I spend the next few days in a state of shock, wondering if this is how I’ve decided to cope with my sister’s death instead of grieving. Lacrimosus is a relatively new disease, so there’s still so much about it we’ve yet to discover, but I never thought I’d know someone who had it. Empathy isn’t my strong suit—that’s a flaw of mine, I know—but I’d still say that I’m aware of global issues and the terrible ways some of those issues affect very real people. It’s just that when you’re feeling bad for someone across the Internet, it’s very different than when it’s someone you talk to face to face on a regular basis. Someone you’re related to. That’s when shit transforms from a cause into a personal matter.
In the same way, Lacrimosus was always something I’d heard about, maybe skimmed a few articles, but never encountered in real life. I knew of the controversy surrounding it, whether or not the people who claimed to have it were just hallucinating or dealing with more deeply rooted problems, but now there was someone in my life with a concrete diagnosis. According to Brian, she’d even been taking medication.
And yet she still chose to take her own life.
Did the medications not work, then? Or had she been misdiagnosed? Could the wrong medication have driven her to suicide?
I’m drawing conclusions based on conjecture, which isn’t helpful.
I slap a pan on the stove top and pour in a couple tablespoons of olive oil, while trying to figure out what to make of the whole situation. It’s hard to come to a conclusion, though, when you’re as ignorant as I am of the topic.
The phone rings.
Halfway through chopping an onion, I shift my grip on the knife so I can pull my cell out of my pocket and clumsily swipe the answer icon.
“Hello?” I ask, squeezing the flat device between my ear and my shoulder.
“It’s me.”
“Hi, Auntie,” I say, angling my arm to start chopping again.
“Are you feeling better?” she asks, and I have to remind myself that I’d left the funeral reception early after feigning illness. Really, my social battery had gone critically low and, despite the apparent catharsis of grieving en masse, I just wanted to be alone. Shitty thing to do at your sister’s funeral, I know, but I’m a shitty person. So, there you have it.
“Yeah, I think it was just a twenty-four-hour thing.”
“Probably from someone there. People are so disgusting sometimes. You know I saw Candice leaving the ladies’ room without washing her hands? How quickly everyone forgets. That would’ve never happened in 2020. When the pandemic—”
“I know, I know, Auntie. That was the only time everyone cared about cleanliness. I was alive, you know.”
“Yes, but you were so young.”
“I still remember.”
“Well, you do forget things sometimes. I can never keep track of what you remember.”
I smile through pursed lips, sweeping the onions and now the mushrooms I’ve sliced into the pan. They sizzle, sending up tendrils of steam.
“Anyway, I was calling because you know how I always have Mariana on Saturday nights?”
“Yeah.” This was a standard rule in Evora’s household, her contribution to Dores and Brian’s well-being. Saturday nights were date night for them, and since Aunt Evora lived close by, she’d have Mariana stay the night so the two didn’t have to cut their evening short.
“Well, I was thinking it would do you some good to have her over this time. You know? Have some company.” She says this in that particular voice of hers, where she knows she’s intruding on your life but thinks she’s doing what’s best for you. I know she means well, but that voice is always followed by reluctant compliance on my part. And nine times out of ten, I don’t actually benefit from whatever it is she’s trying to get me to do. Usually, it’s something like volunteering with her rotary club or cleaning Saint Anthony’s Church—a delightful chore we do so often I now have my own key, which lives permanently in the pocket of my one and only coat.
“Mariana? Does she even want to stay with me?”
“Oh sure, Felix! She adores you!” Evora says. I can just imagine her waving away my concern with manicured fingers.
She’s not entirely wrong. At least, not as far as I can tell. I love playing with my niece, and she giggles at everything I do. But that doesn’t mean I’m chomping at the bit for her to stay in my condo. I look through the kitchen’s interior window at my rack of vintage CDs in the living room, the stone pipe on its side on the coffee table. Not to mention the liquor cabinet layered with precariously placed glassware. I’d have some cleaning up to do.
“I don’t have a bed for her or anything,” I say, then realize I’ve forgotten to add noodles to my boiling water.
“Well, that’s no matter,” Evora says as though I’m being ridiculous. “She could take your bed and you could sleep on the couch—”
How generous of you.
“—or she probably has a sleeping bag or something, I don’t know. Stop making excuses, Felix. She’s your niece, for heaven’s sake.”
“I’m not making excuses,” I mumble. “I’ve just never had her by myself before.”
“You’ll be fine. It’s not like she’s an infant anymore. She’s six. The only thing you need to do is feed and play with her.” Evora pauses, but I don’t speak because I know she isn’t done. Sometimes, she just stops for a moment or two when she feels she’s lost her composure. “Look, you’re always in that condo alone, and this is a difficult time for all of us. I love having Mariana over my house. I think it would do you a world of good to have someone stay with you for a night.”
How do you know I haven’t had people over? Of course, I haven’t, but that’s beside the point.
“Does she have toys or something to bring with her?” I ask. “I don’t have much here.”
“Oh, she has plenty of things she can bring. You’ll have a great time. I know it.”
“Alright, I’ll do it.”
“Great, I’ll let Brian know—”
“Wait,” I say before she can hang up. “I wanted to ask you something.”
“What was that?” she says, her voice getting louder as she brings the phone back to her face.
“Did you know about Dores? About the diagnosis, I mean.”
I can almost hear my aunt restraining herself, her voice more taut than normal, if that’s at all possible. When she speaks, the words are stilted—dry and cautious.
“I didn’t, actually,” she says. I regret asking almost immediately. “But I suppose that was what your sister wanted. Which is unfortunate. All those people—all of them need help. Proper help, if you ask me.”
The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.
How quickly my sister had become those people.
“What do you mean by that?”
“Well, I’m not saying it’s not real,” she says, which is exactly what people say when they’re close to opining about something they don’t consider to be real. “I just think that if they went beyond themselves a bit more, got outside to some sunshine, regular exercise, then it would do a lot more to make the hallucinations go away than any drug would do.”
I may not know much about the illness, but I’m about ninety-eight percent sure my aunt has got this one wrong. Not that “sunshine” and “regular exercise” aren’t good for the body, but they aren’t cures for this disease. Then again, I shouldn’t have let her lead me into this question. And while I’m sure she’d love to have a discussion about it, there are few things I despise more than a useless debate for the sake of debating. I’ll google around on my own, thanks.
When I haven’t responded to her declaration, she takes this as a sign that I’m not willing to engage on the matter.
“Anyway,” she says. “I’ll let Brian know you’re going to take Mariana on Saturday.”
“Thanks, I’ll text him too.”
“Oh, and you should find your rosary.”
I roll my eyes, grateful that she can’t see. Once again, there she goes assuming I’ve lost some rosary I’m supposed to have—and, granted, I did lose the last rosary I was given, for my confirmation, but that’s beside the point. I could very well have a rosary and know exactly where it is, but she’s made a judgment call.
“Why would I need my rosary?” I ask.
“Because I always say it with her before we go to bed,” Aunt Evora explains, as though this is some ingrained practice that can’t be foregone for even one single Saturday. I’m sure if I don’t say the rosary with Mariana, she won’t be too heartbroken over it. She might not even notice.
But sometimes it’s better to nod along than to argue.
“I know where it is,” I say, perhaps too defensively for someone who does not, in fact, know where his rosary is. “I’ll get it out before then.”
“That’s a good boy,” Aunt Evora says. “I’ll talk to you later.”
I say my goodbye and then we hang up, leaving me alone in my kitchen, flustered at the prospect of having to prepare my home for Mariana’s stay. Hopefully, she’ll bring everything she needs with her, because I won’t have much for her to do.
And I still haven’t added the pasta noodles.
~
Rain pours throughout the night, blustering winds buffeting my windows with heavy sheets of water. The evening had been so calm only hours before that part of me wants to believe I am dreaming, rather than lying awake beneath my covers, trying desperately not to feel as though my condo might collapse at any given moment. Yet, my imagination isn’t quite powerful enough to convince my mind of this alternate reality. I’m feeling far too exhausted—and time is passing far too slowly—for me to believe I’m asleep.
Instead, I toss and turn all night, growing more and more angry with myself as the seconds tick by. I’m not sure why rest eludes me—I don’t generally have problems sleeping. And it’s not as though I’m obsessing over any particular part of the day, or worrying about some issue beyond my control, or even mired by memories that are reluctant to let my consciousness go.
I simply cannot fucking sleep.
And so the minutes turn into hours. The intervals between hopeful glances at my run-of-the-mill digital clock alternate between five and thirty minutes apart. Slowly, my exhausted anger turns to exhausted sadness as I realize I’ve passed the point of adequate rest. Even if I fall asleep at this very moment, I’ll wake up tired as shit when the alarm rings.
Which is why I’m surprised to not wake up to the sound of my alarm.
My eyes flicker open in my dim room—dim but not dark. The raindrops drumming rat-a-tat-tat on my window remind me just how full to bursting my bladder is. Yet, while I’m relaxed and rested, that eternal pessimist which takes up a disproportionate share of my brain mutters that this can’t be right.
I roll over to check the clock.
Shit. I nearly piss in my bed, scrambling to jettison myself from the tangle of sheets. I am late. And when I say late, I mean the-bus-leaves-in-ten-I’d-better-get-the-hell-out-of-here late. Thus begins the most frantic and frustrating morning of my life.
To make an unnecessarily long story short, I miss said bus—it pulls away as I arrive at the stop, the pennywhistle theme from Titanic playing in my mind—and I wind up walk-jogging the two miles to my office building in the rain. Because I would hate to tarnish the roughly seventy-five percent success rate of my New Year’s “every weekday workout” resolution, my gym bag bounces against my hip the whole way there. Perhaps the resulting bruise will count as punishment enough for my tardiness.
If I’m being honest, that’s not likely.
I will say that the two-mile moisture parade does give me ample time to reflect upon my choices. I hadn’t chosen not to sleep last night, but I had let Aunt Evora get inside my head. It seems like she and everyone else thinks I’m so lonely, and maybe I am. But I don’t feel like that’s my fault. I’m the one who initiated my gym resolution as a way to better my health and my physical appearance. The hope was that if I made myself a little more conventionally attractive, the rest would follow.
But I suppose I could do more to take the next step.
By the time I power walk my way into 55 Rhodes Avenue, I’m not as late as I could’ve been, but I’m disgruntled nonetheless. I cuss myself out, marveling at my own talent for acquiring new levels of stupidity when I least expect it. Sometimes, it feels like even my general drive for mediocrity is too much to maintain. The bar was low, but wading through a crowded downtown, soaked through my clothes and starving to boot, screams failure. I would strive for more, but I have a sneaking suspicion I will spend my life being mediocre.
Not bothering to wait for an elevator, I hustle up the stairs to the third floor.
Corner House Magazine greets me in oversized letters upon the landing. The sign’s impossible to miss, lit brighter than the surface of the sun in serifed navy characters. I swear the entrance didn’t use to be so gaudy, but ever since Lenae Champeaux left, all traces of taste left with her.
After navigating the grid of cubicles, I toss my bag beneath my desk and head straight for my favorite bathroom. It’s the one by the fire exit, tucked behind the storage closet. If there’s any good left in the world, it’ll be empty like usual. But this morning I don’t trust my luck.
As I thought, someone’s in the stall cutting wet ones with abandon. The smell nearly sends me back out into the hallway, but the squeak of my wet shoes makes me stay. I start emptying the paper towel dispenser, wiping frantically at my sopping shirt.
This method yields minimal results.
Shit. I can’t just sit in my chair sopping wet all day—I mean, I suppose I could, but it’s not going to be comfortable. I could also change into my gym clothes, but that’s not appropriate office attire, and they’re likely to be damp too.
My eyes fall on the air dryer just as the toilet flushes.
The putrid perpetrator turns out to be none other than Frank Weimar from HR. He doesn’t take long to spot me standing awkwardly by the sinks, fistfuls of paper towel poised at the ready. We lock eyes before his gaze travels down my body, taking in my entire composition.
“What happened to you?”
What happened to me? I went swimming upriver to get to work today. What does it look like? Smug fuck. I got caught out in the rain. At least I haven’t been holed up in a public restroom for half the morning laying down fecal mortar.
But that’s not likely to make me any friends. Be nice.
“I had to walk today,” I say, stepping aside so he can access the sinks. He washes his hands without another word, then leaves the bathroom.
I spend the next ten minutes running my knit shirt under the dryer and jamming my elbow against the button every thirty seconds when it shuts off. My pants I attempt to do while still wearing them—maneuvering my lower half beneath the nozzle like an unskilled contortionist—but when it gets too hot to handle, I give up.
Defeated, I return to my desk and am met by a polite clearing of the throat.
I sigh inwardly, spinning in my chair, though I already know who’s standing in the entrance of my cubicle. It’ll be Felicia Alba, the boss herself. I’m prepared to be chastised for arriving late during one of the busiest times for the mag—after all, the winter issue is where we make the bulk of our sales since readers love the shit out of Christmas stories—but I find her looking at me with wide, understanding eyes instead, and I wish I’d just called in sick rather than putting all this effort into making it to work. This is almost worse than the anger I’d been expecting.
“Sorry I’m late,” I mutter, averting my gaze.
She smiles understandingly. “It’s alright. This is a difficult time,” she says. “How was it? You know—the funeral,” she adds, as if I might not know she meant my sister’s funeral.
“Alright,” I say truthfully.
“You know, you needn’t feel any pressure to return so soon. If you need more time off, I understand. We’ll manage.”
“It’s fine,” I say, wishing she would leave me alone. I know I’ve got at least fifty submissions waiting for review in my inbox. “It helps to keep my mind busy.”
“Oh,” she says, with an understanding nod. “Well, let me know if you change your mind.”
I smile appreciatively, but as she turns to leave, I notice several other pairs of eyes lingering on the two of us over the low-wall cubicles. All of them are either nosy or, worse, concerned. I sincerely hope none of them feel the need to come over here to share their condolences. I know their hearts are probably in the right place, but if it was socially acceptable to do so I’d tell them all to leave me the fuck alone. I’m here to fulfill my occupational obligations, and I wish to do so in peace.
Unfortunately, I can’t say as much without coming off as a complete prick, which means any moment now I’m going to be interrupted again.
Why do I care about loneliness?