After my movie, Nobbled, imploded, after all the crap from the investors and their financial chicanery (and let’s face it, thanks to my failure to hire a lawyer to vet the agreement when Averno and Kerrigan offered me funding to make the movie), and after Brian left me and divorced me and went who the fuck knows where the fuck, I spent a bunch of time just fucking around doing not much of anything and spending the money my roommates paid me for rent on alcohol and whatnot, till they moved out and I was all alone in that big apartment. I was in my twenties, as I still am, but earlier in my twenties than I am now. I knew there was a lot of stuff I needed to do, like finding new roommates and figuring out my life, but I couldn’t do it, I didn’t have the energy, it seemed so pointless to try if Life could be so Beautiful one day and then within a couple of weeks, literally everything can fall apart, so I was standing there on a street corner after I bought my morning cup of coffee from that fucking coffee place I hate, and I was just standing there not knowing whether to walk south or north, and then on a whim I took the subway to Penn Station and got on an Amtrak and went to that little town that you introduced me to, you know the place, in Vermont or Maine or Massachusetts or Oregon.
I took a cab from the train station. I didn’t rent a car because I was getting drunk a lot and I wanted to keep doing that. I stayed at the inn at the end of the road and right on the water, you know the one. I checked in early, at one p.m., which I paid extra for. I ordered The Vesper to drink on the terrace (because I don’t drink wine, I drink The Vesper, not “a Vesper”) and then another one, and then I went out behind the inn and pulled a rowboat out of the rowboat-and-kayak shed, and I loosely tossed a life jacket on my shoulders kind of nonchalantly and cavalierly, like wearing such a thing was beneath brave me, even though I can’t swim worth shit, and I rowed out on the water till the inn was a little building block in the distance. I sat out there for a while in a rowboat on the water, the sun beating down on me. I don’t know how long, because I was drunk drunk drunk. Long enough to worry about dehydration, I wasn’t too insensible to know when I was in danger. I rowed back in, then I sat on a faded blue-and-white striped recliner beach chair on the inn’s lawn under a grumpy maple tree, geese running here and there in the distance, and I read a book of poems by Louise Glück called Averno, which was just what I had in my bag when I decided to take the train out here. I swear to you, I didn’t even notice that the name of the book was the same as my enemy’s name, I just pulled it off the shelf this morning. I fell asleep and dreamed about Brian, about kissing Brian on the street in the city, which really happened although not exactly the way it happened in my dream, and then sitting naked on a rock in the ocean at night, with shooting stars streaking across the sky. At the end of the dream, I walked naked across the nighttime beach and I grew butterfly wings. I woke up before I could try to fly.
Back in Reality, the sun had just started to set, I looked out from my recliner beach chair and saw the red glow descend over the mountains and the water. I know it’s a fucking cliché, but that’s what I saw. I climbed the stairs to my little room, brushed my teeth and brushed my tongue and went back down the stairs to the inn’s fucking snooty dining room, a low-ceilinged room with wide-plank wooden floors, windows facing the lake, white tablecloths, soft yellow candles, which the waiter lit for me, the dignified spinster sitting by herself. The dining room smelled like butter and lemon. I ordered cod in some kind of white sauce with fingerling potatoes. I asked the waiter if he could recommend a wine to go with my main course, and he said, “It depends what you like, what do you like?” and I said, “I don’t really drink wine very often, but when I do, I drink cab,” and he said, “Well, of course, Cabernet doesn’t go with cod,” like I was stupid even to mention cab even though he had just asked me what I like, and I replied, “Ok, what goes with cod?” as though that hadn’t been the very first question I asked, and it was back and forth like that, more of that kind of fucking bullshit.
The thing that was notable about this exchange was not that I came across a waiter who was kind of a dick (because people are dicks, generally speaking), but that he didn’t want to help me, he didn’t crave my attention or approval. Back in my Nobbled era and even my pre-Nobbled era, when I went into a place like this, I’d get attention. Not because anyone had heard of Nobbled (no one had, and no one will), but because of Nobbled-adjacent factors. I’ve said this kind of thing to you before, I’m not beautiful, but I am someone who sometimes looks beautiful to people who see me, and I had some creative and emotional energy back then, not necessarily emanating from me but buzzing around me, because I was directing and starring in a movie that financial investors believed in, because I had a gorgeous husband who loved me, because other people in my life saw all this potential in me. A lot of people saw me this way, and it created a certain zeloomph in me and all around me, and so I looked good even to people who knew nothing about me. Usually a woman who has all that attention is beautiful, and so this illusion of beauty clung to me. But when the investors started fighting over rights to the movie and ambiguities in the contract, and then when they finally just crapped out on it, when Brian left me, when my friends couldn’t handle my trauma — “After all,” one said to me, “the rest of us haven’t directed and starred in movies, the rest of us don’t have supportive husbands, so how can we pity you for having fallen back into our world?” — I became normal, just another woman with a tired face and no particular glow or zeloomph.
During dinner, the moon and stars came out, and I walked out the front door and along the narrow, one-lane road, heading away from the train station. I could hear water lapping faintly against the distant shore as I walked. Trees rose up on both sides, the road perched like a ledge over a steep drop-off on the right. There were no streetlights, no farmhouses, no cars. I could hear crickets, the wind in the leaves and the faraway, lonely call of some night bird.
I wish I could tell you that I breathed the country air and let all my cares just drift away in the peacefulness of a country night, but I’ll be honest with you, my head was just a big tangle of resentments and grievance, it was all I was thinking about, Averno and Kerrigan and how they’d fucked me over, and Brian, who loved me so so so much and then didn’t, even though I still loved him more than the Universe is vast, and always would.
I heard a car coming towards me from behind, my shadow grew long on the road in front of me. The car didn’t pass me, it felt like it was slowing down and following me. Then the headlights went out and my long shadow disappeared, the car hummed and then cut its engine. I heard a car door open and then slam, some distance away, like a faraway thunderclap. Then footsteps on the gravel, brisk and urgent. I began walking faster, and the footsteps also sped up behind me. I took my phone out of my bag, there were no signal bars. I tried to call 911 anyway, but it didn’t work. Then the phone battery petered out and the phone went dark. I rummaged around in my bag for my external battery, but I knew it was in my hiking backpack in my apartment.
“Stop following me!” I shouted without turning around, but he didn’t stop following me.
.
AHAH! you will say to me, didn’t that really show you what was important, that all this business with Nobbled and problems with Brian didn’t really matter? But it still mattered; Love and Art still mattered, even stranded there on a dark road. What else matters more than Love and Art? Breathing?
.
A LITTLE HILL right ahead of me rose and then dipped sharply. I ran, leaped over the crest and tumbled down that steep embankment on the right side of the road that I told you about, I slid through leaves and loose dirt until I hit the bottom. The slope rose above me, dark with tree trunks and underbrush. I crouched at the base, pressed low and flat into the shadows, breathing silently. I could still hear the crickets, but now other sounds joined the chorus, a raspier insect (a katydid, it turns out), frogs, a far-off dog barking somewhere at someone or something, and the sound of the man’s footsteps above me.
He appeared in a clearing between two thin clusters of trees, just a regular guy, about thirty. To him, it must have seemed as though I jumped over the top of the road and disappeared. He wore a blazer, a pair of jeans. He seemed tidy; not pathologically tidy. He was looking up and down the road. He wasn’t looking in my direction.
Was he just trying to be helpful? Maybe he saw a woman walking on a dangerous road, and he wanted to help me. But if that were the case, he would have responded when I shouted to him to stop following me, he would have said something reassuring.
.
AT THE BOTTOM of the embankment, an unsettling thought struck me. I was all paid up at the inn, when my stay was through, I just needed to leave. I had my bag with me; nothing was in the room. If I didn’t return tonight, no one would notice right away, and when they checked my room mid-morning, they would think I had checked out. They would see no car in the parking lot, because I’d taken a cab from the train station. Brian was out of my life, he wouldn’t check. I had no job, no one to contact authorities if I didn’t show up. I had no roommates. As for my parents, you know that story. Some friends would be sad when I didn’t respond to their messages, but in today’s world, they would just say, “I was so sad when Kalyee ghosted me.” I hope they’d be sad! Maybe they would say, “Fucking Kalyee, it fucking figures.” Averno and Kerrigan would be relieved that I had stopped bothering them. My credit cards were linked to my bank account, at the end of the month a transfer would go through automatically and pay off the balance, then my credit card accounts would just persist forever with a zero balance. I had some money in the bank, some money in the markets. They would keep accruing. They were all electronic communications; email lasts forever. The tiny maintenance on the apartment was also autopay, and it ran less than the return on my investments, so the building would just keep getting paid forever; that apartment would sit empty, and no one would ever notice. I don’t think there was anything that would spoil in the fridge; I was an order-inner. I kept thinking thinking thinking to try to figure out how anyone would ever know that I had died. The IRS? Would the IRS pay any attention if a woman with no income stopped filing her annual taxes? Someone not rich and not poor. Of course not. Literally no one would have any idea that I was dead, and no one ever would. Even now, I’m not sure why that mattered to me; why would it matter if anyone found out that I was dead or not? At that moment, at the bottom of the embankment, I was alive, and only one person in the world cared where I was, that man on the road, that normal-looking man in a button-down shirt, blazer and creased blue jeans.
From the embankment, I looked up at the road. The man walked back and forth at the edge, glowing in the full moon like a ghost, looking for me.
^^^
Kalyee Srithnam is the writer, director and star of Nobbled, an acclaimed but unreleased feature film, and the author of an upcoming collection of fiction, from which this story is taken. She writes frequently for Oblivioni Magazine and has also written for Audere Magazine.