One day a woman suddenly became blind to McDonald’s. It was just like in the novel  Blindness by José Saramago, except instead of only seeing white, she could see everything that was not McDonald’s. That left a lot of things – puppies, Woody Allen films, plungers, cilantro – but it was trickier than it sounds. Now this woman’s name was Karen, and she weighed 130 pounds, worked as a copy typist at an ad firm proud for scoring a famous razor company as a client and she had just gotten out of a relationship that was probably leading to marriage.  But don’t get too interested in Karen; she’s not the protagonist or anything.

                  Karen ate McDonald’s, on average, 87 times a year, although she would tell you it was once a month, if ever. She liked to eat a McChicken with fries and a Diet Coke. Not too interesting, but worth knowing. She discovered the blindness on one of these particular trips, when she walked past the Caribou Coffee by her office building and found McDonald’s missing. In its place, she saw a faint haze, “like a mist over grass,” she would say, although that wasn’t what she really saw because it wasn’t a seeing sensation. It was more like throwing a marble against the side of a building and watching it bounce off. She bought an overpriced salad at Caribou and went back to the office.

                  Her best friend at the office was a fellow typist, Melissa, a gossipy Midwesterner with a masculine bob cut that she fancied to be rather edgy. Karen told Melissa what happened, not ashamed of the preposterousness of the situation because she generally assumed she was more intelligent than Melissa and had miles of incompetence to display before Melissa could be her superior. Gossip spread, and the creative director of the razor campaign, a smartly-suited man named Henry, walked into their cubicle.

                  “Karen,” he said, “What do the colors yellow and red mean to you?”

                  “Huh?”

                  He was holding a set of colored pencils, and he drew a yellow M (a golden arch) and scribbled red around it.

                  “Does this mean anything to you?”

                  “No.”

                  After a series of similar tests, including forcing an intern to run and buy a Chipotle Snack Wrap, they deduced that she could not sense the physical location, the food or the branding concepts related to McDonalds. That night Henry the creative director picked up a Bible, looked at it for a minute and then put it down and decided to smoke a joint instead. But rather than finding answers there, he ended up with a craving for mesquite barbeque chips, which he devoured while analyzing the ad copy on the chip bag, which was a story of a family with a passion for potatoes.

                  “Classic!” he thought.

                  The blindness spread. It hit a prostitute named Molly in the middle of performing oral sex on a pale businessman with fat, ugly jowls but a fairly normal penis. She felt a sudden sense of loss, although she couldn’t place it. Upon her return home, she stopped in the hotel bathroom to take off her wig. She looked at herself in the mirror and felt something was wrong. A memory of her late grandmother popped up. They were discussing daytime soap opera One Life to Live and doing something … eating … but the memory was botched. There was an emptiness in the physical sensation. She would eventually figure out that these feelings were her McDonald’s blindness in much the same way that Karen did, although without the marketing savvy of creative director Henry to aid her. She did not know that the liberation of the colors red and yellow meant a failure to recognize brand semiology.

                  Unlike the prostitute in Saramago’s Blindness, Molly would not face a life reorientation that jiggled out dormant mothering instincts. But that’s OK; this isn’t that kind of story, and she’s not that kind of girl. She already had mothering instincts, but she had many others as well. The deepest of these instincts was a masculine sense of adrenaline that made her heart beat so fast that she wanted to reach under her breast, grab a ventricle and suck the blood out of it. Sometimes she wished she was a vampire. She liked to lay naked in her bed and think about guns. Now if this sounds extreme, or even contrived, that’s because it was. It probably made up about 10% of her personality, but she had spent her life constructing these violent images and clung to them desperately. In reality she was a lapsed Lutheran who excelled at the clarinet in high school and was forever scarred when the man who she once considered the love of her life called her “boring” and broke up with her. They were eating sushi at the time.

                  A man stuck in traffic was struck with the McDonald’s blindness while listening to a jingle for discount carpeting. The first thing he noticed to be out of the ordinary was that a billboard seemed to be “acting funny.” When he looked at it, all he could think was “billboard billboard billboard,” and could produce no physical sensation beyond that word. Those unafflicted saw a brilliant red background with a Big Mac on it, its spectrum of pale, skin-colored buns, deep brown meats and lettuce creating a harmonious image that pleased the eyes and tantalized the stomach. This man’s blindness did not cause traffic to stop.

                  Aisha, a keyholder at a Burger King by the university, noticed a sudden influx of costumers the same day that the blindness started. This did not make Aisha happy, because a) during slow times she could text her boyfriend b) if an entire army came into Burger King, it would simply mean more work for her to do and would almost never be a causal factor in the raising of her paycheck. She was especially displeased because several of the teenaged cooks on hand were used to working while they were “high as kites” and the suddenly high level of efficiency required just couldn’t be met when everyone was stoned out of their minds. 

“Stairway to Heaven.” I heard the first few bars and knew the worst had happened. Mary was starting a band.

             Mary was my step-mom. Not an evil one, just the blue-collar kind who drinks a lot and lets me do whatever I want. We were an odd pair, Mary and I. She looked nothing like my real mom, who died during childbirth, but she had feathered bangs and a nice, plump look about her that made her blend in at school functions. That is, when she bothered to show up.

The worst thing about Mary was her bass playing. Every night at about 9’o’clock, she’d drag her bass downstairs and pluck out bars from her Pop Songs on The Bass book while she watched reruns of “News Radio.” This week her favorite was “Under the Bridge,” especially the first eight notes.

I was trying to write a paper about “the death instinct” for the Freud portion of my psych class, and the last thing I needed was a jam session played by wind-up-monkeys trying to relive the late ’70s. I put on my robe and walked down there.

“Alex,” Mary shouted, taking off a pair of headphones.

The guitar-playing woman didn’t look up. She was concentrating hard, a cigarette stuck in her mouth with a bunch of ash about to drop any second. She had the distortion up so high that it made my dad’s oil paintings shake. If Mary turned his art studio into a midlife crisis band practice room, I was going to be run away and sign up for whatever reality TV show would take me. Yeah, I’m a tragedy case. I could be high ratings material.

“Alex, this is Sue,” Mary shouted again, pointing at Sue.

This time Sue looked up. She had spiky, dyed blonde hair and eyes hollowed deep into her face. Her mouth was thin and almost lipless, like a mail slot.

“Well hey sweetie,” she said. She was the kind of person who smokes so much that the unhappiness in their lungs rings in their voice. Let us out.

“Can you guys please turn it down?” I asked, surprised at how quavery my voice was, “I’m trying to write this paper about why people kill themselves and [I looked at Sue] smoke cigarettes, and it’s depressing the shit out of me, and the last thing I need is my room shaking from your music!”

“Honey, be nice to our guest,” Mary said.

“Why?” I was afraid I might cry all of a sudden, but I didn’t. “I don’t care about her.”

“Well you should,” Mary replied. “Because she and her daughter are moving into the basement.”

“What? That’s impossible. We don’t need anyone in our basement.”

“I need the extra income, Alex. The funeral was expensive. They need a place to stay. It’s a win-win situation.”

“Why don’t you quit working at the DMV and get a better-paying job,” I spat.

Mary rolled her eyes up into her head and lifted up her hands, dismissing me.

“Well, there is good news,” Sue interjected, putting down her guitar. “My daughter’s just your age, and I can tell you’re going to be best friends.”

Peter had two heads. He floated into my radar, smoking a cigarette with canary-colored smoke and said, “Gracie, you look kind of cross-eyed.”

The smoke smelled like Corn Flakes and strawberries and cinnamon and I realized it was one of those new Marlboro Explosions and I wasn’t entirely crazy. I couldn’t deny that I was seeing double though. Usually when I tried drugs I just did the tiniest bit. A finger-full of coke up the nose. A hit of weed. And I got along just fine. For some reason I didn’t think this glue would be as intense as it turned out to be. Some intel company had discovered this amazing new type of barcode that people could just flash their NEPs over and it would automatically create this five-sense impression on their thought stream, so the government gave it the go-ahead and companies started slapping it on everything before figuring out that the glue it used created a highly psychedelic effect, if sniffed. 

So we knew it was about to become illegal cuz there were all these news streams about noobs sniffing too much and putting their NEPs into overdrive and drinking cheap vodka and then ending up in the hospital. So naturally we had to do as much of it as we could before it went away, and prom seemed like the perfect place to do it. 

It didn’t kick in for me until the runway part, when all the girls walked in their dresses down this catwalk. Suddenly stupid-ass Brooklyn Waterson looked like one of those Chinese dragons and I knew I was fucked. 

Finishing his cigarette, Peter grabbed my elbow and helped me into his black Subaru Clawfoot. The windows were purple and bubbling and I asked him if maybe we were actually in a petrie dish. 

“We are like amoeba,” I muttered to myself, looking at the hair on my fingers.

He ignored me and put on this new group called Black Face and it was this song about TV and dog food and this guy who liked a girl but he had accidentally kissed her boyfriend once, under the influence of a synthetic opium strain called Lazy Cat. It was a good song although the meowing noises, to me, seemed too literal.

“Your dress is melting,” Peter said, finally.

I looked at him. His black hair was getting floppy but in a way that didn’t bother me, and he was wearing sunglasses for no reason. Like all boys, his suit was some ugly corduroy thing that he got from a thrift store. His hands were at the bottom of the wheel, limp.

“You’re pretty high too!” I laughed. “Should you be driving?”

“No I’m not. I tried that glue last night and thought it might kill my buzz tonight. I told you that. Your dress is actually melting.”

I looked down at this purple slip of a dress that I had on. I had a hard time telling what was the glue and what was real, but it just looked like it was shrinking away from my skin in a few places, and a few strings were unraveling. 

“Oh yeah. The rain.”

I pulled down the mirror and looked at myself. Damn. A patch of my hair was missing, right in the back left corner. Just a small patch, but it made me tear up. I touched it and it stung. After all the trouble I’d gone through to get my curly brown hair tamed and into a braid-like-thing, the stupid rain had burnt some of it off.

“Where are we going?” He saw that I had wet eyes and handed me a Marlboro Explosion. I lit it and it made a small fizz of sparks out the window before the yellow smoke started streaming out. The anti-psychotic I’d popped after the dragon incident was starting to kick in, and I felt not quite relaxed, but sort of how you feel when you are in a long line and you finally get to be the third person from the front. 

“Let’s just go to the hotel.”

We’d rented a hotel on my dad’s credit card because he doesn’t care what I do. It was a room in a love motel, which was initially this concept that was stolen from Japan, except here it had become all cheesy and all the rooms were named after stupid couples from the 2020s, when all the girls had romantic hair extensions down to their asses.

“Yeah, the dance will be full of girls dressed up like parade floats.”

“God you’re messed up. No, Lindsay Bloomington’s dress melted entirely off and Chris Thorson got third-degree burns so they just canceled the dance. It’s ok though, I’ve got booze.”

The booze turned out to be this absinthe cough syrup stuff called Purple 9’s and a bottle of cheap white wine, which had a mountain top stream drawn on the label. I grabbed it and walked out to the poolside patio of our room. Joel Patterson was out there with this stoner girl named Jenny. She was wearing a boys’ white T-shirt and denim shorts, but she jumped into the pool anyway and popped her head out, her black hair shiny like an eel. I walked over to Joel and took a slug of my wine, because sometimes he makes very direct eye contact and it’s good to have something to do with your hands.

He was smoking a regular cigarette. Just paper and tobacco. 

“God, can I please have one of those? If I smoke another Explosion I’m afraid some Brazilian carnival party will pop out and trample me.”

He laughed and handed me one. “Nice dress.”

My dress had hung on pretty well. His pants were tattered at the bottom, and he looked like a peasant or something. His fro was a little patchy but his beard was coming in nicely.

“Gracie get over here!” Peter shouted, suddenly drunk. 

I hated when he drank Purple 9’s because it did something bad with the antidepressant stream he was on and he got crabby and bossy, horny and limp. 

“I can almost see your nipple,” he said, grabbing me. It had begun. 

“Let’s do shots,” I proposed, because I was suddenly too sober to deal with this mood of his and also I figured I could get him to pass out sooner that way.

He poured us a couple murky purple shooters and then lit them on fire. The smoke was green and transparent, like a little genie, and it quickly died. 

“To the future,” he shouted, raising his glass toward me.

“To the future.”

“JoAnna Trump and Jacques Roussard tied the knot this morning, and the wedding ceremony was as fresh, fizzy and wild as the new Pepsi Tantrum, the Pepsi with double the caffeine and double the orangutan fruit.”

The words felt like a clawed ferret walking around inside my brain. It was the stupid Pepsi Alarm Stream that I got paid a few sandwiches worth of money per month to have replace my default clock. I turned over and Peter was laying half-in, half-out of the patio door, a lighter in his hand. Christ. We were lucky the hotel didn’t burn down. We were both naked, so we probably had sex or something like it. Did we use protection? Shit.

I scanned my NEP over the phone screen and called myself a cab. While I was waiting, I made some cheap hotel coffee and filled it with powdered non-dairy creamer. There was a bottle of apple schnapps in Peter’s bag, so I took a couple swigs of that too.

The cab ride was short, thank god, because everyone on the streets was looking half-naked after the acid flood, and there was a new kind of acid flood happening in my own stomach. 

When I got out to the burbs, I saw there was a strange car in my driveway. I hoped my dad didn’t have over the skanky new T.A. he was always arguing with. I called her Tweety Bird because she reminded me of this helium-voiced bird from this really vintage cartoon. I went to the kitchen to pour myself some Peanut Butter Flax Attacks and who should be there but my suddenly snotty sister. 

“Victoria.”

“Gracie. You look like you have baby’s first hangover. The veins on your neck are all popping out.”

“Well … it was prom.”

She looked especially put-together. Her ink black hair was gathered into a bun and her eyes were lined with kohl. She was even wearing a flowery sundress. Usually she just lounged around the house in cargo pants and halter tops. 

I quickly saw why. There was a new boy on the porch. He had a pink baby face formed into a square jawline, soft, downy hair and bright blue eyes. He was tall and bewilderingly smiley. 

“Ah, hear prom got rained out and a bunch of 17-year-olds’ cherries couldn’t get popped according to plan,” she said, pouring herself some orange juice fortified with extra Vitamin D.

“Pretty much. Who’s your new friend?”

“Oh that’s Robin. He’s an organic synthesist. He just started working with NFA.”

“Oh yes. An organic synthesist. Of course.” I snorted into my spoon. “Have fun with that.”

I couldn’t believe my sister hadn’t moved out of the house yet. She was always having guys over, drinking bloody marys or screwdrivers with them and then watching these avant-garde movies from the 2030s minimalist period, and then squeaking the bed with them. If my dad had any clue what was going on in the world, he would have kicked her out, but I imagined it was his gentle non-involvement that made our cozy, window-filled suburban home such a perfect place for her to carry out her 20s. What I didn’t understand was how she met all these guys. She was a portrait photographer at this shitty, shitty photo studio and she spent all her spare time volunteering with some non-profit group called Neon Future of America, which was some unbearably artsy cluster of political canvassers who either thought they didn’t drink enough to need AA or thought AA was too religious to deal with. Either way, they were always drinking. 

Victoria and I had always gotten along, but ever since she joined that group we had grown apart. Partly it was that she wasn’t into TV anymore. All our childhood, we would sit around and stream series onto the wall at night, she teaching me what words like “69” meant, getting a kick out of my naive interpretations. But now she was all idealistic and busy and said TV was a waste of her time. She had created this film darkroom in the basement, and she was always making these portraits of half-naked people with shocks of paint in weird places. It was dark orange in there and it smelled like cat piss, but I couldn’t help but be intrigued. There was something methodical and old-fashioned about the way she mixed the ingredients and waited around for things to finish that made it seem sort of zen. 

She and this Robin guy were sitting at the porch table, smoking vintage cigarettes and hovering over this projection full of white boxes. I kept hearing them say things like, “mass customization is a profitable idea, but it cheapens the semiotics of things.” 

“You gotta preserve the semiotics of things,” I parroted, walking out there with a cup of coffee.

“Damn. You’ve got some bad acid burns,” Vicky said. She reached into her purse and pulled out this Dove follicle stimulant scented like “Salted Lavender” and applied it to my shoulders. 

“Thanks.”

“You’re right you know,” Robin told me. He had a wide smile and a peaked nose, with light, peachy hairs covering his chin. There was something pansexual about the way he talked, like he wasn’t distinguishing about who he was attracted to. I would have bet $200 he had done stuff with guys. But still … not gay.

“Everything has to mean something. One thing can’t mean fifty different things,” he continued.

He was looking at me as if he had said something groundbreaking. 

“Well. That’s a very specific thing to say,” I replied.

“Thanks,” he smiled, not catching my irony.

“Where’s Caleb?” I asked Vicky.

“He’s next door.”

There was something I didn’t trust about the neighbors. They had a huge fence surrounded by even taller pine trees, and it was impossible to see what was happening in their yard. Even their windows were small and tinted. Plus, they had this 6-year-old daughter who I could tell made Caleb nervous. Their parents didn’t seem to get that just because they were the same age didn’t mean they had to be playmates. Caleb was fragile and she was grabby, hyper and possessive. She didn’t understand that he didn’t like to dress up and trap kittens in laundry baskets. Not that I didn’t like little Roxanne. She was chubby and ringleted and she seemed like the kind of innocently sweet and girly type who would grow up and lose her virginity to a closeted gay guy. 

Caleb was born during a genome discovery that led to a hot trend of selecting kids for savantism. My parents had decided to go for it, even though there was a 30% chance that he’d end up on the autism scale. They just wanted a brilliant little boy to carry on the family name after pumping out a couple of B-cupped TV-addicts. My dad had assumed we avoided that outcome, but he had never paid that much attention to Caleb in the first place. With my mom always under, Vicky and I had taken on a lot of the Caleb-related tasks, including reading to him at night and meeting with his teachers. He hadn’t started speaking until he was about two and a half, but when he did he was already speaking fully-formed sentences. He hated crowds, broke down if he didn’t stick to a schedule, and his 6-year-old raison d’etre was increasing his encyclopedic knowledge of the insect world. When he went over to Roxanne’s house, he was always taking her Littlest Pet Shop cages and catching weird bugs and hiding them all over the place, under radiators, behind the refridge, stuck in a bookshelf. 

“I’m going to grab him and take him for a walk.”

“Have fun.”

“Hey, Gracie. It was really nice to meet you.” Robin smiled at me in a way that seemed deliberately open to interpretation. Was it sexual? Brotherly? Gay?

My NEP stream kept buzzing that Peter was trying to chat with me. 

“What?” I finally asked. I was mad at him but not sure why. Maybe it was disappointment at my “prom experience” and how, like everything with him, it had fizzled into fuzzy, uninteresting memories and a hangover.

“Where the hell did you go? I woke up naked, outside.”

“Well you got yourself into that mess.” 

“What if I had died? What if I had thrown up on myself?”

“Your NEP stream could have sent off an alarm.” 

“Wow. How wonderfully human and magnanimous of you Gracie,” he said.

“I love that you’re in an english class and you get to try all these new words on me. It’s like you find a new way to condescend me every day.” 

“God you’re a blowhard when you’re sober. Want to grab some bloodies?”

“Hey babe, I gotta go. I’m picking up Caleb from next door.”

“Tell him I said what’s up and I’m going to kick his ass at Pistolwhip Pimps.”

“Will do.”

One thing I did like about Peter was how well he got along with Caleb. His calm indifference to what most people were thinking and doing relaxed Caleb, and his intellectual wit was quick at navigating Caleb’s occasional non-sequiturs. Oftentimes people found Caleb strange and confounding, and they were stunned into silence, reverting to talking down to him, like there was something wrong with him. But Peter just talked to Caleb like he was an equal, just another guy who made him laugh. 

I had planned on taking Caleb to Dairy Queen and buying him a treat - he was such a skinny shrimp it broke my heart - but when Roxanne’s mom, Isabel, came to the door, I knew that it wasn’t exactly going to be a sunny, soft-serve kind of day.

“Thank God you’re here,” Isabel said. Her botox-frozen brow was locked in its permanent surprised state, but she had tiny little wrinkles around her mouth, and they were all pointing south. I could hear Roxanne crying upstairs and Caleb bellowing in a mix of a shout and a moan that came out only during his darkest times.

I ran upstairs and Caleb was thrashing around with a Barbie doll in one hand and its head in another, about to tear off its right arm.

“Caleb! Why are you being so bad?” Roxanne was weeping. “I don’t want to be your friend anymore.”

Three parallel lines of light flashed in front of my right eye and the back of my head went blank. Hangovers and stress brought out a terrible hallucinatory headache that I secretly feared would turn into a seizure someday. 

I ran over to him and put my arms around him, letting him shake me off and hit me and pull my hair. 

“Shhh” I whispered, until he tired out. 

“You smell weird,” he finally muttered. “You smell dirty and Vicky’s icky lotion.” 

“Do you want to leave?” 

He nodded.

“Say you’re sorry.”

“I’m sorry Roxanne.”

Roxanne had buried her snotty nose into her mom’s hoodie. She sniffed and waved him away without removing her face.

“I’ll buy her a new Barbie,” I told Isabel.

She nodded. “Not necessary. Maybe it’s time those two took a little break.”

She was right, but it stung. As much as I worried about him hanging out with Roxanne, I had to admit that we needed Isabel’s help with watching him. But what hurt even more was seeing how evident it was that she watched him not just because the kids liked playing, but because she felt bad for us. 

As we left, Caleb grabbed my hand tight and suddenly he was my small, nervous little brother again, not the epic limb cloud of terror that he occasionally turned into. 

I knew I should punish him, but my hangover won out and I decided to take the easy route. We sat on the curb for awhile and I patted his back until he calmed down. 

“I was talking to Peter and he said, ‘What’s up,” I told him, leaving out the part about Pistolwhip Pimps because his teacher had yelled at Vicky for letting him play it too often.

“Peter! Gracie are you going to marry him? Are you guys going to create a million little ant babies that will march into the cracks in the road?” He was keenly watching a tribe of ants.

“Would that make you happy if we did?”

“No,” he laughed. “That would be gross.”

A woman spreading messages of fornication will clothe herself in a hand-animated green icon.

Technology will reach complex heights that lead children to practice hand-eye coordination on cat pianos.

The word “McCafe” will proliferate.

A massive exodus of women keen on breaking their yo-yo fasts and laying with new men will enter India.

I wrote this back during the 25 Things You Didn’t Know About Me craze.

1. Things is the plural of thing, which comes from Middle English 
2. In Chinese, things are called “dongxi,” which means “east west.”
3. Chinua Achebe chose the word “things” as part of the title of his novel “Things Fall Apart”
4. In some instances, “things’ refers to ideas and not concrete objects. In that case, they can also be called “matters”
5. “Things” can refer to multiple male sex organs
6. “Things” has five consonants and only one vowel, which is fairly rare
7. Things in Spanish are called “cosas”
8. In English, it is common to say, “How are things?” as a greeting.
9. More formally, people also say “How are things going?”
10. Tim O’Brien chose the word “things” as part of the title of his memoir “The Things We Carried.”
11. “Things” was part of the title of a film starring Julia Stiles and the guy who plays Tommy on “3rd Rock from the Sun”
12. In French, things are called “choses”
13. “Things” is usually used when one refers to various objects or matters, and either does not want to list them all or does not want to mention them by name.
14. “Things” is occasionally used as a euphemism
15. A Google search for “things” produces a link to culturecode.com/things as its first link
16. The Thing is a character in Marvel Comic’s Fantastic Four
17. In Portuguese, “things” are “coisas”
18. “THINGS” was used by Milton Bradley as an acronym for their game Totally Hilarious Incredibly Neat Games of Skill
19. A casual alternative for “things” referring to nouns is “stuff.”
20. In American slang, “things” are called “thangs”
21. In German, “things” is related to a philosophical concept created by Immanuel Kant that means “the thing in itself”
22. According to Bill Cosby, kids say the darndest things
23. A common mantra in the English language is “one thing at a time”
24. Halle Berry starred in a film called “Things We Lost in the Fire”
25. “Things” does not appear once in the song “12 Days of Christmas” but the phonetically-related word “rings” appears 8 times.

Found a bunch of old writing in my email.

Misconceptions I had when I wrote this:

-The idea that people buy a bottle of Kahlua to get drunk

-The idea that stories have to be about something IMPORTANT, like suicide

-A VAST, VAST misunderstanding of how colorblindness works

       My son cleaned his room the day before he killed himself. He took all the old cups off of his dresser, wiped away the rings of soda on the wood, and then dusted. He folded his clothes and stacked his magazines. He windexed. He vacuumed.

            He didn’t put away the vacuum though, because I found him next to it, with one leg wrapped around its base in a strangely intimate way. He was bleeding out his eyes and his nostrils and his ears, and with his pale skin and shaggy brown hair it reminded me of misplaced stigmata.

            My husband and I couldn’t say anything about it, but we were both grateful that he cleaned. Neither of us wanted to empty out his room, and he probably knew that we’d be leaving everything there for a long time. This way, it seemed more like a museum than a time capsule. It was cold and formal—no shirts hanging over chairs like he was about to wear them, no lose change on the floor, no books with bookmarks at their halfway points.

            I didn’t clean for awhile though. My husband took a week off of work, and together we sat in the living room watching tv shows that seemed as remote as possible, like shows about why a tiger could mate with a lion but never would. For the first couple days, my husband didn’t want to eat anything but black licorice, which worried me more than it should have. I tried making him a plate of hash browns and some fried eggs, but he just put it next to him on the coffee table and fell asleep, burrowing deeper into his ratty blue robe.

            Our house started to get sort of messy, but we learned to compensate. We started eating off of plastic dishes, or just using the same mugs over and over. We left all of the newspapers on the porch, and left the maintenance of the garden up to nature. 

            My son had left some of his books on the fireplace, and I started to read one. It was a book about Sigmund Freud. It talked about how we can take objects we dream about and find a chain of other objects just by what the first one reminded us of, like bear, forest, Christmas, Grandma, until we find what we were really upset by. My son read all kinds of things. He mainly liked to read books about physics and wildlife. He said they made the world seem mysterious, like there was life underneath leaves and lightwaves and things like that. I thought the world was pretty mysterious, but he was a lot smarter than I am.

            It wasn’t until about a month after his funeral that I found the vacuum in the garden. I couldn’t figure out why it was there. It was on the stone path, under a birdfeeder filled with pine cones with peanut butter in their notches. I shrugged and took it inside. Once I got it into the dining room, I looked at closely. It was black and smooth, like a bowling ball, with its hose broken off and its switch a silver knob that was chipped on the top. It was probably from about 1989. It did a lousy job of collecting larger objects, like popcorn kernels, and made a loud roar that scared our old cat, Tomato.

            I was suddenly embarrassed by it. I plugged it in and gave it a test run over a piece of carpet near the doorway to the kitchen, where various crumbs had fallen. It was quieter than usual, emitting a tv-static-like hum instead of a loud noise. When I tried to unplug it, a tiny spark escaped from the outlet.

            I took it to the garage, ready to throw it away, but suddenly remembered the image of my son lying with it. Something about it was seemingly stuck behind my eyelids, like when you stare at the sun for too long and there’s a ball of light stuck in your usual inner-landscape of black. I left it in the garage, under a broken saw.

            Before my son died, he told me two things: that he’d broken up with his girlfriend, Kelly, and that he was colorblind. He told me both of them while I was folding laundry in front of the morning news. He stood formally, as if they were confessions and he was wary of my response.

            “How could you be colorblind?” I asked him.

            “They did a test at school,” he said, “What I always thought was red was really blue.”

            “What did you think was red?” I asked him, picturing lips, cherries, blood.

            “Things that supposedly are red, are to me what you see as blue.”

            “How did you just notice that?”

            “How did you just notice that?” he accused.

            “What happened with Kelly?” I asked.

            I hadn’t been to worried about his breakup with Kelly. He never seemed to like her anyway. She had black hair that was thick and lumpy, with grease indents by her part. Her eyes were a pickled green and she always wore sundresses that hung right above her skinny knees. She spent most of her time playing her clarinet and reading Emily Dickinson poetry. The most they’d ever done together was go to a couple of baseball games and sit in the garden and talk about God knows what for hours.

            “She asked me if I thought I was going to be with her in college. And I said no.”

            “So she broke up with you?”

            “She said ‘now what’ and I said ‘I don’t know, maybe we should just end it now.’ So she got up and walked away.”

            “Are you okay about it?”

            “I don’t really care,” he shrugged.

            I saw Kelly one day when I was at the liquor shop. I was buying myself a bottle of Kahlua for the evening, and I was just leaving when she came in with an older boy. He had on ironed khakis and brown boots, and his hair was gelled into small spikes.

            “Mrs. Averson,” she said, pausing before deciding what to call me, “How are you?”

            I shrugged, “Not bad.”

            She bit her lip and then rubbed them together, “Hey, I’ve been meaning to apologize for not going to Paul’s funeral. I was in Texas, visiting my dad. I feel really bad about that.”

            “Oh it’s okay. It was a beautiful ceremony. Some kids brought in a memory book where they wrote things about Paul. I saw what you wrote. It was beautiful.”

            She had written Paul was a kind and gentle boy. He really truly loved nature and was prolific with insight. I never saw this coming, not in a million years. I thought that what she had written was surprisingly honest.

            “Well, I wish you guys the best…” she said, then added, “I think my parents are sending you a card.”

            When I got to my car, I turned it on and waited inside for Kelly to come out. She came out about five minutes later, her eyes narrowed. The boy was holding a paper bag and a 12 pack of beers. She lit up a cigarette and smoked it with a urgency that seemed novice, awkward. I couldn’t watch anymore and drove home.

            Paul had overdosed on antidepressants. I didn’t even know he had them, but it was another thing I could never say out loud that I was grateful for. There were worse ways he could have chosen. At least this one had a softness about it.

            I thought about the singer, Nick Drake, who had died the same way. People were cautious in admitting it was a suicide. I was 20 at the time, and his death saddened me. A couple days after Paul died, my husband went outside to mow the lawn and I decided to go buy one of Nick Drake’s cds, feeling too tired to dig up my old record. At the store I picked out my favorite record of his, Five Leaves Left, and stared at the cover for awhile. He had hair that looked peaceful and natural, dirty blonde. I pictured the boy with Kelly, his over-gelled spikes. Nick was in a small room, looking out a window over a vent. He looked like he was on vacation and had tired of the novelty. When I got home I put it in my nightstand, unable to listen just yet.

            I decided to do something that proved I could still be productive: clean my house. I windexed the windows first, and then decided to vacuum. I remembered putting it in the garage, which made me remember my son, his leg around it. I walked downstairs, sweating a little bit, and realized that my face was bright red. I was glad that my husband wasn’t around to see me. When I opened the door, I got the odd sense that the vacuum had been waiting for me. I tried to shake it off, but it was physical: a tingle in my arms. I walked around it a couple times, staring it down. It was quiet in the garage, only a small drip from a pipe somewhere, and a humming from the furnace room. I got down on my knees, letting the dirt get on my pants, and stroked the vacuum’s black surface. I thought about my son touching the vacuum, looking at it as he laid on the ground. It seemed oddly warm to me, unresponsive, but warm, like touching a sleeping baby.

            Suddenly I heard my husband turn off the lawnmower near the side-door to the garage, and I jumped up and ran inside, my face still burning.

            Both my husband and my son have always been very secretive. Not in a purposeful, hurtful way, but more so in a contemplative way, as if they forget that other people are there. I met my husband when we were 22, and it took about two months before he said anything bad about anyone.

            It was a girl named Reese, who had thick black hair and long eyelashes, and wore lots of jewelry. She was in a pottery class that we had taken together, and she’d sit over her wheel, letting bits of clay collect in all of her bracelets.

            “Reese has a really phony laugh, doesn’t she?” he asked me one day, looking at her. “It makes you wonder if she has any idea what humor is.”

            I was taken aback. I hadn’t realized how much he kept his opinions to himself until he said such an acute comment about some one that I hadn’t even been paying attention to.

            My son rarely voiced his opinions either. I used to watch him when I’d come to school for parent days, and he always observed other kids quietly, and approached them patiently. It gave him a very subtle quality of dignity that intimidated me.

            When he was about five, he went through a phase of fears that I could barely detect. I noticed that he was preoccupied, watching cartoons with a blank stare, turning to examine the creases in his palms with great interest. He crawled over to me and grabbed my hand, looking to see if I also had lines in my palms.

            “Does everyone have these?” he asked.

            “Yes.”

            “Good,” he said, “I thought they were a disease. I thought I was dying.”

            He started doing this often, checking with me to see if things like his lymph nodes, the holes deep in his ears, and his belly button lint were normal. He stopped thinking that way at about seven, and after that he closed up. Looking at him became like watching a cat, trying to turn down the suspicion that there is a dome of intense analysis happening inside their mind.

            After my husband’s week off, he started running. He’d wake up at 5:30 a.m. and I’d hear the blender roaring as he made himself a protein shake. He’d turn on the news in the small kitchen t.v. and let it digest, and then go for a run that usually lasted an hour and a half. He’d come back smelling misty and slightly sour, and hugged me where I laid in bed.

            I’d fall asleep until about two hours later, waking up alone. After about a month, my husband was about 15 pounds lighter, and his cheeks started to look sallow.

            He came to me one morning and said, “I want to be great for you.”

            After I heard the garage door go down as he went to work, I felt an intense sense of aloneness, as if it were an external pace to the air. I said the word “alone” in my head until it lost all meaning, seeming like a hollow log floating on a river.

            I got the Nick Drake cd out and put it on our living room stereo.

I pictured him in that dimly lit room, his hair so soft, staring out the window. I walked to the garage and found the vacuum, bringing it upstairs. It had a layer of dust that I wiped off with some windex and a towel. The music made the process of wiping it seem like a dance. I stood up and held the handle of the vacuum as if it were some one’s hand, and slowly danced around the living room. I realized the curtains were opened and I moved to close them.

                  I’ve changed, but not necessarily for the better, I repeated in my head, as I hiked up the mountain. I liked how the words sounded; I could picture myself saying them fresh off a boat, wiping salt water from my forehead. Whoever was listening would think I had some profound experience, like I had just come back from scouting spices in India. Maybe they’d think I learned to use one of those ground toilets, and gotten chased by a cow on the street. Maybe the heat had driven me mad. Not that any of that is true, and not that anyone will ask me anyway. I can’t say how I’ve changed, but the words are there in my brain, like a cat just outside a door, meowing for milk.

            I blame the kleenex. Every day I have to see them, the kleenex pickers. Partly because I want to see Marguerite among them, to figure out why she left me, to look at the way her long black ringlets get caught on her elbows. But I also hike up the mountain because of some kind of cheap, physical desire. The groves of kleenex trees, strewn with beautiful women, give me the feeling that fresh rain must give fat worms. The trees with the kleenex leaves are all bent over, like frail holy men. The women avoid the thorns as they pick, bleeding anyway from their long fingers, wrapping the soft, white material around their wrists like casts. In the evenings they eat the kleenex out of wooden bowls, laughing together in the hot springs and drinking from thin flutes of champagne.

            I’m not sure how eating the kleenex turns their eyes white; I guess it’s some consequence of the proteins inside. I first saw one of the girls in a bar, a tacky tropical-themed one like all the bars on this island. She was singing softly, and turned to me as I sat with a chip halfway to my mouth, stunning me with her eyes, as blank as a picture that a little kid forgot to color.

            As for me, she change has not been physical; I’m still skinny and kind of bird-like, too tan. It’s more a subtle change in the flavor of my reality, as crazy as that sounds. I didn’t know it had a flavor until now, but there it is, a frightening exotic note, like a musky tea room. I can’t tell that to anybody. All I can say, should anyone ask me, which they won’t, is that things have stopped making sense.

            The first change, like the first groan of one continent separating from another, started with a few dreams about Marguerite. In each one her hair would be against a new pillow, a new man on top of her. It wasn’t their faces I remember, but the fabrics: fur covers, silk sheets, lace. In every dream I’d be doing something mundane, like arranging silverware or cutting two-by-fours. I’d wake up, my head feeling like bread soaked in beer, needing to hear her voice.

            She hated when I called her like that, and finally asked, “You really think I’m cheating, don’t you?”

            “No baby,” I answered.

            “Then why do you need to call me right after these dreams?”

            “I don’t know.”

            “Can’t you just tell me what you’re feeling, instead of doing this to yourself?”           

            I didn’t know what she meant.

            “Listen,” she explained, “with a dream you can tell other people how you’re really feeling, because you don’t take responsibility for it. It just came to you.”

            I was confused. She always talked like this. “So you are cheating?” I tried.

            “No. That’s not the point,” she sighed.

            I tried to figure out what was going on at work. I worked at a three-foot lobster shack in a beach full of tourists. There were at least forty fish and fry shacks in the water, each with a constant line. The tourists would wade out, wearing sunglasses that gave them bug eyes, hungry from a day of sweating and beer drinking. We sold lobster buckets, and my job was to squirt condiments in separate containers: ketchup, butter, and mayonnaise. After a week there I was as dark as a Kahlua bottle.

            It was the best place to worry about things, because I was surrounded by people and daylight, which prevented me from getting too pessimistic. I tried to decide if I really thought she was cheating or not, but I kept thinking about her sigh at the end, how soft and sensual it had been.

            Maybe I didn’t want to think about other things. Her life depressed me. She spent all her time with her chain-smoker mom, who sat around watching game shows and ordering diet products over the phone. Whenever I came over, Marguerite wouldn’t want to go to the beach or a bar, but instead she’d suggest we go in her room, where we’d lay in her bed and stare at the ceiling. Her mom never cared; by then she’d have a guy over too. Sometimes I got the feeling that Marguerite looked down on me. I don’t know how to explain it, just a silence that followed every question I asked her.

            I suspect that something bothered her about the time that I found a kleenex-picker girl passed out in a fountain. I couldn’t help but go to her though. She looked a Renaissance painting, the kind where women have swan-colored skin and a flock of mythical creatures chasing them. In her case, she was surrounded by shimmering pennies, and a few birds who were hopping on the edge, oblivious to her existence. I ran to the closest t-shirt shop and called and ambulance. A medic came, waking her up with a potent scent, asking a few questions, and then driving away. I hung around, not sure what I was waiting for. Maybe I wanted it to be like a movie, where she’d suggest we get coffee and Marguerite would pull comedic hijinx to regain my attention, like walking five dogs at once past our table.

            When she did notice me, I met once again with a pair of white irises. There was an emptiness to them that seemed inhuman—just two white circles where most people’s consciousness is believed to be.

            I wondered if she had passed out because of some sleeping disorder. Marguerite thought her mom had one. She found her asleep everywhere: in the kitchen, waiting for the microwave to finish, in the laundry room, on top of a pile of towels. She had told me about it right in front of her sleeping mother once, while we were sitting at her table eating sesame crackers.

            “When I was a kid, I used to think she fell asleep because she was having all these exciting adventures in her dreams,” she laughed softly, “and they were better than any boat rides or amusement parks that this island could provide. Now, when I look at her like this, I know better. You only dream with the material you put in there. Her dreams are probably full of tv static and empty beer cases.”

            Her mom had twitched, like she had jumped into her own muscles, but didn’t wake up. I still remember the soft buttery way that she smelled after too much drinking. I wondered if she could hear us, if she was just pretending to be asleep.

            The kleenex girl brought me back to reality, waving a thin hand in my face and saying, “Hello…”

            Her voice was flat and had a foreign feel to it, like her o was more rounded than ours. I looked at her closely. I had never seen a girl like her before. Her skin was as thin as rice paper, and she had slightly crooked teeth, like a relic from some past life where she had been some one else.

            “You look as tired as I am,” she said.

            We introduced ourselves and agreed to get some juice. Marguerite worked at a juice shop nearby, so we headed in that direction. She hated the juice shop. She said that all the fruit came from sealed bags in freezing trucks from “God knows where.” She had only started working there because her school had called one day, and, thinking she was her mother, told her that she was $200 in debt for lunch money.

            “Hey baby,” I said, when we reached the front of the line, “I found this girl passed out. Let’s get her a juice. How about strawberry kiwi?”

            Marguerite looked warily at the girl, who was examining a small cut on her elbow that had bled a few drops onto her skin. She looked away, unconsciously feeling her own elbows.

            “Okay…”

            “You’re the best,” I told her. I decided to wink, just for good measure.

            She typed in the order quickly, adding a free raspberry drink for me. When I grabbed the drinks and looked for the kleenex girl, she was gone.

            I decided to hang out and wait for Marguerite to get off work. I found a rubbery bench from an artsier period and sat on that, watching some little kids play with a balloon. Marguerite joined me after about 45 minutes.

            “You know, most girls like her die by the time they’re 27?” she asked me.

            I thought I had heard something like that, that the kleenex-picking lifestyle was mysteriously hazardous, but it hadn’t crossed my mind for some reason.

            “Then why does anybody join up?” I asked her.

            She shrugged. “But that’s probably why she was passed out. It wears your body down, being up that high in the mountain, or eating those weird proteins, something like that. They tested the atmosphere up there, and the chemicals in the kleenex, but they can’t figure out why these girls keep dying so young, or what it is that makes their eyes turn white. I think they look kind of like ghosts, as if they’re turning into spirits while they are still alive.”

            “That’s stupid,” I said, “Why would anybody do something so dangerous?”

            “Not everybody wants to live a long life,” she told me, looking away, “some people would rather just live differently.”

            I suddenly remembered a program we had watched once with her mom. It was about a funeral for a bunch of those girls that had died all in succession. A big mass gathered to protest the kleenex business. The news reporter came on and talked about a line of hankies that were offered to people who wanted to boycott kleenex. I guess there had been scented ones—patchouli, rainy day—and ones that came in plaid or cloud print.

            I had forgotten about it quickly though, and so had everybody else. Nobody used hankies. Girls traveled up to the kleenex groves every year. Men rode up there on mopeds and watched them, scribbling in their notebooks, writing poems about them.

            “I think they’re beautiful,” Marguerite said, suddenly, “there’s something nice about the idea of living so simply, living off what you pick with your own hand. Something spiritual.”

            “I don’t know,” I concluded, “I just don’t get it.”

            That night I had dreamt the final dream about Marguerite. She was lying on a bed of kleenex, with new lovers constantly emerging from the folds. A soggy wind began, soaking them all, until the kleenex shrank and glued her to the ground. I was watching it all from behind a tree, trying to find acorns for some birds that were singing like fire alarms. When I woke up, my alarm was going off, oddly set to 3:00 a.m. My window was open, and I could feel a fine mist curling through. I decided to walk outside, and eventually walked all the way to Marguerite’s house.

            When I walked in, the house smelled like hot vaccuum cleaner bags. I walked by her mother, asleep on a piano bench, a picture frame resting on her head. I must have been loud, because she woke up with a soft snort, and looked eerily peppy.

            “Ben…” she began, “Would you like some tea? I’m just waking up.”

            She seemed to have no idea that it was 3:30 a.m. and walked into the kitchen, starting up the kettle. She took out a box of teas that had lemon flavoring already in the leaves. They smelled like dishwasher detergent.

            “She left me.” Her voice was sandpaper, coarse and crumbling. She dipped a teabag in some water, and I watched a brown shadow fill the cup. “It was only a matter of time, I guess. She was different from me, always looking at me like I was small. Even as a little kid, she gave me that look. You know what I mean, don’t you?”

            I did know: her eyes, like they were absorbing everything in the room, even the light.

            “Mothers know something, sometimes,” she continued.

            I felt dizzy, confused. A small part of me told me that I was no longer in the same place I had been, that I had some how become a character in her mother’s dream. I got the suspicion that her mother had never really woken up, but rather sucked me in with the gravity of her sleep. That’s when the reality tilted, the smoky flavor rolled in and stuck around, the smell of my new chamber.

            I ran back to my house, ignoring her question. I didn’t want to think about Marguerite. I thought about the kleenex girls and their blank stares, taking no light, leaving it out there, unjudged.

            “How do I know it’s not for the better?” Asked the drunk girl, watching as her skinny elbows almost slipped out from under her.

            I hadn’t changed for the bettter. I didn’t know how to judge change, in any circumstance. She had picked up a nut and shelled it gently, fascinated by its insides. I thought of Marguerite on the mountain, disappearing behind long leaves of kleenex. She had looked at me, bored, said, “You’ll never change, Ben.” I had thought her eyes would fade to gray and then to white, but instead they were speckled, white and black and gray together, like tv static.

            “Nevermind,” I told the girl, “How ‘bout another round?”

            The drunk girl nodded and smiled, her eyes complacent, blank as ivory.

-thank you for fixing my sunglasses, and also for getting that bird out of my room.

-thank you for watching “frozen” with me, and for the satsuma oranges.

-thank you for buying me a copy of esquire from spain and for being pretty cool about that one night i got too drunk at wine happy hour.

-thank you for cleaning my fan in freshman year and for organizing all the music on my computer.

-thank you for the photo collection of european benches and all of the mr. movies rentals.

i told an unnamed friend to try this exercise and she said, “i’d only have one thing to say for each one: thank you for wasting my time.”