Page 4 of The Deer and the Dragon
Instead of focusing on my edits, I clicked through a couple pages on animal adoption. Every few weeks I talked myself out of getting a chinchilla, a rabbit, or a cat. I knew it wasn’t wise to own an animal, given my propensity for transience. But knowing didn’t stop one from wanting, and I was admittedly lonely. My memories wandered to the exotic pet I’d invented for myself as a child. A white fox had played with me in the woods, had kept me company when I was sad, and had been my only friend in the world when I’d had none. My strict parents would never have allowed an animal in the house, but my imagination had always been vivid, and I’d needed something to stay sane. I missed that fox from time to time, though my imagination had taken on a more mature theme over the last few years. No amount of sushiwith Joshes or disappointing hookups had staved off the ache for something real, though I did try.
I’d told Nia that I wanted what she had, and she informed me that no, I didn’t. I was suffering from a textbook case of Grass Is Greener syndrome. As much as her happy life with a supportive husband called to me, so did my siren’s song of hopping on planes, living in solitude, and sleeping with strangers. She was right, of course. She knew that her marriage to Darius was the exception that proved the rule. I’d never met anyone else who was glad they’d tied the knot.
Then again, I didn’t know many people.
Well, that wasn’t quite accurate. I knew everyone. Some I knew through social media, others through dates, and many from my previous life as a lady of the evening. I just didn’t like, speak with, or care about many. People were tiresome and rarely seemed solution-oriented. Why would they bother complaining about where they lived if they weren’t willing to pack a suitcase and move? What was the point of telling me how much they hated their spouse if divorce wasn’t an option? Their problems were exhausting, and I didn’t have the emotional capacity to feign empathy for half of them. Particularly as my lifestyle grew more controversial and obscure, it hadn’t taken long to prune my friend group further and further until I’d whittled it down to three—all of whom I saw almost exclusively through the accessible magic of the internet.
It would be nice to love and be loved. It would be really goddamn pleasant to have someone else make the coffee while I slept in. I wanted to wake up with someone beside me, to watchFire and Swordswhile cuddled on the couch and to have a built-in guardian to babysit a chinchilla if I needed to be away for a few days. But though I continued to put myself out there, my heart wasn’t open to falling in love.
I tilted my head up from the couch to look at the still-present smudges on the window, then looked away. I’d do what I always did. I’d explain away the psychosis that felt so, so real, with a familiar mantra: It had been wishful thinking. I’dwilled myself into believing I wasn’t alone. I’d leaned into the glass, hoping, wanting, craving, dreaming. There was no one there, nor had there ever been.
My phone buzzed.
(Nia) Please tell me you’re leaving the house today? I’ll never know what happens in Brazil if you lose your mind to isolation
(Marlow) It isn’t just Brazil. I’m doing a blender of South American lore. Thus the name.
(Nia) Pantheon, yeah, yeah, very clever, I’m obsessed, I get it, now answer the question
(Marlow) I’ll get curry from the Indian place down the street
(Kirby) You know that means she’s ordering in. You think we don’t get your sneaky wording by now. Leave the house, you bastard. Go on another date. Bone a stranger in a club bathroom. Just leave your goddamn apartment.
(Marlow) Make me.
(Kirby) Don’t tempt me. I’ll come over there.
Kirby would if I gave them the opening. Both they and Nia would. Despite living within an hour of me, my friends knew better than to show up at my place. I was reclusive enough to ignore the buzzer even if they stood outside my apartment and pressed the button for an hour. They understood, and they didn’t push. Even when Nia had dropped off soup during my bout with bronchitis, she’d left it with the receptionist, knowing me well enough to get that I considered showing up unplanned an act of aggression.
I appreciated my friends more for it.
Allison, the only other person I counted as a friend, lived on the West Coast. We kept our conversations limited to the worlds I created and the characters within them. It was the way I wanted it. As long as I could stay disconnected from the dullness around me, I’d be satisfied. At least as satisfied as one could be while forced to live in reality.
We both know it’ll never make you happy, he’d said.But if you’d prefer mundane restaurants and forgettable men over what I can offer…
He knew as well as I that mundanity wasn’t what I wanted. The only pieces of this life that brought me joy were escaping it. Sometimes through food, sex, drugs, or rambling through the markets in a country where I didn’t know the language. For a few minutes, sometimes even for a few days, I could pretend that I was someone different. I could let go of the chains that shackled me to the earth and disappear into a marveloussomething.
It may have been too early in the day for drugs, but I walked to the bar cart and flicked the top off a bottle of amaretto. I spiked my honey-sweet coffee until the almond liquor refilled the mug nearly to the brim. It was a drink strong enough to purify one’s innards and kill the common cold. But the alcohol helped. Each tingling buzz aided me in closing one of the many open tabs in my brain, which would allow me to focus on just what I was writing, just what I was watching on TV, just what I was eating. The noise was too much to handle without a little containment.
A text came in from my editor. She announced in no uncertain terms that she knew I’d seen her emails and was ignoring her. She told me that she loved me, that I was very pretty, and very talented, but that she’d paint the streets with my blood if I didn’t get her five new chapters by the end of the week.
I chuckled at the message.
The company had paired me with EG, the perfect hostile, irreverent counterpart.
I sent her an emoji with a wink and a kiss. EG responded with a middle finger, an eggplant, a fist, and three droplets of water.
Her threats were an effective rallying cry.
I put on the shittiest audiobook I could find while I brushed my hair, tidied my apartment, and waited for theinitial buzz from the alcohol to kick in. I refused to read anything worthwhile these days. Not only did I not want to compare myself to the greats, but nor did I want to risk being accused of idea theft, but I found that spite was my favorite motivator. Every terrible idiom, every clumsy sentence, every ill-conceived plot and obnoxious main character highlighted ways in which I’d like to do things differently.
Gandhi told us to be the change we want to see in the world. He was probably talking about kindness or charity or something, but I preferred to apply it to becoming the author I wished everyone else was.
I returned to the living room a few times, swigging deeply from the coffee until the alcohol tingled in my fingers and toes. By the time the liquor’s effects hummed gently in my ears, I clicked off the audiobook and settled in to write one, then three, then seven pages. It wasn’t exactly five chapters, but EG would get what she’d get. I’d looked up only twice, each time to fill my coffee cup with pure liquor. When I finished, I sent them to my editor without proofreading. I glanced at the clock to see that it was already five in the afternoon. I’d eaten nothing. And I was gloriously shitfaced.
Ignoring the day’s worth of notifications on my phone, I went directly for the food app and made good on my promise to get dinner. I ordered three dishes, planning to freeze a few of them so I’d have lunches and dinners for the next few days like the responsible meal prepper I was. I flipped on a mindless show about the hunt for Atlantis so I didn’t have to be alone with my thoughts while I waited for my butter chicken and rice. By the time the delivery person buzzed for entry, my tingle had worn off.
My huff sent the loose pieces of hair around my face into a cloud as I sighed at the liquor bottle.
