Please Undo This Hurt (3 page)

She reads it off to me and I get
hammered
with déjà vu: I know it already, I'm sure. Or maybe that's not quite right, I don't know it exactly. It's just that it feels like it fits inside me, as if a space has been hollowed out for it, made ready to contain its charge.

“Please take care of yourself,” the man tells me, on the way out. “If you don't, the world will just eat you up.” And he lifts the caterpillar in salute.

I leave work early. I desperately don't want to go home, where the maggots will be puddled in the plastic up on my ceiling, writhing, eyeless, bulging, probably eating each other.

Mary walks me out. “You going to take any time off? See anybody?”

“I just saw Jacob and Elise yesterday.”

“How was that?”

“A really bad decision.” I shake my head and that, too, is a bad decision. “How's the migraine?”

“I'm okay. I'll live.” It strikes me that when Mary says that, I believe it—and maybe she sees me frown, follows my thoughts, because she asks, “What about Nico? Are you still seeing him?”

“Yeah. Sort of.”

“And?” Her impish well-
did
-you? grin.

“I'm worried about him.” And furious, too, but if I said that I'd have to explain, and then Mary would be concerned about me, and I'd feel guilty because surely Mary has real problems, bigger problems than mine. “He's really depressed.”

“Oh. That's all you need. Look—” She stops me just short of the doors. “Dominga, you're a great partner. I hope I didn't step on your toes today. But I really want you to get some room, okay? Do something for yourself.”

I give her a long, long hug, and I forget about the maggots, just for the length of it.

There's a skywriter above the hospital, buzzing around in sharp curves. The sky's clean and blue and infinite, dizzyingly deep. Evening sun glints on the plane so it looks like a sliver poking up through God's skin.

I watch it draw signs in falling red vapor and when the wind shears them apart I think of the Lighthouse, where the circle of tables was ruptured by the passage of an illusory force.

I want to act. I want to help. I want to ease someone's pain. I don't want to do something for myself, because —

You're only burnt out once you stop wanting to help.

I call Nico. “Hey,” he says. “Didn't expect to hear from you so soon.”

“Want to get a drink?” I say, and then, my throat raw, my tongue acid, a hangover trick, words squirming out of me with wet expanding pressure, “I learned something you should know. A place to go, if you need help. If that's what you want. If the world really is too much.”

Sometimes you say a thing and then you realize it's true.

He laughs. “I can't believe you're making fun of me about that. You're such an asshole. Do you want to go to Kosmos?”

*   *   *

“So,” Nico says, “are we dating?”

Kosmos used to be a warehouse. Now the ceiling is an electric star field, a map of alien constellations. We sit together directly beneath a pair of twin red stars.

“Oh,” I say, startled. “I was worried. After yesterday, I mean, I just…” Was furious, was hurt, didn't know why: because you were having fun, because I wasn't, because I thought you needed help, because you pretended you didn't. One of those. All of them.

Maybe he doesn't like what he sees in my eyes. He gets up. “Be right back.” The house music samples someone talking about the expansion of the universe. Nico touches my shoulder on the way to the bathroom and I watch him recede, savoring the fading charge of his hand, thinking about space carrying us apart, and how safe that would be.

I have a choice to offer him. Maybe we'll leave together.

Nico comes back with drinks – wine, of all things, as if we're celebrating. “I thought that game was charmingly optimistic, you know.”

“Jacob's game?” He's been tagging me in Facebook pictures of the stupid thing. I should block Jacob, so it'd stop hurting, which is why I don't.

“Right. I was reading about it.”

The wine's dry and sweet. It tastes like tomorrow's hangover, like coming awake on a strange couch under a ceiling with no maggots. I take three swallows. “I thought it was about unknowable gods and the futility of all human life.”

“Sure.” That stupid cocky grin of his hits hard because I know what's behind it. “But in the game there's something out there, something bigger than us. Which—I mean, compared to what we've got, at least it's
interesting
.” He points to the electric universe above us, all its empty dazzling artifice. “How's work?”

“I'm taking a break. Don't worry about it.” I have a plan here, a purpose. I am an agent, although which meaning of that word fits I don't know. “Why'd you really dump Yelena?”

“I told you.” He resorts to the wine, to buy himself a moment. “Really, I was honest. I thought she could do a lot better than me. I wanted her to be happy.”

“But what about
you
? She made you happy.”

“Yeah, yeah, she did. But I don't want to be the kind of person who—” He stops here and takes another slow drink. “I don't want to be someone like Jacob.”

“Jacob's very happy,” I say, which is his point, of course.

“And look how he left you.”

“What if I thought
you
made me happy?” Somewhere, somehow, Mary's cheering me on: that gets me through the sentence. “Would this be a date? Or are we both too … tired?”

Tired of doing hurt, and tired of taking it. Tired of the great cartographic project. Isn't it a little like cartography? Meeting lovely people, mapping them, racing to find their hurts before they can find yours—getting use from them, squeezing them dry, and then striking first, unilaterally and with awful effect, because the alternative is waiting for them to do the same to you. These are the rules, you didn't make them, they're not your fault. So you might as well play to win.

Nico looks at me with dark guarded eyes. I would bet my life here, at last, that he's wearing one of his good jackets.

“Dominga,” he says, and makes a little motion like he's going to take my hand, but can't quite commit, “Dominga, I'm sorry, but … God, I must sound like such an asshole, but I meant what I said. I'm done hurting people.”

And I know exactly what he's saying. I remember it, I
feel
it—it's like when you get drunk with a guy and everything's just magical, you feel connected, you feel okay. But you know, even then, even in that moment, that tomorrow you will regret this: that the hole you opened up to him will admit the cold, or the knife. There will be a text from him, or the absence of a text, or—worse, much worse—the sight of him with someone new, months later, after the breakup, the sight of him doing that secret thing he does to say,
I'm thinking of you
, except it's not secret any more, and it's not you he's thinking of now.

And you just want to be done. You want a warmer world.

So here it is: my purpose, my plan. “Nico, what if I could give you a way out?”

He sets down his wine glass and turns it by the stem. It makes a faint, high shriek against the blackened steel tabletop, and he winces, and says, “What do you mean?”

“Just imagine a hypothetical. Imagine you're right about everything—the universe is a hard place. To live you have to risk a lot of hurt.” You're going to wonder how I came up with the rest of this, and all I can offer is fatigue, terror, maggots in my air vents, the memory of broken skulls on sidewalks: a kind of stress psychosis. Or the other explanation, of course. “Imagine that our last chance to be really good is revoked at the instant of our conception.”

He follows along with good humor and a kind of adorable narcissism that I'm so engaged with his cosmic bullshit and (under it all) an awakening sense that something's off, askew. “Okay…”

The twin red suns multiply our shadows around us. I drift a little ways above myself on the wine, and it makes it easier to go on, to imagine or transmit this: “What if something out there knew a secret—”

A secret! Such a secret, a secret you might hear in the wind that passes between the libraries of jade teeth that wait in an empty city burnt stark by a high blue star that never leaves the zenith, a secret that tumbles down on you like a fall of maggots from a white place behind everything, where a pale immensity circles on the silent wind.

”What if there were a way out? Like a phone number you could call, a person you could talk to, kind of a hotline, and you'd say, oh, I'm a smart, depressed, compassionate person, I'm tired of the great lie that it's possible to do more good than harm, I'm tired of my Twitter feed telling me the world's basically a car full of kindergartners crumpling up in a trash compactor. I don't want to be complicit any more. I want out. Not suicide, no, that'd just hurt people. I want something better
.
And they'd say, sure, man, we have your mercy here, we can do that. We can make it so you never were.”

He looks at me with an expression of the most terrible unguarded longing. He tries to cover it up, he tries to go flirty or sarcastic, but he can't.

I take my phone out, my embarrassing old flip phone, and put it on the table between us. I don't have to use the contacts to remember. The number keys make soft chiming noises as I type the secret in.

“So,” I say, “my question is: who goes first?”

Something deep beneath me exalts, as if this is what it wants: and I cannot say if that thing is separate from me.

He reaches for the phone. “Not you, I hope,” he says, with a really brave play-smile: he knows this is all a game, an exercise of imagination. He knows it's real. “The world needs people like you, Dominga. So what am I going to get? Is it a sex line?”

“If you go first,” I say, “do you think that'd change the world enough that I wouldn't want to go second?”

I have this stupid compassion in me, and it cries out for the hurts of others. Nico's face, just then—God, have you ever known this kind of beauty? This desperate, awful hope that the answer was
yes
, that he might, by his absence, save me?

His finger hovers a little way above the call button.

“I think you'd have to go first,” he says. He puts his head back, all the way back, as if to blow smoke: but I think he's looking up at the facsimile stars. “That'd be important.”

“Why?”

“Because,” he says, all husky nonchalance, “if you weren't here, I would
absolutely
go; whereas if I weren't here, I don't know if you'd go. And if this method were real, this, uh, operation of mercy, then the universe is lost, the whole operation's fucked, and it's vital that you get out.”

His finger keeps station a perilous few millimeters from the call. I watch this space breathlessly. “Tell me why,” I say, to keep him talking, and then I realize: oh, Nico, you'd think this out, wouldn't you? You'd consider the new rules. You'd understand the design
.
And I'm afraid that what he'll say will be
right
—

He lays it out there: “Well, who'd use it?”

“Good people,” I say. That's how burnout operates. You burn out because you care. “Compassionate people.”

“That's right.” He gets a little melancholy here, a little singsong, in a way that feels like the rhythm of my stranger thoughts. I wonder if he's had an uncanny couple days too, and whether I'll ever get a chance to ask him. “The universe sucks, man, but it sucks a lot more if you care, if you feel the hurt around you. So if there were a way out—a certain kind of people would use it, right? And those people would go extinct.”

Oh. Right.

There might have been a billion good people, ten billion, a hundred, before us: and one by one they chose to go, to be unmade, a trickle at first, just the kindest, the ones most given to shoulder their neighbors' burdens and ask nothing in exchange—but the world would get harder for the loss of each of them, and there'd be more reason then, more hurt to go around, so the rattle would become an avalanche.

And we'd be left. The dregs. Little selfish people and their children.

The stars above change, the false constellations reconfiguring. Nico sighs up at them. “You think that's why the sky's empty?”

“Of—aliens, you mean?” What a curious brain.

“Yeah. They were too good. They ran into bad people, bad situations, and they didn't want to compromise themselves. So they opted out.”

“Maybe someone's hunting good people.” If this thing were real, well, wouldn't it be a perfect weapon, a perfect instrument in something's special plan? Bait and trap all at once.

“Maybe. One way or another—well, we should go, right?” He comes back from the cosmic distance. His finger hasn't moved. He grins his stupid cocky camouflage grin because the alternative is ghoulish and he says, “I think I make a pretty compelling case.”

Everything cold and always getting colder because the warmth puts itself out.

“Maybe.” Maybe. He's very clever. “But I'm not going first.”

Nico puts his finger down (and I feel the cold, up out of my bones, sharp in my heart) but he's just pinning the corner of the phone so he can spin it around. “Jacob definitely wouldn't make the call,” he says, teasing, a really harsh kind of tease, but it's about me, about how I hurt, which feels good.

“Neither would Mary,” I say, which is, all in all, my counterargument, my stanchion, my sole refuge. If something's out to conquer us, well, the conquest isn't done. Something good remains. Mary's still here. She hasn't gone yet—whether you take all this as a thought experiment or not.

“Who's Mary?” He raises a skeptical eyebrow: you have
friends
?