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Cat Powell

Cat Powell's short fiction has appeared in The South Dakota Review, The Missouri Review, and New Contrast. Her story "Manifold Northeast Life and Trust" won The Missouri Review's Peden Prize for best story in a volume year. She grew up in Boston and has since lived in Cape Town, South Africa, and Syracuse, New York. She completed an MFA at Columbia University and now lives in Brooklyn with her dog. She is working on her first novel and is represented by Janklow and Nesbit. 

The Blues


Alex sees his first blue in early February. It’s his day off, and he lies in bed for a long time after waking, discouraged by the pale winter light and the cold air seeping under the window. He lies there until the sun has almost disappeared behind the building opposite and his need for coffee and nicotine has grown stronger than his dislike of cold. Then he packs himself into his oversize coat and boots and trudges down the grimy stairs.


He gets his Marlboro Reds and his large burnt bodega coffee and then pauses on the corner outside the store to light his cigarette. That’s when he sees it: a thin blue line running through the cement. Like a vein that rises up toward the skin and then fades back into the body. Only a foot or so in length. He reaches to touch it, then decides not to. The sidewalk is filthy.


Another driver at work had first told him about the blues a couple weeks back. People have been seeing them all over the city, the driver said, though mostly uptown. Some people think it’s the work of an up-and-coming street artist, like that dude who does all the secret graffiti, or maybe some kind of prank, or the beginning of a viral marketing campaign. In the deli this morning, one of the guys at the counter said that he’d heard they’re the result of toxic waste getting mixed into the cement, that this is what you get when the city starts cutting corners. No, the other guy said; it’s acid rain, chemicals falling from the skies, radioactive shit—that’s why they glow in the dark. After hearing all this, Alex is happy to finally see one. He’d been feeling left out. Now he’ll have something to journal about when he gets home.


The journal is a new endeavor. Funny, because for years therapists had been telling him to keep one, even—during one particularly bad inpatient stint—demanding that he do so, though he’d resisted. Then, one day about a month ago, he’d driven the van to an event downtown, unloaded the food, and had a few hours to kill. He parked and walked until the cold forced him into a bookstore. There was a display table up front stacked with black notebooks, and he picked one up and ran his fingers over the smooth, hard cover and smooth, cool pages ruled with thin grey lines. The contrast between that grey and the off-white paper appealed to him. He bought one, pocketing the pen he was given to sign the receipt.


Back in the van, he uncapped the pen and started to write. It was one of those nice pens with the thick point and liquid black ink, and at first he wrote just because he liked the friction of the pen tip against the paper and the way the page slowly filled with round, looping letters.


Hi. This is Alex. This is my journal. Today is a Monday. I’m at work. Waiting in the van. I drive a catering van. Why am I telling you this? Anyway, whoever you are, hi. While I was on my walk, I saw a woman who looked like a praying mantis. She was all eyes. She had a lot of make-up on, which made her look more like a praying mantis. She carried her bag in that way old ladies do, in the elbow of a bent arm, with her wrists curled down. This made her look even more like a praying mantis. I wonder if her freezer is full of the heads of her ex-husbands. I wonder if she goes home, cuts off a little slice of cheek, and makes a soup. I bet she keeps praying mantises instead of cats. I bet she lives in a little apartment that is all doilies and praying mantises.


He stopped there to read. He liked the sentence “She was all eyes.” That was a good way to describe her. Also, he’d repeated “praying mantis” a lot, because it was nice to write, but maybe he shouldn’t have used it so much.


He felt better after writing in the journal. The woman had been bothering him, in the way certain images did sometimes. Back when he was in therapy, he could spend an entire session talking about an ugly stray cat or a plastic bag caught in the branches of a tree. The nice man or woman in the chair opposite would nod and tap his or her foot. Whenever they asked dumb questions, he’d pause, look them straight in the eyes, and continue with his description.


Talking it out never helped. But now that he’d written it down, there was a new image: the praying mantis woman as he’d thought of her while writing. This new image was stronger and clearer than the old one, and because it was on the page and not just in his head or hanging in the sterile air of a therapist’s office, he could let it go for a while.


Looking at the blue now, he knows it’s going to be one of those images he gets stuck on. He can always tell immediately—it’s physically hard for him to turn away from them. After he finishes his cigarette, he counts to ten, like a swimmer preparing to dive into cold water. At ten, he closes his eyes and turns quickly, takes two steps with his eyes closed, then opens them and walks as fast as he can back to his apartment and his journal.


Finally saw one of the blues. Looked a lot like a vein under the skin in the forearms. I am looking at my own forearm to confirm that this is true. It is, if you consider the underside of the forearm. Not the veins on the back of the arm that rise up when you flex or when it’s hot out. The blue looked like it was deep in the concrete but was weirdly still visible. Have heard assorted rumors, including that they glow in the dark. Will investigate this soon. I wanted to touch it but also did not want to touch it.


He chews on the pen a little but can’t think of anything else to add. He closes the notebook and then spends the rest of the day watching documentaries about birds. He is scared of birds, and in the journal there are numerous entries on pigeons: deformed varieties of, encounters with, disgusting things eaten by. He likes the documentaries because they remind him that there are other birds more terrifying than pigeons, and the best way to overcome a fear is to find something that scares you more. And so he considers snowy owls, golden eagles, plovers, ostriches. Ostriches in particular haunt him, with their long necks and obscene legs.



The following day, he has to work. He picks up the catering van from the garage in the early morning, drives to New Jersey to get the food, and then drives back into the city to the event, which is uptown, not far from the garage where he started. The whole thing is wasteful and pointless. But so is pretty much everything, and thinking too much on that won’t do him any good. At least he’s alone and it’s quiet.


The event is going to be a long one, so he takes the van back to the garage and goes to his group at the local hospital. He hasn’t been in a few weeks. Because it’s free, it attracts all kinds, and you can come and go as you please. Even better, it has a by-the-mentally-ill-for-the-mentally-ill vibe, so no doctors or therapists in sight.


This week, there are three new faces: a Hasidic man with dark circles under his eyes who stares at the carpet as though trying to unravel it with his mind, and two women in their mid-twenties who seem to have come together. One has bloody fingernails and neat rows of pink scars on her forearms—a cutter, too dramatic for his taste. The other one is kind of cute, though. Her hair is long and wild and badly dyed, platinum blond with faded pink tips and dark roots. It reminds him of the Neapolitan ice cream his mom bought in big tubs when he was a kid.


He’s enjoying sitting quietly and watching the newcomers when Sheila the schizoaffective hairdresser comes in and torches his good mood. She’s always manic and always dominates the conversation with her stupid, repetitive rants. Plus, she picks at her split ends. He’s journaled a lot about Sheila’s split ends, but it hasn’t helped. As soon as she starts picking, he has to bite down hard on his own hand to keep from leaping across the room, grabbing her by the shoulders, and shaking her.


Joe, the other bipolar regular, comes in and sits next to him. Joe has been on Lithium for over 30 years. He starts telling Alex about his latest liver function tests and then asks Alex if his eyes look yellow. He leans in close and pulls down one eyelid so Alex can get a better look. Alex lies and says it looks fine. Joe sighs and says he’d rather be dead than crazy.


Tom—the group’s moderator and an old, gaunt depressive with wild hair—arrives last. He takes his usual seat. The two new girls stop talking and look at him expectantly. Tom smiles at them and then asks everyone in the circle to say their names and diagnoses. The girl with the ice cream hair says that her name is Clara and that she’s been diagnosed with anxiety, OCD, and several eating disorders. Alex hopes she’s not on Xanax. He’s had some bad encounters with girls on Xanax.


As usual, Sheila dominates the conversation. In the weeks since Alex was last at group, she’s gotten fired from the salon where she was working part time and decided to start her own business doing hair out of her apartment. She found a great site on the internet where you can make free business cards. Do people know this? She hands out her new cards. One side says SHEILA in fluorescent pink all-caps. The other side has an address on it. Just a street address—no email, no phone, no mention of “hair” or “styling.” No one points this out to Sheila.


Sheila reminds them again of all the doctors who said she’d never get better. Look where she is now. LOOK WHERE SHE IS NOW. Look how good she’s doing. Alex knows he should have more compassion for Sheila, who’s been dealt a worse hand than he has, but she keeps talking.


Sheila has met a guy she likes. Also, this guy is her drug dealer, but Sheila thinks that’s okay. He mostly sells weed anyway, and that’s basically legal now. They have a lot in common. They’re both entrepreneurs. Tom reminds Sheila to give other people room to speak. Also, Sheila has a new therapist who is herself bipolar. This reignites the long-running disagreement between Joe and Sheila about the wisdom of having a doctor with a diagnosis. Everyone in the group has an opinion. Alex reminds them all that therapists are charlatans and idiots, and Sheila and Joe both turn on him with some twelve-step bullshit about admitting you have a problem. The ensuing argument takes up most of the remaining time.


Afterward, Tom talks to the newcomers. Alex joins him and introduces himself to the ice cream hair girl. He repeats her name several times in his head, hoping it will stick. She tells him that she’s in grad school and works at a coffee shop, but she hasn’t been going to class recently. She’s worried she’s going to have to drop out if she can’t get her mental shit in order. Alex tells her he is also a student, which is sort of true—he’s been working on an online degree for a few years, though he’s taking this semester off. He doesn’t mention this last part. Instead, he says that he works for a catering company and that he’s actually in the middle of a gig right now and should probably get back. He asks for her number. She pauses, but then shrugs and takes his phone. He thanks her, and he thanks Tom, who’s been giving him the side-eye. They’ve talked before about Alex’s habit of picking up girls in group.


Back at the venue, Alex waits in the van for nearly an hour. The event has run late. When the cater waiters finally start bringing out the dishes, he sighs with relief. And then they start bringing out the trash bags. Alex curses as they head for the van. There isn’t a dumpster nearby, so he’ll have to take the trash back to Jersey along with the dishes and haul it to the dumpster himself.


By the time he gets home, he’s exhausted. As he’s about to go to bed, he remembers that he wanted to check whether the blue glows in the dark. Once that thought occurs to him, there’s nothing to do but put his clothes back on and go out to the corner. There’s an orange streetlight directly over the spot, and at first it’s hard to see the blue at all. He has to squat down close to the pavement to locate it. When he does, he cups his hand over it and looks closely: there’s definitely a faint light there, a blue glow on the underside of his palm. He thinks the line is longer, too, though he isn’t sure. He measures it against his arm so that he’ll be able to track any future growth.


11:17pm. Just home from work and checking on the blue. It is definitely glowing. Maybe other rumors are accurate? Stretches from fingertips to just beyond elbow. Will continue to gather data.


That’s a nice turn of phrase, “will continue to gather data.” It makes him feel purposeful and in control. He wishes now that he had bought the notebook with the little blue graphing squares instead of the thin grey lines. It would be better for recording facts and figures. Maybe by doing so he’ll discover something new about the blues, something no one else knows. He likes that thought. It makes all the flotsam in his brain line up, like iron filings near a strong magnet.


Once, when he was manic, it occurred to him that the world existed only because he imagined it. The more he pondered this idea, the more solid it became. And so he grew anxious thinking of all the things that would disappear if he forgot: certain kinds of trees, a rare porpoise, the way sunrise on the ocean looks like an egg yolk popping over the horizon. He spent most of his days and nights sitting on the couch drinking coffee and frantically trying to keep all the important things alive in his mind. And yet he kept forgetting. So late one night, he took a thumb tack and some blue India ink and tattooed CREATE onto his middle left finger. After, when he was coming down into depression, he developed a nervous habit of rubbing at the word like he was trying to erase it. Now the tattoo looks like a capital C followed by a smudge.


These days, his mind mostly feels like an empty membrane, a transparent sac that catches whatever detritus blows his way. The excitement he feels over these blues, though, reminds him a little of his old CREATE self. To distract himself, he texts Ice Cream Hair.


                                                             have you seen these blue things?


The little grey typing dots pop up right away. That could be good—enthusiasm! Or neutral: boredom.


                                        hi who is this


Shit, he should have led with that.


                                                                   its alex

                                                                   from group yesterday


The little grey dots pop up and disappear several times.


                                        oh hey

                                        whats up


That was what he waited for?


                                                                   just wondering if you’d seen those blue things

                                                                   the vein things

                                                                   that are showing up around the city

       

                                        uhhh no

                                        is that a thing


Alex is happy that he gets to break the news.


                                                                   yeah apparently they’re turning up everywhere

                                        oh

                                        weird

                                                                   there’s one on my street

                                                                   in the sidewalk on the corner

                                                                   it glows at night


A long pause. Alex puts the phone down and goes to the bathroom. When he gets back, she still hasn’t replied. He’s concerned that she isn’t suitably impressed by the blues. To be fair, though, he wasn’t that into them until he found the one on his street. He decides to give her a second chance.


                                                                   anyway

                                                                   I was wondering if you’d want to get a drink?


                                        like right now


                                                                    naw just sometime


                                        oh

                                        when


                                                                    Sunday?


                                         ok

                                         what time


                                                                     7


                                         that works


                                                                    you pick a place, let me know?


                                         cool


Alex silences his phone and puts it on the table next to the bed, face down. He tries to go to sleep, but every time he closes his eyes he feels an unpleasant buzzing in his chest. He ends up watching blurry recordings of 90s talk shows until the sky gets light. The talk shows bleed into uneasy dreams of ostriches.



Ice Cream Hair looks substantially less unkempt when she arrives ten minutes late for their first date. She looks so nice, in fact—in a black skirt and loose-fitting black blouse and mustard yellow tights with those boots he likes that go up over the knee—that he forgets her name entirely. He has to run through his mental checklist of girls he’s dated recently: Amanda, Kate, Emily, Jenny, Clara—that’s it. He really has a problem with names, and maybe also with serial dating, and he’s still brooding on this as Ice Cream Clara takes a seat across from him.


They do the first date small talk about where they’re from and what they do most days and what books and shows and music they like. Then they do the mentally ill small talk about their psychiatric histories and diagnoses and current medications and the pros and cons of those meds compared to other meds they’ve been on. He likes the way she laughs and how fast and sharp she talks, running from one thing to the next without ever seeming out of control. He likes her enough to stay for a second drink, even though he knows that, in combination with the Seroquel, this will make him fairly drunk.


Halfway through this second drink, as he balances between a pleasant tipsiness and a deeper intoxication, she asks him about those blue things he’d mentioned. He tells her about the rumors, about finding the vein on his street, about how it glows, how he thinks it’s growing. She says she’d like to see one. Is she inviting herself back to his place? Better err on the conservative side. He says that the blues are all over the city; maybe they could take an afternoon some time to look for more. She smiles and says something about his being pretty confident he’ll get a second date. He laughs.


“So,” he says, “do I?”


“Do you what?”


“Get a second date?”


“Depends how this one ends.”



Date w/ Ice Cream Hair. She offered a theory that blues are alien organism resulting from hush-hush meteor collision. Plausible, maybe. Maybe she was joking. It can be hard to tell. Interesting to talk to, more so than most girls. She touched her hair a lot, and we made out on the street. She initiated. But then left. But was smiling. Can’t decide if sex will be good or not. She talks a lot without managing to say much about herself. She moves her head weirdly, like her neck is really stiff all the time. Maybe she has tetanus. Mentioned her weight several times.



He checks the blue again on Monday night. It’s gotten substantially bigger and is now nearly two arm-lengths, with branches at both ends. He squats down close to the pavement. The vein still looks far away, like it’s submerged and the concrete above has grown transparent. He wonders, if this is the work of an artist, how the guy does it.


On Tuesday, #blues and #veins start trending. People are noticing them all over the city. He even gets a text from Clara—I saw one!—followed by a picture of a glowing vein climbing a brick wall.


                                                                    they’re cool, right?


                              yeah

                              a little freaky, too

                              btw I had a nice time the other night

                              :)


                                                                    me too


He doesn’t say anything more. He’ll wait a day or two before he asks her out again.



On Wednesday, the news outlets pick up the blues story. He spends the first hour of his day as he usually does, lying in bed scrolling through his phone. He mostly reads about the blues, though the articles are just rehashing theories he’s already heard. No one has definitive information. He gets out of bed at noon, promising himself, as he does every day, that tomorrow he’ll do better: go to sleep earlier, get up sooner, leave the phone on his desk.


Another slow day in the van. He texts Ice Cream Hair to see if she wants to hang out on Friday, his day off. She texts back right away and agrees to his plan. He wonders if she actually does go to work or to school. Maybe he should try to Google her to confirm her identity. He’s seen some weird shit—a girl who pretended to have breast cancer, complete with fake mastectomy bandages; a girl who created and impersonated a whole cast of friends, including a cousin with a brain tumor who liked to call him late at night and embark on long, increasingly deranged and intimate monologues. When confronted, she claimed she’d done it all in a fugue state. Pretty sophisticated fugue state.



On their second date, as promised, they go to look for blues. By this point, City Hall has made an official announcement: origin still unknown, investigation underway, remain calm, limit engagement. A more enterprising person has created an interactive map where people can report sightings. It’s quickly flooded with blue dots.


Using this map at their guide, they start at the southern tip of the island and work their way uptown. I.C.H. takes a picture of each occurrence, even the twentieth, the twenty-first, the twenty-fifth. He appreciates her mania for documentation, though he dislikes photos; the uncanny valley between memory and image disturbs him. Instead, he makes notes in his journal: time, location, size. Absorbed in their respective tasks, they speak only to negotiate their movement from one spot to another. He enjoys the silence, which feels purposeful and productive.


When they reach midtown, they decide to diverge from the map. They’ve noticed that the blues tend to appear in clusters, and so they head for isolated blue dots and then sweep the surrounding area looking for more. Moving up and down alleys and cul-de-sacs and through the empty spaces between and behind buildings, they spot a number of veins that haven’t been tagged yet.


Most of the ones on the map are large and well developed, several feet in length, often with intricate networks of branches; the ones they find are small, a few feet at most, some only a few inches. They do make one spectacular discovery, though, at the onset of dusk, as the light fades from white to grey. Alex, tired, hungry, and cold, is weighing his discomfort against his enjoyment of their shared project when I.C.H. spots a thin blue line on the corner of a building on East 111th. They follow this line around the corner and down an alley, until they come to a fence.


“Climb over?” Alex suggests. To his surprise, I.C.H. smiles and hoists herself up the chain link, her movements surprisingly powerful, if lacking in grace.


“Holy shit.” Alex drops from the fence beside her and follows her gaze. There, on the wall in front of them, is the largest blue either of them has seen. It covers nearly half the building. Some of the lines are as thick as his leg; others, the feathery ends of fractal patterns, are the width of a few hairs. The whole thing is beginning to shimmer in the failing light.


I.C.H. begins snapping photos, moving up and down the alley. Alex takes out his journal and makes his notes and then tries to sketch part of it, but it’s making him feel queasy. He squats down and presses the heels of his palms into his eyes. This particular blue reminds him of a nightmare he’d had as a child. On a trip to the local science museum, he’d seen an image of all the nerves in the human body in glowing white outline on a black background. The more he stared at it, the more he became convinced the floor was trembling beneath him, until he began to grow nauseous. Looking at this blue, he feels the same vibration sickness.


When I.C.H. has finished with her photos, Alex stands and asks if she’s cold. She nods. He says he is too. They climb back over the fence. He suggests they go to his place and get food delivered.


“Sure,” she says. He can’t tell if she really wants to go or not.


“We could go out somewhere, if you’d rather.”


“No, that sounds good.”


“Are you sure?”


“Yeah.”


The sun is down now, and as they continue uptown the blues begin to glow. He wonders if the artist used glow-in-the-dark paint, or if they’re powered by some kind of solar cell that absorbs the sun’s energy during the day and emits it again at night. He wishes he knew more about science. Maybe he should start taking his online classes again. They walk in silence for so long that he forgets I.C.H. is there. Then she asks, abruptly, if anyone has tried to dig them up.


“Dig up what?”


“The blues?”


“I don’t know. So you think they’re real?”


“Obviously they’re real.” She looks at him like that was an insane question.


“I mean real as in, like, 3-D. Not just paint or something.”


“It seems like too many, too much work, for them to be man-made. And the way they grow. Also, they don’t look like they’re on the surface.”


“Yeah, that’s weird. It could be an optical illusion?”


“Seems unlikely. But why don’t we settle it? Try digging one up? I mean, have you ever touched one?” There’s a sharpness in her eyes that he likes. But there is also the nausea he felt in the alley. Still, he doesn’t want to disappoint her. They agree to try the one on his corner.


This blue, his first, has grown in both length and width and has sprouted several more branches. He squats and prods the sidewalk. The cement is cold and unyielding. He winces at the thought of all the germs and filth he’s touching. She squats next to him and puts her whole hand onto the pavement without flinching. Isn’t she supposed to have OCD?


“Look,” she says. “It’s definitely inside the pavement.” She’s right—the blue still looks far away from her flattened palm.


“So let’s dig.” He doesn’t expect this will accomplish much, but it’s a good excuse to stop touching the ground. He takes his knife out of his pocket, flips it open, and scratches a little at the surface. The concrete yields readily to the blade. Surprised, he pulls away, and the thin gash re-seals itself, as though he’s been slicing into wet cement. He presses a finger into the pavement. Still hard and cold. He tries again with the knife. This time he sinks the blade in all the way up to the handle.


The pavement is definitely transparent: he can still see the tip of the knife, which now looks like it’s right next to the blue. He twists the knife, and the blade slides underneath the glowing vein. Without thinking, he pulls, and knife and blue rise up toward the surface. He pauses and looks at I.C.H., who looks like she’s about to vomit. She nods for him to continue anyway.


He draws the blue up and out of the cement. Neither of them says a word. They stare at the thin cord stretched taut across the knife, its glow reflecting off the blade. He feels a throbbing in his hand, like the thing is pulsing, though it’s probably just his own blood. He’s gripping the knife very hard. With his free hand, he reaches to touch the blue. Blood rushes to his head, darkening his vision. He drops the knife, steps back, and retches. When he regains himself, the blue has sunk back into the sidewalk, and the blade is lying on the surface. I.C.H. is still crouching, one hand over her mouth, her face a greenish-blue.


“That shit’s not right,” she says.


“We should go.” She nods. He thinks about picking up the knife but can’t stomach it. Neither says a word as they continue on to his apartment. Once inside, though, and the door closed safely behind them, the silence breaks. I.C.H. is once again the talkative girl of their first date, as though she needs enclosed spaces to make her thoughts cohere. She tells him that she likes his studio, which is very clean and very white and furnished entirely with mismatched cast-offs from friends who’ve died or left the city: an orange futon, a wingback chair upholstered in 1980s floral, a coffee table lacquered with generations of red wine rings and cigarette burns.


“Do you like living alone?” she asks. He nods. She sits on the futon.


“Do you want a beer?”


“Sure.” He goes to the fridge, which is stocked entirely with things in bottles: beer, mustard, vegan mayo left by an ex-girlfriend. He returns with the drinks and sits next to her on the futon.


“I think I’d like it,” she continues. “Living alone. I’m so sick of roommates. It’s just that it’s so expensive, having your own place.”


“This place is rent controlled. I inherited it from a friend.”


“Oh, that’s cool. Rent controlled is, like, the really good one, right?”


“Yeah.”


“So how’d you get it?”


“It’s…I don’t know, maybe a story for another day.” It’s a bleak history, and he doesn’t have the energy for it.


“That’s cool.” She pauses, and he’s worried she’s not going to let it go. But then she launches into a new story, as though determined to cheer them both. “You know, I did live alone once. I sublet my friend’s studio for a semester while she was away. And, well, there’s a funny story about that. So I came home one night and there’s this GIANT cockroach sitting on the kitchen counter. To be honest, this is the first time I’ve really seen a cockroach. I didn’t grow up in a city. And this cockroach, I mean, it has to be a mutant cockroach. It’s enormous. I don’t think of myself as a squeamish person, but man, something about this roach got me. Like, it touched some weird primal fear nerve or whatever. I screamed. I know I need to kill it, but the thought of squishing it’s just—too much. So I panic, and I grab the nearest thing, which happens to be a Tupperware container, and I slap it down over the thing.”


Alex laughs. The faces she’s making as she tells the story are oversize and goofy and seem to be slightly out of her control, as though the faces dictate the story and from the story comes the thing that actually happened.


“So you did squash it?”


“Nope! Just trapped it. And then I couldn’t decide what to do with it. So I didn’t do anything. I just left it there under the Tupperware.”


“For how long?”


“Well, this is where it gets weird. Because I was living alone, right? So there was no one there to get after me about it. I kept it for like three months. I gave it water. I googled what cockroaches like to eat. I fed it pretzels. I named it. I’d even come home and talk to it.”


“You kept it as a pet.”


“Yup. I had a pet cockroach.”


“Wow. So what happened in the end?”


“Well, my friend was coming back, right? So I had to do something about it. I decided I’d set him free. I thought I’d get the lid on the container somehow and take him to the park across the street. But my friend’s building had a doorman, and I didn’t want the doorman to see me, like, carrying around a cockroach in a Tupperware. He’d think I’d totally lost my shit. Maybe I had. Anyway, I called my friend Sad Rain and was like please come over and help me.


“Her name is Sad Rain?”


“Him. His name is Rain. But he’s so terminally sad that I call him Sad Rain. You know, one of those people. But super sweet, super lovely. Just sad.”


Alex nods, swallowing an unexpected jealousy.


“Anyway, I called him, and he said he’ll come the next day and do it for me. But by the next day, Sad Rain is too sad to get out of bed. So I have to do it alone. I go to the kitchen and I’m like, working up the nerve and shit, when I realize that Gregor isn’t moving. Like normally he’s kinda twitching around in there. So I tap on the Tupperware, and then I shake the Tupperware, but still, nothing. I’m like, oh my god, I imprisoned a cockroach and then I killed it. I’m the worst person ever. I can’t even take care of something that can, like, survive a nuclear apocalypse.”


“So, in the end, you did kill a cockroach.” Alex takes her hand and runs his thumb over her palm. She looks straight ahead and talks faster.


“Well, so, I brought the trash can over, and I lifted off the Tupperware, planning to slide the corpse into the trashcan, when—BOOM!—Gregor comes to life and flies into the trash. Little turd was faking it all along.”


“One smart roach.”


“Yup. Then I figured, where would a roach truly thrive? A landfill. So I put the lid on the trash and took it down to the basement and that’s that. I hope Gregor’s descendants are off in a pit somewhere, happily swimming in refuse.”


“I’m glad the story has a happy ending.”


She turns to him now, mouth slightly open, like she’s about to say something else, but she doesn’t. Alex leans in to kiss her. She kisses back.



She gives amazing head. Some of the best he’s had. He has to slow his breathing and count backwards to keep from coming too soon. It’s been awhile. Has it? He’d stopped texting Emily—no, Amanda—three weeks ago. After she had that Xanax blackout and decided to start a new life out west. Bought a ticket to Wyoming, called a Lyft, and then vomited in the back seat on the way to the airport. The driver threw her out on the side of highway. She called Alex for help, and that’s the last time they talked. The getting fucked up and doing crazy shit was one thing. That was none of his business. But expecting him to clean up the mess?


Shit. He’s not going to be able to last much longer if she keeps this up. He stops her, and she looks hurt, so he goes down on her for a long time, until he thinks she comes. But then when he asks her, she admits she was faking it. She says it’s her medication; it makes it harder, especially the first time with a new person.


“If you don’t come, I don’t come,” he tells her. She protests, but he sticks to it. This at least he can do right. And the sex is still good, without any of the awkwardness of a first encounter, even though it doesn’t really go anywhere. He likes it better this way sometimes: wandering, aimless, without the pressure to build to or arrive at anything. Just enjoying the thing itself.


She doesn’t linger in the morning, though he offers to make her coffee. She says she has shit to do, but she hopes to see him soon.


After she’s gone, he takes out his journal. He wants to describe what happened last night when he dug up the blue and tried to touch it. But when he thinks of the thing—the give of the knife sliding into the cement, the pulsing in his hand—he again feels the need to vomit. He writes about I.C.H. instead.


Need to remember that her name is Clara. Sex was pretty good though no one came. She left early this morning. Not necessarily a bad sign? She just seems self-contained. All the talking makes her seem almost manic. Like she’s vibrating very fast. There’s something tough in there. The way she dealt with the blue. Kind of like the blue, actually, the vibrations, the strength of it.


He sits and stares at what he’s written. She’s a bright presence in his mind, a lot of light, soft edges. He wants her to stay that way. He puts down his pen.



One of the other drivers gets the flu, and he spends most of the next week crisscrossing the city in the van. He doesn’t even make it to group, though maybe that’s for the best. Give Ice Cream Clara some space. She texts him regularly, mostly about the blues. The city has decided to excavate one of the big blues downtown. Construction crews tear up a whole block trying to find the end of it.


I.C.C. goes downtown and texts him pictures of the construction site. It’s been covered with a white tent to deter the many curious onlookers. Workers in hazmat suits go in and out while a crowd presses up against the police barricades. She says the mood in the crowd is strange.


                              part block party part political protest

                              part rubber-necking at a car crash

                              lots of human impulses on display


                                                            weird


                              yeah it’s all extra weird

                              want to hang later


                                                            can’t

                                                            work


                              oh


                                                            tomorrow?


                              yeah ok


Later that day, she sends him a video of a guy taking a power saw to a blue in his backyard. It’s a big one, as thick as the man’s thigh. The man lowers the whirring blade onto the blue and sparks fly. He raises the blade. The blue is unharmed. Watching in the van while waiting for the second gig of the day to end, Alex breaks out in a cold sweat. He has to put the phone down. He takes out his journal and tries to think about Clara and not about the video he just watched.


Looking forward to tomorrow. Feels like anxiety, but pleasant. Waiting in the van is harder but momentum through day is nice. Saw a woman with a chicken on a leash this morning. Wanted to roll down window and tell her that birds are not pets. Tiny eyes, vengeful, vicious. They are all just biding their time.


Alex wants to continue writing about birds, but the event is ending and he spends the next hours loading, driving, unloading, driving. He doesn’t get back to the garage until two am. His is the last van back, and the garage is empty. The street is too as he exits the building and turns toward home.


And then, just as the garage’s door smacks closed behind him, the lights go out. All of them. The street lights, the lit windows in the buildings, the floodlights in the alleys. For a moment, he is utterly blind, and he experiences another feeling he hasn’t had in a long time: terror, and the accompanying white-hot burn of adrenaline in his veins.


Then his eyes adjust. Vision returns. Everything is lit now by a diffuse blue glow: the street, the sidewalks, the sides of buildings. Everywhere a network of lit veins. Only the living things, the trees and the grass, are dark. They flatten into silhouette against the blue gloaming. Alex stands still for a long time. Partly out of fear, and partly because it is incredibly beautiful. He worries that if he moves, this vision—of the city transfigured into unearthly organism—will turn out to be a momentary illusion. But eventually he grows tired and walks home. Nothing changes. The blues glow. The power stays off for another hour. When it does come back on, the light nearly blinds him.

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