That was when he apologized to Xanax. “I’m sorry,” he looked down. Then he saw what he had done. Apologizing to an inanimate object was clearly a bad sign; he glanced around to see if anyone had noticed. They hadn’t. He un-foiled his dollar bill and put it back in his wallet. He took the time to wonder if he was going crazy. Crazy people talked to objects.
He walked down the street, scanning for a crazy person to compare himself to, but the street was shockingly clean, and there were no crazy people in sight, no homeless people, even. Only business-y commuters walking in long, self-righteous strides. A street in Brisbane without any crazy people on it! What bad luck! What terrible luck.
He thought about how he would tell his roommate the “I’m sorry ha ha, I apologized to a drug” story when he got back. Thinking of telling it as a story made him feel less crazy, and the pleasure of this, of having a funny anecdote to relate, buoyed him through the next few minutes, and carried him through the walking that he had to do, and soon enough he was on the subway, not having noticed anything.
On the subway, the girl in the seat across from him wore pink headphones; a squiggle of cord led to her iPod. The girl was sultry-looking and was wearing a top that slashed diagonally, and via the transitive property — via the algebra of attraction, multiplying by X like that — this made him think that pink headphones were also sexy and sultry and appealing, and then he took a second longer and realized that, no, pink headphones were just stupid. But by this point, he was distracted by thoughts of having sex with her. The thing to do after having sex with her, he decided, would be to make some gentle wardrobe suggestions. No, not so much like that; more like this. Less pink, try to utilize more charcoal gray in your day-to-day attire. But then, since he wanted the fantasy to be realistic, in his imagination she started bitching him out for always complaining about her wardrobe like that. Who do you think you are? she said, hands on her hips. You don’t own me, she said. …Then they fought, then they had sex, and then, soon enough, they had been married for twenty years. Then they got divorced and split up the kids. Depressing.
The girl yawned and punched a different song into her iPod; her neck made a zig-zag in time with the music. You could go too far with subway infatuations like this, where soon enough you had been in a decades-long mental relationship with the other party. Now he felt tired just looking at her. If the girl had suddenly gotten up, crossed the subway car, and put her hand on his knee, he would have said: “Oh, what is it now? The best twenty years of my life, I’ve given you already!”
Thinking of this, he smiled. Unfortunately, the girl saw him grinning in her direction, and she scowled at him. He scowled back. The doors dinged open; it was his stop. Maybe he really was going crazy. He definitely needed more Xanax.
In the kitchen of the apartment, his roommate was making some sort of dish. She said his name neutrally as he entered: “Nico.” Whatever she was stirring in the pot looked like alien seed pods, though that couldn’t be right, and probably it was Brussels sprouts or something. Brussels sprouts made up a surprising proportion of his roommate’s culinary repertoire; he was learning to enjoy them, their strange acidic tang.
She stood over the stove. She was tiny, barely five feet tall, but in his imagination, she was tinier still. When she wasn’t around, he thought of her as being almost invisible, porcelain-doll sized, then was impressed by her actual stature when she appeared. Her skin was white, whiter than white; her hair was like coffee or chocolate. His sense of adjectives failed when describing her: coffee, chocolate-y, everything sounded stupid... She was his roommate, and also, the two of them were fucking, and also, she cooked lots of Brussels sprouts.
“How’s the Xanax situation coming along,” he said, then cursed himself for leading off like that, for not waiting ten minutes longer.
“The same… as yesterday,” she said, and picked up her wooden spoon in defense.
“So no good,” he said.
“Not thus far.”
“No good,” he repeated.
“I can’t make them go any faster. You’ve been taking too many.”
At this, Nico wanted to shout, But I’m an artist, don’t you see?! I have important things on my mind. I can’t be possibly expected to keep track of every little Xanax! But there were problems with shouting this. For one, he wasn’t an artist. For two, that was a horribly pretentious thing to shout. And for three, now he remembered stealing Xanax from his roommate’s room the day before – sneaking in and stealing them, and then willfully suppressing this memory – the blast of guilt that he felt over this kept him from saying anything.
In compensation, he put his hand between her shoulder blades and massaged her back gently; she continued stirring the pod-things in the cooking pot. Nico wondered if she was surprised by his bursts of affection; so many of them were prompted by nothing more than guilty thoughts. It must seem random to her.
Thinking of her, he thought of how he always felt guilty when he came home. The last time he had entered her bedroom, he had especially felt shame — and it hadn’t been shame over stealing the Xanax. Her room was just always so sad.…Thinking of this, he removed his hands from her back.
He entered her room. The sadness, the waves of sad spinster-ness washed over him. …And she was only twenty-three! Silken doilies were placed under everything in her room: her vases, her candles, her piles of books, her knickknacks. Who used doilies when they were twenty-three? His roommate did. As always, he blamed this on her growing up in Bangladesh, though he had only the faintest conception of what Bangladesh was like, and his imagination and the process of making excuses for her had turned it into a fairly odd place: a doily-covered land where people hunted tigers and ate a lot of Brussels sprouts.
Bangladesh flooded a lot, this he knew. It was the poorest country on earth, this he knew. He had looked up “Bangladesh” once on Wikipedia: the nation’s principal export was jute. This then involved clicking on the Wikipedia link for “jute.” Jute, it turned out, was wood. It probably wasn’t a good sign financially if your principal export was wood. He made lots of jute-related jokes when she was around. He felt that it was his job to keep some humor in their relationship. She wasn’t going to be the one to do it, Lord knows. They were roommates who had met on Craigslist and now they were fucking and it was his job to entertain her — or entertain himself — with a constant stream of jute-based jokes. Such was his life.
And yesterday, in the afternoon, he had crept into her room and stolen a bunch of Xanax. He would inevitably be found out for this. He would inevitably pay for this. It was… inevitable.
She entered the bedroom; she said that dinner would be ready soon. He realized that he had been blankly staring at nothing and tried retroactively to make it seem like he hadn’t been blankly staring at nothing. This involved flipping through a book. Halfway through the book, he realized that he had no idea what he was reading, and he paused and looked at the cover. The Sound and the Fury. Okay then.
“I apologized to a pile of Xanax today,” he said.
“Oh. I do that all the time.”
“You do?”
“Yeah. Doors too. I apologized to a door just last week.”
“What?” he said. He felt a surge of affection for her.
“Have you been snooping around my room.”
”No.”
“Looking for the Xanax… maybe?”
”No.”
“Okay then.”
He grabbed her by the waist. “We should move to Bangladesh.” This was a recurrent fantasy of his. Her family still owned a farm there. They could move there and he could write a memoir-y sort of thing about it. About a year living in Bangladesh, the poorest nation on earth. A fish-out-of-water sort of thing.
“I told you about this. The worms would go up your legs instantly.”
“Aaaah!” he said. Now he remembered; she had told him before. Something about all the water being infested with vile parasitic worms. “Aaah!” he said again.
“You always go ‘aaah.’ I’ve explained to you about a million times.”
“I always forget!”
She put her hand out and smoothed his hair. “Well, don’t forget. Remember; worms.”
“Right.”
Their other roommate, Sheila, banged the front door. Thirty seconds later, she banged the door to her room.
“She always goes straight to her room.”
“She likes it there,” she explained patiently.
“I never see her. It’s like not having a roommate at all.”
“That’s a good thing, though… isn’t it?”
“Is it?”
“You told me that you hate having roommates and you hate all people.”
“Did I?”
“Yes.”
“Oh.” A pause. “…Do we have time to have sex before dinner?”
“No! Not before dinner. And what if Sheila hears us?”
This was her new thing. Constantly worrying that Sheila would hear them.
“I really don’t think that Sheila would care.”
“She would,” she said. And she left the room and closed the door.
Now, he felt zero affection for her. Not due to the lack of sex — he hadn’t really wanted sex, had suggested it specifically because he knew she would say no — but due to her lack of… adventurousness. How could someone from a land with tigers and oxen and vile parasitic worms — be so unadventurous and scared of everything all the time? He was convinced that if he ever went to Bangladesh, he would die within the first thirteen seconds. But she had survived. She had thrived. And here she was, afraid that fat, boring Sheila would hear them fucking. It was all very mystifying.
He waited until the cooking noises from the kitchen got louder, and then did a quick search through her room for a second vial of Xanax. He couldn’t steal any more from the original bottle; if took more, the level of pills would dip, and it would be noticeable; highly noticeable. But she must have another vial somewhere.
“How was your day?”
It was later. They were in bed.
“It was okay. There’s a new doughnut place near work.” Her voice was half-asleep, drifting in the darkness.
A long pause. “And…?”
“And I got a bacon-and-maple-frosting-covered bear claw.”
He rubbed his belly; a reflexive sort of thing. “Yum!”
Then, he waited.
“And?” he said. His voice was grouchy, tipsy; he had had a bottle of wine with dinner. But she seemed never to understand that he needed her stories to be more… story-ish. With a beginning and an ending and everything.
“And I got violently ill from it at work.”
“Huh,” he said. “That story took a… darker turn than I expected it to.” But already she was asleep, snoring suddenly now, and she missed the humor of the statement. Assuming that it had any. He wasn’t sure.
She was asleep. He looked at her in the half-light, the were-light. …And now, without meaning to, he thought unkind thoughts about her. He couldn’t tell which way his thoughts would go when she was asleep, when she was defenseless: at these times his thoughts were either deeply loving (Oh, her chocolate-y hair) or deeply hurtful.
…Did this make him a bad person, this unkindness? He stared at her and he thought: She’s boring. She gets sad too easily. Her nipples, her areolas, were far, far too large, though he couldn’t see them at the moment. Her nipples in fact grossed him out deeply. It was bad, but there it was. He often tried to rush before having sex so her shirt would be left on. She was boring and her nipples were too big.
Was he a bad guy? That was the burning question. Nico, age twenty-one, with a chip in one of his lower right teeth, with brown hair, freckles on his shoulders, lover of cats and dogs and video games, current part-time Home Depot employee; all these things were true about his character, sure — but was he a bad guy?
…But even that didn’t get to the heart of the problem. He didn’t just want his life to be like a movie; he wanted his own personal director and choice over the co-stars and a personal lighting team and a crew of husky union guys to haul away the scenery and add new scenery. To make it rain at the right times. To make it sunny at the right times, and no dilly-dallying between the pouring rain and the sunshine, he wanted them when he wanted them, instantly. To provide a light dusting of snow on Christmas Eve; crispy fall weather and falling leaves on Thanksgiving. …He wanted the boring parts edited out and the dramatic scenes to be heightened and multiplied, and he wanted a twenty-second jump-cut if he had to travel from New York to Los Angeles. He wanted Paris and Rome and Vienna to be all bunched together, on the same set, so that he could just stroll between them when he felt like it. …To get very far with pleasing Nico, you’d need to start massively reordering the planet. He wanted the mountains by the seaside, so that he could swim during the day and ski at night. He wanted funnier friends and a smarter, cuter, more sexually voracious roommate.
And so on.
But these things didn’t happen the way he wanted them to, which was why he was so anxious, which was why he drank and why he took drugs.
Which was why he was deeply, deeply worried laying there and looking down at Xanax, trying desperately to find the right words.