Don is snoring, if that’s what you’d call the sounds he’s making. He breathes out through his closed mouth, and a little air escapes, making a soft pop-pop-pop sound. I almost expect champagne bubbles to float out of him.
Joseph is gone. What happened to Joseph? We were arguing about something, I remember. You think you’re so superior, he said. Fuck off, then, I said. I think I passed out for a while after that. I’m sprawled in a striped wing chair and I feel too high to move. I imagine Joseph riding home in the ghastly light of a Muni streetcar. All around him, partygoers in brightly colored costumes talk and laugh, heading for another party or for the festivities on Castro Street. He sits there lonely and bitter, his shoulders slumped, and I wish I’d given him my phone number.
Mona is leaning over Don, her back to me. It looks like she’s taking off his pants. But then she stands up, and I see she’s got his wallet. She pulls out the bills, and a silver credit card, then flips the wallet closed and sets it on the nightstand.
“Mona,” I say.
She wiggles her hand behind her back, waving me away.
“You took his money.”
“No shit,” she says, straightening. She picks up her beaded clutch, clicks it open, and drops the money and credit card inside.
“You’re stealing his money.”
“I’m liberating it. Let’s go. He looks dead to the world, but you never know.”
“You’re a thief,” I say. Mona is a thief. I wonder how I could not have known before. It seems like the most natural thing in the world.
She comes over and pulls me up by one arm. I stagger and fall into her. Her perfume’s too strong and she smells like all the cigarettes she’s had, and I gag and taste the fries I ate earlier, rising on a tide of champagne.
“Wait.” I go into the bathroom, squat down and crouch over the toilet, but nothing happens. I pull a hand towel off the rack, wet it under the faucet, and wipe my face. Don’s ring is on the counter, just like I thought. It’s there next to his electric toothbrush and a tube of mint Colgate he’s been squeezing from the top instead of the bottom. I pick up the ring; it’s a plain gold circle, and inside, in cursive, the name Debbie is engraved. I close it in my hand, and when I come out I slip it into my purse so fast Mona doesn’t even notice.
We head out of the room and along the hall to the elevator. It’s one of those mirrored ones. The walls below the mirrored part are dark wood, and the floor is thickly carpeted, and a brass railing runs all the way around. I look at us in the mirror as we descend, and Mona watches the numbers light as we go from 5 to L. We look like shit. The skin under Mona’s eyes is pouchy, and there are small red veins in her cheeks where her foundation’s worn off. My eyes are bloodshot, the lids drooping. I forgot my hat, and my hair is flattened and tangled.
In another couple of minutes we’re through the lobby and out of the building, on the sidewalk, empty now except for a few shadowy bodies stretched out in doorways. We walk fast toward my car, our heels echoing and amplified, like we’re on a movie set. The fog is in, and it looks like there’s no sky at all, like the movie takes place in some damp underground world where the sun never shines. I know where we are, though. I can’t see the moon, but I know it’s out there somewhere, a well of light. I tell myself I could throw myself into it any time I wanted. I tell myself that, even though I know who I am.
Breathe in, the teacher—roshi, guru, leader, whatever—says, so, okay, so far, so good, deep breath, hold it, let it out on a long exhale. Amber, my roommate, smiles at me, like, Isn’t this going to be great, isn’t California so cool? and I look back like, Yes it is, even though I don’t think so. Already my knees are bothering me from sitting cross-legged. We all take a few more deep, noisy breaths. We’re supposed to close our eyes, but I peek around at the class, trying to spot someone cute who might want to talk to me later, until the teacher, woman, enlightened being, bitch, catches me, and her soft open eyes get hard, and I zip mine closed again.
Be still, she tells us. Go inward. She has some kind of accent I can’t figure out. She sounds a little like that waitress in Montpelier, Vermont, where I spent Christmas with my parents. They didn’t want to have Christmas at home in Florida anymore; they said it would be better if we were somewhere with snow. We stayed in a farmhouse, and it was really cold. My parents went tromping around through the woods in galoshes and boots and cross-country skis, and I stayed in by the fire under a big quilt, feeling lonely and sad and fat. I felt like a big icicle was dripping inside me, without ever melting. So I don’t want to go inward. Right now I want to go home, ignore my freshman comp homework, and curl up on the couch and watch The Tudors, the entire series, for the second time on Showtime On Demand. I want broken treaties and assassination plots and girl baby after girl baby being born to King Henry VIII, while he gets more and more desperate for a boy.
Watch your thoughts, the teacher says at this point, and I get that, that’s easy; I just imagine my TV, a thirty-two-inch flat screen I got from Best Buy. I watch Amber telling me I should do something else besides eat and watch my new TV night and day, and then I watch her fill the fridge in our dorm apartment with probiotic ginseng drinks and baked tofu, and then I rummage around on my own shelf for some sugar cookies I baked and put in there to cool. I hate them warm from the oven. I will eat the dough all day long, though. That’s bad, I guess, because raw eggs can infect you with salmonella, but if I die from eating raw cookie dough I don’t think I’ll mind; I’ll just pitch over in our kitchen with a big smile.
So now I’m thinking about death. The death thought looks like a lump of buttery sugary dough and raisins, and then it looks like a shiny balloon that’s starting to crinkle and sag, and then it’s a baseball cap—a pink baseball cap just floating in space with no person in it. Then, as I watch, the cap falls sideways into a tunnel like it’s being sucked out of my head, and my little sister, Bethany, appears in all her dead glory, or rather in the slide show my parents made of her afterwards, that we all watched projected on our living room wall when we got back from the cemetery. It’s mostly pictures of her when she was healthy. There’s one of us in our bathing suits at Lake Placid one summer, and another where we’re posing with our Easter baskets, in bunny ears. There’s only one of her from near the end. She’s wearing lipstick and blue eye shadow and that baseball cap on her head, looking like Cancer Awareness Poster Girl, a goofy smile on her face, like she didn’t throw up the morning our dad took the photo.
I don’t really want to watch the slideshow in my head so I open my eyes again, just let them slowly part to tiny slits so the room looks fuzzy. The teacher, woman, skank, catches me again, so I open my eyes all the way and look straight at her and give her a gentle look, like I’m all blissed out, and she nods her head at me and closes her own eyes and opens them, like, It’s all good. Which it is not, but here we are.
I must have given her some signal because she suddenly says, Let’s all chant some Aums. Everyone tries to hold their Aum longer than everyone else and some people cheat, taking a second breath while other people are still letting out the first one. I get my Aums over with as fast as possible. All I want is to get out of here and go home and order a big gooey sausage-pepper-onion pizza from Red Boy and eat the whole thing in front of the TV. Anne Boleyn and Cardinal Wolsey are down with the sweating disease. They’re going to recover from that, but they’re done for, anyway. Wolsey will get arrested for treason and kill himself, and Anne will stand on the scaffolding bravely addressing the crowd, saying nice things about Henry, who ordered her head cut off. She’s going to forgive the black-hooded guy with the sword, and kneel down and pray. She’ll look up at the sky. Black birds will flap around for an instant in the blue. I really want to see that episode again.
But the class, torture session, boredom hour, has just begun.
With