Each having survived the trauma of reintroduction to the other, cocaine was a deserved treat for Gloria and I. Doing the cocaine also worked as a nice segue out of our taught commiseration, as Gloria was astonished to learn I’d evolved into a person with the ability to procure cocaine. My recitation of the Saga of Robert captivated her, though I made some choice omissions in the telling, specifically the mystic/prophetic stuff, which I also skirted around while recounting the rest of my day. I just figured, why even go there? Why stress out a fun night unless I knew I really had to? For all I knew, none of that weird shit amounted to anything. However, I did make a point of emphasizing what Robert had told me about the ketamine.
“He said the ketamine was really, really strong. So if you want to try it later on, maybe I would too, but right now I’m thinking I might not.” Gloria also seemed uncommitted to the ketamine. Slipping the stuff into a back pocket and out of mind, I asked again, “What’s the deal tonight? Are we hanging out in hotel bars?”
The timing of my question was poor; Gloria was on the verge of doing the blow. She held up a finger like hold on, please and skied the slope tapped out along the back of Robert’s business card, inhaling it straight off the surface. I’d offered a crumpled five-dollar bill for her to use as a straw-tool, but Gloria explained to me the sanitary benefits of using the highest denomination possible when doing this sort of thing, explaining Robert’s use of Benjamin Franklin, something I thought was just for show. If Robert had managed the impressive achievement of snorting cocaine with dignity, Gloria one-upped him by snorting cocaine with elegance, her execution unconscious and unapologetic. When she finished, we switched off, and Gloria finally began:
“Seth, you know I’m well off, right?”
“Hm. Sure, but that’s a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ sort of thing, tacky to bring up. I noticed you covering people’s tabs a lot; very nice…” I considered further. “You never complained about having to buy books or new furniture or anything. I didn’t think too much about it. Besides, Gloria, you know I don’t care about that.” I tapped out a modest line as I talked, working cautiously like I was preparing to snort nitroglycerin.
“Yeah I know you don’t care.” Gloria kept fussing with her hair, a pitch-black tangled thicket, famous for its unruliness. I pictured a small bird flying out, and I liked the image, but kept it to myself. Carefully I raised the bump to my face. When I did, Gloria sucked in air and puffed out her cheeks like she was going to blow all the dust off the card, but stopped just short, cackling. Gloria was a real rascal on coke and I told her so before snorting my portion.
Gloria kept laughing at me. “You do it so funny.”
“What so funny?”
“The cocaine. So intense when you do it!”
I harrumphed. “Sorry I can’t do cocaine cool enough for you, Miss Beverly Hills.”
“And still so sensitive!” Gloria cooed before resuming, “Yes, I’m well off. But the degree of how well I am off is a key distinction, because, see, I’m…up there. Way up there.” She raised her hand high above her head, palm facedown, marking a point on her imaginary yardstick that measured height of wealth.
“Noted,” I said.
“And so…where do I start with this?” Gloria froze into a statue, Girl Caught in Thought, fist in her mouth, paralyzed by the effort of organizing her exposition. As ever, I let her do it, waiting patiently until things clicked and Gloria decided, “I’ll start with the answer, then explain it: The party we’re about to go to is an annual affair hosted by Mockingbird Support, a group who provides specialized therapy to the children of billionaires all over the world. I, Seth,” Gloria, self-deprecating, daintily pressed her hand to her breast, “am one of the anointed few. Dad, Ol’ Cassius, qualifies as a billionaire.”
“Making me a plus-one to the anointed few.” Teasing, I bumped her shoulder.
Gloria sighed impatiently. “C’mon, man, give me a reaction! I’ve been so nervous to tell you this, it’s not very flattering. And I don’t want to hear you ‘don’t really care;’ tell me what you’re thinking for real.”
What I was thinking for real. “What’s not flattering about your dad being a billionaire?” I was being an idiot for real.
Gloria gave me a look of withering incredulity. “Are you stupid now? Half the people we know from school would lynch me if they knew I belonged to the One Percent. We’re despicable, and I’m ashamed.”
Gloria was correct on all fronts. It was unfashionable to be Of Wealth, despite most of our peers being so. Socialists in the streets, yet sleeping in capitalist’s sheets, so to speak. And sure, billionaires were bad in general. “Tell me more about Mockingbird Support,” I said. “I’m still processing.”
“Alright.” Gloria lit another cigarette and wielded its glowing end like the tip of a pen, punctuating and underlining her speech in amber ink. “Mockingbird Support is an international organization founded in the latter half of the twentieth century. A new generation, the children of the elite, were being born into the insane circumstances of their parents’ unprecedented prosperity, fucking up their brains in new and beautiful ways. Suicide rates rose spectacularly high, and no established methods of therapy were helping.” Gloria stopped her recitation to consider: “I shouldn’t say ‘these kids’ or use the past tense. I’m a part of it, I’m not detached.” I thought this was a rhetorical statement, but Gloria was looking at me expectantly, so I said sure, she should say it however she felt was best. Gloria kept handing me whips to flagellate her, but I wouldn’t do it.
Gloria rubbed her eyes and kept going. “Okay, so all our rich parents began noticing that we were killing ourselves and decided to pool their powers to figure out exactly how to throw money at this problem to make it go away. Mockingbird Support is the result of their efforts, an intensive group therapy session held bi-annually at rotating locations. Their logic was that, if it’s only our peers we can relate to, then it should be our peers who conduct the therapy. With some professional supervision, of course.”
“Whoa,” I said. “What goes on in these sessions?”
“This is the creepiest part.” Despite Gloria’s disdain for the subject, I could see she relished the opportunity to storytell, an aptitude she was proud of. “I can’t tell you. Anyone who’s a part of Mockingbird Support has to sign one of those…those things, they’re called…” Gloria snapped her fingers to jog her memory and the silver rings that adorned them glinted.
“NDA?”
“NDA, yes. We are sworn to secrecy. No sharing the methodology of the therapy, no sharing what participants say. People fly in from all over to make these sessions, and the Support is super strict about attendance. If you miss two, you're done, kicked out. Because you’re not to be trusted anymore or whatever.”
Now this was worth a reaction. I believed what I was hearing, but I couldn’t believe I was hearing it. “So you’re, like, actually on some Illuminati shit,” I exclaimed, unable to hide the excitement in my voice.
“Nah, the Illuminati is a whole other thing, we don’t really chill with those guys.”
I gasped.
“Just kidding! Kind of. But yes, it’s all weird weird weird. I really wish it wasn’t a part of my life, but it is.” Gloria shook her head. I did not envy her.
“And so now I’m your plus-one at the Mockingbird Support party?”
“If you want.”
“Oh, yes. I never get to do anything boujee. It’s just, based on what you just told me, it’s hard to believe they would allow any outsiders into their party.”
Gloria shrugged. “Against character, right? Yeah, I don’t know, but they do. I’ve actually never been to one of these parties because I never want to go, I’m not really friends with anyone else in Support since we only meet twice a year, but everything lined up to have you here at the same time it was going down, so I figured, well…” She gave me a compromised smile, close-lipped. “Maybe it could be alright if Seth was there.”
That got me. I choked up a little and squeezed Gloria’s hand. “Aw. Well, I’m glad to be here. It’s gonna be fun. It’s already fun.” A moment of silence dropped like a period. The exposition was delivered, the drugs were done, and the rest of the world slowly crept back onstage. Luxury vehicles circled Gloria and I like we were the sun.
The stars were hidden and the warm breeze never stopped, swaying through and taking the dead tree as its unwilling dance partner, dry, colossal limbs creaking as they blustered to and fro.
“But Gloria,” I said finally, and she turned to me, eyebrows arched. “You gotta tell me at least one thing about Mockingbird Support therapy sessions. Just one, then I won’t ask anymore.”
Gloria smirked and considered it, tapping her chin. Gloria is very beautiful tonight was what I was thinking for real. Dark lipstick and dark eyeliner accented her best features, and the jumpsuit was doing favors. I thought about the history of the world as told by its most beautiful women. I thought about things I liked and things I wanted. I bit the inside of my cheek. Cut it out.
“All I’ll say is: Reeducation.”
***
The party was not in The Purity proper, but tucked in a corner of the hotel’s expansive property. I was following Gloria, re-tucking my handsome corduroy shirt as we approached the main building then turned right, following the shrub-lined sidewalk until the entrance materialized just around a hidden bend, an iron-rod gate embedded into a cobblestone wall that gave no indication as to the size of the space behind it. Flanking the gate were a pair of bouncers, buzzcut silver-fox types with jawlines that could cut string, standing alongside a pair of lit tiki torches, their flames shivering in the wind. With Gloria at the lead, we approached.
“Hello,” Gloria greeted the man on the left. “We’re here for the Mockingbird Support party. I’m ‘Gloria’ and I’m with ‘Seth,’ my plus one.” She nodded in my direction and I nodded at the bouncer, who did not nod back. This Leftside bouncer was taller than the Rightside bouncer and seemed like a meaner guy. A tall forehead was lined with years of skepticism, and those lines must have been heavy enough to make it impossible for Leftisde to lift his eyebrows up to a friendlier height. He ran a finger of intimidating girth down his supplied list, looked up and eyed me.
“You know you’re the only plus-one here tonight, sir?” Leftisde spoke with calculated casualness, perhaps trying to catch me in a lie. He was playing detective and had chosen me as his plaything. A little annoying, but we all have dreams and we all need to get our kicks in, so I shrugged it off and proceeded cordially.
“I did not know that. That’s very interesting.”
“What’s that, sir?” His eyes darted up like I’d just shown my hand.
I stood my ground. “I said it’s interesting.”
Leftside glared at me and worked his chiseled jaw until Gloria cleared her throat on my behalf. It was satisfying to watch him bend the knee and move on. With barely-concealed malice, Leftside returned to the script: “Mockingbird Support welcomes you and encourages you to enjoy yourselves to the fullest extent tonight. All food and drink are on the house. And as always, we ask that private matters discussed during sessions remain private.” My eyes couldn’t help but roll, though I suppose I should have been flattered. I couldn’t think of a time I’d been considered such a threat to an establishment.
Leftside had seen his role to completion, so Rightside stepped forward to give Gloria and I plastic, neon-yellow bracelets that signaled we were Guests. Then Rightside pulled an incomplete deck from his back pocket, fanned out the cards with their faces down, and presented them to us.
“There’s a raffle tonight,” he explained stoically. “You could win a prize.”
I examined my options, then snatched the third-from-last on my left. In my haste I accidentally also grabbed the fourth-from-last card (“whoops!”), so I gave that one to Gloria. Leftside looked like he wanted to murder me, but Gloria remained placid, chuckling at my snafu and accepting the card. She showed me hers so I showed her mine: two of clubs face to face with four of diamonds. “Thank you both very much, have a good night,” Gloria said to the bouncers and we moved past them to the gate.
“You ready?” I asked Gloria first, hand on the latch.
Gloria exhaled sharp and fast, but grinned. “As ready as you are.”
And so Gloria and I passed from one world to the next, following in the footsteps of Alice, Neo, and whichever kid was the first to get to Narnia. We walked down a narrow, roofless hallway made from the same cobblestone used for the entrance as tasteful lighting emanated from hidden sources to show us the way. My mouth was dry and I kept adjusting then re-adjusting my The Clock Is Stuck At Midnight shirt. I let my hand graze the wall as we went along and my head was on a swivel, drinking up every detail. So far from home, so out of my element, so unsure and moving second-to-second, I saw whatever happened next as a test of gumption and durability, and I relished the opportunity to prove myself within extraordinary circumstances. I knew I could go to work, pay the bills and contribute to society in all the quotidian ways. Now I wanted to know if I could do this.
Then we reached the end of the hallway and everything opened up far and wide. Cobblestone remained the material of choice for setting boundaries, assembled into a tall wall that wrapped around the perimeter of the enclosure we now found ourselves in, a space roughly the size of a baseball field and containing a prestigious flower garden criss-crossed with brick walking paths, making jagged cuts jagged through plots like scars tracing veins. Posted between the flowers were mailboxes, twee to the max, and inside each mailbox was a weathered envelope containing a different handwritten ‘letter’ from ‘Agatha Alps, The Gardener,’ all addressed to ‘You’ from ‘Us.’ Each letter provided tidbits of information about the garden delivered via passionate and lyrical prose, almost sermon-esque. Gloria and I learned the garden’s name (New Eden, born from me as the Old was from God) and how it was grown (A little girl’s dream was the seed, her lab was the soil, and her investors were the water). The contents of other letters detailed the cutting edge features of the genetically modified flowers (My GMFs shall produce no scent and no pollen. My team and I ask, Why burden the bees? Why unjustly punish the sinuses? Can we not be wiser than our fathers?) and gave insights into Alps’ and her team’s process when it came to curating and designing the look of New Eden (When we came out of the acid trip, I had two daughters, not just one).
Gloria and I poked fun, of course, but we could not deny the fauna of her labor. Neither of us possessed a particularly critical botanical eye, but you didn’t need one to appreciate the breadth of color on display, shades being shown off which my eyes had never seen and my mind had never reached the cusp of fathoming. There were tall flowers with petals grown out to be arches for us guests to walk under, as well as a field of teeny-tiny buds, each a different color of the natural rainbow, arranged to evoke as much. Irreverent and present among the genetically modified flowers, Gloria and I palled around. I made a bit out of asking Gloria, in as cloying a voice as I could do, “We’re not in Kansas anymore, are we?” any time we saw some new wonder, which was about every five minutes, and I did that until she commanded me to stop.
New Eden was beautiful, it was horrifying. It was perfect, it was dishonest.
“Seth, just say it.” Gloria punched me in the shoulder.
“Evil!” I said.
Everyone was dressed in either all black or all white, finally making sense of Gloria’s dress code and drawing a diabolical contrast against the vast spectrum of color provided by the flowers. All paths around the garden inevitably led to its nucleus, a shabby/chic bungalow fit with faux-weathered sidings and a wraparound porch upon which super rich kids lounged, chit-chatting and grooming, truly the fat cat children of their fat cat parents. A few had found their way to the low-hanging roof to drunkenly call out celebratory nothings to their fellow members of Mockingbird Support or go on their phone.
I resented these people for making me so nervous. Hollywood had taught me that, as the underdog, there should be some thing I possessed, a trait or skill, that would befuddle my opposition and ultimately compensate for my lack of means. But the truth was anyone there could outtalk, outquip, outdrink, and outsmoke me easily. I couldn’t even take a sort of sick pride in being able to debase myself to a lower point of abjection than they could, because that, too, simply wasn’t true. There was nothing in my arsenal I could count on to antagonize young billionaires, the single class of people I wanted to antagonize most of all, and try as I might, I could not let go of the gross unfairness.
“I need to drink,” I told Gloria.
This was about thirty minutes in. Gloria and I had been doing well so far, keeping to ourselves, mostly, apart from some obligatory introductions to people who were surprised to see Gloria there and wouldn’t use her name because they couldn’t remember it (“Good to see you!/How are you?/See you later!”). A few tried to be ironic about themselves, but they had a lot of trouble managing a statement with more than one meaning, so their attempts came out flat and self-satisfied (“Oh, I’m doing just great.”). The naivete puzzled me. Of all people, shouldn’t these guys be the masters of double-talk? But it was like they had only ever used sarcasm to lie, never for a laugh, which made me wonder, then, if: They were just being polite. It was confusing.
Gloria was a perfect saint during these interactions, and so was I, but under the shadow of her recent depression reveal, I was keenly aware of her heavy exhales after social interactions, like she’d been holding her breath, or how she was scratching her neck in rhythmic patterns, or reaching for my hand before letting go just as quickly. I didn’t say anything about it; I didn’t think Gloria would appreciate me tallying her. Also ignored was Our Breakup. It had been toiled over enough as is. Everyone knew the details. No one wanted to make anything new out of it. But of course I was thinking about it. Gloria had to be too, remembering our standing disagreement. A matter of interpretation. Special girl had predicted something back then…
Behind those big brown eyes…
I had a name for them…
“I need to drink,” Gloria told me. I took her order and said I’d meet her in the yard in front of the bungalow, where various lawn games and sitting options were set up, as well as the party’s only bar, which was designed in the fashion of a humble beach cabana. Two bartenders, a pair of identical twins, brothers, had their work cut out for them, though you wouldn’t know it from watching them move so dreamily, so assertively. They were exquisitely handsome young men, I guessed French Jews, with black mops of hair falling into their sultry blue eyes, obstructing their work ever so often and inciting them to toss their hair back, which, in turn, showed off their protruding, pulsing Adam's apples. Cigarettes never left the embrace of the twins’ thin, parched lips as they gracefully catered to Mockingbird Support, never needing to verbally confirm or consult a thing while their wiry hands, blue veins tangled over sharp knuckles, never stopped working. It didn’t feel right for these beautiful boys to be taking orders from anyone, and I was ashamed to be, in their eyes, just a part of the mass. Nevertheless, we needed alcohol, so I waited in line and sauntered up when it was my turn.
“A G&T and a screwdriver, please and thank you.”
“Oui, je t'entends.”
The drinks were before me in seconds flat. I left a fat tip, took the glasses, and went back for Gloria. I spotted her quickly, standing adjacent to a rousing game of cornhole, but she wasn’t alone. Towering over Gloria like a pair of chic vultures was one man and one woman, both blonde and dressed in all white. Their backs were to me, and through the gap in their shoulders I could see the mood blossoming on Gloria’s face like a bad bruise: Dispirited. I walked a little faster and bobbed my head up and around to catch Gloria’s eye. She saw me and pointed just as I arrived.
“There he is.” Her agitation was barely obscured. “Chloe and Oliver, this is Seth.”
I handed Gloria her G&T and set my screwdriver down for a proper introduction, shaking Chloe then Oliver’s hand and saying how nice it was to meet each one. They responded in kind, and that was how I learned they were British, the accent putting their words on stilts. Both shook my hand with a firm grip and a short, punctual shake, never breaking eye contact–perfect form. Chloe and Oliver had short hair the color of daylight. Chloe’s was done in a bob cut that ended just past her ears that wore big silver loops. Oliver’s hair was cut in the fashion of ninety percent of men, buzzed on the sides and longer up top, gelled. He had a stud in his ear. Both had straight white teeth behind thin lips, sun kissed skin and strong bodies. The blue of their eyes was the shade of pool water. Oliver wore slacks and a short-sleeve Polo shirt that showed off his enormous biceps, while Chloe had on high-waisted jeans and a cutoff Champion t-shirt. He held a mango White Claw tallboy and she, a cosmopolitan. I pinned Oliver as slightly older than me and Chloe as slightly younger, and they were both so beautiful that I wondered if they, like the garden, were GMOs. Their test tubes should be so proud.
“Glad to meet you, Seth,” Chloe said, her voice husky and full of sex. “Any friend of Gloria’s is a friend of ours, right Oliver? Such a special girl.”
“Absolutely,” Oliver grinned. Gloria smiled weakly at the compliment.
“All our parents work closely together, so we’re often paired up in our Sessions. But the NDA won’t let me say much more past that. Did you tell him about the NDA, Gloria?”
“She did,” I said, intervening. Chloe’s eyes darted between me and Gloria, not saying anything but clearly sniffing out the dynamic. I took a gulp of my screwdriver and proceeded with, “Just as well have an NDA, in my opinion. Therapy is private, after all.”
Chloe laughed. “That’s so kind of you to say! But you can be honest; it’s suspicious, no? What is that we could be talking about behind those doors?” She looked at me suggestively, like of course I was dying to know, because surely Beautiful Chloe had been conditioned by sycophants and horny men to expect fascination and adoration from a peon like myself. It was a mean assumption, maybe undeserved, but the chip on my shoulder was deepening with every sip of screwdriver, and I felt entitled to the attitude, besides.
The time it took my to swallow my gut reaction made my reply a second too late, and in that second of silence, Gloria shot me a look of warning, perhaps sensing my mind’s malice, and even though she’d guessed right, it still peeved me that she felt I needed to be babysat, like I still didn’t know well enough to hold my tongue. My conspicuous silence was hanging heavy over our party, so I dragged myself back to the surface of myself to mumble, “That’s your business,” as cordially as I could muster and drink more screwdriver. It was very strong.
“Chloe’s dad is actually one of the founders of Mockingbird Support,” Gloria said, moving things along. “Running it is his main gig now, if I’m not mistaken.” I saw Oliver begin to say something, then stop. I wondered what that was about.
“Yes, yes,” Chloe admitted, pairing a humble tone with a glamorous smile. “I don’t like to bring it up too often, but I am proud of my father’s involvement. I’m hoping to take on a bigger role in the running of things within the next few years, once I graduate out of Support.”
“Oh, that’s nice. How old are you?”
“Twenty-six. Oliver’s twenty-two.” Chloe squeezed Oliver’s shoulder affectionately, and he puffed out his chest proudly, highlighting pectorals shaped like bricks and just as hard, I bet. My estimate of their ages had been way off, and I didn’t like that Oliver was younger than me while also being so much taller and stronger. I straightened my posture, making my back crack. Oliver heard it and snuck me a wink accompanied by a shit-eating grin. A slimy, writhing tendril of rage was born inside of me at that moment, and suddenly I was totally cognizant of how these people and this conversation was making me a worse person, and so I opened my mouth to excuse Gloria and I, but was thwarted when Chloe reached over to feel the fabric of my shirt, rubbing the corduroy between her fingers and asking, “Seth, may I ask where you got this fabulous shirt?”
“Um. It’s, uh, I think the brand is called The Clock Is Stuck At Midnight. There, you can see a little clock on the breast pocket.” Chloe placed her hand on my chest to inspect the clock, and the gentle touch made my ears burn.
“Love it. ‘The Clock Is Stuck At Midnight,’ is it? We’ll have to check them out, won’t we, Oliver?” She spoke to Oliver but kept her eyes locked on mine, the mystery of her intent making me uneasy. Were they a couple? Hunting for a throuple? Fucking with me? I averted my gaze, looking any which way, hoping for Gloria to sense my discomfort and stage an escape, but she seemed singularly devoted to her G&T, her face stony and flat, thinking about something else. So I was on my own.
Chloe took her hands off me and resumed: “Oliver and I are influencers, actually, based out of London. We’re called ‘Culture Contrived’ on all social platforms, and you could say it’s our day job. It’s a bit embarrassing to be building a career out of a concept so vain, but the followers found us–”
“And some were bought,” Oliver said in a stage whisper, bumping shoulders with me conspiratorially and almost knocking me off my feet. I had reached the bottom of my screwdriver, and it was sabotaging my balance as well as my mood. Grinding the heel of my hand into each of my bleary eyes, I cursed all the drugs in my system and pledged to nuke their combined efforts with a load of cocaine as soon as this conversation was over; some mutually assured destruction between me, myself and I.
In the meantime, I grimaced politely as Chloe playfully slapped Oliver’s bicep. “Oliver, you rogue! But he’s right, it’s just impossible to build any sort of sustained following without buying some number of fake followers. All very boring algorithm stuff that we pay someone to think about for us, thank god. But part of our thing is putting a spotlight on up and coming brands, and I think we just found our next one. Is there anything else interesting about ‘Clock Near Midnight?’”
Not interested in correcting her, I stumbled through an explanation. “They, uh, are politically conscious. Jaden Smith wore them once. It’s a woke thing.” I remembered Green Greens from the MAZ and felt like crying. Chloe was all smiles despite how obviously fed up I was, but I thought I saw something sinister stir behind her sparkling eyes.
“Well,” Chloe chirped, “we’ve bothered you two long enough. It was so wonderful meeting you, Seth, and I hope you’re enjoying L.A. well enough.”
“Likewise.”
“Besides, it can’t be too hard to have a good time when you’re in company as good as this,” she said, meaning Gloria and going in for a hug with the aforementioned girl, who reciprocated weakly, not even letting go of her drink.
“Pleasure,” said Oliver in our general direction. It was weird, I saw that his White Claw was lime flavored, but could have sworn he started the conversation with mango. The two of them departed, with Oliver’s hand on Chloe’s back, slipping down to graze the ass.
“Oh!” Chloe cried, and turned around to call, “And good luck at the raffle!” She winked and finally left Gloria and I alone.
I gingerly placed my empty glass in the grass and groaned. “Well, that was a fuckin’ drag.” I said this pointedly, meaning to open the door for Gloria to share what was going on in her head. She might’ve not heard me, she might’ve been ignoring me, but regardless, Gloria did not speak as she reached mechanically into her purse for a cigarette, her face as slack as if she were waiting for the bus. My fear had been borne out–Gloria was sad, and it was hard not to feel like I had failed at protecting her.
“A fuckin’ drag,” I repeated, prodding. “Wouldn’t you agree?”
Gloria lit and inhaled, not looking at me. “Sure.”
Her callousness made my stomach clench, but I tried again. “C’mon Gloria, forget the Fantastic Blonde Duo, they’re no good. Let’s not lose momentum, right?” Desperation encased my voice, peeking through the cracks in my words. “Here, let’s do some more cocaine, yeah? We’ll do a real whopper in the bathroom, it’ll be hilarious. I’ve always wanted to do drugs in a bathroom, just like the movies.” Not even a chuckle. I stood there like a jackass while Gloria kept smoking. Anger, hatched from hurt, started slithering up my throat, ignoring all attempts at suppression. “Say something, Gloria. What’s up?”
The muffled vibrations of Top 100 Pop Hits emanated from the nearby bungalow. Laughter and chatter buzzed in the air like flies, and I wished I could swat the sounds away so I could focus. Finally, finally, Gloria ashed her Parliament and faced me to ask, “Are you the same, Seth? Or are you different?” Her eyes were cold and aching like the surface of a frozen lake, underneath which anything alive was merely surviving, and her tone sounded undecided as to whether she was accusing or pleading. The angle Gloria had chosen to express her disappointment bewildered me, as I couldn’t pinpoint the relationship between our conversation with Chloe and Oliver, Gloria’s depression, and this ultimate question of whether I was the same or different. Only Gloria could see how these pieces came together, and I was torn in my feeling towards her: Either empathy for the complexity of her hurt, or indignant for being punished when I was still blind to my wrongdoing. Was it something I said? Something I didn’t? Of everything that had happened thus far, what was it about the last five minutes that had made Gloria so existential about me?
What was I missing?
Personally, I did think I was different. Or, I was trying my very best to be different today, at least, and I felt that was enough to satisfy any reasonable person. But sadly, drunk, high, tired, hungry, and thirsty as I was, I was unable to articulate myself with any kind of finesse, and so what happened was I threw my hands up and shot back, “Well, Gloria, I don’t know why you’re asking when it seems like you already know.”
I hadn’t meant to use you already know. Upon hearing myself say it, I faltered and lost steam altogether. I pinched the bridge of my nose and sighed. What a mean fuckup I was. Gloria hadn’t missed the usage, either, and it was heartbreaking to see how it made her wilt, how I made her wilt, a skill I was still miserably adept at. Her thick eyebrows first pursed, quizzical at my cruelty, then dispersed as hard acceptance set in. Just like that, the argument finished before it started, congesting all our emotional energy and resolving nothing.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I have to use the bathroom.”
“It’s okay,” Gloria lied. “I’ll see you.”
Blunted by abjection, I jammed my hands into my pockets and sulked towards the bungalow, heavy footfalls carrying me up to the porch where the coolest kids on Earth chatted and laughed together, together against me, it felt. I wanted to hurt them somehow, for the freaks to see how I didn’t care about what they said or did, but the thought contradicted the desire, which pissed me off. I opened the screen door and let it slam behind me. Inside was a sparse and open redwood floor, currently crowded, with a crackling fireplace embedded into one wall and a couple of busy bookshelves, packed with either books or knick-knacks, lining the other wall. A long dining table sat at the opposite end, fully attended with people playing card games or whatever. The few other chairs and couches about the room were all occupied, the grandfather clock read nine, and the whole thing was a disgusting simulacrum of hominess. Without Gloria acting as life-vest, and still reeling from all that had gone on, I was drowning in this sea of opulence. All at once, a sharp paranoia budded at the front of my brain. There was no concrete fear in me, just a panic growing from my awareness of seeing and being seen, coupled with the paramount need to melt outside of recognition. Every passing moment was the one I expected everyone to drop the act and attack me.
But I had to keep my cool. Head down, making myself not run, I weaved through the party until I reached the opposite end of the house where, to my right, there was a hallway with a door at the end titled “LAVATORY.” The walls were coated in an erotic bloody light that was sourced from a single red bulb on the ceiling. Also adorning the walls were a series of framed depictions, in various styles, of the night the Titanic sank. One particularly imaginative take portrayed Marilyn Monroe doing her famous skirt-blowing-up pose on the very tip-top of the ship moments before it was swallowed entirely by its arctic grave. She blushed from the attention of hundreds of frozen corpses, male gazes locked forever in death on her shapely legs. The doorknob was ruby-red to match the light and was made of that kind of faux-crystal. I gripped it and it felt warm from the inside. Twisting, I entered, foolishly believing I had made an escape.
コメント