found at sara-brody.com.