“Should we not wait until she’s hooked up?” asked Errol, as gently as could be.
“Absolutely,” Clive agreed. “We wouldn’t want valuable data being lost to idle chitchat.”
11
Over the next few days, a routine emerged. Each evening, I’d have an interaction and then I’d walk over to the Golconda, where Errol would greet me. Then I’d report to Vadis and Jin, the two of them coming just shy of shoving a thermometer up my ass. Errol began escorting me everywhere I went, which seemed more than a little Pyongyangy. Each time, I was told the meditation room was off-limits, under construction, or no “chaperone” was available. This, despite the fact that Errol was standing right in front of me. Meanwhile, if Clive was around, he’d breeze through, confer with his staff, and thank me for my participation as if I’d signed up to taste-test gum. Then he’d take his leave, off to some event requiring cuff links.
Soon I knew this stretch of Chinatown better than my own neighborhood. I could draw every street corner, reproduce the font on every window. I knew which buildings were diligent about breaking down their boxes and which weren’t, which had window ledges wide enough for me to put drinks on.
But the repetition was chipping away at me. Instead of dressing up in anticipation of the past, I began dressing down for it. So what if someone I used to sleep with no longer entertained the idea? Who cared what these men thought of me? There would be another one of these jokers along at any minute. I felt like a human Etch-A-Sketch—all I had to do was blink and a new chapter of my past would be waiting for me. They say you only hurt the ones you love, but it turns out you can hurt lots of people you only moderately like. I began to feel like my dating life had been some elaborate logic proof, showing me how to wind up with someone not for the one person he is but for all the people he isn’t. If human partnership was founded more on trait elimination than trait gravitation, what were all those years of heartbreak for?
There’s an acceptable degree of slovenly that anyone can attain, the point at which one’s sex appeal still shines through and becomes more appealing for the challenge. I blew past this point quickly. I wore different combinations of the same set of clothing, which I did not wash. I stopped tucking, tweezing, or shaving anything. I decided that moisturizer was unnatural. The cavewomen didn’t have moisturizer and some of them made it to forty. My scalp began to itch. Ponytails were painful to the touch when released. I gnawed at my cuticles until they bled. When I bathed, I did so poorly. Waxy flakes of soap would lodge themselves in the hair at the base of my neck and I’d still be picking them out at noon, sniffing to confirm they were soap.
Spending this much time in the past, with men as the common denominator, wasn’t doing my mental hygiene any favors either. On top of being repulsed by the digestion of romance as identity—the world was on fire and I couldn’t pass a Bechdel Test with myself—my behavioral borders were disintegrating. Devoting my nights to a parallel world made this one feel like a simulation. I stared at people on the street as if I were wearing sunglasses. A woman sitting next to me on the subway would be shaking her foot, and the urge to bash her knee with a book was so overwhelming, I’d have to get up and move.
On the phone with Boots, I’d drift off or stare at the cat while he was talking until it felt like his voice was the internal monologue of the cat.
In the mornings, I’d brush my teeth and stare at the tube of toothpaste, cowed by the mental feat it would take to buy another one when this one ran out, by the repetition of all existence. I imagined some corner of a museum, piled high with empty toothpaste tubes.
At work, people followed up about emails they’d sent and I looked at them as if through a scrim. They were addressing old me, daytime Lola, before my world was flipped over, chunks of the past falling into the well. They’d ask about my weekend plans, which was how I knew it was Friday. I’d stare at my monitor, brightness cranked up, as if trying to blind myself. Oh, how much easier it is for the sane to imitate the insane than the other way around. Who could understand me now? Recently revived coma patients, that’s who. Those were my people. People stuck in the past and flung, without their consent, into the present.
* * *
Fernando was the son of a prominent commercial director who told him that all women would be after his money. Brush your teeth, go to sleep, don’t dream of gold diggers. He eschewed any behavior that teetered on generous. We always split the bill. “Since I got” was a common refrain. Since I got the tickets, you can get the snacks. Since I got the car, you can get the gas. Since I got myself out of my mother’s womb, you can get your ass to Queens. Fernando was supposed to help me move apartments, which I’d told myself would be a cementing experience. I had visions of U-Hauls and “Do you really need this many cookbooks?” But he never showed. At first, my texts contained photos of overstuffed garbage bags, accompanied by captions like “thinking of leaving it like this.” Then they escalated to “REALLY?!” until, eight hours later, settled in my new apartment, I dug out a cedar stick Oscar had given me and smudged every room.