 
### Joy Cancer

Copyright 2016 Lily Markova

Published by Lily Markova at Smashwords

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author's reasonably sick imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental, as is everything else in this pointless world.

Table of Contents

Epilogue

Why

Yesterday

Well, Fuck

Adam

B-52

The Dreamers

The Revolution

No

Prologue

About the Author

To my mother and my father, who didn't always understand me but never failed to love me more than I could ever understand,

and to my brother, whom I love so much I hope he never grows to understand me,

and to _X_ , whose films broke my heart and, for a night, made me feel like shit as if I had found a close friend, and who reminded me that we create to feel less alone.

I wrote this novella in the hope that it might make a nice an understanding friend to someone sad, someone angry, someone who feels as though they have no one to talk to, even if it's just for tonight.

Warning: strong language and a ridiculously tremendous amount of fucks (told you) given about virtually everything.

This is a story about a girl, a boy, and his boyfriend.

A story about a girl, yet not a traditional love story.

A story about friendship, in which nobody dies of cancer.

A story about suicide, in which nobody dies.

(Although, don't hold me to that last bit; like many writers, I am a liar.)

But first and foremost, this is a story celebrating the love of life—in its own strange, hopeless way.

All right, enough with the preludes. Here's what happened:

Epilogue

My first word was "Why?" I was lying in my crib, thrashing my little legs, and crying. Shrieking at the top of my tiny pink lungs, choking on this wail, "Why? Why?"

That was twenty-four years ago. Nothing has dramatically changed since then, to be honest.

I mean, of course I don't sob anymore—not publicly, anyway. My "Why?" is now automatic, impassive, like a broken, stuck echo. Tell me anything, and I'll return, "Why?"

"Have you eaten today?"

"Why?"

"Happy Birthday!"

"Why?"

"I love you."

"Why?"

"Have you, did you, you should, you can't—"

"Why?"

"Why," as in "What's the point?"

My name is Joy. _Joy_ , do you get it? Like fuck you do. You don't get anything.

I'm lying on the hot, snow-white shore of a small island in the Indian Ocean, and I'm dying laughing. Quite literally.

_Joy_. My name is Joy, and I'm finding this so hilarious right now my eyes are watering.

Admittedly, my laughter sounds as if I were being smothered with a pillow and screaming in terror. I'm not scared—it's just that laughing normally when you have a plastic bag filled with gas over your head is fairly tricky. Whenever I stir, the sticky tape sealing the bag rustles and prickles my sweaty neck. I shouldn't be twitching too much: The pipe running from the gas container (its other end inside the bag, the edges of the hole also sealed around the tube) might fall off. There would be a breach in my anti-reality bubble, my spacesuit helmet, and air would start leaking into it. No, thank you very much. See, air is exactly what I'm trying to avoid here, so I'm doing my best to laugh motionlessly.

I wish I were able to catch the fresh smell of the ocean one last time so I could die with it trapped in my chest forever. But I had to empty the bag of oxygen and fill it with the gas, I had to breathe out before putting it on, I had to let the smell of the ocean leave my lungs, I had to let it go, let it all go.

It's all right, though. I can content myself with just feeling the scorching sand under my bare back and calves, and hearing the soothing, if muffled, whisper of the waves coupled with the chirr of exotic insects. God, I'm such an idiot. How could I have forgotten to prepare the right bag?

The thing is I have planned everything down to the minutest detail. The volume of the gas tank, the rate at which the gas should flow into the bag, everything. A minute, tops, and I'll black out. After five minutes, my garrulous, exhausting brain will be starved of oxygen and, as a result, irrevocably damaged. Ten minutes, and I'm gone. "K bye." No pain.

Human bodies tend to do some embarrassing shit when they break free of consciousness, when they escape our control. That's why I'm executing my plan (and myself) in the evening: Soon, the next high tide will arrive, and the foamy water will cover me like a soft comforter. And when the blanket is lifted, I won't be underneath it. Peekaboo! Where did little Joy go? There will be neither the gas tank nor even a heap of stuffed animals, deceptively shaped like a sleeping girl's figure—like ten years ago, when I took to slipping out of the house in the middle of the night because I couldn't take any more walls and ceilings and ticking clocks. The low tide will drag me into the depths and erase my footprints. No trace. No funeral. _It's okay to be eaten by fish, 'cause I won't have any feelings._ Perfect. Everything's perfect, except—how could I not have thought to prepare the right bag?

My head's swimming. Not literally, not yet. How long do I have left? My phone with its stopwatch running is right under my hand, but I can't see how much time has passed since I opened the valve because I'd forgotten to prepare a clear plastic bag. Stupid idiot.

My empty and clueless stomach tries to get my attention by letting out a loud, plaintive grumble, and I chuckle again. How poetic. Some kind of bug is crawling up my foot. The tickling is torturous, but I don't dare shake the insect off, worried that the movement might disturb the tape.

In short, when I realized, on my way to the beach, that I had left something as important as a proper bag out of my maniacally meticulous calculations, I had little choice but to stop by a local fast-food restaurant, _Happy Meat_ , and buy one from them. They didn't have transparent bags, which is why I'm about to die with the words "Happy Meat" printed across my face. Oh, God, why is this so funny? My dumb head shakes with laughter again, and the tape responds with a warning bite on my neck, near the carotid artery. Fine, fine, I'll calm down. Jesus.

My forehead also says, "Non-GMO" and "No Preservatives." No preservatives, ha. This one would be amusing if someone found my not-exactly-fresh body a week from now—but the ocean will make sure that doesn't happen. And then there's "No, Sugar" somewhere around my mouth. That's right: "No, Sugar." With the comma. Oh, no, sugar, not this time. "This packaging is biodegradable and can be easily dissolved in water—just flush me down the toilet," my chin says. Just flush me down the toilet. Oh, this bag is killing me. I'm not even laughing anymore, merely smirking.

So these are my profound musings from a deathbed, huh? Look at me—I'm dying and _still_ babbling nonsense. Well, what did you expect? It's fair enough: a mediocre, shallow ending for a mediocre, shallow life.

If I weren't so gutless—also not literally (after some consideration, I had to dismiss the idea of mummification as overly pompous and difficult to perform single-handedly)—okay, if I weren't so gutless, I could face death. I mean, greet it with my chin proudly up, my eyes daringly open, my mind sober and curious. The biological death, the final one—the most thrilling mystery of all, the one-time-only, one-per-person experience no one can give you a firsthand account of. Is it true that a dying brain releases so many endorphins that the happiest we can ever get is shortly after we stop breathing? Is it true that all the dopamine numbs the pain so the moment I die might be the only second in my life when I'm not hurting? Is it true that we enter a state of heightened consciousness when departing so we are able to feel our death deeply, all its beauty and ugliness and dread and liberation, we can _realize_ it as clearly as nothing before?

I'll never know, because I'm gutless. I'm not afraid of dying per se, but everything that comes before and after horrifies the living hell out of me, so I've chosen to die in my sleep.

Before "insomnia" became the third phrase I'd turn to when having to describe myself during job interviews, right after "latently wayward" and "mono-functional" (no wonder I've had many job interviews), I used to sleep a lot. I slept in classes, I slept on dates, I slept at rock concerts. I even slept under a bridge once. It wasn't so much that I wanted to sleep—I just didn't feel like being awake.

I don't really want to die, either; I just don't feel like being alive anymore. Do you get it? Ugh, like fuck.

" _Why is life this way? It's full of pain and blood,"_ I told my mother once, looking up at her with my sad but no longer tearful eyes as if she had deceived me, as if she had betrayed me.

" _Well spotted,"_ she replied with a subtle indulgent smile, and she bought me a mint chocolate chip ice cream (which, I should mention, immediately rose to the top of the podium of my all-time favorite mankind's achievements).

I mean, we were returning home from the dentist, after I had said good-bye to one of my baby teeth, so my reaction was only natural, but still, I don't think I've ever made a better point in the course of my stupid existence. It's a shame that there are only so many times a delicious ice cream can help ease your existential agony.

Many years later, I read about a guy who had been so angry with the government he'd blown up a hundred and fifty people. There was a lot of pain and blood around him that day. On the eve of his execution, he ordered two pints of mint chocolate chip ice cream as his last meal. I can't explain how infinitely weird I feel about this "fun fact."

_Anyway_ —this beach is the most breathtaking place I've ever seen. ( _Breath-_ taking? Will you shut up, brain, you're not funny.) I could be watching the red sinking sun right now through polyethylene as if through misty glass, seeing only blurs and vague forms, like a Monet or van Gogh painting—had I only not been such an idiot and had I prepared the right bag beforehand. If I open my eyes now, the sole thing I'll see is the word "meat" written backward. _Taem_. It means "time" in one of the aboriginal languages of the island. _Time_. Time is a mockery. No, I'm not going to open my eyes; my eyelids are so leaden. . . .

I'm falling asleep as sweetly as when I was a kid and Mom sang me lullabies. She used to compose them herself, and her voice was so gentle, so magical, like a porcelain wind chime.

"Forgive me, Mom"—a numb-lipped, barely audible mumble, and I'm disconnected. No signal.

Oh, forgive me, Mother, for I have sinned, so, so much.

I'm dreaming of Her—tiny, ashen-faced; she's curled up on my bed, hugging my old, one-eyed teddy bear to her chest as if it were a baby. She's weeping, howling and biting into the pillow, her screams fading into a chilling, broken lullaby. . . .

No—

" _Mommy_ —"

What should have been my first word becomes my last.

Why

I see my life as a sequence of flashes of light. I blink, and it's as if a photographer pressed the shutter-release button, and everything lit up. There are sounds and colors and sensations, and I barely have time to take notice of everything before the scene implodes and darkness falls again. I feel as though my eyes were closed most of the time, as if nothing were ever happening, as if I didn't even exist between these flashes.

One moment, I'm in my bed, yawning and wincing as two gun-shaped alarm clocks loaded and set for seven a.m. fire through my ears. Next thing I know I'm in the office, staring at the screen and striving to understand whether I'm just daydreaming again or the letters really are rearranging themselves into "YOU LOSE" followed by derisive red digits counting down like a bomb timer. Trois, deux, un. Zero. I shut my eyes, and. . .nothing.

When I open them, somehow I'm on the subway. Then suddenly, it's night and I'm behind the front desk at the hotel, answering a call while suppressing a jaw-locking yawn along with the urge to let out a scream so piercing that the glasses of whoever's on the other end of the line will crack. Then I'm at my parents', then—I can't remember how I get from one place to another, I'm not sure how much time passes between the "shots." Half an hour? Half a year?

It's not like in _Fight Club—_ oh, God, do I sometimes wish it were. Nor am I occasionally possessed by a demon who inhabits my body to do their sinister things and kindly wipes out my memories afterward. I suspect I don't teleport without realizing it, either. I don't get black-out wasted. No, nothing exciting like that, really. It's just that I don't feel present, I don't pay attention to what's going on when I think it doesn't matter, which is, sadly, almost always. Here I find myself listening to somebody—or should I say, _hearing_ somebody, close to drooling as I watch their mouth distort in the bizarrest ways—and the next moment—

_Flash_! Applause, encouraging exclamations. I blow out the candles.

Twenty-five.

The clinking of glasses, the hiss of champagne.

"Joy, Happy Birthday, darling. You—be happy. Just _be happy_. My only wish is that you find yourself, find your place in the world. We love you."

"Oh, come on, Mom. Everything's great. Thank you. I love you, too. Oh—"

A sticky kiss on my cheek. When her lips tear away from my skin, this tackiness remains. All I can think about is how I want to rub the maroon lipstick off my face, but I'm afraid that that might upset her, so I lace my fingers under the table and smile at her instead. I need to focus my mind on what's happening so another flash of light won't take me away from her, from them, from this. This is an important moment. Right?

Dad clears his throat and raises his glass. "Joy. . .here's to you. You know I'm not as good with words and all this. . . _talking"—_ his eyebrows twitch, almost imperceptibly—"as you and Mom, but I really love you, and—I'm really worried about you."

"Dad—"

He's got a black sesame seed stuck between his lower front teeth, and I adore his perfume. He's been wearing it every day for at least twenty years, and I still adore it. I adore it so much that sometimes when I catch this scent on someone else, I just want to drop everything and follow that person as if enchanted. I— _concentrate_ , Joy.

"Okay, ahem, I wish you every success in life, in your—well, whatever it is you do there, and—" Dad sighs and shakes his head, probably in frustration at his inability to get it over with less painfully. He's never been comfortable with little formalities like birthday wishes and toasts. I guess I got it from him. I cover his free hand with mine and slightly shake my head, too, to remind him he doesn't have to do this.

"I seem to understand you less and less, but I love you. Don't ever forget that. You'll always be my child, _our_ child, and you know you can always come home, and we'll always be waiting for you. Now now, what are you doing? Stop it, stop with the tears, all of you!"

Hugging, crying, laughing. Happiness.

Embarrassed, heart-rending happiness.

_Flash_! The sickly bluish light of fluorescent tubes. The beeping of barcode scanners.

"May I see your identification, please?"

"Sure. Here."

The cashier shifts her incredulous gaze from the ID to my face. Her suspicions must have something to do with the fact that before having this photo taken, I had sobbed for twenty-four hours in a row and so had to use a thick layer of makeup to paint a new, more humanlike face over my swollen one. Or maybe it's because of my last name.

I shake my legs with impatience and lower my hood so she can get a better look at me. She finally hands me back my ID, chewing, all businesslike, and reaches for the cigarettes under the counter. "Gray pack?"

"No, no, the black ones."

Black as my goddamned lungs.

"Cancer?"

"Excuse me?"

"Joy Cancer?"

Oh, _that_.

"They named you _Joy Cancer_? Like you've got a cancer in your ability to feel good?"

You don't know the half of it.

She blows a pink bubble and pops it back into her mouth, and I try not to notice the shreds of the chewing gum lingering in the corners of her lips.

"Yeah, tell me about it. Oh, and a stick of that gum, please. Thanks."

_Flash_! "You shouldn't smoke. How old are you, sixteen?"

You see, where I live, it's illegal to smoke in public places, and every other passerby has a cigarette hanging out of their mouth. Being a non-smoker in my city is equivalent to leaving home without an umbrella: You're very likely to regret it. Smoking is a necessary defense mechanism against this ubiquitous rainy melancholy. I think if people here didn't clutch at their cancer straws, the only alternative for them would be to drop half dead on the streets and lie there with pensive faces as somewhere on the other side of the city, they're being fired from their dead-end nine-to-fives.

Holding on to my cigarette the way a drowning man holds on to a lifebuoy, I'm standing outside a dental clinic, _Smiling at Strangers_ —a name that would better suit a mental hospital. Perhaps I should buy one of their paper bags with those deranged grins on them and wear it over my head whenever I'm outdoors.

Staring at strangers for longer than, like, a second is also frowned upon (literally), where I live, and _smiling_ at someone you don't know upon accidentally meeting their eyes is just incriminating. Here, if a stranger smiles at you, provided you don't look too weird (just check that you aren't completely naked, because if they're smiling, you probably are), it can only mean one of three things:

_a_ ) They are a foreigner or have just returned from abroad and haven't fallen out of the habit of politely smiling at everyone yet. Reminds me of the animal world—the fear grimace, you know. When two macaques get in each other's way, the weaker one grins to avoid a face-off. So when these guys bare their teeth, I read, "I'm not looking for trouble. Don't gnaw my face off, please."

_b_ ) They're trying to flirt with you.

_c)—And this is the most common reason—_ they are entirely insane and dangerous and they can rip your throat out with the same teeth they're smiling at you with.

Don't get me wrong, I love my city, my damp, aristocratically chilly city. The sky here is as gray as the walls and pavements, so you feel as if you were running around inside a giant box made of recycled cardboard. Every local homeless drunkard can quote poets of Decadence, and intimidating-looking folks keep apologizing _every_ time they push you in the mosh pit at a grunge gig.

Yeah, I love my city the way some women love their abusive significant others because those are handsome and nice to them on their birthdays. I love my city in a Stockholm-syndrome sort of way.

"Hey, kid, are you deaf or what? I'm talking to you, aren't I?" He himself is squeezing a pack of unfiltered _Ahl Fakhirs_ in his hand. He looks like he might be around fifty or so. He also looks like he could use a reminder to fuck the fuck off. "You're gonna be a mother one day, you know that? Have mercy on your future spawn. Smoking's bad for your health, don't they teach you this in school nowadays?"

See? I was right.

I'm twenty-five, for Christ's sake. You know what else is bad for your health? Thrusting yourself upon strangers with your unsolicited opinions and your narrow-minded assumptions and—shush, Joy, _chill out_. I have yet to perfect my art of not giving a damn. Giving a damn is lethal here. It's a sin, a weakness, a malfunction. Don't let anyone notice that they have the power to get to you, that you care about anything, or you'll be discarded as broken.

I only take life advice from happy people. Too bad I've never met anyone truly happy. I'm talking about the real "happy" here, you know, not about those brainwashed cheaters with their inspirational quotes. Give me a fucking break. Happiness is a competition. Happy is a success, a sell-out. Put on a smile, winner. You have every right to look down on those sad losers.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not one of those couch misanthropes going on and on about how much they despise everyone. I like people, and I would like them even more if they stopped liking themselves so much and disliking everybody else all the time. I like people—it's just that they make me angry sometimes. I mean, I would rather hang out with someone whose IQ doesn't exceed their age, or someone who listens to mindless pop songs than someone who bashes the harmless kind of stupidity and questionable musical preferences.

Maybe I like people in a Stockholm-syndrome sort of way, too.

I give the man a drawn-out, meaningful "hmph." Put on an exaggeratedly nice smile. Turn away and exhale the smoke. _Ahl Fakhir_.

_Flash_! A drowsy purring of engines, the squeaking of escalators. A robot-like female voice announcing the arrival of a train—although, you can't be too certain with her unintelligible messages. Maybe it's the arrival of the Third World War she's announcing. Or an inrush of Jovian-Plutonian tourists. Or Ragnarök. Maybe everything is exploding and screaming and running for their lives up there while the subway trains are swiftly carrying the passengers to work, unaware that today's the ultimate day off.

Don't look around. I know the way by heart, every step, staircase, turn, and transfer; I don't have to take my eyes off my tattered sneakers as they alternately outrun each other. I never just walk; I always run, even when I don't need to hurry, because I'm afraid that if I don't run, I might stop for a second and ask myself why the hell I am going there in the first place.

Just don't look around. We all play this game here. You meet someone's gaze, you lose.

Besides, if I catch sight of another shrill ad trying to convince me all I need to be happy (fuck off!) is to get laid or buy a new pair of skinny jeans or purple lipstick or eat a tuna salad sandwich, I swear I will scream. I will scream, " _Noooo_!" as if someone were torturing my favorite fictional person before my bloodshot eyes, and I will jump in front of a train. God.

Then, of course, I will get up, apologize to the driver for the inconvenience, and go and grab that tuna salad sandwich, because I'm hungry.

I count feet. The car is half empty. Standing in the middle of it, not holding on to anything, I close my eyes and imagine the people around me: lowered heads, gritted teeth, knitted eyebrows, shaking hands, gray faces, heavy blackness under their inflamed eyes. Am I one of them? Do I have to be one of them? I feel like bellowing all of a sudden, scaring them all away, as if in a morgue.

Look at me, there's been some kind of mistake, I'm alive! Let me out!

It's funny, really—when I was a kid, I had this fear of being buried alive, and now I spend two hours a day underground.

Slowly, I raise my arms and start to dance, to a ridiculous, inappropriate pop song. Right here, in the middle of this car that reeks of stress and despair. No one is looking at me directly, but everyone can see me. And I can sense their pity mixed with contempt—to them, I'm just another victim of the city, a lunatic. I can sense their anger, too— _I'm_ the one who's doing something incredibly stupid, but it's _they_ who have to feel uncomfortable about it.

. . .I'm not really dancing. I never dance and I never shout at people. It's all just in my head. Outwardly, I am composed. I don't jaywalk. I brush my teeth at least twice a day. I don't swear out loud. And I don't dance on the subway. I abide by all the rules for surviving in a human pack.

The train vibrates and wobbles a bit more fiercely than usual. I open my eyes for a moment, and I lose. Someone's black eyes are peering into mine, then the stare slides down, and up again, down, up. I can't see their lips, but the eyes are smirking. As if innocently, I rub the bridge of my nose with my middle finger. It's not a big deal, but I immediately feel used, humiliated, powerless, and so, _so furious_. God, I'm just so angry all the time.

The moment you look at me with unloving and hungry eyes,

to you, I stop being a human and turn into some sort of hamburger,

but to me, I am still a human, and I guess you're a human, too,

and that

makes you a cannibal.

Shut up, brain. I won't write so much as a single line ever again.

_Flash_! I pause before the front door. Chewing gum, mouth freshener—just to be sure—and perfume. All right. Like a schoolgirl, for God's sake.

Bent over, unlacing my sneakers.

"Joy?"

I flinch. I often flinch when someone calls my name. I feel like a chameleon hearing a child's scream, "Look, there's a chameleon!" I guess in moments like this, in the chameleon's mind, too, races a panicked thought, " _Fuck_."

"How's work?"

I'm sitting at the table in my parents' kitchen now and watching the clock above Mom's head while she's fiddling with the oven. It's better to look at the clock than at her hunched, tired back. I have a thing about clocks. I just can't take my eyes off it whenever I see one. Is it me, or does the second hand really slow down after it passes "7" and kind of plunge after "2"? I don't know, perhaps this clock is simply old and its hands just can't fight gravity anymore, much like my stupid childhood dreams. The speed with which the second hand makes a full circle petrifies me. It's hypnotic, it's doomful, it's making me anxious. Tick tock.

"Joy?"

"Huh?"

"How was work? Your night shift? At the hotel?"

Let me think. To me, the least alluring part about being a night receptionist is not even the lack of sleep; it's having to deal with people whose judgment is affected by their own lack of sleep. Whom am I kidding? It's just having to deal with people. I'm not very good at it, you see. A dilemma: Do I suck at my job because I hate it, or do I hate it because I suck at it?

" _What do you mean, 'receptionists are not required to be well versed in Satanism'?"_

" _Excuse me, Miss, what is the correct way to use a teaspoon?"_

People assume you should know everything, however unrelated to your line of work. I classify those as the "Are you my mommy?" type of questions. They aren't the worst, though, I must admit. I would prefer them any day to another category of popular comments and enquiries—the "Who is your daddy?" type.

" _So, honey, what time do you finish?"_

" _What sports do you do? Karate, is that so? So you can, you know, fight back? You can, you know, do the splits?"_

" _I'm a doctor. A serious kind, not like some pediatrician or whatever. Resuscitation expert, I am."_ Every time he opens his mouth, a strong smell of ethanol strikes my nostrils. " _I save lives, and you're just sitting around here. Can I kiss you? What do you mean, 'that's not in your job description?' Are you gay or something? I see people die. When they ask me for one last breath of fresh air, I open the window. It's not in my job description, I don't have to, I know they are dying, but I open the window, right? Why can't you forget_ your _job description for a second? I open the window for dying people, why can't you kiss me? Are there any hot girls in the other rooms? Are you a virgin? You look like you could be a virgin."_ He pauses to gauge my reaction: Did the word "virgin" make me blush? Did he succeed in embarrassing me?

I do feel trapped. I can't talk back, I can't scratch the hell out of his face. I have to be nice to people who don't see me as anything more than a piece of happy meat. My job is to smile.

" _I save lives, okay? Can't you be nicer? You're a silly little girl. We could be friends. I'm a doctor, okay? Sometimes I save lives, and sometimes I don't. People just keep fucking dying."_ He laughs.

I remember the last time I was waiting outside the closed doors of an ICU, I remember the _beep beep beep_ turn into a _beeeeeeeep_. People just keep fucking dying. This I know. I smile back politely.

" _Nah, you can't be a gay virgin. What time do you finish?"_

He may be a jerk, but he's right about one thing—if we suppose (for argument's sake) that human lives matter, then his job matters, too, and he has every reason to crack up, and all _I_ do is just sit around here. Maybe I actually deserve to be treated like this. I mean, what else am I good for? Smiling is about the only useful professional skill I've acquired in twenty-five years. Twenty-five years. A third of a life. A half, if I'm lucky. But I'm just me, just a kid—when did _that_ happen?

Tick. Tock.

"Joy? Hello?"

I flinch. "Fine. Work's fine."

"Are you hungry? You want me to heat up the pasta for you?"

"Mom, I can't do this anymore." My traitor of a voice trembles.

"Can't do what?"

"You know, food, work, the Internet. Every day, same thing. Nothing is going to change. Ever. It's all there is."

When you're a child, they keep telling you everything will be all right, things will work out, everything will happen at the right time. Don't they know that things don't happen to you, you have to _make_ them happen? Things don't work out, you have to work them out yourself. "Good things come to those who wait?" Such bullshit. Nothing comes to you if you just sit there and wait—except, perhaps, obesity and osteoporosis. You have to do something if you want things to change. _I_ have to do something. I have to do something right now. I wish I knew _what_ I have to do.

I am terrified. I am agonizing. Why can't I express it? What's the point in loving words if you can't put them together in the right order, can't communicate something important to another person, something so important it won't let you sleep? What's the point in trying to speak if you can't pick the perfect ones out of all the words, the ones capable of breaking this eternal silence, this omnipresent loneliness between us, the ones capable of letting someone hear I am incessantly screaming, immured behind this quiet façade? And even if do find those words, what's the point? Why?

" _Food, work, the Internet_. . . . Is that what you're sick of?"

I manage to unglue my stare from the clock and fix it on the back of her head. Turn around. Just turn around and _look at me_.

For a second, I imagine that she does turn around, and instead of her face, there is just another apathetic nape crowned with a shock of hair. Damn it, I'm losing it again. But she doesn't look at me, so I'm not sure if her face is gone.

"You're tired of having something millions of people can only dream of? You're tired of falling asleep knowing what's coming tomorrow? Knowing you'll still be safe?"

_Safe_. Sometimes I think I can feel the roots of my hair going gray from anxiety.

This cage is only for your safety, they said. These handcuffs are only to make sure you don't hurt yourself, they said.

Am I despair, or am I rage? Have you ever been caged under the pretense of being loved?

All I want is the freedom to be me.

To say what I mean.

To stand up for what I believe in.

To fight for those I love, myself included.

But I am a slave.

And I have to be quiet and obedient.

And I have to smile nicely because if I don't smile, I will be torn apart.

And I want to be torn apart, but I don't have the luxury of choosing that either, for my life is not mine.

It belongs to someone who put me in this cage, pretending it's for my own good.

Shut up, brain. I'm safe.

"Mom, look, you know I didn't mean it like that. I do realize I have more than many—"

"But you want even more?" She's kneading the dough now, a bit more violently than necessary. Her hands appear older than they should from all the housework. My heart howls and shrinks. _Guilty_.

"I don't want _more_ , I want _different_."

I want to feel as though what I do is important. As though it's worth it. But nothing is. _Nothing_ is worth anything, _nothing_ is important. Absolutely _everything_ on this planet, and probably beyond it, is absurd and doesn't really matter. _Everybody_ knows it. _Everybody_ deals with it. Why can't I?

"Mom, please don't smoke, your heart—"

_Hypocrite_.

I light up every half an hour when she's not around. Sometimes I think if it weren't for my addiction to nicotine, one day I just wouldn't be able to find a reason to go outside or even get out of bed. Cigarettes help me survive as much as they help me die.

"When was the last time you wrote?"

When the planet cools down or explodes, Beethoven's sonatas will be of as much value as my old socks. There's no point in creating something, saving someone, falling in love. In the end, nothing you do will last.

"And you?"

She waves me aside.

"Mom, how do you live with this?"

Mom, what do I do? I'm so scared. I'm so confused. Sometimes I don't even want different anymore, I don't want anything at all and I don't want to want anything. Sometimes I hate myself with a cold, disgusted hatred, and I don't even understand why. I can't live with myself some days. Mom, help me, as you did when I was a kid. Can you please be my mom a little longer? Why did you run out of the answers to my questions so soon?

Tick. Tock. Tick tock. Tick tock, tick tock, tick tock ticktock-ticktockticktock—

"Should I reheat the pasta?"

_Flash_! Night. My old room. Their shouting voices on the other side of the wall—that's old, too. Walls, walls, ceilings. This room is bigger than the entire apartment I'm renting. I like that, that cramped-ness. Makes you feel as if you were in your cozy burrow, your stronghold. This room is too much space, too many walls, too many ceilings. It looks cold even on the hottest summer day; it feels vulnerable even when all the locks are secure.

I never feel more homesick than when I'm home.

"I am _sick_ of her extreme-attitude all-or-nothing black-and-white existential bullshit! Why can't she just live? She has everything!"

"Hush, Dean!"

"I won't _hush_ , Meredith! I wish she'd find a boyfriend already, Christ's sake. We won't get to see any grandkids from her! Doesn't want to be a mother, does she? Is that a trendy thing to say these days? Doesn't want a career, either. Fooling around, that's what she wants! We are too smart and profound to live like everybody else, aren't we? And me and you, huh? We don't live our lives right in her book either, do we? We have invested everything—"

"Dean, do lower your voice! She'll hear you!"

"Why, I don't care! Let her! Let her listen! It's time to _grow up_! It's all _your_ fault. We should have been harsher on her, and you treated her like a princess! Books, arts! Enjoy now! Enjoy the fruits of your labors! She can't do anything with her hands, she's helpless! What is she going to do when we aren't here anymore? She doesn't even live in the real world! Still waiting for some alien with a stupid spaceship to come and take her away, is she?"

I shut my eyes— _I_ am my own burrow now; the only fortress that still withstands is my feeble body.

Dad is right about everything, except, of course, the part about its being Mom's fault. But he doesn't mean it. And the guy on the subway probably didn't mean to make me feel like throwing up. And my day-job boss, Julia, probably doesn't mean to turn my working days into a circus. We're all human. How often do we really mean to hurt someone?

I love them so much—too much, maybe. Maybe it's unhealthy to cling to your parents like this after you turn, say, twelve. Visiting them every weekend, sleeping in your old room, silently begging them to please mend you. Sometimes I wonder if my love for them is no longer anything more than just a mixture of gratitude, pity, and guilt.

I mean, when you come down to it, isn't any love, even a blinding, desperate parental love, just a gaudy bouquet of hormones, habits, and fears? How sad is that? How pointless?

Me? I've never had a problem falling out of love with someone. When I was sixteen, almost every night, I habitually covered my stuffed animals with a blanket so it looked as if I were still in bed, slipped out of the house, and headed to my first crush's place. Once, I made the mistake of walking, not running, so I found myself stopping for a moment and seeing him for what he was, for what we all were—bones and blood and delusions, however nice his taste in music might have been. All it takes for love to die is for you to channel all those intoxicating neurotransmitters into something productive. So I turned around and went to a bar—in my city, no bartender cares whether you're old enough for _Bloody Maries_.

What? You must be thinking, "What an evil bitch! What about the guy's heart?" Well, he always talked about how he loved my long fair hair, so I cut it short and dyed it black. He wouldn't even recognize me at school. Oh, shut up. I was sixteen, all right? Love turns you into a dazzlingly reckless idiot, and the effect lasts for some time even after it's gone. It's been a long time since, and my hair is once again fair and long, and he's married. (She doesn't have any hair at all, if you're curious. Rather pretty and an all-around great person, I hear.) Yeah, I guess you're right. It's not nice of you to call me an evil bitch, but I'm no role model, that's for sure.

Fishing one person out of seven billion and dubbing them "the sole purpose of your life"? I could never understand those who claim it's uncontrollable. For me, it's always a choice. I _choose_ to love my parents, because that's the one thing separating me from accepting that I am a biological whim, only a tiny bit more complicated than an earthworm. I can opt out of loving them anytime. How scary, how painful is this realization?

Not long now, I guess, until people find a way to fix love. A couple of intramuscular injections in the ass, and you're waving your dysfunctional family good-bye as they nod at the little piece of disappointment that you have always been and disappear around the corner. So much more free time, such sound sleep at night.

I slap myself for even thinking this. Extreme bullshit, that's right.

I didn't mean to fuck up my parents' lives.

_Flash_! Loud lo-fi punk rock, laughter in the background.

"Oh, you guys—haven't seen you dorks in ages!"

"Look at you, man, you've got a beard now! Aww, I missed your senile mugs."

"What can you do? It's all work, work, work now."

"Yeah, adulting's fun, huh?"

"Yeaah."

Laughter, the clinking of glasses.

_Tipsy_. "Listen, listen. Shut up for a sec! You know what would be _fantastic_? Let's get together, all of us, and just go traveling. South Asia, for example. What do you say?"

"Nah, money, dude."

"Fuck money. We'll figure something out. The point is, together. Like we used to be. Just, you know, agree that we have one another. Whatever happens, we're not alone. Then money, troubles, all this bee-ess turns into adventures. We could busk, steal oranges, with farmers swearing and firing their rifles as we run away and—come on, sounds great, right?" _Clingy_. _Desperate_.

"I dreamed of something like that when I was a teen. Well, not the 'farmers' part—you know, quests and friendship, like _Harry Potter_. . . . We're not teenagers anymore, Joy."

"Yeah, I'm like sixty, my back is falling apart. I mean, I could have a trip right now if I stood up too quickly."

"I have a fucking _mortgage_."

"And I can't leave the Dark Lord. He requires my services."

"We'll take your cat with us. The Dark Lord will _love_ the land of big birds. I heard of a guy who travels with a raccoon." _Stop_. Just shut up, brandy! I mean _brain_ , shut up, brain.

"Guys, I kinda proposed to my girlfriend—well, Alice, you remember her, right?"

"And I'm pregnant!"

"Oh my God, you guys, and you're only telling us _now_?"

"Congrats, man!"

Hugging, the clinking of glasses, laughter.

They all manage. They manage, why can't I?

"So y'all are happy, right? Content, I mean? You got all you wanted?"

Eyes averted. Coughing. _Buzzkill_.

"Yeah, sure."

"I guess."

Silence. Emptiness.

"So, um, have you seen the new episode of. . . ?"

Music, the clinking of glasses, laughter.

_Flash_! A stack of papers landing on my desk. Two stacks. Three.

Somebody stop my eyebrows from catapulting away and punching two little holes through the ceiling. "What is this? Author: Fidelity Low, _Anatomy of Passion_ , _Passion of Anatomy_ , _Passion for Anat—_ is this a joke?"

" _This_ is time-sensitive, and the clock's already ticking. I expect all three translated by the end of the month. Tick tock."

The sycophantic minimalist clock on the lethally boring pristine wall behind her plays along readily, "Tick tock."

"Julia, come on, please, give me something real. I'm begging you. You know I can—"

Julia extends an arm and starts to brush some imaginary specks of dust off my shoulder. "Dear, I hate to be the one to break it to you, but it's time you got over yourself. What? Education? Talent? I don't give a crap, and you've got to learn to respect that. I pay you, which means you sell yourself to me. Your brains, your time—you sell them to me, all right? They're mine. Don't tell me how to use what's mine. Until you have some real experience translating serious works—"

"But how do I get—"

"—let alone some basic _life_ experience, kindly translate me these god-awful romances. Our customers are mainly housewives; it's not your pseudo-philosophy they're hungry for. Are we clear?"

Fuck it.

"What did you just say to me?"

Shit, shit, shit.

Fax it. I said I would do as you'd told me and I'd fax it to you and—and it's the twenty-first century, whoever even remembers what a fax looks like?

"Fuck it. I said 'fuck it.' Fuck it, fuck Fidelity fucking Low, fuck you and your stupid habit of touching people when you're talking to them. It makes me want to fucking die, okay? When I die, I'll leave a note blaming this stupid habit of yours. Just know that your hand with your stupid-perfect-rectangular-red-fucking nails on my shoulder is what's done me in."

Did I say it out loud this time? Say hello to my anger issues.

Man, look at her face. Reddened, distorted with wicked glee. It's a scandal. What imprudence! Oh, she _so_ wished I would commit this crime so she could punish me. That's what _she's_ hungry for.

I open my eyes—no, I haven't said it out loud. Julia is still patronizingly stroking my shoulder.

That's it. I'm done. "You know what, Julia? All things considered, you've been an okay employer. You should see me sober sometime."

"What—?"

Slowly, as if under mild anesthesia, I bat her hand away, step around Julia, who's frozen in what seems to be the first confusion she's experienced in her life, and I exit the office three weeks ago to come out right into the blindingly bright present, where I'm on a small island in the Indian Ocean, lying on the beach and sluggishly inhaling gas.

It's so sadly stupid how the final straw is often some kind of nonsense. You can endure physical pain, break-ups, your beloved ones' funerals, poverty, daily news about catastrophes, terrorism, global-scale violence and indifference—and then you give up because somebody routinely violated your personal space, or because Fidelity Low's identical books about two people whose only distinctive character trait is an irresistible lust for each other are in demand.

Despite what I had told my parents before hugging them and watching my favorite front door in the world separate us forever, I didn't come here to become a freelancer, have fun, or clear my mind. I came here with one intention: to die. For three weeks, I did nothing but swim, read, smoke weed, and dance, and I finally felt almost free. Almost happy. Then, of course, I ran out of money and killed myself.

Yesterday

Tomorrow

I'm going to do it tomorrow. Tick tock.

I strut along the mossy pavement like a heron, lifting my feet higher off the ground than usual—I still haven't changed after my last-ever scuba dive, even though it was hours ago. The only garments I got rid of were two oxygen tanks—so weightless underwater, on land they are too heavy for me to even stand straight with them on. The mask is pulling my already dry hair back like a headband, and the snorkel dangles rhythmically near my cheek. The sound of my fins slapping the road seems all the louder for the peaceful, dreamy silence around me. It's dark, very tropically dark—the blackness is so rich it seems viscous, difficult to move through. I feel as if I were walking on the bottom of the ocean, through a sunken village. Not a soul. Even the birds are quiet. It's just me, and the empty dark country lane, and nowhere much to go.

What do you think about when you have less than twenty-four hours left to live? I guess I should be thinking about big stuff. About what comes after death. About the indifferently beautiful Universe—yeah, that big. Or bigger still, about all the regrets I have and all the things I could have been if I had taken a different turn somewhere along the way. Picked a different college maybe, or called a different person when I got a bit too drunk one night.

They say there might be multiple versions of us in parallel worlds: Some live exactly as we do; others made better choices at some point—or worse ones. I wonder if there is a copy of me that managed to write something decent, or became a sad blonde cocainated model, or went to the doctor, who fixed her with a trainful of antidepressants, and now she does whatever I do, only with more cheer.

I can't really keep my mind focused on any of the big things at the moment. It insists on drifting back to worrying about my having to check out of the hotel tomorrow before noon, and whether the money I have left will be enough for me to rent a bike, and about how I hate to be one of those irresponsible people who won't return the bike on time. Or ever.

I freak out about not being able to shut the mundane thoughts up at such an important moment, and then it occurs to me that freaking out about it at such an important moment is pretty mundane, and I start to freak out about that. Freaking out about freaking out about freaking out about—what a pathetic example of recursion. Jesus, why would anybody waste their precious time thinking about artificial shit people made up in order to pretend that life is deeper and more complicated than it is, like recursion?

Ugh, what blander, more artless way to spend my last night than to just wander around the island all alone, with no particular destination in mind? Maybe I should walk into some wild party and get drunk and do something stupid one last time, as on my friend's birthday once, when I informed two dozen people (half of whom I'd never seen before in my life) how much they sucked, then stood up in the middle of the room to tell a funny story and passed out at its most intriguing point, smashing my nose against the corner of a table and flooding the room with blood. I am so much fun.

Yeah, on second thought, no, I don't want to party. I always feel miserable at parties, anyway. Too much pointlessness concentrated in one spot. Too much loneliness.

The drowsy silence has long since been unapologetically broken, but I don't notice it, lost in the labyrinths of my mind, until the noises become too intrusive to ignore. I leap aside only a moment before a rattletrap, dirty-orange car bursts out of a gravel side road and screeches to a halt in front of me, blocking my way. A loud pop song in an unfamiliar, guttural language is streaming out of its four open windows, and the taxi sign on its roof is phosphorescing in the darkness. The driver, so suntanned his thin mustached face looks as though it were smeared with charcoal, leans halfway out the window.

"How much you want?" he asks in a thick throaty accent, smiling widely, as if _I_ were the one offering _him_ a ride, and not the other way around.

I shake my head. "No, I'm good, thanks. I don't have any money." I clap my hands to my thighs, where pockets are supposed to be (which, of course, is not the case with the wetsuit), and then spread my arms to indicate that the imaginary pockets are empty. "I'm headed in the opposite direction, anyway. I don't see how you can turn around here." The car is slightly wider than the lane, its wing mirrors digging into the shrubs, so any further maneuvering is likely to result in dents and scratches. Then again, judging by the sorry sight the taxi already is, its owner is not the type to fuss over his car much and give it cute pet names and all that.

The driver keeps grinning at me, nodding knowingly and apparently not having understood a single damn word I said.

"No taxi." I start acting as if I could hardly speak any English myself, which is pretty stupid and which a lot of people seem to do nonetheless when they encounter inarticulate foreigners.

"No taxi," he agrees rather happily. "Pot."

"Sorry?"

He makes an X-shape with his hairy forearms. "No taxi. Pot." The last word is accompanied by a thumbs-up.

Now it's my turn to feel lost. "You sell pot?"

The driver nods so vigorously I'm scared his head might fall off and roll against my foot. Something tells me that even then, his white-toothed smile would continue to gleam in the light of the taxi sign.

"But isn't that sort of illegal here?"

"Illegal, yes," he doesn't hesitate to agree again, still radiating positive vibes.

I open my mouth but can't think of a reasonable answer, so I just shut it and try to wriggle around the car without getting forever trapped in lianas.

With a reflective frown, the driver scratches his forehead and watches me squeeze between the car's hood and a particularly poisonous-looking specimen of the local flora. "No money?"

"No money," I confirm, as I scramble past the passenger door.

"Okay." In front of my face (so close to my nose it takes me a while to refocus my eyes) appears his yellowish palm with a joint on it. "On the car. Don't swim, fly. Take, take," he says, his hand jumping up and down insistently.

Caught off guard, I grab the cigarette and immediately attempt to replace it in his hand, but it's too late. I've been warned not to accept anything from the locals, because the moment you touch something they're trying to press on you, you're supposed to pay for it, whether you want the thing or not.

"No worry," he says, and I don't know if it's because he noticed how annoyed I am with myself for seizing the joint, or if that's simply what he calls weed.

The driver frowns again, looking me up and down. "No light?"

I can barely restrain myself from breaking into laughter. This man just summed up my whole existence in two words. "No light," I say. "No light, indeed."

"Take light." After some rummaging in the glove compartment, he hands me a box of matches.

"I—thanks, but—"

"Don't swim, fly." He smiles broadly again and hits the gas, only by some miracle not crushing my feet with the rear wheels. My mouth agape, the joint and matchbox in my still-raised hand, I watch the car speed away, its wing mirrors chopping off leaves and branches along the way. Puzzled, I shake my head, and I keep shaking my helplessly grinning head a while longer as I walk in the opposite direction.

Soon enough, the lane ends, and I find myself in the public square—"the Plaza," they call it plainly. There are four rusty street lamps, one at each corner—the Plaza is the only place on the island that is lit at night. I stomp on toward the center of it and once there, lie down with my arms and legs outstretched. The uneven paved surface is still warm from the day's heat: I can feel it with the back of my head and through the elastic fabric of my wetsuit. The stars in this part of the world are so countless, large, and bright they seem Photoshopped to me, given that I've spent most of my life in a rainy, cloudy city where an appearance of the sun in the sky is seen as an alien threat.

Its timing inappropriate as ever, my mind decides to play me a verse from this song titled _I Went So Far As To Get a Job._

" _Fell in love with a woman,_

and married her boyfriend,

ate a light bulb

and broke my leg—

Ooooh, the things people do when they're bored."

Now that I come to think of it, the lyrics don't sound all that farfetched. They remind me about this article I once read, about an experiment where the participants were locked in separate rooms with nothing but stun guns inside. After some time, every one of them began shocking themselves just to dispel the boredom.

I could do with a stun gun right now.

Oh, I know what I should be thinking about, what could always shield me from boredom. Words. Omnipotent, magnificent words. Like the Russian word "bezmyatezhnost'." It means "serenity," "peacefulness," but at the core of that word is "myatezh"—"rebellion," "mutiny." So bezmyatezhnost' is a state in which there's no revolt, no tumult inside your skull and chest anymore. When I think about that word, I picture a clear sky, a calm sea, my mother's face—the way it looked back when she was very young and bright-eyed.

Most of all, however, I love simple words. They often denote the most complex matters, don't they? "Time," for example, or "family." So short, and yet there's so much to them. My favorite word is about the simplest there is: "No." When I say "no," oh, I can hear a heavy clank of chains falling to the stone floor of a medieval dungeon, I can hear trombones trumpeting "revolution," I can hear the sound of locks being undone. "No," as in "I won't be manipulated." "No," as in "I want to do it my own way." "No," as in "They won't take me alive." As in "I am free."

The problem is every time I say "no," it somehow comes out as "okay."

" _No,"_ I would tell my kindergarten teacher—nobody to me, a stranger—who was trying to force semolina pudding into my mouth. _"I don't want it."_ I wasn't hungry; I was thirsty—for rebellion. I remember this ferocious desire to start a riot; it was striking its roots so deep into me there was no room left for _bezmyatezhnost'_ in my mind that day. I hated the pudding and I hated her merciless face. Pudding. That's where it all started to slide downhill.

" _There are no such words as 'I don't want,' "_ she would say. _"There's only the word 'must.' "_

It was a stupid thing grown-ups told you when they didn't find it convenient that you refused to do something. It was stupid because it was an obvious, lazy lie. "Because _I_ said so." " _Don't_ be loud." "You have to act like a girl if you _want_ boys to like you." The words existed—they kept using those words, separately and combined (" _I don't want_ you to turn out like one of those aimless slackers who don't even know where they will be tomorrow."). So here's the lesson my childish brain took away from that: When someone is making you do something you don't want to, they will tell you ridiculous reasons why you must, and they will do so with self-righteous faces.

Need I even mention how much I hated the word "must"? I still do. That mutinous feeling never subsided; it only grows stronger as the things I have to do grow bigger, and the face of my oppressor becomes so blurred I can't make it out anymore.

The blurred face says, "You must spend your youth listening to a bunch of subjective opinions disguised as objective facts on either interesting things you've already figured out by yourself or artificial shit that's only good to know when you feel like showing off in front of someone." Recursion, anyone? How has knowing what the fuck recursion is ever helped me in any way?

"No!" I say.

"Looks like your parents can't manage you. Maybe we should—" the blurred face says.

"Okay, okay, I'll do it," I say.

"That's the spirit! Now, let's move on to the exciting part. Kindly spend the rest of your life stressing yourself out for pieces of paper (which are, by the way, made of trees that could have been your home, your air, and your food). Long for a moment of free time so that you could enjoy being alive and do something you actually like, and when you get one, feel so exhausted from all the pointless things you were doing that you can barely remember who you are and what it is you wanted."

"No!" I say.

"Unemployed, homeless, hungry, dead," the blurred face says.

And I say, "Okay, fine, give me that shit."

That's what we all do, right? We all mean to say "no," but mutter "okay" instead. It's not that we're cowards—we _must_. If you think you are free, try sleeping under a bridge. Try letting your passport expire while you're abroad. Try accidentally discovering a "state secret." You may be surprised to find out you're not even free to move around your home planet. I mean, if you're satisfied with the interior design of your prison, that doesn't make it any less of a prison.

If you think you are free, we won't relate. If you're not angry, fuck you, because I am.

But tomorrow, tomorrow I'll say "no," and it will finally sound right.

I can almost see the stars float around, can almost feel the earth revolve. I imagine what I must look like from above now, lying like a star in my diving suit, illuminated in the middle of the dark island in the middle of the dark ocean. That. . .that must look. . .lonely.

I guess. . .I guess I _am_ lonely right now. This is weird, but I don't want to be alone tonight. Not tonight.

I mean, being physically alone never bothered me. If only I had someone, somewhere, if thousands of miles away, who knew what I'm thinking, what I'm going through right now, someone who got it, really _got_ it all, I wouldn't be feeling this lonely.

I have this theory about loneliness, too. It's like stopping suddenly in the heart of a crowd—everyone is bright-colored and hurrying somewhere, and you're just standing there, black-and-white and still. You look around and realize you have seen these people before. These faces, these clothes, these mannerisms. Heard these voices. It's as though reality palmed off the same people on you, over and over again, just because it were too lazy to make itself look more convincing. How many real people, with beating hearts and vivid minds are truly out there? How many of those we pass on our way to work are only there to fill the void, to create the illusion that something's going on, like extras, a faceless mass in a movie? Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V.

And that's why it's so lonely, according to my theory. There are simply no people around. Just decorations. Fillers. No dreams, no worries, no genuine feelings. Just playing the roles, just pursuing the scheme. Maybe I am one of them—not the main character of the story, only here to give up my seat when the right time comes. Maybe that's why everything seems so pointless. But why does it hurt so much?

We only stop feeling abandoned, I think, when we meet a person, a real person. The trick is it doesn't happen to everyone. It's rare, like every miracle. When you're a kid, they tell you that you'll inevitably meet someone special and you'll marry them, of course. I don't believe it works like that. You only get a glimpse, a word, or a night, if you're lucky. Then they go on with their lives, because they are so alive, so busy changing the world and figuring themselves out, so dazzling they don't need anyone. And you're left behind, treasuring that memory until the end of your days. Just knowing that you met them, that you talked to them, looked at them, held their hand, if just for a night, is enough to feel blessed.

I never had that.

I light up the joint and take a hit. There's something particularly enjoyable about smoking while lying on your back. I pull the mask down over my eyes to protect them from the falling ash, and laugh, recalling the taxi driver. I wonder if he ever gives anybody a lift at all. Or is it always like this: You run out of the house, late for work, yell "Taxi!" and he drives up and says, "No taxi, pot!"? You argue with him, stomping your feet and tearing your hair out, and then wave a hand, buy the weed, and go home. Fuck that work of yours.

I stub the cigarette out in the crack between two paving stones and fit the snorkel into my mouth. The earth keeps revolving, the stars keep floating around, and I am so tired.

I open my eyes at dawn, when the first tradesman arrives to set up his fruit stall. Soon, scrawny women and old men and children will wake up from their two-hour sleep and flock to the Plaza. At night, they literally work their fingertips to the bone by sewing cotton and hemp backpacks and clothing, and during the day they sell those for a couple of dollars to tourists, who, once back to their rich developed countries, will resell the "exotic" goods for hundreds per item.

Life has never been even half as unkind to me as it is to these people every day. "Enjoy what you have," everyone keeps repeating, and all I can hear is, "Fear." Doesn't this mantra always go hand in hand with "because somebody has it worse"? Someone, somewhere, right now, is dealing with a terminal illness, struggling to survive another day. Someone is learning how to walk on artificial legs. Someone is despairing because their children haven't had anything to eat for days. There's always someone who has it still worse than they. But how is that supposed to make me feel better about my life? If anything, it makes me feel more hopeless. "Be grateful for what you have," they say, and I hear, "Fear, fear that things might get worse for _you_ , fear that you will lose it all."

I've been told I'm too pessimistic—depressed, even—but I don't feel as if there's something wrong with me. It's the world, you know? There's just so much that's not right with the world. I can't bring myself to get over it.

The only building on the square that doesn't look depressingly ramshackle is _Happy Meat_. It won't open until ten a.m.—unlike the vendors, the owner can afford to sleep late, sure. The restaurant stands tall and shiny, like an oasis of successful, wealthy modern civilization in this desert of beggary. Foreigners choose to dine there, because it's familiar, because the place is pasted all over with photos of laughing young people. "Delicious! Crunchy!" Because the food the locals offer at their rickety stalls doesn't seem as sterilized, because their faces don't seem as pretty as the faces of the _Happy Meat_ waitresses.

No, I lied: This restaurant does look depressing. It's the most depressing thing around here, and it makes me want to throw up stomach acid all over its clean doorstep. But I won't. I won't do anything about it, really, nor will anyone else. There's no point.

The tradesman keeps casting oblique glances at me, though without particular interest—I guess it's not that rare for travelers here to get stoned and fall asleep wherever they happen to feel weary. The air is already stifling, and the sunlight is making me squint.

"Hi." I wave to the tradesman, spitting the snorkel out of my mouth. "Sorry about my outfit. I was just searching for my fugu fish. Have you seen it swim by?"

_Idiot._ I could have said that I just thought I was in an IKEA (because I used to sleep in IKEA stores too), or that the last thing I remember is being stung by an electric ray, which was probably radioactive as well, and now I'm almost certainly a _Skate_ r-Man. Or I could have just bitten my tongue and saved the residual crumbs of my dignity.

That's the annoying thing about my brain: It just won't shut up. Keeps making cheesy comments about everything, keeps asking corny questions, keeps rambling away. It's exhausting me. _I_ am exhausting me. I bet you, yes, _you_ , with your short attention span, are already yawning and looking around for a gun to shoot me. Don't bother, I got this. Tonight, I'm going to do it tonight.

I sit up, stretch my back, and crack my stiff neck, my joints producing characteristic popping sounds. As I tilt my head to the side, I freeze. There are little white flowers laid out around me like a chalk outline. I picture the surreal scene the tradesman saw when he came to the Plaza—snorkel and diving suit and flowers and all, and I laugh out loud. He looks at me as if I were mad and shakes his head, turning to his stall again.

I raise my hand to remove the mask, and to my even greater surprise, realize that I'm holding something. A crumpled napkin with crooked words scribbled on it.

Sometimes I wonder if cats' instinctive fear of water

is because there are people who drown kittens by the sack.

Sometimes I wonder if my instinctive fear of darkness is because secretly, I know,

my skin remembers,

my lungs remember

that the darkness can devour me,

as it devoured many before me,

as it devoured

_many_ me

before me.

Sometimes I wonder if your instinctive fear of people is because there are people who drown kittens by the sack.

Sleep tight, strange stranger—when you wake up, it's going to be dark.

I frown at these odd words for a minute, but then fold the napkin and smile—perhaps a little sadly, but I smile, unable to help it. Life is so, so strange.

I don't know who encircled me with flowers and put this note in my hand. I don't know whether it's creepy or nice. All I know is I wasn't alone on my last night on earth. Maybe I met my real person—got my glimpse, my words, my night.

It's happening tonight. Tonight, I'm saying "no." Oh, the sound of drums in my heart!

No, as in "No." Enough. Fuck you. Fuck your semolina pudding. Fuck everything.

I'm not scared. I'm excited, as excited as I had been about my first family trip to the zoo, long before I understood that the animals there were trapped, mistreated, and unhappy. Long before I started to feel that way myself.

Tonight, I will be set free at last.

Well, Fuck

Something hot, scratchy on my dry lips. Something pushing down on my chest as if some cat were kneading me with its paws in search of the most comfortable sleeping position. A rather fat, heavy cat—a medium-sized cheetah, maybe. Air forced down my throat and farther into my lungs, expanding them, burning and biting like frost, and almost tearing them apart from the inside.

"Wakey-wakey. Get up, you dormouse, you're late for school. Do you want to sleep through your life?" Huh? Well, yeah, that was the plan.

A _talking_ medium-sized cheetah, then? A medium-sized cheetah talking with an Irish accent? That's a bit over the top. Ha, a bit over the top _of me_. Do you—ah, forget it.

I open my eyes what seems like a dozen times in a row before they finally deign to remain open, and I see a purple sky. Purple clouds, a purple face floating among them—even the air is purple. How strange, how beautiful, but what the f—something's wrong, but I can't remember—the bag! Where is my "Happy Meat"? Where is "No, Sugar"?

No, no, no, no, no! I sit up with a jerk, a stunt I can only perform because I'm so panicky no nausea or dizziness can hold me down, and I breathe in as deeply as I can. The salty air fills up my lungs like a wave of fire after an explosion. I think I can hear tiny adrenaline soldiers marching through my veins and shouting warlike slogans.

"Your shoulders are sunburned. You should cover them if you don't want blisters." Where did the Irish accent go? Now it's positively a Scottish one.

Hanging over me is the _stupid_ , _stupid_ triangular face of a blonde guy—no older than eighteen from the looks of him (then again, _I_ , a grumpy grown-ass adult with a childish resting "niceface," should know better than to trust appearances in this regard). Now that my vision is mostly restored and the world has colors other than purple to offer again, the triangular face turns out so tanned that the guy's teeth and the whites of his eyes seem fluorescent, almost neon-green for this contrast. He's squatting on his heels next to me and peering, expectantly, into my face. And of course he's wearing a silly Christmas hat, too far back on his head. Fucking terrific. I can't believe it.

"How long? _HOW LONG_?" I grab my phone and brush the sand off the screen. Eight. My racing heart trips over this number. "Eight. . . . _EIGHT_! God, are you out of your mind? What if I've become stupid, what if I've gone insane? I won't even be able to tell if I'm now insane! I won't be able to arrange all this again if I'm now stupid, don't you get it? _Fuck_!" I toss the phone away and bury my face in my hands.

"So I take it I caught you at a bad time," he says. _Genius_. "By the way, in case you were too busy to notice, I kind of saved your life. Feel free to be overwhelmed with gratitude and admiration as soon as you're done with your tantrum." Hello, new accent, where are you from? New York, I hear.

The adrenaline soldiers in my blood drop their tiny guns, shut their eyes, and shake their heads with secondhand embarrassment.

"Oh, _thank you,_ Santa. Does this look like I want to live? Like I wanted to be saved?" I spread my arms and look around me in indignant disbelief. "Does this look like a hysterical attempt to get attention?" I pick up the torn bag and shake it in his stupid face. "Look at this! Does it look like my head wasn't working straight when I dragged the tank here, when I chose the perfect time and the perfect place and the least painful way? God!"

Exhausted from all the useless anger and shouting, I fall back on the sand and press my hand to my forehead. My head hurts like hell; it's almost as if my brain were trying to split my skull in two and hatch out.

With a spark of curiosity in his neon-green eyes, my noble knight lifts the bag and flattens it on his knee. "No, Sugar." He chuckles. "It's kind of funny, though." Australian? Oh, please.

I shoot him a sidelong glance full of rage and notice two silver rings pierced through the right corner of his bottom lip, which reminds me of the recent scratchy sensation on my own lips and the pressure on my chest.

"You didn't have to give me CPR," I say, still a little annoyed but mostly calm now. "I was breathing, you stupid. The whole point of the gas bag is that it doesn't interfere with your instinct to breathe. It's better than drowning, say. There's no oxygen, but you're still breathing, so your last minutes don't hurt."

Santa shakes his head, the white pom-pom of his red hat waggling back and forth. I'm beginning to suspect the hat is nailed to the back of his head, or else I don't understand how come it doesn't fly off. The presence of a nail in his brain would also explain why he looks so nauseatingly proud of himself. Look at me, I'm wearing a Christmas hat in the summer and I don't let strangers commit suicide as if it were my business! Well, ain't I a nice lad?

"I exhale carbon dioxide, right?" he says. "When you inhale too much see-oh-two, it alarms your brain so it starts to fight for your life. I can see you're a crazy bitch, but what are you, dumb, too?"

"Of course I am dumb now! Eight minutes!" I yell again, suppressing the desire to burst into frantic laughter. Somehow, the fact that this character is not trying to be careful with me, not afraid to call someone who just tried to kill herself a crazy bitch, makes me almost respect him, the way a child might appreciate a grown-up talking to them as an equal, without that fake lisp.

"You could have accidentally stopped my heart," I grumble, just so that he won't think he won the battle.

"Oh, shut up, I took a first-aid course once."

The air is still hot and sticky against my skin, but I start to shiver. I was nearly dead. It was all almost over, but I don't think I can fully comprehend that. It doesn't feel real. Can I be dreaming? I must be still dreaming. I must be still dying.

It is at this dramatic moment that my hero unbuttons his denim shirt. If my mind has decided to show me a movie before I go, it certainly could have picked a better genre. I'm a bit disappointed. Can I have a different hallucination, please? Something less cheap and more adventurous.

Santa takes the shirt off and covers me with it.

"Four."

"What?" I half sit up and, my hands shaking, wrap myself in the shirt.

"It was four minutes when I removed the bag. You didn't come to yourself right away, but your brain should be all right. Well, considering." He points his chin at the gas tank and twirls his index finger at his temple. I've lost count of his peculiarly changing accents.

I don't answer for a while, feeling both relieved and confused as to why I even care whether or not my brain got messed up. Santa flops onto his back beside me and reveals that he's not the real Santa.

"I'm Kirk."

"Joy. I mean, _I'm_ Joy, _not_ that it's a joy to meet you or anything," I say distractedly. Why is life so bizarre? Why?

Kirk breaks into laughter. "Priceless."

"What?" I say, with as little enthusiasm and as much disapproving bewilderment as I can manage.

" _Joy_ ," he repeats, and he laughs still harder. "Oh, man, I can't."

I can't help but snort too, and then I remember the first meaningful thing he told me after I'd opened my eyes, and I erupt in full-on laughter. All I can utter is, "Sh-shoulders—ha—sunburned." What a smart thing to say to a dying person. Now we're downright roaring.

"Didn't you see the warning sign?"

Kirk blinks. "What sign?"

I raise my right leg and nod to my foot with a _Do Not Disturb_ label hanging from it, like a newborn's name tag—or the toe tag of a corpse. "Stole it from the hotel."

"Are you from Eastern Europe?"

"What, because I'm angry and I stole something from a hotel?"

"No, your accent." Wow, he can talk.

"Oh. Not originally. My parents moved there when I was—never mind." Oh, the sweet period of my life when I thought people didn't understand me because I couldn't speak their language, and not because people don't understand one another generally.

The hysterics abates, and I begin to feel anxious again. What the hell am I to do now? "What on earth possessed you to even turn up? I thought this was a wild beach nobody goes to."

"I live nearby. It's my favorite place on the island, actually. Probably because it _is_ a wild beach nobody goes to. Your lying around here kind of screwed up my 'me time' tonight, you know?"

Kirk gives me a mock stern look, but I don't laugh, so he clicks his tongue and rearranges his face into a serious expression. "Look, I know you're pissed, but look at it my way for a second. What was I supposed to do? Turn around and go home? You'd get to die, and I'd get to hate my favorite place because it was ruined by my seeing a bikini-clad girl die here? I'd get to live with blood on my hands? With the image of your sunburned shoulders haunting me in my sleep? No way."

I snicker. "My shoulders do feel a bit itchy, though." I stutter and merge the words so it comes out as "a bit bitchy." I guess my brain did become damaged. Well, at least the part responsible for being nice did for sure. I don't think I've ever yelled at anyone else in my entire life the way I did at Kirk.

He rolls over onto his stomach, still managing not to lose his hat, and squints at me slyly from under his floppy sun-bleached fringe. "So, uh, we're having a party at our place. Wanna join?"

I stare at him. "You're joking, right? Wait, you're not hitting on me or anything, are you?"

"Nah, crazy half-naked bitches are not really my type. Aaalthough—" he adds, as if having remembered a relevant story, and then he shakes his head, as though hoping it might help him forget that again. "Anyway, it's just a party."

"Do I look like I want to party? I want to die." In case that's not obvious enough already.

"Everyone says, 'I want to die.' Let's go to the party. C'mon, it's a small one. _And_ ,"—he reaches out and rights the overturned gas tank—"you look like you're interesting company."

"You really got no one better to talk to?"

"Me? Not me. I _hate_ talking. But I'll introduce you to someone. I bet you two will hit it off. What kind of gas is this, by the way?"

"Helium. It's the best. Knocks you unconscious fast, and it doesn't stink and is easy to get—"

"That's not how you use helium, silly. Let me teach you." Kirk puts the end of the pipe in his mouth, opens the valve, and takes a deep drag. "So, what do you do when you're not killing yourself?" he says in a high-pitched, cartoon-like voice. He mimics Woody Woodpecker, and I roar with laughter again. "Now, _that's_ how you use helium."

I don't even consider it all that funny, but I can't stop convulsing. Maybe it's the shock, maybe my brain is acting up, or maybe Kirk's piercing laughter is contagious. This reminds me of the Tanganyika laughing epidemic—a weird disease that literally started out as a joke, probably stress-related, they say, and affected a thousand people. Villages were quarantined, schools were closed, all because people wouldn't stop laughing. Can you imagine? Those not infected were afraid to hear themselves laugh, afraid to even smile.

Before I can gather myself, Kirk springs to his feet, picks up the gas tank, and heads toward the forest. "Keep up!" he shouts, still in a high-pitched voice.

"What? No, wait! Give me my helium back! I need my helium!" I get up, too, trying to collect my phone without getting tangled up in my own legs.

"Wait, I have to return the bike," I say, as I catch up with him. The _Do Not Disturb_ sign flaps around my ankle as I run. "I rented a bike."

"Fuck it, won't you?"

"No, I can't be like this. I promised to return it tonight. Someone's going to have to look for it and bring it back—"

"Wow, you really worry about that now, do you? How would you return it if you had died?"

"But I didn't die. It's different. They have my passport, and, uh—and my diving suit. Long story."

"Well, how about you return it tomorrow, apologize, pay the late fee. . . ?"

"I have no money left."

Kirk stops, puts the tank down between his feet, turns the front pockets of his shorts inside out, and throws crumpled bills at me, one by one. "Here, here, here. Here's your money. Look! I'm paying you to stay alive a little longer. I'm like your mother. Now let's move."

For about half a mile, I make it my goal not to lose sight of Kirk as he strides along the barely distinguishable footpath, pushing aside huge wet leaves, which spring back to slap me in the face or at least shower me with dew and sleepy insects. My second priority is to avoid stepping on something slippery, like a giant vindictive man-eating snake.

"What would you do if it were six or seven?" I pant.

"What?"

"Minutes. What would you have done back there, on the beach, if the stopwatch had shown more than five minutes?"

"I'd rather not go there."

"Well, imagine it. You come up to me, and you know you don't have time to mull over the decision, because in two or three minutes, I will die in front of your eyes. And you also don't know for sure just how badly my brain is screwed by now. Maybe I'll turn out all right, and maybe I'll forever remain a vegetable unable to talk and walk and I will only eat throw a straw and believe scripted reality shows. Which would it have been? Would you have risked it?"

"Look, stop loading me down with this shite, aight? Like I said, I hate _talking_."

Oh, I think I know you, Kirk. For people like me, there's hardly anything more annoying and exhausting than having to deal with someone who stubbornly refuses to _talk_.

" _Mom, my friends are going to a neighboring town for the weekend. My favorite band is giving a concert there, and—"_

" _We've discussed this, Joy. You'll get to do whatever you want as soon as you're eighteen, but for now—"_

" _This is so important to me_ right now _. It's my life_ right now _. What if I never turn eighteen?"_

" _Stop talking nonsense, of course you will."_

" _You can't know that! Things just happen, there's no guarantee—"_

" _Joy, stop it, you will live a long life."_

" _How can you know that? How can you be sure, when so many people die every day, and nobody expects—"_

" _I just know."_

" _Nobody can know—"_

" _Joy, this conversation is over."_

" _Argh!"_

For people who stubbornly refuse to _talk_ , there's hardly anything more annoying and exhausting than having to deal with someone like me.

"Kirk!"

"Hmm?"

"Thank you."

"I thought—"

"No, for the shirt."

"Sure."

As the trees thin, we bump into a red-haired young couple, a girl and a guy, beach towels draped over their shoulders. Apparently, they're on their way to the very beach we just left. Once again, I remind myself to find a more secluded place to kill myself next time.

They have stopped to take a selfie with a nimble and noisy little parrot, and they smile at us, a little bashfully, as if apologizing for being caught in such an unseemly position. I smile back and nod, hoping to make them feel less uncomfortable, at the same time pulling the sleeves of my (technically, Kirk's) shirt down over my knuckles, a movement betraying my own uneasiness. We are almost past them when suddenly Kirk changes direction and runs up behind them just in time to arrive into the shot with a creepy maniacal smile.

"Oh no, I don't look right. You have to delete this and take another one," he demands with a straight face when they turn the camera around to have a look at the picture. The girl giggles, covering her mouth with her hand, and the guy throws his head back in raucous laughter. I smile faintly, too, shifting from one foot to the other a little way away.

"Who _are_ you?"

"I'm Kirk, and that's Joy, she's crazy, I don't know her, I just found her sunbathing with a gas bag over her head."

"That'd be me," I say, raising my hand slightly and giving them an awkward wave.

"You guys feel like going to a party? It's right over there, across the pond."

Kirk points toward several two-story bungalows nestling near the greenish water. It isn't hard to figure out which cottage Kirk's talking about: It looks like a teenage volcano, its windows erupting with music and iridescent smoke. That sure doesn't seem like a small party.

"Come on, guys," Kirk squeals, apparently having sneaked another drag of the gas while I was looking away. He winks at me. "We've got beer and helium."

Adam

"Hey, Adam!" Kirk shouts, as we stand in the center of a low-ceilinged bamboo room full of twinkle lights and thick colorful smoke and spicy herbal smell and mesmerizing ambient music and many-voiced sincere laughter. It feels as if the room were swirling around us in slow motion. Dizzying.

"I think there's more than just one reality. And I don't mean that there's one 'real' reality that we can perceive differently. I mean there's this default reality that we can. . .customize. We can create child-realities that would be as functional and. . . _responsive_ as the original. I think reality adjusts to what we believe in." The young man's eyes reflect the fairy lights and seem to sparkle with passion and evidently too much limoncello, a bottle of which he's holding in his right hand. He gestures abundantly, supporting every phrase with a fervent motion so the limoncello keeps spattering onto his black T-shirt saying "I *heart* the Andromeda Galaxy"—as well as onto the beige pants of a swollen-faced guy sitting next to him. The latter can barely keep his eyes open, nodding nervously and drumming his fingers on his knee.

"Adam!" Kirk bellows again, taking care, however, to wink at somebody in the process.

"Tibetan monks, for example," says the black-T-shirt guy, who must be the Adam whose attention Kirk is so vainly seeking. "They can do things that seem impossible to _me_ because they believe that if, I don't know, if you train hard enough and clear your mind and all that, you can. . .not feel pain when sitting in a pot of boiling water or walking on red-hot nails. In _their_ reality, it's possible, you can achieve this. But can anyone do that? No, you might really want it, but if you fail to believe in it for a second, then it's not _your_ reality, and you're going to burn your ass off. Wanting something to be true and believing in it are not the same thing; otherwise, I would be in Hogwarts now."

The other guy remains unimpressed, but Adam doesn't seem to need a grateful ear to continue this exciting "conversation." He finishes the bottle in one big gulp and throws it over his shoulder, which results in the sound of shattering glass and a couple of offended ' _hey_!'-s.

"Speaking of Hogwarts—there are people in whose world magic and witchcraft are real. They might put a curse on you, and if something awful happens to you after that, in _their_ universe it's because they are good at bad magic, and in yours, it's just that you're out of luck."

"Man, I don't understand a fucking word you're saying," his couch companion confesses. "I'm wasted." At that, he hiccups convincingly, but Adam ignores his protests nonetheless.

"And then there are superstitious people. And if they're having a lousy day, it's _actually_ because a black cat crossed their path this morning—because that's what they believe in. If you think people are evil, back-stabbing, stupid, and shallow, that's who you're going to keep meeting. If you think that people are amazing and talented and weird, then fate will keep bringing you and such people together—if you believe in fate, that is."

"Dude, can you please just _fuck off_?" begs the beige-pants guy, in the tone and with the expression that _I_ would rather reserve for imploring a psycho armed with a chainsaw to spare my silly life.

In agitation, Adam runs his hand through his spiky dark hair. His features are so agile my eyes can't keep up with all the facial expressions he makes. I kind of wish I were him right now. He must be going through that adorable phase of drunk when you fancy that you can see the world as clearly as if its miniaturized version were resting on your palm. You can scrutinize every detail, every reason for everything, and oh, God, those insights, those ideas—how come you have never realized it all before? I smile to myself. Then, of course, comes the hazy hungover morning, where you don't remember a thing you "understood" yesterday, and even if you do, you're so ashamed of letting all that crazy pretentious stuff escape your mouth you can't even look at yourself without cringing.

"I mean, people can do almost supernatural things when they're in shock. They can lift things five times their weight, squeeze through holes they shouldn't be physically able to fit through. . . . Like when they're scared or have to save someone they love. I think it's because they turn off their minds"—he snaps his fingers—"they don't think rationally, they don't stop to ponder if it's possible. They just know they have to do it, they _believe_ they can, so reality literally _bends_ to their will."

"Adam, God, leave me alone, you're making my head hurt! You're driving me crazy, all right?"

"Crazy!" Adam exclaims. "When people go crazy, the monsters in their heads become a real thing. You can't just tell them, 'Dude, it's not real, calm down!' " He shakes his friend by the shoulder as if the "calm down" part were intended for him. "In their reality, monsters do exist, and they're not just cruel people—I mean like the nightmare kind of monsters. And if you're suddenly hit by a bus in the middle of telling them to calm down, in _their_ reality, it's because the monsters got to you, and in your reality—I mean, in _my_ reality, because you're dead and you don't have any reality anymore—so in _my_ reality, it was an accident, or you didn't look around, or the driver was drunk."

At this point, the second guy leans over and throws up all over his unfortunate beige pants. Adam pulls an aristocratically appalled face.

Kirk groans and rolls his eyes. "Ugh, nooo! Jesus, Oliver! Do you really have to vomit every goddamned time? Grow some immunity already! Adam, enough! Your speeches are literally nauseating, they make people vomit! Adam! ADAM!"

Kirk grabs him by the collar of his T-shirt and drags an unresisting Adam into the corner where I've been hiding for a while, half listening to Adam's revelations, half reflecting on the unprecedented absurdity of my unforeseen extra life.

"What?" Adam demands defensively, glowering at Kirk.

To my terror, Kirk positions him in front of me, then skirts us, stops behind me, and says, slightly shaking my shoulders as if I were some newly bought piece of clothing he's showing off, "Look what I got you! The perfect victim! Adam, meet _Joy_. She's from Eastern Europe, and I just found her on our beach with a bag filled with helium over her head, and look at her foot! How cool is that?"

"Impressive, indeed," Adam says, scowling at Kirk and sounding utterly bored.

I feel my face turn so red I could probably reheat a cup of cold tea just by holding it up to my cheek. Kirk said the two of us were supposed to get along, but his way of introducing me to people kind of ruins my chances of passing myself off as a sane person. I mean, ' _she's from Eastern Europe_ ,' really? Social suicide.

"Joy!" Kirk leans forward and places his chin on my shoulder, which responds with painful tingling. "Joy, this is my boyfriend, Adam, the most annoying person you could possibly ever meet. He once tried to hang himself from a ceiling lamp while listening to that _I'm gonna swing from the chandelier, from the chandelier,_ " he sings. "Art-house film lover much, that Adam—but he wound up falling down and breaking his ankle."

"That's very nice, Kirk. Keep telling everyone," Adam snaps.

Boyfriend? "Oh, so you—" I shift a pointing finger inquiringly from Kirk to Adam and back.

_Tactless_. I quickly crook my ill-mannered finger and bite it in case it decides to embarrass me further.

"Shorry, I zhust shought zhat 'e—zhat 'e—" I try to explain myself, nodding to Kirk, who's already dancing next to some dreadlocked people in striped beanies. Never thought one could _dance_ to dark ambient. "Never mind."

"Is that his shirt you're wearing?"

"Oh—sorry, yeah, I just—"

Adam shrugs. "Don't bother. Sometimes, I myself still have a hard time telling whether he's flirting or just being. . .well, himself."

"Sorry, right—"

"You say sorry a lot."

"Sorry. Uh, sorry." I wince. "Sorry, I just—damn it! I just apologized for saying sorry, and then I realized I had said sorry again, and I apologized for that, and—uh."

"Well, it's your business, of course, but personally, I think you should only apologize if you did something wrong _accidentally_ , or if you didn't realize at the time how the consequences of your actions would affect someone, or you've changed since then and now you truly regret what you did. I knew someone who would get drunk as fuck and, as a result, repeatedly break promises and let people down, but that didn't drive me berserk as much as the fact that every time, he would say, 'Sorry, I'm such a fuck-up.' _Sorry_? What are you sorry for? Tonight you're going to get wasted again. I know that, you know that. Don't give me your 'sorry' shit. Have the decency to say, 'I wanted to get drunk, and I did. I knew I was supposed to pick up the fucking kids from school, and I got drunk anyway. And I'd do that again because that's who I am. Cheers.' " All the while, Adam keeps grimacing and looking around, as though he were giving an interview he couldn't ditch, and he hated the question and probably the interviewer, too, for good measure.

I don't see what any of that has to do with my mechanical (and harmless, the way I see them) "sorries," but I smile helplessly and offer him my hand. "R-right. It's nice to meet you."

Adam frowns, lifts his chin, and shakes his head. "Don't do this."

"Uh, don't do what?"

"This thing with your teeth." He twirls his index finger pointing at my mouth.

"I, uh—I believe they call it a smile," I say, wishing I had the guts to just bark at him as if I were nuts and crawl away, with dignity, on all fours.

"So, an hour ago, you were going to kill yourself, and now you're smiling and saying shit like 'nice to meet you'? The fuck is wrong with you?"

My eyebrows fly up and my lower jaw drops. The fuck is wrong with _me_? _The fuck is wrong with you!_

"Politeness!" I say, in a rather rude tone.

"Pretense! Just as you pretend you don't care we're a couple."

This time, I downright gasp in surprise and indignation. A rush of heat runs through my body and then condenses in my chest into an almost unbearable knot of shame. Tense, anxious phantom shame you feel when you're accused of something you didn't do and you're afraid that nobody will believe you. "Whoa, _what_? What's that supposed to mean?"

Adam purses his lower lip, as if in disgust, and shakes his head again. "Which are you?" he says challengingly. "You act like it's not a big deal, but you're suddenly all nice, so which are you? Let me guess, you must be that fake-lesbian type—you know, the ones who date girls just to appear 'different' and complain about how they're oppressed."

Christ, what a douchebag. "Oh, fuck off!"

" _Excuse me_?"

"Fuck. Off. I'm not going to go out of my way to prove to you that I'm normal!"

" _Normal_? Do you even hear yourself?"

" 'Normal,' I mean, not as in 'not lesbian,' but as in 'not giving a fuck as to who wants whom.' I'm not going to tell you that—well, whatever it is people usually say when you make them feel like they need to justify themselves." I pause to gulp some air, having spat that sentence out in one breath. "Ah, fuck it. You're right. I shouldn't be nice to you. I don't like you. Not because you're gay, but because you're not a likeable person. You're arrogant, you're pretentious, you make assumptions—is that because Kirk told you I was from Eastern Europe? Who's being presumptuous now, you, you judgmental—?" I struggle to find an offensive enough word. "You know what, I'm out of here, and you can fuck off, I don't care what you think."

If I _had_ held that imaginary cup of tea to my face, it probably would have boiled dry by now, through sheer force of my irritation. I shove past Adam, my shoulder throbbing as it collides with his, and I head for the exit, but he grabs my elbow, and says, in a completely different, soft tone, "Wait, that was a test."

"Fuck off with your tests," I suggest, ripping my arm free from his grip, and I turn away.

"Wait, wait, I'll get you an apology beer!" he shouts after me. I stop dead and roll my eyes. Does he really think my pride is that easy to neutralize?

The acid in my stomach is corroding its lining already, and my throat feels like sandpaper with thirst, and Adam's face, unfittingly pale for the local climate, doesn't look as haughty anymore, so I guess he's right. It really is that easy. Bye, pride—hello, beer.

"It'd better be a good one."

Adam lets out quite an innocuous laugh. "There's no good beer on this island. It's all shit. It's disgusting."

"Oh, God, it's disgusting!" I say, after I take a sip from the cold dewy bottle he gave me and cover my mouth with the back of my hand to prevent myself from spitting the beer out.

"Warned you." He tilts his bottle toward mine so they clink, and takes a great swallow. "Christ, you're hysterical."

"That's recent. I don't really shout at people."

"You should. You're good at it." He pulls a creased pack of cigarettes out of his back pocket and, probably having noticed the desperation flaring up in my eyes, offers me one.

"Thank you," I mouth emphatically. "So what's with the test?" I ask, after we light up and I savor an almost cathartic feeling of smoke filling the emptiness in my sore chest. I throw my head back, open my mouth, and let the smoke slowly escape from my lungs. _Heavenly_.

"Ah, forget it, you passed."

"Hey, not so fast, smartass. You owe me an explanation. That wasn't cool."

Adam takes a deep breath, as if he were about to dive in. "All right, but remember—you brought this rant on yourself. You see, there are certain kinds of people I like to avoid, so I try to identify them as soon as I can. There are these _tolerant_ folks, who only treat you decently because that's what progressive society bugs them to do now, because they're afraid to be seen as the shitheads that they are. They smile at you (through gritted teeth) and say how they respect your rights, but they don't really recognize you as their equal. They would never even consider you a potential friend. They would shudder with fear internally if you talked to their kids. And if their kids are gay? They'd hang themselves. ' _Where did I go wrong_?' " he mimics in a high-pitched voice. "Fuckers. I don't need their _tolerance_. I hate that word. It means you put up with something unpleasant, something you fear or don't like. Something that is somehow beneath you. Seriously, I'd sooner shake hands with an open hater than listen to that tolerance crap. Those are at least true to their beliefs, however fucked up."

"Okay, but what did lesbians do to you?"

"Lesbians? Nothing. _Fake_ 'gay' pisses me off. You know, the ones who inform everyone about how gay they are and how every lamppost is mean to them, and end up marrying some rich idiot of the opposite sex and assuring you that you're only still gay 'cause 'you just haven't met the right person yet.' Oh, come on, what's with the frown? You know I'm right. We're not supposed to say that out loud, because _tolerance_ , but no one has canceled attention seekers. They've always existed and they'd do anything to have some drama in their shallow lives. Those clowns are so loud and obnoxious everyone sees them and assumes that that's what most gay people are like. They make it harder, you know, to be taken seriously, for those of us whose orientation is just a natural part of our personality, not some _fashion statement_ ," Adam says, the bitter repulsion in his expression unmistakable. "Not that I give a shit, of course."

"Of course," I agree. "You've made it quite clear that you don't."

Adam looks at me half reproachfully, half cunningly, as in "I see what you did there, but _can you not_?"

"And then there are _those_ girls"—he lets out a small humorless laugh and takes another giant gulp of beer—"who're dying to make a gay male friend, because they think they can ask you to do all the shit for them without feeling 'threatened' by the possibility of you falling for them, and they can show you off to their girlfriends and Instagram followers, and what drives me nuts the most, you're like a pet to them—call them fat or ugly or whatever, and they're just going to giggle and go 'aww, you're so cute.' They wouldn't bother to really get to know you, because your orientation is, like, the only thing about you that matters to them. If _you_ were one of those, you'd start to apologize again and mumble about how you love 'the gays' more than you love straight people and how you've made your Facebook profile picture rainbow-colored."

I chuckle and measure him up with narrowed eyes. "You're not a nice person, are you?"

"Fuck being nice," Adam says hotly and raises his almost emptied bottle as if in a toast. "I'm angry."

Well, cheers to that. I gaze at Adam and get the weirdest feeling that I'm looking at myself from the outside—not appearance-wise, of course. I'm not yet sure I like what I see, but it feels so. . . _familiar_ , in a good way, so oddly intimate. . . .

"Religion," I say.

"Huh?"

"Take, for example, religious and non-religious people. Some people believe in God. I might believe in reincarnation. In _their_ reality, after I die, I'm probably going to go to hell. In my reality, after I die, I'm going to be reborn as someone else." I pause to take another sip of my beer, which gradually becomes less and less disgusting as I find my company for tonight more and more agreeable.

" _I'm really sorry that you're going to burn in hell."_ I remember yet another awesome conversation I had with a guest at the hotel.

" _I'm really sorry to disappoint you, Sir, but I'm not, for there is no hell."_

" _You see, that's exactly why you'll end up there. I will pray for you."_

Smirking, I swat the memory away and return to Adam. "But does it mean I'm absolutely sure that just because I believe in reincarnation, I will be reborn? No. Because, you see, in _my_ reality, after I die, I won't be able to believe in anything much anymore, so my thoughts won't be able to affect reality anymore, which means the _default_ reality is going to happen, whatever that is. And I can only hope that I'll either forget this life and be reincarnated, or I will simply be no more, and it's going to feel the way it had felt before I was born, which is like nothing at all. I just won't exist, I won't be feeling anything." I fall silent for a moment, the sweet idea of my non-being taking over my mind, and, nodding to myself, I finish, "And I think it's great."

A cloud of cigarette smoke is drifting between us like a bizarre pearly nebula, and through it I can see Adam's face, which is grinning at me. His eyes and teeth mirror the warm twinkling lights adorning the room, about whose existence with all its people and noises I have completely forgotten by now, and I beam back at him. And I mean it.

The next four hours we spend in the backyard, sitting across from each other on the floor of an empty swimming pool and talking, talking, _talking_ greedily.

"So how do you think reincarnation works? You're going to be a pineapple in your next life?" Adam says. We have already established that neither of us really considers reincarnation a plausible possibility, but it's still fun to fantasize about it a little.

"Yeah, looking weird and digesting people's mouths while they eat you is alluring, but let's face it, I'm more likely to turn into a banana. I mean, they're radioactive, they make you fat, and most people would be embarrassed to hang out with one in public. No, I think you only climb higher from where you are," I say, having given it a more serious thought. "If you don't screw up too much in this life, next time you'll be a bit wiser, a bit more. . .enlightened. That's why there are super-smart people—their aggregate experience is so vast. They don't remember it, of course, but everything they've ever known and gone through is still there, so they learn faster, seem to understand life intuitively, and they are kinder because they have suffered, they have seen so much. And that's why I believe you _shouldn't_ be angry with ignorant, petty people. Maybe it's one of their first lives—they didn't have as much time to figure things out. They are like newborns."

"So how high are you?" Adam says, and after we stop laughing, he adds, "I mean, on this ladder?"

"Pretty low. I mean, I'm angry all the time, and I don't ever understand anything. Aliens!" I almost spray whatever I'm drinking at this point (I have no idea, honestly, and I don't care) out of my mouth with this sudden electrifying insight.

"Aliens?"

"Then, we can be reincarnated as aliens! How could I have forgotten about them? You agree that aliens exist, right?"

"Of course! God, I have so many theories. What do you think they're like?"

My heart is jumping up and down in its cage; euphoria clouds my mind like laughing gas. It's so pointless, so silly—aliens, reincarnation, society's disapproval of our minor differences, but I feel so happy and grateful to talk about all this right now I want to sing—which I'm pretty sure we'll get to at some point when discussing our favorite bands.

"Psst! Oi, you aliens!"

We both look up and see Kirk lying on the edge of the pool, his red hat hanging over us. With a myriad of big blue stars scattered above his head, he looks like a Christmas card, Santa staring down into a chimney. He keeps his hands behind his back, as if he's brought some gifts, too.

"Hey, Joy, how's stealing my boyfriend going?"

"Just fine, thanks! We're getting married in the morning," I say.

"Good! I love me a spontaneous wedding—did you know I'd actually met Adam at a spontaneous wedding? Well, it was _my_ wedding. Well, it was a _fake_ wedding, but—anyway. Some heated discussion you're having there, though."

"Yeah, can't help it, darling, we're on fire," says Adam.

"You have no idea," Kirk says, sounding as if he's struggling to suppress laughter, "how funny it is that you should say exactly that. But you will in a moment."

He gets up and stretches his arms out in front of him so we can see _what_ gift he's been hiding behind his back.

"Kirk, don't do this," Adam says, trying not to laugh himself. "Please, just don't."

"Nonono! Not funny! Kirk, I'm sorry! I'm sorry I was going to marry your boyfriend! It has always been only you!"

"It's too late," Kirk says gravely. "I shall avenge my bruised ego—I mean, 'heart.' "

Our cries of exaggerated terror are drowned in the deafening hissing sound, and we ourselves are drowned in a violent stream of water and foam. A minute later, the hissing is over and I dare to open one eye, blinking several times to shake the white flakes off my lashes. Kirk brings the nozzle of the fire extinguisher to his lips and blows away the last bubble of foam as if smoke off the barrel of a gun.

"I knew that that fire safety course would come in handy one day. Nobody move. I'll be right back," he says, his tone menacing, "with some liquid cement."

I take a moment to become aware of how completely wet through I am and how the shirt is sticking to my skin like static cling. Adam, who's sitting in a puddle of suds reaching as high as his waist, lets out a somewhat dazed snort, and a soap bubble pops out of his nostril. That makes me laugh so hard my supporting hand slides on the slippery floor, and in a wink, I find myself buried under the sizzling white mass as if under a lightweight snowdrift.

" _Jack! Jack_!" Adam calls in an affectedly hoarse whisper. He pulls me back to the surface, and I can barely breathe for laughing and coughing and spitting the bitter water out of my mouth.

" _There's a boat! Jack, wake up_!"

Clutching at his hands and peering right into his eyes, I say dramatically, " _Don't say your good-byes, Rose. You're going to die an old lady, not here, not this night. . . . Promise me you will survive, promise me now, and never let go of that promise._ "

" _I'll never let go, Jack,_ " Adam says, knitting his eyebrows to emphasize the gravity of his vow.

And we laugh, and we talk, and we talk, and we talk. About the acts of human kindness and cruelty we heard of or witnessed ourselves, about global problems and plot holes in a certain sci-fi TV show that we pledge to love until the end of times no matter how crazy it gets, and about how hypnotic and frightening whales are, and the oceans they roam, too, and other fantastic creatures they might be hiding, and the cold black space we're wandering through. We talk, and we barely notice that the cigarettes in our hands have long since gone out and turned into narrow sticks of ash.

I know him. I know Adam. I only met him several hours ago, and yet I know him better than I know anyone else, I understand him better than I understand myself. It's almost as though we kept meeting in all of our lives, and we forgot, but then we remembered—not the times and places that had brought us together, but the feeling, the beautiful feeling of having found each other.

As if from somewhere far, far away, I can hear funny voices yelling and laughing, and that wakes me up.

"No, wait, don't use it up! I'm going to need this!" I climb up the ladder and get out of the pool, shedding lumps of foam like feathers all around me. Not without some struggle, I win the helium tank from the red-haired couple Kirk and I met on our way here, and leave them giggling on the swing set in shrill voices.

"Sorry." I slosh back to Adam, pressing the tank to my chest. The magic dissipates.

"So you're going to try that again, aren't you?"

"Yeah." I shrug. "Tomorrow night, I guess. Actually, can I borrow a plastic bag from you, please? If you have a clear bag, that would be great, but honestly, anything will do. And maybe some tape? I don't think I'll manage to prepare everything before the morning tide, and, you know, I don't want my body to lie around in the sun for too long, 'cause—"

"I get it." Adam nods, interrupting my ramblings. I can't express how thankful I am that he doesn't act like it's a tragedy, that he doesn't try to talk me out of it. That he doesn't ask _why_. "Look, do you mind if I show you something? I, uh—come on, come with me."

I follow Adam back to the bungalow, through the dancing crowd in the swirling bamboo room, up the stairs to the second floor, and into a small bathroom that smells like a drugstore.

"Welcome to my office," he says with a theatrical bow.

The mirror above the cracked sink is plastered with stripes of black insulation tape so my reflection is looking at me as if from behind the bars.

"I was in the helium-bag kind of mood," Adam explains, having caught my stare in the mirror, and he turns away quickly. It doesn't escape me that his right hand jerks, probably without even him realizing, to adjust his leather bracelet—about four inches long, fastened tightly around the wrist of his left arm. "We don't use this bathroom anymore. The working one is at the end of the hall, in case you need a shower or something. The brown door next to our bedroom."

I want to ask him _when_ , how long ago, and about the _Chandelier_ story, too, but he didn't ask any questions about the helium, so I guess it's only right that I should reciprocate the polite silence.

"Yeah, I think I've had enough shower for tonight."

Adam pulls open one of the cupboard drawers and fishes out a stack of papers from under a mess of pens, gnawed pencils, crumpled inked-up napkins, and colorful pills.

"It's, uh—it's really rough," he says, bending and unbending a corner of the first page, "and I don't normally show my works to anyone until they're as perfect as they can get. It feels like, I don't know, like if you talk about the plot, or ask someone to read the story before it's finished, it's as if the idea has already been actualized, became alive, separate from you, and you just don't feel this urge to work on it anymore. But since you don't have much time—I just think you might like it."

Adam holds out the stack to me, tilting his head to one side, rubbing its spiky-haired back, and screwing up one eye, as if still unsure whether he wants me to take it. "Look at me, I'm like a typical author—you're about to commit suicide and I'm still trying to get you to read my book. You don't have to, of course—"

"No, no. It's okay, I want to. I don't know what to do with so much extra time, anyway. Thank you. I'll start right away, then."

"You can stay here." Adam takes a heap of plaid blankets and pillows out of the base cabinet and throws them onto the scratched floor of the bathtub. "It doesn't look relaxing, I know, but it's noisy downstairs and Oliver barfed on the couch, so—you can spend the night here, then we can eat breakfast, watch a movie, and then I'll even walk you to the beach and sing you some _Placebo_ or _Radiohead_ while you're killing yourself. How does this plan sound?"

"It's really kind of you, but I don't want to be a bother. I can't—"

"Kirk said you didn't have any money, where are you going to go? Consider it your reward for your beta reading services. Besides, it's not exactly our place," Adam adds, biting his lower lip, as if slightly ashamed.

"But you're renting it?"

"Uh. . . . Yeah, sort of. It's just that the landlord is not aware of that, and we don't really pay him, so—oh, it's all right, he only lives here in winter. It's unfair for such a cool place to stay abandoned, or at least that's how Kirk convinced me it wasn't that horrible of an idea."

"But that's not even breaking and entering, that's squatting," I say, imagining what would happen if the house owner decided to pop by and found the place wrecked and crammed with weird drunk intruders. "You guys could get yourselves into _a_ _lot_ of trouble."

"Well, I'm sure Kirk will find something positive about the local prison. When life gives you lemons—" Adam says, rolling his eyes.

"—it's only 'cause you're allergic to citrus fruit," I conclude.

"Exactly. Look, you probably have bigger things to worry about." He smiles and throws a meaningful look at the gas tank I'm still hugging to my chest.

I laugh. I've already forgotten. "That's right. Thanks. Actually, I think this tub's kind of comfy. Tight places are nice." I cringe at the awkwardness of the phrasing, but Adam nods.

"Like you're protected from every side."

"Yeah."

He leaves, and the door clicks shut behind him, cutting me off from the shouts and otherworldly music of the first floor. I get into the bath and wrap myself, wet and soapy as I am, in the blankets so only my head and my hands gripping the draft of Adam's novel remain on the surface.

_An Ephemeron Fly_. From the very first lines, I can see I'm in for something incredible. You know that moment when you meet someone fascinating and you're not in love with them yet but you already understand it's inevitable, and you're scared, and you're excited, and you're anticipating but don't want to rush it? That's how I feel about the opening scene of Adam's book.

After absorbing the first ten pages, I spring up, pull a cigarette from behind my ear, and light up. My heart is knocking on my ribs. _Let me out!_ I return to reading, leaving the unfinished cigarette smoldering in the sink. Adam's words—simple but witty, in a kind way—make me smile almost unceasingly, and several times I burst out laughing really loud, and I don't even try to prevent myself from crying. And the most wonderful thing about it is all of that smiling and crying is evoked by a different emotion every time. He fills me with hope, and then takes it away with just one line. "Fucking Adam!" I say. I want to punch him in the shoulder. I want to. . .

An ephemeron fly. It's a story about a girl who forgets. She has a rare memory disorder, and every morning she wakes up not knowing who or where she is. On her nightstand, she finds a journal, with many pages missing, and reads her life's story. She discovers that she has a big happy family and that her brother is away studying medicine at a prestigious school and he often calls and tells her about his life in the big city. That her parents still madly love each other, and every evening they eat delicious dinner together and play table games, and she has many amazing friends who often ask her out and show her the same movie over and over again because she loves it so much, even though they know it by heart.

She closes the diary and leaves the room, smiling to herself, and by the evening, she returns into it, and sobbing, with a broken heart, she writes the truth—her friends have long since given up on her, her brother is hospitalized with clinical depression, her parents drink and fight a lot, and their house is dirty, and they often have nothing to eat. Then she rips out the ink-smeared pages and burns them in the fireplace, and writes again—her brother called this morning and told her he'd been offered a great job, and Tim and Kayla showed her her favorite movie once more, and it was her dad's turn to cook today, and she beat them both at cards.

She chooses to lie to herself every time so that tomorrow, when she wakes up and reads the diary, she can be happy for a little while. I just want to find her, I want to give her a hug, I want to yell at her family so that they'll wake the fuck up and do something nice for her. I want to become her friend and show her that goddamn movie.

Fucking Adam!

"Adam!" I shake him carefully by the shoulder. It must be somewhere around ten a.m. now. The party is long over, and he's asleep, but I'm so drunk on emotions (and maybe on that disgusting beer, a little) it won't wait. Can't believe I have actually broken into their bedroom. "How could you do this to me?"

Adam groans and sits up. "What? Joy? Jesus, what happened? Wait, don't wake Kirk." He gets out from under the blanket, gropes for his T-shirt on the floor, with one eye open, and after we step into the hall, quietly closes the door behind him. "What's wrong?" he says in a raspy voice, squinting and rubbing his eyes. He's got a Gothic castle for hair, and the dark circles under his still-drunk eyes are amplified by the smudged eyeliner.

"You broke my fucking heart!" I shout in a whisper, as we walk to the bathroom. "Then you mended it, and then you broke it again! And you kept doing that, and the last scene is just—" I search for the right words but can't find anything as devastating as the ending of _An Ephemeron Fly_ was for me. "Fuck you!"

"So you didn't like it," he says with a sad smile.

"Like it? I _hated_ it!"

"Oh." Adam fixes his gaze on the floor. "That bad, huh? I should have stuck with the aliens theme. You know, my second choice was that she reads the diary and comes out of the room only to find out that Earth has been invaded by giant space ants, and only a small percentage of the population was left alive so the ants could have slaves to—I don't know what to say, I—"

"God, I am so _mad_!" I clutch my head, burying my restless fingers in my disheveled hair, and I pace the tiny bathroom: three steps in one direction, turn, three steps in the other. I must look like a junkie going through withdrawal. There is just too much going on in my head right now. I'd better hold it so it won't fall apart. Adam just stands there, silent, his head lowered, and rubs the bridge of his nose. He looks like a pouting child that has just been told that the most exciting things in life, like superheroes and magic, aren't real, and come back down to Earth, boy, we can't all be astronauts. I stop abruptly next to him, shoulder to shoulder but facing the opposite wall.

"I love you." The quiet words escape my mouth before I can even fully grasp the feeling. I've never said that to anyone outside my family before. I've been saving the words, keeping them to myself like a wary miser who dies of hunger, spread-eagled on top of his pile of gold that never got to buy him a moment of happiness. But suddenly, I don't regret blurting them out to a stranger I just met; I don't feel like being stingy with these words anymore. Not when it comes to Adam.

"Huh?"

"I hated everything about the book because it turned me inside out, because it made me feel so much, because it's perfect." I laugh hysterically at the puzzled look on Adam's sleepy face. "I _loved_ how much I hated it, and I loved the book, you brilliant clueless idiot! And you—I'm envious of you, how you can express everything I can't, and I—I love you. Yeah, that's right. That's what your fucking book did, it made me love you. In a good way."

Adam gives me a timid smile, still a little confused.

"How can you love someone in a bad way?"

"Well, you know, I mean, not demandingly, not possessively—in a good way. If we— _when_ we part, remembering you is not going to make me unhappy. It'll make me smile. That's a good kind of love, one that doesn't hurt anybody. I just want to hug you, and—"

"What's stopping you?"

"May I?"

Adam laughs, shaking his head and hiding his face in his hands for a brief moment, and then spreads his arms as wide as the bathroom allows.

I hug him tightly and say into his shoulder, my eyes round with a scary, disturbing _joy_ , "I read it, and I felt like I've found a friend. The kind of friend you're meant to meet but never do. It's like I've been looking for you my entire life."

Adam's chuckling tickles my ear. "I shouldn't have let you read it drunk."

His heart is beating crazily fast, and I like that. I mean, he must have arrhythmia or something, and besides, he _did_ polish off a bottle of limoncello last night—so, no, his heart is not pounding because my company pleases him so much, but I still like that. It's just nice, hugging someone so evidently much more alive than I am.

"So, you never told me what you do," he says, after our embrace falls apart and we finish laughing. The thing about hugging is no matter how sincere your impulse is, no matter how tight and nice and safe it feels, there is always a moment when somebody has to let go, and it's always a bit awkward, like waking up from a sweet movie and realizing that everyone in the theater raises their eyebrows at that goofy, dreamy smile on your face.

"I'm a translator, I, uh—I translate shit."

"Translator, huh?"

"Yeah, I translate shit like Fidelity Low—you probably have no idea what she is. It's just horrible. But I mean, at least she does what she wants to, right? I used to write myself, too, but I don't anymore," I ramble, feeling heat rise to my cheeks again.

Adam throws his head back and bursts into exuberant laughter, although I don't understand why he finds what I said so funny. " _Fidelity fucking Low_." He wipes his eyes, and adds quickly, "Can I read something of yours?"

I draw back. "No. No way! Are you kidding? After this?" I point at the pages of _An Ephemeron Fly_ lying on the blankets in the bathtub. "If we compared the sizes of our literary talents on the universal scale, yours would be like Jupiter, and mine, well, not even Earth, it would be _on_ Earth—in somebody's fridge, like a banana. No, a mini banana."

" _What is it_ with you and bananas?" Adam grumbles jokingly.

"I just don't want you to think I'm shallow because I can never find the right words. I won't survive it if you don't like what I've written. Anyone else, I don't care, but if _you_ don't like it, I just feel like I won't be able to live with that embarrassment."

Why do I still use phrases like "won't survive," "won't live with that"? They're such platitudes they don't have any strength anymore, especially not in my case. I mean, I won't last much longer in any scenario.

"Oh, snap out of it." Adam winces. "It's not like I'm this evil expert or anything. Besides, _I_ did survive you calling _Anatomy of Passion_ shit. Although, surprisingly, it was more painful than I would have expected."

I stare at him for a few seconds. He must be kidding. It can't be.

"Nooo."

"Yep."

"No."

"Oh yes." He grins and stretches his arms out, as in "can't-help-it."

" _You_? You are Fidelity Low?" The mere thought of it sounds ridiculous.

"Uh-huh."

"Sorry, I—I didn't mean to be mean," I say, taken aback by his guilty expression confirming that it _is_ true.

"Pretense."

"You're right, but it's _shit_!" I exclaim, laughing nervously.

"Yeeeah, it is."

"I don't understand? How? Why? You can write like _this_ —" I nod to _An Ephemeron Fly_ again—"and you—? How did you even contrive to craft a book that has so little meaning in it? How did you manage not to include at least one powerful scene, at least accidentally?"

Adam lets out a half-surprised, half-thoughtful hem. "Well, I. . .I guess I don't like to waste myself. I use myself sparingly, you know. When I have a decent idea, I write for myself. And Fidelity Low. . .that's me selling my soul. As much as I wish it weren't this way, my life is not about art, it's about getting by. I just want us—Kirk and me—to have something to eat tomorrow, you know? I don't want to be constantly afraid that tomorrow we won't be safe anymore, and that's what I sell myself for, and I hate it and myself for it, but that's my choice," he finishes with a bitter smile.

"It's unfair."

"Is it ever? Oh, I've got it easy. People deal with much more serious problems."

"Right, right! ' _Someone has it worse,_ ' I know! But that doesn't make it any less miserable that you have to waste your short life doing something you despise, only because it pays to, and push what you love doing, what you're really great at, into the background!"

"I could have been homeless," Adam says.

I look around. "Aren't you?"

"Oh, good point." He nods, pursing his lower lip, as in "haven't-thought-about-it-this-way-before."

I sit down on the edge of the bathtub and bury my face in my hands. "How do you live with this? With all this, you get what I mean?"

I look up at him, waiting for—I'm not even sure _what_ it is that I'm waiting for, but Adam's answer is just another humorless laugh and an indefinite shake of his head.

"Look, help me." I don't know how, but I find myself on my knees, grasping at his hand, looking into his eyes the way a puppy does when it realizes it's being abandoned—scared and hurt, but still hopeful and loyal, begging him to take me back home, asking why does my human, my everything, have to leave me.

Adam looks just as lost and powerless as my mother did when I would ask her to fix me. My poor mother. . . . No, I can't think about my family. I mustn't. It's all over, the door to my home is shut.

"I'm sorry. I can't." Adam squeezes my hands gently in his. "Nobody can help anyone. Nobody knows all the answers, nobody knows the right, perfect way to live."

"I don't need answers. I know all the damn answers, sometimes I think I know all of them, but I can't take the truth, I just can't take it, and I need you."

" _Me_?" Adam snorts derisively. "Me! I can't even handle myself! I wouldn't be able to take care of a fucking cat. I'd forget to feed it or to close a window when going out to buy cigarettes."

"Then it's a good thing I don't need to be fed, and there are only two stories here so I won't get too squashed if I fall out the window. No, no, it's not like that. I don't need you to babysit or lecture me. Listen, you know what would be good about the end of the world?"

"Apart from everything, you mean?"

"The minutes before it happens, we would all be soulmates. Nobody would have to speak, everyone would know exactly what others are thinking, we would be united and understanding as never before in human history! You know, I think if I had someone to just lie on the grass with, watch that big fiery rock hurrying to collide with us, and make stupid jokes about it, and talk about how majestic peanut butter is, I would sincerely call it one of the happiest days of my life. I need you so that I can take it, so I won't be scared, so that I can feel like I'm never going to be alone. Can you please be my friend?"

I never thought I'd say something along these lines to someone I barely know without feeling as though I'm a needy, pathetic loser deliberately humiliating myself. But somehow it seems to me I can say anything to Adam, and he will listen calmly, and he will get it.

"Let's just agree to never abandon each other no matter what. We would be invincible! We would wander around the world and write horrible books that have zero meaning and value and—"

"Joy," Adam cuts me off quietly, "I really like you, I do, but right now, I'm not in a state where it's a good idea to form bonds. I'm a time bomb. _You're_ a time bomb. Tick tock," he says, his distant stare dissolving behind the bars on the mirror.

"No, don't say that."

"Besides," he says, in a forcedly merry voice, as if woken up from his thoughts, "I don't think friendship works that way. We can't just make a deal. That's cheating."

"Says who?"

"Well, it has to be natural, it has to grow from something—shared memories, you know—"

"All right. Fine with me. Let's go make them."

A surprised _ahem_ makes us both turn around—standing at the door is Kirk, who shifts his stare from my body frozen in a praying position to Adam. I let go of his hands right away, but don't get up, figuring that it wouldn't help Kirk unsee the whole thing, anyway.

"It's not what it looks like," I mumble. "We were just talking about the end of the world."

"I see. We've run out of toothpaste," Kirk says casually, "and the fridge is pretty much robbed. Thought we should make a trip to the Plaza. Oh, and we could return Joy's bike while we're at it."

He throws a brief cold glance at the mirror and leaves, closing the door behind him. As soon as he does, I exhale all the air I've been keeping inside my mouth, afraid to make any more noise after my stupid remark. I hide my eyes behind my hands.

"Adam, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to get you into trouble. I don't want to come between you two or anything."

"You say sorry too much," he reminds me with a sigh. "It's all right. Kirk's not the jealous type. Come on, get up."

"He didn't make a joke."

"Huh?"

"I thought he would laugh about it. For some reason, I expected him to say something funny about this stupid scene, but he didn't make a single joke. Are you sure he—?"

"It's the bathroom," Adam says, and his gaze gravitates to the crack in the sink. "He doesn't find it funny."

I get it.

"Why are you together? Sorry, it's none of my business, of course, but it's just you two don't seem like soulmates."

"Kirk, he. . .he keeps me afloat. Well, you've seen him. He makes me laugh, you know. Keeps me distracted. Sometimes I think you don't need someone like yourself in order to be able to keep going, you need someone about whom you think 'I'll never go near that guy' when you first meet him. Someone who seems almost incompatible with you."

B-52

On the next evening, I don't kill myself, because just as I'm about to leave, Adam, without ungluing his eyes from the screen, his mouth full of banana chips, says, "Oh, come on, please, just one more episode."

I don't kill myself the day after that, either, because I volunteer to make dinner as a small token of my gratitude for their giving me a place to sleep, and this is when it turns out that Kirk took cooking classes, and by his standards, I haven't prepared a single proper meal in my life. He says it's immoral to die without knowing how to make decent lasagna and insists on teaching me.

" _Vegan_ lasagna," Kirk specifies, deep gloom clouding his face, as he pours olive oil into a large saucepan. "Because Adam wouldn't be the most annoying person in the world if he weren't vegan on top of everything else."

"On top of _what_ else, exactly, may I ask?" says Adam, who's standing to my right and mincing garlic while I'm trying to turn tomatoes into a paste and resembling a horror movie poster with my hands and clothes and even face spattered red. "What's so annoying about my refusal to eat corpses, anyway? It's not like I'm running around the house in a broccoli costume and brandishing protest signs."

" ' _Corpses_ ,' here he goes again," Kirk whispers into my left ear. He puffs out his cheeks in disapproval and even goes so far as to let one tear roll out of his eye, which probably has more to do with the onion he's chopping now than the prospect of a meatless evening.

"It's a scientifically proven fact," Adam says in an authoritative tone, "that meat-eaters are inconsiderate bastards."

"Well, my data is a little more up to date. Yesterday, I had a call from—what was his name?—Joy, name a famous biologist, quick."

"Uh, Darwin?"

"Yes, thank you, that's the one! Charles Darwin called yesterday, he mentioned something about vegans being sniveling downers who can't be happy over little things," Kirk fires back, looking unexpectedly stung by Adam's remark.

"He said, crying," Adam sneers.

"It's because I feel so bad for this fucking onion, like the _inconsiderate_ bastard I am."

"Love is in the air," I say, stuck between two people armed with knives and growing visibly more irritated with each passing second. Sometimes I suspect that the concept of a romantic relationship was invented by a person who wanted to make sure they always had someone to criticize at hand. "Come on, fighting over _food_? Can't you guys skip that part of the dating process?"

Kirk seems to be too angry (must be meat's fault) to abort the arguing so easily. With an air of defiance, he runs the tip of his finger down my cheek and licks the blood-colored substance off. I bite my tongue and decide that the wisest thing I can do now is stay out of the performance (which seems as likely to work out as staying out of an earthquake while being in its epicenter). Adam only snorts.

"You know," Kirk says, swinging around and pointing his knife at Adam. I have to dodge back and forth so that he won't accidentally draw a zigzag on my face as he waves his hand. "I'll tell you on top of _what_ else. I gave a local ragged kid a bottle of bubbles once, and that trifle made him look happier than I've ever seen anyone—definitely happier than I've ever seen _you_."

"Yes, you're very charitable, but what does that have to do with anything?"

I can imagine that. Yeah, you can bet the kid was excited. Maybe those sparkling soap bubbles floating up to the sky on a sunny day will become one of his happiest childhood memories, something to turn to in the darkest hour when he's old, with a painful, bittersweet nostalgia. Just soap bubbles. Some other kid on the other side of the world would probably laugh at that, with all their robots and gadgets and a guaranteed future career in law they take for granted. Soap bubbles are not even remotely entertaining for many children nowadays, and I can't blame them. I mean, _robots_ , man! I picture the local kid's face once more—all lit up and fascinated at Kirk's gift. How many memories like that will he get? It's just so unfair.

"But that's sad," I say from under the table.

"No," Kirk says with a groaning sigh, as in "you don't get it," and he turns to the cutting board again. "What's sad is that even if I got you two the biggest bottle of bubbles in the world, you'd still be miserable."

On the following day, Adam asks if I left a note.

"A note?"

"Yeah, a note, you know. Like a middle finger drawn on sand. Or a mysterious abbreviation. Something tasteless, flamboyant."

"Oh. Right. You mean a suicide note."

Oh, I've written hundreds of those. Some notes were long and bitter, but most consisted of only a few words. Like "Fuck you," when I was angry. I was rarely angry with anyone other than myself, but I didn't exactly want my farewell message to sound like "Fuck me." No, that could prove just a little bit awkward.

Sometimes my goodbye notices would simply read, "Sorry." I never meant for the notes to break off there, but every time I wrote the damn word, I'd immediately start to weep. I didn't weep for myself, of course—I wept for those whom I was going to leave behind. I would only have to die once, and then I would be free of pain, I would be free; it was they who would die a slow, torturous death every time they'd hear my name.

The letters beginning with the s-word were intended to explain why I did what I was about to do. As though if I provided them with solid, logical reasons, they'd understand. As if that way they wouldn't be hurt.

I never stopped searching for a way to escape without hurting anyone, as though there were one. My parents didn't deserve to lose their only kid. My friends didn't deserve to miss out on life because of my funeral. But sometimes, the people I was holding on for were the very same people who made me want to die most. Sometimes I myself was hurt so much that I just couldn't find the strength to care anymore.

The problem with justifying my suicide is I have no idea why. I can't say, "I want to die because I was abused when I was a teen." Or, "I just can't get over my friend's death even ten years later." Or, "I think I'm losing it, and I don't believe I have a future." Now, I'm not going to tell you how much of that is true, because none of the above would be _the_ reason. If I knew _why_ , I would be able to fight back. But my enemy is elusive and almost invisible.

I feel as though I'm a bad person for not being happy. Is it okay to want to die when someone else would kill to stay alive? I don't know if it's okay—it certainly doesn't feel like it. Depression, for lack of a better word, is something disgraceful, a "white man's problem." If you're unhappy, there's something wrong with you. You must be lazy. If you were busy, you wouldn't have time for self-pity. Cancer is a disease. Depression is a whim. Even though it, too, takes a human life every minute, melancholy is just a caprice. Get back to work, you sluggard.

"You need to leave a note," Kirk says, clicking his fingers in front of my face to bring me back to the moment. "That's the rule."

A rule is a rule. Don't I always obey?

And so Adam supplies me with paper and pens, and I sit down to write the note, and without even noticing myself how, I begin to _write_. Time stops, shrinks, and stretches, and I sit in my bath, in my head, far, far away from the island, from my odd reality, from myself. It goes on for hours, which grow into days.

I only take breaks in the evenings, and we watch movies in their bedroom, and then Adam and I discuss them for hours to the accompaniment of Kirk's deep, even breathing until we, too, fall asleep. Tonight we watched _Arizona Dream._ The room's been quiet for a solid ten minutes since the closing credits, and I finally say, "Can't remember the last time it was this easy to breathe," and Adam answers, quoting the film, "Life is beautiful." At this, we look at each other and laugh as if what we said were utterly stupid, but we laugh very quietly: Kirk has been half asleep for the majority of the movie.

"Adam? Would you bother finishing your novel," I whisper, "if you knew you had a month left to live? Provided that it would be published and become popular?"

"Absolutely," Adam says, a bit faster than I hoped.

"But what's the point? You wouldn't get to reap the rewards."

"I don't know. Vanity? Vanity only thrives in the face of death," he says with deliberate pretension, and he chuckles.

"And if you knew that the novel would turn out a failure, or simply remain unknown, unread?"

"Still, I would absolutely finish it."

"But why?"

"Well, to be honest, I guess I'm only reasonably vain. You see, recognition is only alluring to me insofar as it can buy me the freedom to spend all my time doing my thing and to say what I mean. Whether people remember my name or not, I'll be dead. And I don't fool myself into thinking that I can say something new, or powerful or beautiful enough to change someone's life for the better. But if I can make someone's day better—just one person, just one day—if I can make someone feel understood, if I can hope that I will be understood by one person, that is reason enough for me to spend my last days trying to arrange twenty-six letters in the most entertaining order I can think of."

It sounds as if the answer had been ready before I even finished the question—I guess Adam _had_ asked himself that.

"Kirk," I say.

"Hmm?" he groans sleepily. "Shut up."

"Will you kill me if I live a little longer? Here, I mean, if I live here. I think I need to finish my story."

"Yeah, whatever."

If I can make Adam's day better, if I can make him feel understood, if there is a chance that he will understand me even more than he already does—to hell with reasons, it will be worth it. I begin writing something for Adam, on the back of his crossed-out poems, on napkins, with his chewed pencils, and the words come of their own accord.

I wish I could say that returning to writing, something I used to love doing, immediately feels like a relief, like reuniting with a lost family member, a lost limb, a lost self. No, it does, it does, but it's not always like that. Sometimes there are torturous seconds, no, long periods, as if years, of restlessness, anxiousness, where I know I have to write as if somebody were chasing my fingers, I have to write even if the house catches fire. I know that if I stop, the words will kill me, I'll explode the moment the pen loses touch with paper. The moment I stop, I'll die. No, worse than that, I'll feel as if I'm about to die, but it'll never come.

And then I flounce around the bathroom because I can't take it, it's too much, and I scream, and I wriggle in Adam's arms until his calm voice quiets me down and I fall asleep. But I do feel, for the first time in a very long while, as if everything made sense, as if _I_ made sense. As if.

"You know what's good about this house?" I say, plopping down on the couch, next to Kirk. We're waiting for Adam to finish his showering so we can all go to the beach.

"That it's totally awesome and free?" Kirk says in a detached tone.

"It's quiet!"

"Is it?" Kirk arches an eyebrow and looks up. Even here, on the first floor, I can hear Adam singing something heart-rending over the running water.

"There are no _demanding_ sounds," I explain.

"How d'you mean?"

"Alarm clock, phone, doorbell, goddamn desk bell! No demanding sounds!" I look around to check something I just realized. That's right. I haven't seen a single clock around the house. "No fucking _tick tock_!" I yell victoriously. "And. . .no flashes of light, either. I'm awake. I'm always awake. I'm always fully _here_."

Kirk squints at me, puts his pointing finger to his temple and rotates it. "Going. . . going. . . going. . . aaand you've lost me. Dude, I don't speak crazy bitch, sorry."

Soon, my head is resting on Adam's shoulder. His other arm is occupied by Kirk's neck. We're lying by the ocean, on three beach loungers pushed together, sunglasses over our eyes, flaming shots in our hands. It's two a.m., and the water seems like liquid silver in the starlight.

Adam doesn't give the slightest start, and neither do I, when suddenly Kirk begins to scream. Not in pain, not in fear, just scream for the sake of it. His loud animal-like interjections wake birds in the woods behind us, and we can hear them flapping their wings as they fly away, in dismay, to some safer place.

Adam and I take synchronous sips through the straws in our cocktails, his arm bending around my neck as he brings the glass closer to his mouth.

"God, it feels great," Kirk says, when he's done torturing our eardrums. "Come on, you should try it. Shout the shit out of your sad little brains!"

I look at the sky and yell, "ARE YOU THERE, DOCTOR? IT'S ME, JOY!"

"WE LANDED ON THE WRONG PLANET!" Adam supports me. "IT'S CALLED REALITY AND THERE'S NO SENTIENT LIFE HERE! TAKE US BACK HOME!"

"God, you two are hopeless," Kirk says.

"Let's scream that thing we know about humanity," I say to Adam quietly.

"All right, one, two, three—"

"HUMANITY IS FUCKED!" we bellow in unison.

Kirk was right. It does feel great.

Then, I shout the first line of a song both Adam and I like, and Adam backs me up. The song is called _I Don't Wanna Go to Hell_ , and it pretty much goes like this: "I don't wanna go to hell," thirty times, only with different intonations, and ends in a quick yell, " 'Cos I don't want to meet my ex-classmates."

"Oh, Christ, you lot are downers," Kirk says, as we take a moment to recover our breath, but when I start singing another one, he can't keep from joining in.

"MY EYES SPARKLE—"

"—WHEN I'M DRUNK—"

"—OR AT LEAST THAT'S WHAT MY MOTHER TOLD ME—"

"—WHEN I WAS IN FIFTH GRADE," we scream all together.

For a couple of minutes after we finish the song, we lie there, panting and laughing and drinking up our flaming B-52's, which, of course, were prepared by Kirk, who just so happens to have taken bartending classes.

"Joy, I was wondering," Kirk says, refilling his glass from three of the many bottles we have under the loungers. "Your favorite band. Is it, by any chance, _Joy Division_?"

"Oh, shut up," I say, administering him a half-hearted kick over Adam, and then I sit up with a jerk. "Oh my God!"

"What's wrong?"

"I just realized. I'm older than Ian Curtis!"

Adam chuckles, pulling me back down, and Kirk says stubbornly, "No, you're not. He would have been sixty now."

"That's just stupid. He died at twenty-three, which means he's forever twenty-three, he's never going to be sixty, lucky Curtis. That's like saying Johann Sebastian Bach would have been over three hundred now if. . .if he were a tortoise," I finish, figuring that no human would have lasted that long.

"Would you care as much about _Joy Division_ if—" Adam says.

"If Ian had been a singing tortoise? Of course! Wouldn't want to miss _that_."

"—if he were still alive?"

I frown, hesitating. What is it about rock stars killing themselves? Do we obsess over them because they did it, or because the kinds of people who end their own lives generally tend to be very obsession-worthy? Is it that the ideas and questions that torment them, reflected in their music, are so powerful they touch a cord, or do we give their art that power after they choose to go, just because we lack the courage and cowardice to do so ourselves?

And what about those who choose another kind of courage, another kind of cowardice? What about those white-faced, red-eyed martyrs who survive? Who lower their heads, sell their souls to some rich record company, treat their anger and despair with pills, settle down to married life? Who dive into religion or alcohol, who live to become grouchy conceited old men with head tremors and not a single drop of talent left?

Would their lyrics still seem so raw, so witty, so heartbreaking, if I knew that the person who wrote them got better, turned into one of those people who somehow keep it together and know where they're going? Would it be possible for me to relate to them then?

"You know, this sign," Kirk says, pointing at a nearby wooden post bearing a cardboard placard. _Public beach is closed from 23 p.m. to 6 a.m. Being here at night is forbidden and punishable by a fine._ "Some locals say it's because at night, all kinds of nasty beasts crawl out of the ocean."

"Adam," I say, rolling over onto my stomach and looking at him earnestly. "What would _you_ do it if it were seven or eight?"

This question just won't leave my mind. It seems so important, even though I don't understand why.

"What do you mean?"

"She's talking about the beach again." Kirk grunts in annoyance. "About whether you'd try to save her if she was out longer than five minutes."

"Not necessarily _me_ —anybody, someone you don't even know. It's hypothetical. Kirk won't tell me what _he'd_ do."

"I wouldn't do anything," Adam says, again too quickly for me to be satisfied. Doesn't this question seem any more problematic to anybody but me?

"But—"

"If it was less than five," Adam adds, "I would definitely interfere. Not doing anything would be the same as killing them. But longer than that—you can't choose for them. You can't take that kind of responsibility. If they become disabled, if they don't even know who they are anymore—"

"Jesus, can you two drop it?"

"Yeah, I guess I wouldn't, either," I say, rolling onto my back to stare at the sky again. God, I really should choose a more secluded place next time. I can't let my death fuck up some random passerby.

"Kirk would," Adam says. "Pretty sure he would."

"How do you figure?" Kirk says, unconcealed irritation in his voice.

"Because you're the hopeful one." I can hear a smile in Adam's tone. "You would believe until the end that everything's going to work out. And if that stranger is fucked, you'd babysit them for the rest of your life, as you do with me."

I feel as if I'm hearing more than I should, so I try to change the subject.

"I wish I were immortal."

Kirk sniffs dismissively. "Are you kidding? _Immortal_? I thought you wished you were dead. Immortal! You can't even handle the sixty or something years you've been given."

"Yeah, I know, I know. It's just, somehow, it seems like immortality would solve everything for me. I'd spend a hundred years reading every book I could lay my hands on, another hundred watching movies, one hundred writing, then I'd learn how to play every musical instrument, and I'd learn Japanese, and French, and Italian, no, I'd learn how to speak a hundred languages. Can you imagine how many beautiful words there are in the world? I'd even spend a hundred years traveling and learning how to cook so I could kick your ass at making lasagna. It's all about time, you know. I just don't have enough time to make things right, to become really great at something."

"You're the one depriving yourself of time."

"Yeah, I'm sorry, I wish I could be able to explain but I don't think I can—"

"Well, shut up, then! Shut up, both of you!" Kirk says, even though Adam has been quiet for a while, looking upward reflectively. "Look at us! We're sunbathing in the middle of the night God knows where, and we're young, and the night is black."

"Like my lungs," I say automatically.

"Like my life," Adam says.

"Shut up, shut up, shut up, you two, right now!" Kirk shouts.

"What do _you_ believe in, Kirk?" I ask, laughing.

"I believe"—Kirk raises his glass—"in having fun. In enjoying every moment, in not talking about life and not thinking about death. I believe in cheap beer and weed, I believe in unhealthy food, I believe in being funny and awesome, I believe in dressing with taste!"

With this, he jumps to his feet and spins around, demonstrating his impeccable attire consisting of just a pair of Hawaiian shorts.

"I believe in scuba diving and in parachuting, I believe in hot sex. I believe in not giving a fuck!"

"Wow, that's—that's impressive," I admit. "Have you considered becoming a shrink? The world needs more shrink speeches like this."

"I took psychology classes, actually," Kirk says.

"He did," mouths Adam, widening his eyes.

"Is there _anything_ you haven't tried?" I ask in mock indignation. "I'm beginning to get suspicious. How old are you? Are _you_ immortal?"

"I believe in dancing," Kirk continues, and with an elegant nod, he offers Adam his hand, helping him up.

They bow to each other with ridiculously solemn expressions and begin to dance, and I drink and hum a tune to give them some rhythm. My voice keeps slipping off-key as I stifle laughter, but their moves are far from perfect, either. Kirk stomps on Adam's feet time and again, and Adam staggers and can't seem to control his fidgety face. And I can suddenly see that their features are just so right for them, as if their personalities had shaped them—Adam's self-righteous, angry eyebrows that seem to be frowning even when he's surprised, contrasting with his long eyelashes that scream "sensitive" and "sincere"; Kirk's mischievous, carefree smile and his sharp, stubborn, almost militant chin. Their faces instantly make you feel as if you'd known them forever.

"You're so beautiful," I say, completely fascinated as I watch them. "Both of you."

"Oh, come here, you suck-up." Kirk gestures for me to join them.

"We can't dance the waltz all three of us together."

"We can do anything we want. Anything, do you get it?"

And we waltz, all three of us, together, under the indifferent stars, and the night is black, and we're young.

This is a very good night. I bet I will remember it as one of the happiest nights of my life. These moments are like. . .like iridescent soap bubbles in the sunlight.

The Dreamers

"Guess who got a job?" I yell, as soon as I fling open the front door, beaming.

Adam and Kirk look at me as if they had taken me deep into the woods last night and tied me to a tree and now couldn't believe I managed to find my way back to the bungalow.

"You what?"

"Are you nuts? Why? What job?"

"A stripper. Economy class," I elaborate, noticing the skepticism in Kirk's eyes.

"Why economy?" he asks.

I shrug. "Apparently, I'm not big enough in the VIP department. No, I'm now a _Happy Meat_ waitress," I say cheerfully, and I add, with a little less enthusiasm, "The owner beat up the last one so bad she can't work for a while."

"That bitch is crazy," Kirk tells Adam, chewing and pointing a fork at me.

"God," Adam says, looking really worried. "You realize that place is like _Sweeney Todd_? I bet they have a morgue in their cellar, and they chop off pieces of the deceased and sprinkle them with paprika and wrap them in some pretty red packaging, because red makes you feel like you're hungry?"

"Orange," I correct him. "They have orange packaging, because orange makes you feel like you're happy."

The truth is they have something nastier than a morgue down there, but I'd better keep that from Adam so that he won't get upset.

"Dude. Their uniform," Kirk says. "You're going to wear a skirt?"

"Yeah, why?"

"Well, some locals are animals. Trust me."

"Technically, we're all animals," says Adam sensibly.

"I can handle them," I say. "Although, sometimes I wish I were a man. I would wear skirts all I want and beat the shit out of fuckers."

"Didn't work for me," Kirk says seriously and points at a little scar splitting his right eyebrow in two. We laugh.

So it goes. In the daytime, I wait tables at _Happy Meat_ , smiling to hungry eyes and serving American and European kids with knockdown portions of carcinogens and artificial sweeteners that make you fat and edgy. I'm paid four times less here than at the lowest-wage job I had back home, and my boss openly yells at me in a language I don't understand, which propels me to miss Julia tenderly. And yet, this job makes more sense to me than any job before. I realize clearly that I'm doing this to survive without living off Adam and Kirk. And I realize clearly that I need to survive so that I can write my novel in the evenings while Adam polishes _An Ephemeron Fly_ , and so that at night I can talk with Adam, or burn half the kitchen with Kirk, or watch gray-and-blue silent movies with both of them. All this time, the helium tank is waiting for me under the bathtub I sleep in.

Even though I can't reread my own words without muttering, "What a load of shit!" under my breath at regular intervals, the more I write, the more curiously liberated I feel, my mind weightless in my skull, my lungs wider in my chest. All the heavy, toxic hatred seems to be gone. I don't hate myself anymore. But more importantly, I can finally see why I did for so long. And now that I know _why_ , I can fight back should the self-loathing return.

Since my early teenage years, I had hated myself, and I did not understand why. I could not rationalize it. But now I get it.

All those years, I kept forcing myself to do things that made no sense to me, that my whole body resisted doing, that made me feel unhappy. College and work—for years and years after I realized that hospitality and translating cheesy romances weren't my thing. Going somewhere and talking to someone because "I had to." I had to be nice to people. I couldn't be impolite, so I made myself listen to someone ramble about things I did not care about while feeling as if that person's mouth were draining the life out of me. I was my own oppressor. I hated myself as I'd hate anyone who imprisoned me and forced me to do things that made me want to die instead of things I was dying to be doing.

That morning I woke up (it's not very original, but I did not know of a better way to stop sleeping);

I was tired, as unhappy people often are in the mornings.

I didn't feel like going to school, or to work, maybe—on that particular morning, I could not remember just how old I was exactly and where I was supposed to go,

So I locked myself in the room and I erased the door, and the windows, too, in case someone decided to peek in.

Now it was just me and the four walls and the floor and the ceiling.

On that particular day, I could not remember where the floor was and where the ceiling was and why it was supposed to matter, so it was just me and the six walls all around me and I circled the room all day, and by the evening I noticed that my fingertips had become transparent.

The funny thing about me is that I only exist when someone is watching.

I am only funny as long as there's someone to laugh at my jokes,

I am only pretty as long as there's someone to admire my looks,

I am only happy as long as there's someone that wants to be lied to.

But now there was no one around, just the walls, and gradually, I became completely invisible.

Now that I had no voice, I no longer cared if my voice was loud enough for me to be noticed,

Now that I had no face, I no longer cared if my face was loud enough for me to be heard.

Now that I had no spectators with expectations, it mattered no more if I was thin or pretty, if I had makeup on, if I was dressed up and sober and drunk and happy, but not too happy in case there was someone who could be offended by my atrocious well-being; I did not have to worry that I might say the wrong thing and I might do something stupid.

I no longer cared to smile, and I remembered that I hadn't wanted to smile for a couple of years now and there was nothing wrong with that and there was nothing wrong with me and there was nothing right with me either and it was all okay.

I remembered that I liked to sing so I made a new voice for myself, and it was quieter than the last one, and it sounded like the voice that had always been whispering in the back of my mind.

I remembered that I liked to draw so I drew myself a new face and it looked more like me than the last one had done.

I drew the windows again and the door and before I threw myself into the bright shouting world once more, I remembered a funny thing about me.

The funny thing about me is that I only truly exist when no one is watching.

Ugh, what a load of pretentious shit!

"What do you think?" I ask Adam a month later. "I know, it's just a few chapters, and I wouldn't dare ask you to take a look—it's just, you know, I hadn't written anything in a long while. I just don't know if I'm good at it anymore. I just need to know if it's worth it."

"Joy, I'm no expert."

"As a reader," I ask.

"What a load of shit," Adam says. I sigh and return to my bathroom.

"What a load of shit," Adam says two weeks later, when I show him a thoroughly edited version. I frown and return to my bathroom.

"I really like it how you've separated your character from yourself this time, and at the same time, this piece seems more like you than the ones before," Adam says another two weeks later, when I bring him a couple of completely rewritten chapters.

"But?" I ask carefully.

"But what a load of shit," Adam says, looking at me apologetically. I swear and return to my bathroom.

"You. . .you need to finish this," Adam says one day, just as I'm about to turn away and withdraw to my bathroom. "You need to finish it. It's bigger than you—you have to finish it for someone like you." He must be telling me this only because he's afraid I'll go and finally kill myself if he says there's just no point in working on it.

"Look, I know, the plot is very simple, and there are no smooth transitions between the scenes—"

"I like that. It's like in real life—you get a few important moments, a couple of profound conversations, and there's no plot, and between the scenes you eat, sleep, and wash dishes."

"I know I don't describe the characters—"

"Because the protagonist doesn't care about looks."

I begin to pace the bathroom again, my hands around my head, and we both know that it's a sign of an oncoming emotional typhoon, which I can't seem to tame ever since Kirk pulled me out of my helium-induced sleep.

"I just—in order to write something worthy, I have to be unhappy, but when I start writing, it makes me feel so happy I can't write anything worthy anymore, and that makes me feel so unhappy, but not unhappy enough to write something worthy. And the words aren't—"

Adam steps in front of me and quells me by squeezing my shoulders and just looking into my eyes, coolly and patiently, waiting for me to calm down. It's strange how he's always so collected when I run amok, and how my mind becomes so clear when he's the one going crazy.

"Joy, you need to stop being afraid. You need to stop trying to make it perfect. Just make it good. A failed attempt is always better than no attempt at all."

"Even with suicide? Or murder?"

Adam gives me a reproving smile. "You know what I mean. You need to finish this. Promise me, Jack."

And I promise. And I see. One more time, Adam, perhaps even unbeknownst to himself, points me to a giant tumor in my perception. This perfectionism, this disease, my undoing. Every time I refused good things, it was because good had never been good enough for me. If something wasn't perfect from the start, I just didn't want it. That's what happened to many of my potential relationships with people, many hobbies I could have been into, many adventures I could have had. My life.

My life will never be enough for me if I don't change my ways. No matter what I do, my family will never be ideal, and I will never get back the years I spent doing the wrong thing. I think this might have contributed to my desire to kill myself—my life was already screwed in a couple of ways, so I didn't want it.

If my many years' hesitation to write was because of what they call "procrastinating perfectionism," where you don't do anything because you can't achieve your ideal anyway, my decision to kill myself was the fruit of "destructive perfectionism." Kill everything that isn't good enough to exist. Kill everything.

And the better I get to know Adam, the more clearly I understand that we can never be friends. We're not equals. Adam is a fucking genius, no matter how hard he tries to hide that behind all the alcohol and lazy talk and sometimes rather hurtful snarling. All _I_ can do now is just admire his mind and be grateful I was so lucky as to meet him.

Adam, however, has become noticeably accustomed to having me here and I guess has even grown affectionate toward me, in a way. Sometimes he comes to my bathroom and just sits there, smoking and watching me try to squeeze something worthy out of my mind, and then looks at me with some strange, sad warmth, kisses my forehead, and leaves without a word.

And the more we lose ourselves in our long conversations about movies and books (ours and someone else's), well, about anything, really—the more irritable Kirk becomes. I don't venture anymore to ask Adam if he thinks that Kirk might be after all a little jealous. I try to convince myself that I mean no harm and there's nothing weird or awkward going on between the three of us, but I still can't get rid of the vague sense of guilt that awakes in me every time I see Kirk. I definitely refrain from proclaiming my endless and awestruck love for Adam whenever he says something I can relate to and something I could never see before he'd mention it.

Kirk, meanwhile, keeps trying to get us to go out and "do something," like play beach volleyball or some stupid stuff like that, pulls more and more annoying pranks on us, and offers more optimistic nonsense that makes my teeth itch already. He rolls his eyes at every little thing we say, and more and more often, having caught us brainstorming our drafts again, he shakes his head and at best, leaves the house without inviting us along or telling us where he's going, and at worst—

We are watching Bertolucci's _The Dreamers_ , about young cinephiles who entertain themselves by re-enacting bits from movies they love. Right after an especially explicit scene involving the trio of main characters taking a bath together, Kirk gulps down his tea and asks, quite nonchalantly, "Shall we repeat?"

Unanimously, Adam and I choke on our own drinks and exchange horrified looks.

"The tea!" Kirk yells angrily. "I'm talking about the tea, you sick bastards."

A long silent pause ensues, during which the screen displays something that really isn't helping at all.

"Anyway, what dull gibberish," Kirk says. "Can't we at least once in a while watch a movie that doesn't have some crazy bitch ruining everything in it?" He turns off the TV ("Heeey!") and storms out, slamming the front door behind him.

"Adam—"

"That's not it. Don't worry about it. _Fuck_." Adam gets up and follows Kirk outside, and I remain sitting in front of the black screen. Yeah, definitely nothing weird or awkward going on.

The next day, I decide to try and speak with Kirk openly, even though I have a feeling it might be impossible. This feeling is only magnified when I find him in the kitchen with a party blower in his mouth. He leaps up and down in front of the window like a ballerina. The upper sash of the window is opened, and the lower one's stuck closed. An ugly greenish bug the size of my thumb has flown into the house, and Kirk is struggling to chase it out through the open sash, but the insect insists on bumping its head against the glass.

"Kirk, I'm not trying to ruin anything for you," I say, perching on the sill.

He doesn't so much as turn to look at me. "Come ong, ger our!" he growls at the bug without unclenching his jaws.

"Look, if you want me to leave, just please say so, and—"

"No, I'd like you to stay," he says distractedly, his attention still focused on the insect.

Such a brazen lie makes me lose my temper.

"What? Fuck off, Kirk! Admit it, you hate my guts."

"How do you figure?" He finally deigns to spare me a look—a rather spiteful look.

Wordlessly, I use both my hands to point at his face, whose expression serves as my strongest evidence.

"Listen, what do you want from me?" Kirk's words are muffled a little because of the party blower, which he still won't take out of his mouth. He waves his hands at the bug, but it's stubborn in its determination to crash into the glass over and over. "Shouldn't you be with Adam right now, talking about how cool it is to be selfish and dead?"

As much as I wish I could turn a deaf ear to this remark, both my ears register it perfectly well and don't hesitate to go red. I choose to forgo vulnerability and translate my pique straight into anger.

"You know what? It's _your_ fault. _You_ brought me here, _you_ placed us nose to nose with each other and commanded us to get along. Isn't this what you wanted? Now you don't have to listen to his _annoying speeches_."

"Stupid creature." Apparently, Kirk has come to terms with the fact that reasoning with the bug is not going to be very productive, because he finally changes tactics and tugs at the stuck sash.

And as I watch his clumsy and futile but persistent attempts to save the bug, it dawns on me. So Adam's right. It's not jealousy.

"Move away from the window, you're distracting it," Kirk says, trying to push me aside.

I narrow my eyes. "You're _afraid_."

Instead of answering, Kirk blows the party horn.

"You're afraid to go through this alone," I say, ignoring that he's ignoring me. "Watching him suffer and not being able to help. You thought _I'd_ help him. You thought I'd somehow make him feel better, _understood_ , right? But I'm only making it worse—is that why you're so pissed? He's been more depressed lately, hasn't he?"

Kirk widens his eyes and whistles at me again, which only confirms that I'm digging in the right direction.

"Look, if you think you know how I can help him, enlighten me. I can shut up if that's what it takes to put him out of his misery. And I mean that in a good way," I add quickly. "Not the 'mercy killing' way. I just—I really don't know what I can do."

The party blower unrolls, squealing, in my face three more times.

"You have no idea what to do yourself, do you?"

The bug hits the glass one last time and falls dead just a second before the lower sash gives way and opens. Kirk shuts his eyes and begins to pound his forehead rhythmically against the window frame.

"I'm sorry." I don't really mean "about the bug."

"Joy, Joy." Kirk pulls away from the window, places his hand on my shoulder, and says, "Let's go and get something to eat. I want a sandwich."

"I mean it, though," he says, when he hands me a peanut-butter-and-cheese sandwich and butters his own.

"Yeah, I know. Why would anyone lie about wanting a sandwich?"

"Hey, don't pretend to be stupid, that's my way of doing things. I mean I meant it when I said I'd like you to stay. Granted, you're a pain in the ass, but he does need someone to talk to, and he won't talk to _me_ anymore because he knows _I don't get it_ , anyway. At least he hasn't had one of those breakdowns of his since you arrived."

"What kind of breakdowns?"

"Violent," Kirk says, chewing.

Not twenty-four hours later, Adam and I are sitting side by side in a narrow, damp room, and our gloomy eyes follow the movements of a man sporting a khaki uniform as he struts back and forth on the other side of the rusty bars. In the opposite corner sits a sturdy young Norwegian, his long face embellished with fresh bruises and scratches. He's been scowling at Adam for the past thirty minutes. In his defense, there's not much else in the cell to fix one's gaze on. I mostly just stare at the holes in the walls and the ceiling, where old gray bricks have fallen out. Sunlight is pouring in through them, as if freedom were tantalizing us, teasing us with its proximity, but the holes aren't big enough for a person to climb through. I remember with anguish Adam's drunk speculations on how adrenaline helps people perform impossible feats, but I'm not feeling particularly scared. If anything, I just feel tired.

Adam, whose face looks no better than the Norwegian's, sticks a middle finger up at him, and the Norwegian darts toward us, but the guard shouts something unfriendly by the tone of it and knocks on a bar with his stun baton. The Norwegian spits on the floor and returns to his corner, where he resumes the glowering at Adam with intensified hatred. I rest my splitting head on Adam's shoulder and wipe the blood from my lip with the cuff of my shirt.

"Joy, I'm really, really _sorry_ ," Adam repeats under his breath.

"Forget it. It was my fault. I shouldn't have gotten involved."

"I didn't realize it was you."

"Adam, it's fine. Can you distract him?"

"Sure, yeah."

Adam rises to his feet and limps over to the bars. The guard shouts and knocks again, and then points his baton at the wooden bench I'm sitting on, indicating that Adam needs to back off. While Adam is spouting some drivel about giant space ants and waves his hands, I bend down, and noticing the intense stare of the Norwegian, put my index finger to my lips and fish my phone out of my right sneaker. Keeping an eye on Adam, whose back screens me from the raging guard's sight, I dash off a message to Kirk. After I slip the phone back into my shoe, I let out a small cough and, when Adam turns back at the sound, give him a quick nod. He raises his hands in a gesture of capitulation.

"All right, all right, you should have just said you weren't a fan of sci-fi," he tells the guard and returns to the bench.

About an hour later, the alarm goes off, and after giving us a suspicious look and knocking on a bar one more time, the guard disappears from view. Another minute later, behind the cell door appears Kirk jiggling a handful of keys. "Fucking amazing, isn't it?" he says at the sight of us. "Come on, hurry up, jailbirds."

He doesn't need to ask twice.

"What, you're going to let him out, too?" Adam says, as Kirk lingers at the door, gallantly holding it open for the Norwegian.

"Adam, he'd rot in here."

Adam grimaces and nods, reluctantly, and the Norwegian squeezes past us, taking care to shoulder Adam, who immediately lunges at him, but this time Kirk and I manage to hold him back together.

"We've no time for this!"

"Fine, fine! Get off me!"

Kirk leaves the keys in the lock, and we run outside through the dilapidated front door and farther toward the woods, without looking back at the small, run-down local police station, where they keep lawbreakers like us until those can be transferred to a bigger island, to some proper prison that doesn't have holes in it.

"Got to quit smoking," I say, after we collapse on our safe, soft, dry couch, all three of us out of breath from having run all the way to the bungalow. "My lungs suck."

"So what happened?" Kirk says, panting, as he rummages in the first-aid kit for some cotton balls and hydrogen peroxide.

"The Norwegian," I say, casting a cautious glance at Adam, who's sitting next to me with his head thrown back on the backrest of the couch, eyes closed, chest heaving. "We were in the Plaza, and he was just walking past us when he brushed against Adam accidentally."

"He shoved me on purpose," Adam says, without changing his position or opening his eyes. "I told the motherfucker to watch where he's going."

Kirk lowers himself to his knees in front of the couch and pours a generous amount of hydrogen peroxide on a cotton ball. "And?"

"And, well, he didn't for some reason like being called a motherfucker," I say carefully, "so he began yelling that Adam has to apologize, to which Adam replied that he doesn't apologize to clumsy motherfuckers, and they proceeded to argue and push each other, and then Adam, he, well, went a little. . ."

"Savage?" Kirk helps.

"Well, he lashed out at him, hitting and kicking, all right in front of two policemen."

"And your lip?"

"Well, I—"

"You should have seen her," Adam says, pulling at the collar of his T-shirt as if it were strangling him. "She pounced on him from behind like a jungle cat. I should have seen her, too, so that I wouldn't have punched her in the face." He opens his eyes and turns to me. "I thought you were someone else, Joy. I'm so, so _sorry_ , I—"

"It's all right, really," I repeat for what seems like the hundredth time.

"What would you do without your fangirl, Adam? Well, Joy, I knew you were a crazy bitch," Kirk says, and I notice how, probably for the first time since we met, he stresses the word "crazy," as opposed to "bitch." "I had no idea you were that fierce."

"Who's talking?" I say. "How did you smoke the guards out?"

"Well, I _smoked_ them out. Made them a special cocktail, didn't I?" Kirk grins, cleansing a deep, bleeding cut on Adam's cheek. Adam's face doesn't even twitch, retaining a half-detached, half-cross expression. "Threw it in through a hole in the back wall. That cell seemed to be empty. I knew that that, ahem, _bartending_ course would come in handy one day."

"Kirk," Adam says stiffly, "thanks for getting us out. I know I'm always landing myself in some mess, and you could have just decided to teach me a lesson for once—and you would've been right—but you got me out, again."

"Oh, I only attacked a police station, which is, like, five years in prison if I get caught, all to rescue your impulsive, selfish asses," Kirk says. "No need to get all gay about it."

I can't help but laugh, and Kirk takes another cotton ball soaked in peroxide and dabs it on my lip, winking at me even as I hiss in pain.

The Revolution

"So, what do you think?" Kirk says, tilting his head toward Adam so his chin is pointing at me.

They're sitting on the bamboo-room couch, which has been emitting the distinctive smell of lemon-scented laundry detergent ever since we reanimated it after Oliver's outrage. I'm standing in front of them in a puddle of evening sunshine streaming in through the open window—as if in a spotlight, as if they were the jury in some reality singing competition, and I'd just finished performing and were now waiting for them to gracefully explain to me why I suck. Even my hair is fluttering duly in the humid, salty wind blowing from the ocean, as if in a stage fan.

"What's going on?" I ask, since I have no idea.

Kirk appraises me with skeptical eyes, his hand reaching into the large bowl of fortune cookies resting on his lap. "She doesn't know how to have fun—"

"Hey," I protest. "I once watched thirty-four seasons of _Doctor Who_ in three weeks when I was supposed to be cramming for my exams. Don't tell me I don't know how to have fun."

"—she swears like she forgot to buckle up for a roller-coaster ride—"

I let out an approving hem. "That's, like, a very accurate metaphor for how I feel about my life."

"—she can't cook—"

"To be fair," Adam says, "you think you're the only person in the world who can cook worth a damn."

"—she always has this sad confused face, like my grandma at a death metal concert, to which she had to escort me because I was underage and everybody else was busy. On the plus side, she—Joy, not my grandma—would fight a big Norwegian dude for you and she loves _talking_ , which I don't, so I guess she kind of compensates you for all that."

"What's going on?" I repeat.

"Adam here," Kirk announces, placing his hand on Adam's shoulder, as if I weren't capable of locating him myself, "almost finished his _Ephemeral Fly_ —"

" _Ephemeron_ ," Adam and I correct him automatically.

"Whatever. And our visas expire in fourteen days, which is why we think it's time for us to go home."

"Home?" I ask dumbly. What—

"Leipzig, ja," Kirk says matter-of-factly, "And since I'm basically like your mother, I suggested that we should either get you a ticket to Mordor or wherever it is you're from, or we could take you with us. It's up to Adam now."

"Adam?" I ask even more dumbly. My mind is still busy processing the weird German sounds that came out of Kirk's mouth so naturally.

"Well, it's not that I'm trying to undermine your right to choose where you want to be, but I really don't think it's wise for you to stay here alone. You'll either get yourself killed, by your batshit crazy piece of a boss, or you'll kill yourself _yourself_."

I slowly sink to the floor, and sit there, cross-legged and pretty much crushed. I feel as if my brave new world had just fallen apart and pressed me to the ground with its debris. Home? Leipzig? When did that happen? How come I didn't know they were from Germany in the first place? How come I never asked? They seemed so in their element, so organic on this sunny, lazy, godforsaken island it never even occurred to me that they had some past, that they'd come from somewhere, and most importantly, that they wouldn't remain here forever. How come we talked about everything but never really talked about those mundane details? Like, "Where are you from? How old are you? Have you ever served jail time for murder?" What do I even know about them? About Adam?

I mean, of course, it's not like it matters a great deal. You don't need to know every event from someone's biography in chronological order to truly _know_ them. And still, this unforeseen discovery makes me feel lost, unsafe.

"But you can go to a neighboring country, right?" I ask hopefully—desperately, if I'm being honest. "You can stay there a few days, update your visas, and return?"

"Already done that, twice. We can't return here sooner than half a year from now, which we will consider, but for now—we need to spend some time home. You know, it's good for your travel history."

Stupid, stupid rules. Why can't they just be wherever they want to be? Why can't they just stay? How come we're illegal aliens almost everywhere on our own planet?

And why, why is it Kirk, not Adam, telling me this? Why didn't _Adam_ invite me to go with them? I mean, I can find a job, I can rent my own place, I can—I thought we were—what did I do? Is he tired of me? Why doesn't he think it would be a nice idea for us to remain together a bit longer?

And he does look tired. He looks tired, and bored, with his eyes fixed on his mismatched socks, his fingers drumming noiselessly on the armrest. I doubt he's even been listening to us for the last couple of minutes.

"I—"

"Oh, come on, don't look so pathetic," Kirk says, leaning toward me and offering me the bowl. Reluctantly, I take a cookie. "That's decided, then—right, Adam? We'll bring your loyal groupie along. You're going to love Germany. Ever been?"

I shake my head and watch Adam. Please, please, look up, look at me.

"Listen, can we discuss all this later?" Adam says, closing his eyes and rubbing the eyelids with his fingertips.

"You need a cookie." Kirk makes Adam grab one, too, and unfolds his own prediction he has been fiddling with for a while.

"What does it say?" I ask mindlessly.

"I have no idea." Kirk turns the fortune to me so I can see the words written in, presumably, Hindi. "The dude I bought them from is a prominent troll. Let's see."

He scans the slip of paper with a translation app on his phone. "It says, 'you will eat a cookie today.' Smartass." Kirk sends the cookie into his mouth, shakes his head in amusement, chewing and chuckling, and turns to Adam, who's still holding his unopened treat, apparently not in a hurry to learn what fate has in store for him. "Well, come on, give me yours."

Kirk snatches the cookie from Adam's unresisting hand and cracks it open. "Oh, this one's in English. I guess." He shows us the note threatening, "You will rip yourself to peaces."

"Don't know if the guy is a misunderstood genius or just ominously ungrammatical," Kirk says. "That's what I love about his cookies—they're not your typical 'work hard and you will succeed, maybe.' You really never know if he's going to curse you or give you some deep shit."

"Yeah, well, mine says, 'the proxy server could not handle the request,' " I say, slightly disappointed, and I demonstrate the translated message on my phone to him. "Didn't know they had things like 'proxy server' in Hindi, though."

"Like I said, deep shit. Try another one."

Kirk hands me a new cookie, and I open it.

"Well, what does your future hold? Mordor or Germany? Or getting killed by your boss?"

"It's empty," I say, this time decidedly disheartened. "Look."

I show him the fortune, which is positively blank.

Kirk purses his lips and says, merrily, "Guess you don't have a future, then. Adam, take another shot."

Adam, who seemed lost in thought the whole time Kirk and I were trying to peek into our hereafter, softly moves the bowl away. "Look, I really feel like doing something cool tonight. Or stupid, I don't know. Got any ideas?"

"There _is_ something." My voice shakes a little, but I get a hold of myself.

I have always taken pride in my lack of need to be liked, admired—accepted, even. Understood, yes—but proving my worthiness to someone? Never. Not wanting to impress anyone is a luxury nowadays. But now, I'm overwhelmed with a stupid, childish desire to make him want me again as he did the night we first met, before I fucked it up with my clinginess, to deserve appreciation, to give him something so that he won't be sad or bored with me anymore. "There's something I've wanted to do for a while, but it's mainly pointless, and most certainly illegal, which, I guess, counts as both 'stupid' and 'cool.' "

Kirk shrugs. "Aight, bring it on."

"Yeah, okay, I'll just grab some props."

I hurry up the stairs, to my bathroom, and return to the bamboo room five minutes later, carrying a flashlight and three _Happy Meat_ bags with eye and mouth slits cut out in each, like balaclavas.

"Are we supposed to—? Oh, of course we are," Kirk says, as I put one of the bags over my head and hold out the other two.

"K, I have a really bad feeling about this," Kirk says, his voice a little muffled, after they put on their bags, too, and we fix them around our necks with adhesive tape. "Well, at least this time there are breathing holes. That's some progress."

"I need a drink," I say, and I run across the room to the fridge and take out three bottles of disgusting beer. "God, I'm so excited—I haven't been this excited since I tried to kill myself."

"Could you give us a clue as to what we're going to do and why we need to cover our faces so we too can be excited?" Kirk says.

"No, let it be a surprise. To the stupidest and coolest thing I'm ever going to do," I announce, and we clink our bottles against one another's, and we down them in several gulps.

"Tell us, at least, where we're going," Kirk asks, as we step outside.

"To the Plaza."

It takes us half an hour to get to the square on foot. The sun has already gone down; as we walk, unhurriedly and a tiny bit tipsily, under the cover of the warm, singing, windy night, I can't help but think about the indifferently beautiful Universe, about all the sad long words I want to write, all the simple kind words I want to say to my family—about big things. And it feels so, so reassuring to just be able to breathe the thick, sweet tropical air, to silently share this thrilling moment with somebody.

"So what now? Jesus, Joy, tell me we're not going to break in," Kirk whispers, as I lead them up to the back door of _Happy Meat_.

"We're not. Technically, we're not _breaking_ in. We're just walking in, unauthorized." I hold up a bunch of keys in front of his masked face and rattle them like a bell.

"What, you want us to spit in the burgers or something?"

"How prosaic! No, I want to make a little mess." I tiptoe to a red switch on the wall and turn off the security alarm.

"Didn't know they had it," Kirk says. "What about the cameras?"

"Well, there's nothing I can do. The boss is definitely going to want to take a look at the footage after tonight." I tap my index finger on my temple. "That's why we're wearing bags."

Kirk groans. "Oh, shit, Joy. When I said you didn't know how to have fun—you shouldn't have taken it that seriously, you know."

"Adam, remember how you said we had a morgue down there? Well, it's worse. We don't have a morgue—we have a waiting room of death. Here," I say, unlocking another door at the end of the kitchen.

We grope our way down the stairs (with Kirk muttering about horror movies and basements and crazy bitches) and enter a stuffy, dark room filled to the rafters with cages. The moment we appear on the doorstep, the cellar begins to chirp. I pull on a dirty, squeaking chain hanging from the ceiling, and a dim light bulb illuminates the surroundings.

"Oh my God," Adam says. "Joy, how can you work here?"

There are about five dozen cages here, each imprisoning a hundred little, fluffy, butter-yellow, cheeping baby chickens. The cages are so small the birds are piling on one another's heads. The ones closest to the bottom can't even move; they just sit there, pressed into one another, while their luckier pals stomp their feet and try to flap their tiny wings, distressed by our arrival—the light means someone's come to feed them, or take them to the kitchen and feed them to hungry tourists. I don't know whether they know that or not, but I think they know enough to be scared.

The stench is so intense my eyes sting.

"Joy, I'm no moralist, but this is really fucked up," Kirk says. "Now I understand how it's possible that they're 'Non-GMO' and 'No Preservatives.' "

I cross the room and push open the high window. "Kirk, would you mind getting up there?"

He scrambles outside, and I pick up one of the cages nearest to the window. Adam helps me lift it over our heads, and Kirk pulls it out and puts it next to the wall.

"Don't open for now, they'll scatter and get themselves crushed," I say.

Kirk sighs. "Did anyone ever tell you you're a crazy bitch?"

"Think someone might have. We should hurry up."

Twenty minutes later, we stand on the dewy lawn behind _Happy Meat_ , stretching our pleasantly hurting arms and surveying the sixty-five cages in front of us.

"Careful, try not to step on them," I say.

The three of us exchange looks (or rather, turn our heads toward one another, for I can't see their eyes well through the bags' slits) and dash to open the cages, one after another, and soon we're in the middle of a yellow, swarming sea.

The birds keep peeping weakly and stomping around; only a few of them head, uncertainly, toward the forest.

"We have to make them move," I say, "How do we make them run?"

"Well, maybe something loud," Kirk says, and at that, we bend in half, and we cover our ears with our hands, and the baby chickens disperse in panic in all directions, because the alarm goes off.

"Shit," I say. "I thought I turned it off!"

"Run, run, silly things!" Kirk yells.

"This is a revolution!" I yell.

"This is for freedom!" Adam yells.

"I think we should run, too," Kirk suggests.

"You go, I'll be right along," I say, scrambling back into the building. "There's one more thing I need to do."

"Joy! Don't be stupid, they will chop our hands off if we get caught! How are you going to kill yourself if you don't have any hands?"

"Well, maybe you could talk the judge out of mutilating us. You wouldn't happen to have taken law classes or something?"

"I WOULD!" Kirk yells.

"He would," Adam says, bending in two again—this time with laughter.

I sprint back up the stairs and through the kitchen, my heart galloping, drop the keys, return to pick them up, slipping now and then on the tiled floor, run farther into the dining room, to the counter. The alarm is so loud my ears hurt and I can barely see straight. With my shaking hands, I unlock the cash register and count the bills. Five grand six hundred—our weekend's receipts. That's a fortune here.

"JOY!"

Through the glass front door I can see Adam and Kirk yelling and waving at me in the square. I collect the money and dash to the door. Kirk looks around nervously and encourages me to hurry the fuck up as I fumble with the lock.

"Really, Joy? You risked our hands just to steal some money?"

"I risked our hands for the revolution." I throw the bills up in the air, and they fly over our bagged heads, and the wind scatters them all over the Plaza, all over the rickety stalls.

"Great, now let's GO!" Kirk yells, and laughing, we run through the square.

"Where—Joy, our house is _that_ way!"

"I know," I yell, "That's not where we're going!"

"God, where now?"

"The fish farm, of course," I say, panting.

We run for ten minutes longer toward the ocean and climb onto the top of the fish farm, an underwater cage stretched out along the shore.

"You're crazy," Kirk says, sending a terrified glance over his shoulder at the fine cottage standing a few dozen yards away. That's where the owner of _Happy Meat_ , my nutcase of a boss, lives. The lights are out, which is a good sign. There's a chance he didn't hear the alarm.

"Quiet," I say.

Carefully, I walk on narrow metal planks toward the edge of the farm. Now that we're not shielded from the ocean by a wall of trees anymore, the wind is angrier; it rustles and inflates the bag around my head, whistles in my ears, threatens to throw me off balance.

"Damn, the tide is too high," I say, peering down. "Gonna have to dive."

"Oh, the horror." Kirk stands close to the edge, next to me, and removes the bag from his head, and Adam and I follow his lead.

"I hope this thing is waterproof." I turn the flashlight on, and without allowing myself time to change my mind, I jump first. The water is rather cool; the salt stings my still-unhealed lip. Adam joins me, and Kirk remains up there to keep an eye on the cottage. I take a giant breath and dive as deep as I can. In the beam of light from the flashlight, the quivering fish glisten like silver.

As soon as I find the gate valves and try to open them, the flashlight flickers and goes out. I drop it and push myself off the slimy, silt-covered bars of the cage, but something won't let me go up. I scream and hear the sound of air bubbles running out of my mouth. I jerk upward again but can't break free—I think my (technically, Adam's) overalls have caught on something. My clothes seem to grow heavier and heavier, and I can't see anything. Absolute darkness. I can no longer tell which way the bottom and the surface are. _My skin remembers, my lungs remember that the darkness can devour me, as it devoured many before me, as it devoured many_ me _before me._ I grope for the thing that holds me down and suddenly realize that this is it, the end. So quick, so silly.

For some reason, I'm not panicking at all. I remember lying on the beach with a bag of helium over my head, and I all I feel is chagrin.

I don't want to die like this. I don't want to feel the pain, and the cold, and the fear. I want to be in control, as I was on the beach, I want to be prepared, I want to be the one to decide how I die. I want to—

I want to finish my story. No, this isn't fair. Was it all for nothing? I want to finish my goddamn book. It fucking matters to me. And maybe another one after that. And another one. _Fuck_. I want Mom to read it, I want her to have something that could make her proud of me.

My mother. She once said that if we weren't family, if we were the same age and met somewhere, like at school or a party, we'd never like each other. Some people call their exes when they get drunk. They sob and say how much they still love them. When I get drunk, I call my mother.

I understand her now, I think. I understand what she feels when I crawl at her feet, begging for help. I understand why she doesn't answer when I scream at her, because there's nothing she can say to help me, and she knows that. I just want to see her again, one last time, I just want to tell her that I understand. I get it. I'm going to be fine. I'm going to try harder.

More air bursts from my chest, and I finally give up and breathe out fully. My lungs immediately feel like a vacuum, and I have to control my quivering nostrils so that I won't inhale. Just don't inhale. I feel as if I'm about to faint from the strain. I'll inhale. They say it hurts like hell when water gets into your lungs.

Please, please, I'm going to try harder. I'm going to try harder. I'm not ready. I'm not, I'm not ready yet. There's so much I want to do, there's so much I must do. I don't want to die. _I don't want to die._ I'd laugh if I could. I'd laugh like a child at the sight of soap bubbles floating up to the sky, I'd laugh at this beautiful, stupid, all-consuming lust for life, if only I weren't about to die.

Then I feel something clasp around my waist, feel something tear, and the next moment, Kirk helps me get out on the cage's roof, and Adam's head emerges from the waves and he climbs up, too. We lie writhing and breathing heavily, and I laugh.

"That's it, that's it," Kirk says, helping us to our feet. "It's over. Joy, never do that again. Jesus! Screw you, you scared the hell out of me."

"I've opened the latches," I say. "We just need to push now."

Kirk thrusts his weight upon the top of the gate and pushes it open. The fish stream out into the ocean, a silver river in the light of the stars and the moon.

"This is beautiful," Adam says.

"Fuck," Kirk says.

I turn to look at him, assuming he's so overwhelmed with emotion because of the magical, Disney-like scenery, but he's staring the other way.

"Fuuuuck," I say. My head is still spinning.

My boss is standing on the porch of his house. He's holding a rifle. He squints at us for a moment, then starts to yell, and it sounds only scarier for the fact that none of us knows his native language. We gape at him, at a loss as to what to do. If we run back the same way we came here, he will intercept us. He cocks his rifle with a click. I swallow.

"Fuck," says Adam.

"YOU!" my boss yells, pointing the rifle at us—at _me_ , I guess, because " _YOU_!" probably means he recognized me.

"Aaaah, what do we do what do we do what do we do," I say.

"All right, Joy, if we die because of you, it'll be your fault," Kirk yells.

"That—the 'your fault' part was kind of unnecessary because it was kind of already included in the 'because of you' part," I say.

"Oh shut the fuck up smartass," he says, and he kicks me back into the water, and I almost lose the overalls with one shoulder strap torn and another missing its buckle. Then he pushes Adam, and then he jumps himself. Lead pellets fly over our heads, the sound of firing motivating us to swim as fast as we can.

When we're far enough away and the bullets can't reach us anymore, my skin becomes covered in goose bumps. Maybe it's because the farther we are from land, the colder the water is, or maybe it's because I keep losing sight of Kirk's and Adam's heads among the high waves gleaming in the pale moonlight. Most likely, however, the goose bumps have something to do with the weird prickly sensation in my feet, which I get every time I can't feel the ground under me. I have no idea how deep the water is here, and I try not to imagine. There could be anything underneath me now, any _thing_.

"Everyone all right?"

"Yeah, all good." Adam spits out water and laughs. "Oh my God, Joy, this is the stupidest and coolest thing I've done in my life. Thank you."

I smile and almost swallow a wave. The boss doesn't follow us either into the water or along the shore, probably having decided that he has more important things to take care of at the moment. Or maybe it's because of the—"Beasts!" I yell, nearly springing out of the water with sudden fright.

"What?"

"THE BEASTS!" I yell. "Locals say that at night, beasts crawl out of the ocean," I remind them.

"Aaaaaaah, Joy, I'm going to fucking drown you, why did you have to say that?" I can hear unmistakable panic in Kirk's voice as he speeds up, too.

Adam laughs and tries to keep up with us, but then he stops laughing abruptly, and I turn around, terrified that the beasts have gotten to him. His face looks even paler than usual, and fear raises the hairs on my arms. It's always like this when I think about the ocean, only right now it's much worse than usual, because I happen to be in the fucking middle of it.

"Adam!" I shout. "What's wrong?"

"Sharks," he says.

"Oh-my-God-what-where?" Kirk yells, his voice suddenly several pitches higher.

"No, no, I don't know about the local beasts, but sharks are real," Adam says. "And so many fish probably got their attention."

"Aaaaaaaaaaah," we say all together, and without pronouncing it out loud we unanimously decide that my boss is not nearly as scary as sharks, and we rush back toward the shore.

When we get out, still alive and uneaten, we drop to the sand, and we laugh, and we can't stop laughing, and I think we're going to have to leave the country sooner than we planned, and there's a chance I will be forever banned from visiting South Asia if my boss reports me to the local police, but I'm so happy, and Adam looks so happy, and Kirk look so happy that none of that really matters.

No

The next evening, I wake up from a nightmare, with a heavy, nervous feeling. I can only vaguely remember what I was dreaming about, but I'm shivering—probably because the pillows and blankets are wet with my cold sweat. I fling the covers off and sit up, trying to calm down. Looking around to make sure that this is real, that I am awake and safe, I notice a pile of papers in the sink, which wasn't there this morning. I get out of the bath, my legs trembling, hair strands sticking to my forehead and cheeks, and take a closer look. It's _An Ephemeron Fly_. Adam has finished it. A warm sensation spreads from my chest to my freezing fingers and toes. Everything's all right. I'm all right. Adam—

A handwritten note falls out of the pile as I pick it up out of the sink. He even left me an accompanying card. I unfold the peach-pink piece of paper. How swee—

A sting of disappointment. The handwriting is different from that on the napkin I'd found in my hand the night before I almost killed myself. I haven't even realized until now that I was secretly hoping it was Adam who had written me those words.

Dear Joy,

_I wish you would not keep forgetting  
(when someone is being unfair or cruel to you)   
that the patterns the moles form on your skin repeat constellations of stars,  
and your skin itself is created from stardust—  
the same dust that_ their _skin is made of.  
I wish you would not keep forgetting_

(when you take their words close to your heart)   
that stardust is all there is   
gonna be someday   
left of your skin and their skin and their words and your

heart.

When you are told you are weak,   
I wish you would not keep forgetting   
that you don't really need to hold on to   
anything,   
whether you're trying to swim for the first time, or balance yourself on the subway, or hearing the news of your loved one being

dead.   
You don't really need to hold on to   
anything—

when you are told you are strong,   
I wish you would not keep forgetting   
that strong doesn't have to mean stubborn or cold or alone or unkind,   
and sometimes flexible things are stronger than solid   
ones   
and sometimes spider silk doesn't rupture where diamonds break   
and sometimes the hardest thing there is is to ask for help.   
I wish you would not keep forgetting that still, sometimes

you cannot be strong and kind at the same time—

I wish you would not keep forgetting which one

you're supposed to choose then.

When you're told you are doing okay,

I wish you would not keep forgetting that doing okay is enough—

or maybe it isn't?

I wish I would not keep forgetting.   
I wish you would not keep forgetting   
that you already know all the answers, and secrets, and truths, revelations that you often long for—

I just wish you would not keep forgetting them.

I wish you would not keep forgetting that time

is the most important thing you don't have and that time doesn't really exist, while succeeding

in eating away at your flesh and your past and your future

and turning you into the stardust

the way it composed you from it   
yesterday.

I wish you would not keep forgetting you're doing okay.

I pause and bite my lower lip. This doesn't feel right. It's nice of him to have written a poem for me, of course, and I guess it's supposed to help me feel more hopeful and lighthearted, but the constricting disquiet I woke up with returns.

"Adam?" I call loudly, frowning. He doesn't answer, though I can hear something fall and break, probably a cup or a dish, on the first floor. There's only a few more lines left to read—whatever that was, it can wait a minute.

I love you, Joy. In a good way. You don't need to look for a soulmate. We can't save anyone, we can't help anyone but ourselves. You're stronger than I am. I root for you, okay? Look for yourself, the you that will make you laugh, the you that will keep you distracted, and write something extraordinary. You promised me, remember?

Please don't be mad at me, or yourself. It's not that you weren't enough—it's just no matter how tightly you hug me, inside my head I will always be alone, I will always have to fight on my own, and I just can't anymore.

I'm sorry, I gotta go.

"Adam!" I call again, unable to take my eyes off the note. It's the note. It's _the note_ , and I can't move. It can't be real. Of course it's not real—I must be still sleeping, still trapped in a nightmare. How do you pull yourself out of a bad dream?

P.S. See you in the next life, hopefully on some alien planet.

P. P. S. Unless the aliens we'll be reborn as don't have eyes. In which case, I'll hear you, or some other sensory thing we don't have here on Earth.

"JOY!"

Kirk bursts into the bathroom with a crumpled piece of green paper in his hand, his other hand bleeding. He's breathing heavily and bending double, supporting himself on the sink. A stream of blood rolls down its edge and into the crack, and Kirk withdraws his hand abruptly, a flash of _remembering_ , of terror in his eyes.

I'm sitting on the edge of the bath, _An Ephemeron Fly_ on my lap, rocking back and forth as I burn my palm with a cigarette.

"What the hell are you doing?"

"Trying to wake up," I say, frowning at the interruption.

"Crazy bitch," he spits. "What did he write you?" Kirk snatches the book with the poem on top of it from me and runs his eyes through it.

I look down, and fear, a fear unlike anything I've ever experienced, grips my throat.

It all fits together. Why Adam didn't care if I would go to Germany with them, why he wanted to do something crazy last night, why he looked so sad and why he looked so happy.

"K-k-kirk—" I can't speak, I can't tell him, and it's so important, more important than anything.

"Shut up." He keeps reading.

"Kirk!" I clasp his hand, but he jerks it away.

"You're a monster."

"Kirk, the helium tank." I finally manage to get my voice to work. "It's gone. The helium tank, it's gone. Kirk—"

I'm not sleeping, and we're losing time. Tick tock, tick tock.

He throws _An Ephemeron Fly_ at me, and the pages fly about the bathroom. Kirk rushes down the stairs, slamming the door with such force that it flies off its hinges, and I dash after him.

There's no point in creating something, no point in falling in love, no point in saving someone, and I run, and we run, pushing and shoving each other, stumbling over stones and branches, clutching at each other's T-shirts, as if we're two rivals competing to see who'll finish first. We're running so fast the world flickers in front of my eyes. On and off, on and off.

There's no point in saving someone. There's so much pain in the world. While you're saving one kitten, somewhere else a hundred of them are being drowned. You feed a homeless child, and thousands of other children die of hunger before the kid can say "thank you."

The birds we had freed were probably caught and brought back to their cages, and those that got away will die of hunger because they'd never known any other life but the cages and they won't be able to find food. The fish will be eaten by sharks or die for the same reason as the birds—can they even survive in the wild? The money we'd littered around the Plaza for the poor craftsmen to find was probably collected by my boss after he realized that the fish farm wasn't the only place we had broken into. It was all for nothing. Even if it did work, how much would it change?

There's no point in saving someone, and I run, I run, and Kirk runs too, and we push each other with our elbows, and our legs are so weak with fear they almost give way.

Weirdly, all I can picture now is a model of a black hole being born that I first saw in my astronomy class years ago. Two radiant neutron stars drawn toward each other through space, revolving around each other in a passionate dance, spilling matter and deadly energy everywhere, faster and faster, closer and closer. . .and colliding—still speeding up their rotation, but already as one, and in the middle of their merged dead bodies begins to grow a newborn black hole, and hungry, it devours them. Me and Adam, two neutron stars. We found each other, we reached our flaming arms out, we danced around for a while, and here we are, exploding into each other, spilling burning light all around us, dying while holding each other tightly, and turning into a black hole.

I break out of the forest first, and Kirk grabs me by the elbow, and we both stop still, staring at Adam, who's lying by the edge of the water, with a clear plastic bag over his head, with the helium tank connected to it like a hospital dropper. Stupefied, we examine a giant middle finger drawn on sand. Beneath it, there's an abbreviation, "IWIWI."

"I wish I were immortal," I whisper hoarsely.

The high tide will erase it, just as it will erase Adam, my human, my everything.

No—

"Adam—"

I run to him, collapse to my knees, rip the phone from his limp hand, and my heart trips over the number. My heart trips, falls, and breaks, and breaks, and breaks, as if on an endless loop. The splinters cut me from the inside, get stuck in my lungs and my throat, and I can't breathe anymore. I don't want to breathe anymore.

"K-k-kirk—"

He takes the phone from me, looks at the stopwatch, shakes his head, trying to hold back the tears in vain, and hurls it into the ocean. He turns away and wraps his hands around his head.

"Fuck! FUCK!"

"Kirk, we have t-to—"

The next second, I'm dangling in the air, struggling to inhale.

"K-k-kirk, you'll smother m-m—"

"I should have left you to die!"

He slams me to the ground, and I fall, suffocating, next to Adam. His face, cut and bruised, looks so peaceful under the polyethylene. _Bezmyatezhnost'_.

"It's all you! You! Your gas tank, your place, your _talking_! I did everything! I saved him every goddamned day! _I_ was the one who dragged him out of the bathroom when he was convulsing and shedding blood all over his fucking drafts!"

I crawl closer to Adam and clasp his wrist. The bracelet comes unfastened, and under the scars, slowly, weakly, life is pulsing.

"Kirk, he's still—we have to—"

"Don't you dare touch him!" He pushes me away toward the ocean, and I fall again, swallowing a gulp of salty water. Scrambling back to land and coughing, water and blood spilling from my nostrils, I hit something with my knee. Adam's phone—screeching and its screen flickering, but by some miracle still counting the seconds. The minutes.

"Nine, Kirk, we must—"

" _I_ was the one who drove him to the hospital when he was howling in pain with his broken leg and a noose around his neck, and that fucking song is still playing in my nightmares!"

I get closer to Adam again, and again, Kirk pushes me away, and I clutch at him, and he falls along with me. He doesn't let me move, pressing me down with his weight, and we start to fight.

"It's all you! I would have pulled him out if you hadn't turned up, with your sad eyes and your 'deep' conversations, and your ideas about soulmates and your stupid useless scribblings and understanding!"

"Nine fifteen, Kirk!" I pull at his sun-bleached hair, at the same time looking sideways at the phone half-buried in the sand. "Now is not the time for talking, don't you get it? Why do you need to talk _now_?"

"I should have kicked your body toward the ocean, I should have made sure you wouldn't creep back out to take everything I had and finish off Adam with your ideas!"

"Ni-ni-nine thirty," I pant, one of my hands pressing at his face, another reaching out to Adam.

"You know what will become of you? I'll tell you what. You will never write that world-tearing book, and you won't shoot yourself in the mouth, and you won't spontaneously leave for Australia. You will spend your life in someone else's rooms, working at some lousy office for food, and you will never get to see that beautiful mountain, and you will die of laughter ten years from now when you'll look at yourself in the mirror!"

"Why now, Kirk, why now?"

I jerk toward Adam.

"Don't you dare!"

For a second, I manage to break away and claw into the bag. I pull at it, and it rips. The phone's screen goes out. Nine forty-five.

We don't kill the ones we love. We put them in a cage, and we go mad with fear and pain when they get out.

With a helpless growl, Kirk deals me a stinging slap in the face, and blood from the cut cheek fills my mouth.

"You had no right," he says through gritted teeth. "It was too late, you had no right to choose for him. This is what you call love?"

He lets go of me and crawls to Adam, and falls onto his chest, listening for his heartbeat, and sobbing.

"Kirk—"

"Get out," he whispers. "Get out, or I swear I'll kill you."

"Kirk, please. Let me—"

"I'll take care of him. I always take care of him. Get out. Scram back to the hell you came from."

Prologue

My first word was "Why?" I was clasping my hands around Dad's neck, thrashing my little legs, and laughing. Choking with excitement as I watched him fly a kite. Why, why?

"Why?" as in "I'm curious." "Why?" as in "I'm fascinated." "Why?" as in "I'm alive."

As in "How come life's so hurtfully beautiful?"

Flash!

"Adam! ADAM!"

I'm so sleep-deprived I can't even keep my head up on my own, so I lean my heavy forehead against the glass front door of the bungalow, channeling every last scrap of my strength into my smarting fists, which hammer on the door so hard the entire house seems to be rattling. It's locked. This is wrong—we never bothered to lock the door either when we were all out or at night, when we were hopelessly and drunkenly asleep.

Having eventually given up beating the door, I make a visor with my hands, trying to discern what's going on inside. No movements, no shadows. The place is unusually quiet, unlike my body that feels as if every cell in it were shouting. Adam, Adam!

"Kirk, please! I need to see him! I just want to make sure he's all right, and then I'll leave you alone for good, I swear!"

No answer. I ram my body into the door once again, more in anger than in the hope that it'll give way. Nothing. I sigh. Looks like violence is the only solution.

I skirt the cottage and, once in the backyard, decisively head toward the empty swimming pool, where Adam and I acted out a dramatic scene from _Titanic_ and he promised me to die an old lady. _Liar_.

"What have you done, Rose?" I mutter, part of me close to laughter, the rest horrified and ashamed of this untimely urge. Rather eager to stop thinking of myself as multiple parts with their own opposing feelings, which is probably a symptom of impending schizophrenia, I concentrate on the business and look around.

Yes, there it is! I lift the fire extinguisher—it's scalding hot, faded by long days in the sun, and still unexpectedly weighty despite having been fully unloaded—and return to the front door, peeking into the windows on the way.

I'm not sure how much time has passed since I fled the beach, leaving Kirk to cradle Adam's unconscious body. I came back for them when all the panic and shock had subsided, but they weren't there anymore. No Adam, no Kirk, no gas tank, no IWIWI, no trace.

"Kirk! If you can hear me, then—then you're a dick for not answering, and also, please stay back from the door. Okay?" I wait half a minute longer, straining my ears for any sound, but there's no response, no footsteps.

_Crash_!

"Sh—"

Sucking the blood from the newly acquired deep cut on my thumb, I curl the other hand through the broken glass, careful not to brush the large, sharp fragments that make me feel as if I were reaching into a toothy mouth of some beast, and I open the lock from the inside. The door lets me in with an aggrieved squeal, and I step over the fire extinguisher, splinters crunching under my sneakers.

"Adam?"

Silence. The kitchen looks different somehow, and after a moment of concerned gazing around, I notice two big suitcases under the table. Another sigh escapes my chest, this time one of relief. I was starting to worry they had already left.

"Kirk?"

Slowly moving through the rooms of the first floor, I look around for signs of other human presence—to no avail, just as I anticipated. I walk up the stairs and push open the door to Adam and Kirk's bedroom. Empty. Where could they possibly go? A hospital? The closest hospital is dozens of miles away, on a bigger island—the island with a hospital, a prison, and _an airport_. If you're too broke to afford a cruise ship ticket and too sane to use a self-made raft as the locals do, you can only get there by a humanitarian-aid helicopter, which only leaves once a week, which is—what day is it? What time is it? God, where's a single clock when you need one?

I run to the bathroom and snatch my phone out of the sink that is still stained with Kirk's blood. The battery's almost dead. _—which is on Friday. Which is today._ I dial Kirk, but of course he won't answer. Biting my nails as I listen to the long beeps, I look up at the mirror, which reflects a dirty, deadbeat wild animal rather than my face the way I remember it, and I command my brain to work despite all the queasy mist swirling in my head. My brain's battery seems to be running out, too. So, the helicopter takes off in about two hours. I collect the pages of Adam's book, tuck them, together with the useless phone, into my (technically, Kirk's) jeans pocket, and with increasing anxiousness, pull open the cupboard drawers.

"Shit, shit, shit."

I sit on the edge of the bath and try to calm down and remember where I could have put my passport. No, it should positively be here. Have they taken it? Why would they take my passport?

The front door creaks again, and I jump up and dash to the first floor but stop rooted halfway down the stairs. Those aren't Kirk's and Adam's voices, although one of them does seem familiar. It must be just somebody from one of the countless parties Kirk threw, but I still feel alarmed. I try not to breathe as I listen closely.

"Look! I told you, didn't I? Someone's been living in my house! Private property! The door wasn't broken this morning, I'd locked it before I went to the station!"

I curse under my breath. Oh, this is great. The landlord. Today, of all days! Some people just don't have any manners. Who arrives at the doorstep out of the blue like this, without a warning call?

"Can you do something about it? What does your law say about breaking and entering? It's scandalous! I receive my utility bills, and what do I see?"

"No worry," the second voice replies in a throaty accent, and I recognize it as the voice of the policeman who arrested us for the fight with that unfortunate Norwegian. "We catch them, they go to prison. For long."

Oh, double great. _Now_ he speaks English. The sinister glee in his tone as he utters the last sentence makes my skin crawl, even though I honestly can't imagine why anyone would stay in their prison "for long," seeing as getting out of there is as easy as getting poisoned by their food.

"They must be still here, I'm telling you, the door wasn't broken when I left!" the landlord repeats.

I begin to back away, slink up the stairs, wondering what the chances of breaking a leg from jumping out the second floor are, when suddenly I flinch—like a chameleon hearing a child's scream, "A chameleon!"

"Joy Cancer!" the landlord thunders. A panicky groan almost betrays me as I breathe out. My heart appears to intend to desert me and leap out the window without me. "What kind of name is that?"

I bend forward and peek around the corner. The landlord, a tall middle-aged man wearing a dark blue business suit that couldn't look more out of place in this jobless Hawaiian-shorts heaven, cringes, examining my passport in the sunlight.

"Must be fake, too," he says, wincing in indignation.

"Joy Cancer?" The second, younger policeman, who has been waiting outside, shows his face through the hole in the front door. I congratulate myself on being totally trapped and with a sinking heart come to appreciate the level of freedom I enjoyed up until my first encounter with the local police. "I think I've heard this one, quite recently. That's right! The restaurant owner reported a robbery yesterday. He claimed he had seen the waitress and her accomplices. Well-deserved, that, though. Greedy —" He adds one more word in the local language, and the older policeman lets out an approving, but thoroughly unkind chuckle.

He puts his finger to his mouth and points toward the bamboo room. The young one nods with an air of importance and comes in, trying not to make any noise as he maneuvers himself among the pieces of glass scattered before the door, and the two of them tiptoe out the kitchen deeper into the house.

I shut my eyes for a second. Right, Joy, this is your only chance. I take advantage of the moment when the landlord opens the fridge and its door prevents him from seeing the stairs.

"And what the hell is that?" He takes out a saucepan, removes the lid, and sniffs at the contents with suspicious disgust. He pushes the fridge door closed and freezes, apparently noticing me out of the corner of his eye. I'm just a few inches away from him.

"That's vegan lasagna," I say, ready to burst out laughing again. For someone who's in so much trouble and who thinks so much about death, I sure laugh a lot.

He turns his head slowly and stares at me without a word.

"Hi," I say, and I smile. "Nice to meet you. I, uh—" I reach my free arm out and carefully take my passport from his stiff hand. "Thanks."

There are muffled footsteps behind me, and from the darting pupils of the landlord, I gather that the policemen are returning.

"Right." I turn around and walk backward slowly to the front door, still pointing the knife at the landlord. Oh, yeah, did I mention the chopping knife? It's a very useful tool when you don't feel like being yelled at. "I'm really sorry about the mess. It's been a crazy couple of days. You've got a really nice house, though."

The landlord swallows and continues to stare at me at a loss, and the policemen finally make it to the kitchen. The older one reaches for his waistband.

"Hey! _You_!"

"Is _that_ the intruder?" The young one seems a little disappointed. After the story with _Happy Meat_ , he probably expected to witness a furious vigilante in a leather costume rather than a worn-out, staggering twenty-something.

The landlord nods. "Don't shoot, for God's sake, not in my house!" he exclaims tiredly as the policemen put out their handguns. I have a suspicion that they're either fake or unloaded, but I don't feel like finding out for sure.

"Stay where you are!"

"I'd love to chat with you guys, but I have a couple of friends to keep up with. Oh, and the first bathroom upstairs—it's not working, you should use the one with the brown door," I say, as I slip out through the front door. God, this mouth can never shut up.

"Take her!"

I drop the knife, which I would never have used, of course, and I run again—if not for my life, then at least for my freedom, and it feels wonderful. I'll be sure to take the time to analyze what a horrible person I am once I'm somewhere less crazy, but for now, I am too overwhelmed by this feeling of rebellious, intoxicating youth, and the youth in me knows no mercy, no compromise, no sorry.

_Flash_! The check-in agent raises her eyebrows slightly as she studies my passport and plane ticket. I'm always a bit nervous about the security questions, as if I had done something wrong, as if there were a bag of weed in my pocket. This time I did do something wrong. I did every wrong thing I could. I employ all my self-command to prevent myself from looking around in panic, watching out for policemen led by my ex-boss or by the landlord.

"Going west?"

"Yes. Home. I'm going home."

"Why did you choose to visit our country?"

To kill myself. I needed a beautiful beach to kill myself on.

"Meditation," I say. "I needed a place to think things out."

"Any luck?"

"I'm not sure."

"Please state your full name."

"Joy Cancer. Joy Beatce Cancer," I correct myself.

She stamps my passport and hands me back the papers.

"Enjoy your flight home, Ms. Cancer."

"Thank you."

_Flash_! My mom is standing at the foot of the escalator. God, she's tiny. I always forget how tiny she is. When I'm far away, my memory paints her so tall, so omnipotent. Turn away, please turn away, don't look at me. I can't bear to look her in the eye so I hug her as soon as I step down.

"Thank you for the ticket. I'll return—"

"It was Dad."

I nod and give the checkered floor a small, guilty smile.

"Are you hungry?" she says stiffly. She must have a head cold. "Let's go home, I'll make you pasta."

"No, are _you_ hungry?" I say, looking up at her. "I can make really nice vegan lasagna."

_Flash_! Subway train. I look around. I look people in the eyes. They seem different. More alive, more _real_. Did I miss something?

"Nobody dances on the subway. It's improper."

I turn my head—a woman is scolding a shamefaced little boy. I offer Mom my hand and ask her for a dance.

People avert their eyes—we're just another pair of lunatics. Only the child watches us as we waltz and laughs with disbelieving delight, tugging at his mother's skirt. But then, an old man in the far corner of the car starts to play his violin. People smile and raise their eyes to one another.

Reality adjusts to what we believe in.

_Flash_! A stack of papers lands on the desk that used to be mine. Two stacks.

"You think you can just walk away on me and then return _months_ later and—"

"Julia, shut up and read this."

"What is this?" she says, reaching with two red-nailed fingers for the left stack titled _Helium_ , as if she were about to grab a rat by the tail and toss it away.

" _Life experience_. No, this one first."

I push the second novel closer to her, and she gives me another indignant look before she lowers her eyes.

"What in the hell are you wearing, and who's this Adam Fernweh?"

"Fidelity," I mutter, "fucking Low. Julia, please shut the fuck up and read it."

"Listen up—" she starts, but then silence falls as she reads the first words. She looks up at me again, a little less irritated, it seems, as if she's checking me out. I always knew she was all right.

"Get out," she says. "I'll call you when I'm finished. And don't think I'm ever going to hire you again!"

As I walk away, I can see her reflection in the mirrored face of the new clock; she is reading and biting her lip.

I exit the office and come out right into the blindingly bright present. The streets of my city haven't changed, but my eyes have. I can see now that the sky and the walls aren't all lifelessly gray; there are tints of reflective blue, and hopeful pink, and reminiscent yellow. And there is the lively, stubborn green of the grass breaking through the pavement. Green as Kirk's eyes.

I hear there was a riot on a small island in the Indian Ocean. Scrawny women and old men and children broke into the police station and freed the prisoners, then besieged the building of the local authorities and demanded jobs, rights, _change_.

Lifting a cigarette to my lips, I notice a man glaring at me, his lower jaw dropped open. I grin to myself and give him a drawn-out, meaningful "hmph." _Ahl Fakhir_.

"You know what?" I say. "You're right. I shouldn't."

"Beg your pardon?" he screeches.

He doesn't recognize me, and I don't blame him—it's easy to forget faces when there are millions of people in your city, and besides, I wasn't wearing the wetsuit when we first met.

"You're right," I repeat louder. "I shouldn't smoke."

I take the unlit cigarette out of my mouth, snap it in two, and fling it away. The freshly opened pack follows it into the garbage bin.

"Doesn't do me that much good lately, anyway. I want more air," I say, and I put the snorkel into my mouth, and I walk away, leaving him to scratch his bald patch. I walk down the busy street, with no idea where I'm going, and I laugh. I look at strangers' faces, and I laugh, and I laugh, and I laugh.

I guess my brain did become damaged. At least the part responsible for being unhappy did for sure. I laugh, and people turn to gaze at me, confused, and then they begin to laugh, too, and as I move through the crowd, the street grows louder and louder with this insane laughter.

For all I know, I might have just started another laughing epidemic, like in Tanganiyka.

I don't care.

Despite the frantic laughter, I feel startlingly calm. In control. Bezmyatezhnost'. Like the mass murderers Adam and I often wondered about at night. The scariest kind of killers, not psychos, not obsessed, not driven by passion or lust for revenge—no, the other kind. The ones you'd hear on TV and you'd come closer, and you'd sit down and give them your undivided attention. Hmm, you'd think, that kid has got some sensible things to say. Damn, they must feel so lonely. What a weird feeling—I think if we met, we'd get along. Wish I could give them a hug. And then the news presenter interrupts them and with feigned terror informs you that the kid shot twenty people yesterday.

I always feared I might end up like one of those guys. Why, why do they do it? They never explain why, they just look at you out of the screen with a little smirk, as in "You're missing something important. You're not getting it." I savor my mint chocolate chip ice cream.

Who surrounded me with flowers that night, who wrote those crazy words about drowning and darkness? Who was that "real" person that shielded me from loneliness the night I thought I was going to die?

It could have been Adam, in such a hurry to get those words out of his system that his handwriting became unrecognizable. Could have been Kirk, so wasted that he felt like talking, in a way, if to someone unconscious. It could have been the taxi driver or the fruit stall vendor furtively dreaming of becoming a poet. Could have been me. Yeah, I think it could have been me.

I'll never know for sure, but it doesn't really matter.

I shouldn't be laughing, of course. I should be sick with worry about Adam and Kirk—the two people who saved my life, and not just literally. Adam was everything I had been looking for for so long. A soulmate, an idol, a mirror. But in the end, it was Kirk who reminded me of one of the most important rules for surviving in a human pack. If there's no point in anything, what's the point in worrying about that? Maybe Adam was right, and the ones who keep us afloat are not the ones who reflect us, but those who represent everything we don't get about the world.

No matter what Adam said, he'd do the same thing I did. He'd rip the bag. Kirk would do the same thing. Why do we keep trying to save someone? Why do we fall in love? Why do we create? Why would I continue to write even if there were no one to share that with, no one left on Earth but me? Because as long as I'm here, there's at least one person for whom I need to create, whom I have to save, whom I must learn to fall in love with.

We create because we don't have a choice. We must. It's not the hateful "must" that comes from the outside, it's our inner "must." I was a fool to ever think I had another option, that I could just give up.

Adam. Is he alive? Has he gone mad? Lost his memory? Became crippled? No, these are not the right questions.

Was Adam even there in the first place? Or maybe he and Kirk were just the characters of _Helium_? Did I rip my bag myself at the thought of my mother?

Did I dream them? Maybe it's my dying brain that generated Adam and Kirk? Why? To save me? To entertain? To soothe the pain?

I want to stop and think about it all, and the crowd seems to slow down, but then I blink, and it swoops me up again and carries me down the street, as if in fast-forward.

Am I dead? Am I still dying?

Doesn't matter. I think I've just made a deal with myself. Whatever happens, I will always know I'm safe, because I have me. I won't waste another second on something that doesn't feel important.

I'll have my quiet, peaceful times, when nothing will be able to overwhelm me, nothing will be able to break me, and I'll know that everything is right about the world, and even if it isn't, I can take it. I'll have times when routine will devour me whole, and I'll spend days and months in the wasteland of worries—some nice, like "Am I eating healthy? What city should I spend the next five years in?", some not so—like "Am I going to have something to eat and somewhere to sleep tonight at all?"

And there will be times when I won't be able to bear to think about everyday stuff and all the peace and Zen will seem like self-deceit. Times where everything I am will be an all-consuming wish, need, urge to escape. Not _into_ something, no, out, out, as if there were some kind of out. The leading theme of everything I ever wrote was escaping, but from what I saw in movies and books, it's not the escape itself that matters, it's the process, the planning, the fight for the freedom. When the characters do make their way out, the story either turns so they need more escaping to do, or it just ends. They lived happily ever after. Because there's nothing out there, there's nothing more to tell. Secretly, everyone knows that there's no escape, no freedom, no out.

So I want the process.

I will be an ephemeron fly. I will lie to myself every morning so that I can be happy. I will dance on the subway and hug my parents, I will meet with my old friends, I will take in a stray cat, I will fall in and out of love. I will write horrible books and wander the world—well, the parts of it where I'm not on the wanted list.

Then, of course, I'll run out of money and—

About the Author

_(ceci n'est pas une writer)_

Surprisingly enough, I'm quite a happy, harmless, and mostly self-sufficient person, who doesn't indulge in as many questionable activities as my characters do. The opinions expressed by my fictional friends are often diametrically opposed to mine, but hey, I don't judge them.

The end.

