Fear and Loathing in the Catskills

I’m going to kill a stranger, / so don’t you be a stranger.

Everything Everything, “No Reptiles”

I’m the last spring on the ship before the slinky was invented. I’m a hot iron across the wandering queen’s hands, the proving ground for her little messiah, the punishment and the divine intervention. Shot, reverse shot. She fire-walked with the iron in her palm, eyes closed, smiling soft because she knew God protected her. I am the father, the mother, the divorce papers and the house itself, overwrought with all the stopped lives. Paranoid, seething, enervated, more than a bit superstitious. Knock on wood, touch the temple, cross your fingers, empty your mind. Inhale. What was that meditation again, the one about Comte de Saint Germain? It involved a green glass pitcher, and the most furious ultraviolet liquid. When you come of age in high white spaces, you have the mind of a debutante and the finances of the ideal starving artist—living for free, indebted to everyone. Exhale. 

Tension. All the people I will never be—

Outside the Crown Heights Utica station, a big guy stands with a megaphone. His bulk is covered top to bottom in blocky, multicolored, handwritten words—MERCY, SALVATION, DAMNATION, LUST, IDOLATRY, HATRED, HELL, HEAVEN, REPENT, CONFESS, SUBMIT, PREPARE. Jack nods at his back as we approach. He’ll see us, he’s facing the mouth of the subway, his voice hoarse from the sermon. I keep my head down. We don’t hold hands, but we might as well have. The man diverts his attention to us. Puffy eyes sear into my back.

“My faggot father burns in hell,” the man yells, “you will too!”

All I want is to go underground. All I want is to lurch through the dark on the 3, lights flickering as the segments slam against each other because the train hasn’t been updated since the nineties and it shows. I don’t want to be noticed:  I come here to the city because I’m not noticed, because I don’t matter.

“I flipped him off,” Jack says, and what I want to say is how dare you, what I want to say is that won’t work, what I want to say is who cares, his faggot father burns in hell and soon, we will too. Instead I squeeze his hand, which I should have been doing anyway the whole time. From the moment we left his apartment and even before. It’s not like shying away will save me. I’m already doomed. 

Later on, back home, in Baltimore—and here the present crashes into the past as I recall the nervy old man at the Catskill mansion who stammered, “Baltimore… that’s, uh, that’s a bit of a heavy city, if you catch my drift. You seem to have found a way to survive, though, maybe. Have you?” and I glare at him because it doesn’t actually matter if he remembers me as a friendly Indian or a hostile one, I’m probably never going to see him again, and if I do, I’ll just play it off anyhow. I can lie to white men like nobody’s business. I’m cute enough to get away with it. Aren’t I? Or is that a finite resource? Am I running out of charm?

I drive to Catonsville to set up a checking account with MECU because I’m pushing all my poker chips forward, “All in.” All in on Baltimore, all in on literature, all in on us—my lovers. My men and the women who tolerate me. It’s Friday, July 19th, 2024, and I’ve got a check from the Robert W. Deutsch Foundation to support my work on No One Gets Out of Here Alive—all in on that, too, my chips clattering as they fall in the story’s favor. Church and state and violence and the memory of my mother’s uncle, buried in Georgia. Died October 17th. 

“Well, you have this for your checking account,” says the agent setting me up, “but we require an additional five dollar deposit for your savings account. Do you have that?”

I nod enthusiastically, though internally I wonder if that’s even true. 

“Cash,” she adds, and I wince.

“There’s an ATM outside,” she says. “I’ll wait for you.”

Out in the crushing heat, I drag my bad leg behind me and wonder why I’m still so against using my cane. I put the debit card I know for sure has more than twenty on it and run my fingers across the glossy touchscreen. When I follow all the instructions, the terminal fills with one message, pretty and bold in a sans-serif: TRANSACTION NOT POSSIBLE. A woman in a bright orange bodycon sundress swelters behind me. We are so afraid of each other, as a species, that she stands in the violent light to give me the run of the shade. 

Another woman is in the dark with me, an old stud who sucks her teeth when I pull back from the ATM. She jangles her carabiner and squints as Sundress Lady approaches. I mumble an apology and a warning: I’m sorry, it didn’t work for me. I’m not going to wait in the sun. I lean against the wall and wonder at my financial situation, at the future, at the squeaking of my car and the long drive ahead of me. I’m taking a trip to the Catskills and my AC isn’t working, which could be a quick fix or a seven hundred dollar one.

When I was small and briefly homeschooled, my dad brought me into the kitchen and fried an egg on our island stovetop. These are the proteins of your brain, denaturing, he said, and I watched the yellow sun in our stainless steel pan sizzle, watched the egg white spread and crisp. This is what would happen to you if you stayed in a hot car. 

“What the hell?” Sundress Lady snaps me out of my reverie. “I’ve never had a problem depositing a check before.” She looks around, not fully at me or the old stud. The stud starts:  she’s been waiting for someone to notice.

“Global technology shut down,” says the stud. “Y’all didn’t get the warning? Hospitals, banks, all of it… down.”

Sundress Lady meets my eyes through her sunglasses now. We’re united in our ignorance and the shock of being addressed like this. A silent agreement passes between us. Business as usual, ma’am? Yes, yes, I do believe we’ll press on. 

“No,” she says. “Will the tellers take my check inside, then?”

“Worth a try,” says the stud, and returns to jangling her carabiner. 

I follow the lady inside, pulling out my phone. I’m googling “Global technology outage” and I register that it’s real with the same dull comprehension as always, like it’s all just recitation at this point. The agent tasked with helping me returns to her desk. Our mirrored expressions:  polite terror, a sense of the script having been forgotten or revised moments before shooting. Line? 

“S-sorry,” I say, “the ATM… it wasn’t working for any of us. Something… happened.”

Her too-bright smile tells me my addendum was incorrect—I am not supposed to say what has happened. I am only supposed to apologize and defer to her, so I do. We sound like robots for the rest of the meeting.

You will need a cash advance. There is a twenty five dollar fee for that. I have never done a cash advance before. Leave it to me, give me your card. Thank you. Thank you for your patience, I’m sorry it took so long. You’re all set. Thank you for your patience. Have a good day. You as well. Thank you.

One of the headlines: This doesn’t have to happen again. For some reason, I remember an old lover of mine who struck me. The tone, maybe, or maybe the words. This doesn’t have to happen again. We can keep going like this. Just give me another chance. 

I grip my welcome packet and wonder what the hell I just did. All in. The casino’s about to close. Last call. Sure, fuck it. All in.

Later, I go to the Save-a-Lot near my apartment. I want Miracle Whip and milk. I want Honey Comb and some meat. I’m out of everything but I can’t go grocery shopping until I’m sure I know what to do with the food, until I’m home long enough to have a better routine. I’d been in Crown Heights mere days prior and I’ll be in Catskill tomorrow and the outage is churning my brain toward an old memory of a prophecy I once dreamt, something to do with the water. I haven’t been able to swim in a long time. I haven’t wanted to learn, either. My mother gets on well enough without swimming, why shouldn’t I? But in the dream a flood came and I had to swim or drown. Those were my only options. 

The lights in the Save-a-Lot flicker. Ominous, but I push my discomfort down and fix my eyes on the stained tile floor. Ahead of me, all of the meat and produce has been covered up by grey blankets. Like mass graves, my brain supplies unhelpfully. Two old women stand a few paces ahead, staring. One grabs the other by the shoulder, shakes her. 

“You stay here, I’ll go up front and see what’s going on.” 

Hastily scrawled on every sheet: Please do not touch.

This is a dress rehearsal, my brain interrupts, and I shake my head, furrowing my brow. No. I’ll have my Miracle Whip, god damnit, and the milk, too.

Bad luck. No milk. The refrigerators are shuttered with stickers on them: Please do not open. I hobble out of the Save-a-Lot, past old men smoking in the shade, past the mobile PNC Bank truck, past the old folks home. I push into my car and look at the sad lattice of my phone’s GPS, bereft of any map, any names, just my blue arrow, spinning in the off-white grid.

When I get home, I open the Miracle Whip, excited to finally make a sandwich. I yelp as soon as I pull the seal off—it’s turned a sickly greenish-gray under the cap. I spin the jar around. Best before May 2024. Jesus H. Christ. 

I mutter the names of the interstates and highways to myself as I throw everything away. South to Catonsville. North to Towson. South to Auntie Mary. North to Jack. Westward through Cleveland to get to Brad and Melissa. You’ll always have a home in Chicago, remember that. Or North to Ithaca? Connecticut? Auntie Royce? One day I’ll have to give you shelter, I have foreseen it. Did you move home? I did. There’s an extra room for you, if you ever need. My parents in Philadelphia, they’ll always welcome you, no matter how long it’s been since we’ve spoken. Just tell them who you are to me. From Chicago through Madison, to Kim, Kim’s house with the functional garden and the fence and the access to the waterway. Would I need a boat? No, cut north, toward Eau Claire. Then Minneapolis. Take the 10 up, up, head for the homelands or take the hi-line all the way to your sister—

In the dwindling light of the evening, I catch my scrawny silhouette. The frame is there, the bones are there. What they need is meat. 

It’s Paul’s birthday party tonight. I take my boyfriend with me, waking him up from our nap to say, “There’ll be hot dogs there.” They roll back and forth in bed, beaming, and we dress ourselves carefully. In the lush, overgrown garden behind Paul’s house, I feel at once protected and on edge—because I know where we’re going, I want to spend as much time inside, plugged in and wasteful and cooled by air conditioner as possible. Stockpiling memories for my future self. Soon, my body says. Soon.

I love hanging out with Paul and Paul’s friends. There’s a healthy assortment of people, mostly trans, and more Indians than I’d initially known how to process. I’m pleased to find they’re as excited to see me again as I am to see them, and I make tentative plans with a Piscataway boy to drive back to my homelands together for rice season. My eyes dart over the laden patio table and catch my white trans boyfriend, happily socializing with another white trans person, and I look back at the two Native people I’m with. 

“A cousin of mine,” I say to the Piscataway boy, “says if we wanna survive what’s coming next, we gotta find solidarity with honkeys.”

The Piscataway boy laughs. “Man, my cousin said the same thing. Word for word, even.” A beat, then, “We gotta bring back ‘honkey.’ Cracker, too.”

“‘Cracker’ never left,” Luna, Paul’s girlfriend, cuts in. She’s a beautiful Southwest Native tattoo artist with choppy bangs and a perpetually enigmatic grin.

“Certainly,” says the Piscataway boy, “my dad never let it go. He tells me this story…”

The evening passes in gentle camaraderie. I tell a handful of people about my apocalyptic day, and everyone says they’d dodged it, they hadn’t even heard of CrowdStrike. Unaffected, they’d simply taken this as just another Friday. Somehow, I knew this would be the case. How we all have different “timelines” because of our hyper-personalized social media feeds. It feels as though this isolation, this bloated, rotting corpse we call individualism, has spread like black mold from our feeds to our real lives. The world ended for me, a couple trans kids out in Minnesota, an old man who needed surgery, two ladies at the grocery store, and a woman in a bright orange bodycon sundress. It ended and we just have to keep going like it didn’t, because we bounced back. My GPS filled itself out again, streets and names and live updates on traffic collisions, speed checks, construction. We bounce back. This doesn’t have to happen again. 

I brush my hand over my boyfriend’s and kiss them on one freckled cheek, the shoulder, the neck I bruised the night prior. Our cycles are synched up—we ovulate with the full moon and bleed when the sky turns black.

“Home?”

We spend the entire evening trying to get each other pregnant. Our fathers raised us for the end of the world. We are both beyond fear, beyond doom. Pleasure stays. So does our capacity to chase it. On the bus home from Crown Heights a few weeks ago, a woman switched from patois to english to say, loud and emphatic, “There is a time for everything.” Time for pleasure. Time for pain. Time to prepare and time to let go of the comfort. Time, I suppose, for the dress rehearsal, because I can feel the overture coming to a solemn close.

Saturday. I don’t want to leave, but I have to. I empty my trash, I take out the recycling, I wash the dishes and I tremble on my white vinyl couch. My world. All I think about is furniture and my boyfriends. I allow myself the luxury of shallow hedonism because I know this, too, will recede with the long shadows ahead. Joy, desire, hunger and its fulfillment will remain, of course, but hedonism dies in the war, clarified by blood and loss and yes, love itself. 

Dani Mercury lives off the grid right now. Years ago, we belonged to a friend group our mutual friend Mars curated. When I say curated—

Looking back, it was a chrysalis. We were almost always congregated after dark. Something about the lighting in that house, which Mars shared with Jake Seeger. One day, Jake would meet a friend of mine and Phil’s at a party and fall in love, but we didn’t know that yet. At the time, he was just Mars’s housemate. They lived in an enormous house near Martin Luther King street. Mars was in their final year at Ithaca College. They majored in Cinemaphoto, which they always followed up with, “So basically nothing of substance.” Their insubstantial studies flanked us in large, translucent sheets, illuminated by warm, amber bulbs and candlelight. We had met at Qinfolk, a festival for Black and Brown Folks™ that happened exactly one time. Ev Pakinewatik and I had a film screening there, Waaseyaa, at Cinemapolis. Dani Mercury and Mars were student volunteers alongside a handful of other Ithaca College students. In exchange for their labor, they were allowed free attendance to a few of the workshops.

It was at one such workshop that Mars caught my attention, curled, as they were, in a strangely childlike pose, despite the elderly facial expressions they flitted through as the workshops progressed. You got the sense they were humoring you. Out on the Commons, blinded by the autumnal sun, I asked if we could be friends. Just like that, like a kindergartener asks to be friends. Mars looked up at me, eyes narrowed, and then they simply told me when and where to be. I listened.

There were four or five of us, at any given time. Sometimes seven, eight, nine even. Ten. That first night, I lost count, all of us crouched or curled or perched in Mars’s living room. We would paint together, usually, paint and talk. From this tenuous new clique, new connections budded and old ones were bolstered, deepened. Revelations revisit me from time to time, even now—Willow saying our tears are libations for our ancestors, Gaby declaring herself a lesbian, Dani smiling in Mars’s doorway, asking for an herbal cigarette.

“That Mars is like a little grandma,” Dad observed. 

They were determined to get their friends to lessen any dependencies—on weed, on nicotine. Everybody was cared for and taken into account. Then, as December shifted into January, they left. My only glimpse of how emotional they were over the impending move happened when I asked them twice to come back to my house for ceremony, that my father had invited them. Tears pricked in their eyes.

“Honey,” they said, “I can’t.”

Crossing into the Catskills, Hudson Valley region, I call Dani to check their ETA. I’d left later than we’d planned by about thirty minutes, but I was still on track to get to the trailer before six.

“Shit,” Dani hisses, “I honestly wasn’t counting on you being on time.”

We laugh, but a chill runs through me—a lot has changed in the past week and a half, and quickly. I’ve been waking up before my alarm and being punctual, for one. Easing into a new body, a new life. Patch notes. A software update for this strange machine I pilot.

Signage labeled CATSKILL HUDSON VALLEY WELCOME CENTER leads me off the highway and into the Woodbury Premium Outlet, a cluster of shops selling luxury clothing and jewelry for over fifty percent off retail prices. A whopping four parking lots, each the size of a soccer field, glimmer at me as I ease my beat-up Corolla through the clearcut trees. There’s some kind of fortress in the woods overlooking the mall. Monstrous cars, shiny and new, fill every parking lot to the brim. Their occupants glide through the lots towards the shopping center, dressed in tacky brand-name luxury clothing and so skinny, they could cut the air. My hackles raise and I look down at my own thrifted outfit, slick with sweat.

Is this really a destination? By the families laden with brand-name bags, carrying Häagen-Dazs plastic cups or designer water bottles, I must assume so. Disgust mixes with discomfort as I enter the cafeteria. There aren’t many white people here, but the few I come across are friendly enough. The nonwhite people, though, particularly the ones who vaguely resemble me, seem upset at my arrival. I clench my fists. For fuck’s sake, I just want to kill some time. Is that so terrible? Why are you looking at me like that?

More looks follow me, mouths open in mirthless laughter. I know I’m being cagey, but it’s hard not to be. I feel like I’m in trouble, like I’m breaking the illusion of affluence by being dirty and broke. Poor people want to dress rich, I remember, and rich people want to be poor. Somehow that makes me angrier—you don’t even have the money to live like this. None of us do. Why pretend? Then, absolutely out of nowhere, an older man, iced out in a way that’s well-past parody, stops with his friend and rakes his eyes up and down my exhausted body.

“Man, you stink!” he says. He laughs, but it’s subdued, unnatural. A civilized laugh.

I scan his face. Crow’s feet. Stress lines. No laughter lines, which breaks my heart almost as much as it pisses me off. A deep gash between his eyebrows. 

Cosplayer, I think. Pushing fifty and still delusional. His friend laughs, too, and they talk about me all the way out the door. An older woman, privy to this exchange, turns to her friends.

“It’s that cheap cologne!” she hollers, and they laugh, too. 

Fever dream. Do I buy my way into this empty life? I glance around. Who are these people? Why live like this? Not for the first time, I think about when my friends post “Democracy has failed” on Instagram, citing heightened police presence, harsher punishments, steeper costs of living. I snort. It hasn’t. The vast majority of Americans really are this selfish, pigheaded, shortsighted and pathetic, and they do vote in accordance with their own interests. Just because the election results aren’t what you, specifically, want out of your country doesn’t mean it’s failed. We have to organize, to bend these systems until they break. We have to put our phones down and take some risks. Whenever this happens—I mean to say, whenever I’m visibly Othered in one of these suburban nightmare hellscapes—I pin the moment like an insect to the board of my memory. Dissect it later.

It’s been a long time since my dark age, when my only social interactions were with other chronically online people on Tumblr and Instagram. I recently came across a post on Tumblr—I do still use Tumblr, though infrequently, and usually for aesthetic or pornographic purposes—by a chronically online trans person who absolutely hated the “people online / people in real life” memetic format. For the uninitiated, the format usually goes something like this:

The Tumblr poster in question took issue with the “real life” person, arguing that the “real life” person was probably racist, transphobic, homophobic or otherwise bigoted. I was floored. Here was a complete invention, a straw-man with no real argument, just a greeting, “Hey man how’s it going,” and this fully grown adult was taking issue with it because maybe, probably, definitely the “real life” person is unsafe for them to be around. 

It’s been difficult for me to come across chronically online people in real life. The mean girl in me wants to pull them aside and say, in the gentlest voice possible, “Your vibes are way worse than you could ever imagine,” but that’ll most certainly break what reads as a weak spirit. What I mean is, hey, how’s it going? Come out into the big, bad world. People fucking suck but sometimes you catch them off guard and it’s amazing, it’s like the best high ever, when you get to disrupt their pattern of behavior enough for the light to reenter their eyes. Even at the cost of your comfort. I love getting mad at a person, a real person who really tried to hurt me, because then I get to point out their real flaws, their real weaknesses. You can really do some damage when you get to know enough people. It’s like… you know how the people who love us often hurt us the most? I love every human being on earth, so. You get the idea.

When in Rome, I murmur, and I walk into the J. Crew. I do need some actual shorts, especially if this heat won’t let up. As I rifle through the five-inch inseams, I think, you hate these people because they’re just like you. Clawing their way to the top of the bucket, trying to reach the sea. The difference between you and them is your dad told you not to get married in your twenties, told you to try out as many people as possible until you got to know exactly what you like, what you don’t like. Nobody else here got such a gift, clearly. And so you hate them, too, for making you sad. For reminding you of the freedom you will never be denied.

Out in the wrong parking lot—I realize it too late, my car’s in the third block—I run into a little Hasidic boy. He stares at me, trembling, and I look easily back at him, trying to project a sense of kindness or, at the very least, harmlessness. His nostrils flare and he power-walks across the road, scrambling up the stone wall. Into the fortress he goes. 

I clamber through the landscaping that separates the lots from the road, from each other, until I find my car, sticking out like a sore thumb amongst all the enormous suburban war rigs, trucks like neutered bulls in a field of dead grass. I change into my new J. Crew shorts and start my engine. Goodbye forever, all ye pretenders to the throne.

Between the Woodbury Outlet and Catskill itself, something terrible has happened. State Troopers, ambulances, police from neighboring towns converge on the side of the highway, shaded by the blown-out, jagged edge of a broken mountain. Four, maybe five cars have pulled over. A truck with big, glaring TRUMP 2024: SAVE AMERICA stickers is at the center, hazards off. An old woman walks with a man who looks like the prototypical trooper—big mustache, aviators, ten gallon hat. She is resolutely not crying. She is talking in an even, careful tone. 

Between the Trump truck and a Biden Subaru, a burly, sunburnt man in a baseball cap and tank top cradles a limp little body. I see bony arms, cornsilk hair, and a scrawny, pasty man running from the pair to shoot a thumbs-up to another car, though his smile isn’t reassuring at all. I tear away from the scene. It’s their business. For the rest of the drive, though, every time I blink I see the child. The child and their father and the sirens and the sun. 

Entering Catskill in broad daylight eases my tension further. I know these roads, those trees, all them hills. This land is not my land, but we love each other. I pull into the wrong driveway just as Dani walks out of the house they’re boarding at. We run at each other and wrap up in a big bear hug. 

Saturday night, the Catskills offer a grab-bag of performance art. It’s all extremely New York and bores me to tears, but we go regardless. The first show is a repetitive meditation on “being Indigenous,” and there’s a wealthy Native woman who clocks that I’m Native, too, and we refuse to interact. She’s one of a couple Native women in the audience who’ve married rich white men, had their children and settled in the New York City nouveau riche scene. The audience fascinates me way more than the performance and I people watch openly, safe and shameless so long as the show goes on. A few familiar faces, though I can’t place them or name them. Their headshots flashbang into my mind, though, and I recognize they’re supposed to be important, noteworthy. 

One of the strangest things about the Catskills, Hudson Valley area has to be the echo of the frontier. Here you have redneck country, meth towns, abandoned storefronts and rundown, ramshackle apartment complexes flanked by shiny new breweries, speciality boutiques, performance art spaces and summer homes. White people colonizing white people—here, Dani cuts in: “It’s not just white people colonizing white people, though. There’s hella Black people in the Hudson Valley. And they’re excluded from all the ‘BIPOC’ events.” They wipe the sweat from their biceps—they’ve been out working the farm all day—and continue. “You just think it’s white people pushing out whites because that’s all you see here, I mean, we’re in a very white town right now, but there are others. Many of the Black and brown people here are… recent. ‘BIPOC’ is for rich people.” The new push out the old, revamp their shattered houses into intellectual property. The New York City Extended Universe, if you will. Glossy magazines grace foyers in livened-up warehouses, bright, beautiful text reading CATSKILLS—IT HAPPENS HERE. Motor homes and the lands they sink into get price gouged for people who own, actually own their apartments in Williamsburg and the East Village. 

Here’s where the cream of the crop, tip of the top get to live out their homestead fantasies, to be the unwashed monarchs of their peaceable kingdoms. So you get the usual small town fare in every diner, working-class Americans who’ve been here “forever” talking to the waitress like she’s their niece because she basically is, but you also get the big wheels from the city, too, with their hurried, clipped cadence and their carefully shuttered eyes. Uncanny valley, to be somewhere so cozy, treated with the same vacant contempt I’ve come to value and cherish elsewhere.

The second performance of the night is worse than the first because it’s supposed to be comedy. We’re at somebody’s mansion, gallery space, microbrewery and herbalist workshop watching a guy who, judging by the expectant look he shoots me just before his show, is supposed to be memorable, even beloved. All his jokes land with the wealthy attendees, but it’s bizarre—they laugh like how babies laugh when they’re learning how to laugh. You know, that sort of delayed, measured, monotone braying your baby does when the rest of the family is cracking up? It’s like that. Timing’s the same, too. It goes joke—pause—sudden flurry of muted drones. Dani passes me a handful of cardamom to chew.

“I have no idea where I brought us,” they murmur.

“I’m hungry,” I say, tapping my cane on my foot. “Should I stage a nervous breakdown so we can escape?”

As it turns out, I don’t have to. The show comes to a baffling close followed by thunderous applause and I stand, swaying a bit before I use my cane to steady myself.

We eat at a lovely Mexican restaurant in town and decide to go home. In the car, I turn to Dani, all our shared past come up to meet us.

“Do you think Mars knows?” I wonder. “Like, do you think they know what they did?”

“There’s no way,” Dani says. “How could they know that they altered the course of my life, permanently, and also saved it?”

Inside Dani’s trailer is a childhood fantasy of mine made physical. A deep green wooden floor with a desk, so many bookshelves, art everywhere, and delicate curtains pinned to plywood windows in thin, maplewood walls. A few in-progress furniture repairs lean against the far wall here and there, while a soft bed rests on a wooden platform with drawers in its base. It smells the same as Dani’s homes have always smelled—like clay, palo santo, herbal medicines, dried flowers, and the breath of the wood itself. As always, I relax, my head growing heavy, like I’m sinking into a hot spring after a long winter.

Sunday morning comes and Dani wakes me, gentle at first, then firmer. They’re usually up around six or six-thirty, but they’ve let themselves sleep in until seven today. I, being the lazybones I am, have slept in until eight.

“Time to hit the gym,” Dani announces.

We drive somewhere Dani’s been calling “the creek,” but to me it’s a gargantuan reservoir, replete with waterfalls, slate and swirling estuaries.

“This is the creek?” I exclaim. “When you said ‘creek’ I thought you meant, you know, like, a crick.”

Dani shrugs. “Catskill creek.”

Not since last year’s visit to Cranberry Lake have I bothered to swim. No lakes, no rivers, no pools, not even Puget Sound. I’ve gotten my feet wet from time to time, but I’m not like Dani or Taylor, really. Water destabilizes me. I prefer the concrete under my soles, the loud voices in a busy cafe, the graffitied and sticker-laden walls of the bathroom at any given dive bar. I’m the guy at the hardcore show standing stock still having the time of my life. I’m boring, normal, and unimaginative. And if I want to live long enough to see my own midlife crisis, I can no longer continue in this way. I must course-correct. 

Agile and quick as a monkey, Dani navigates the sharp stones of the “gym,” jumping over the rushing current while I lumber after them. My silhouette shows me the clumsy, uncertain gait of a child. We come to a large, flat stone, and Dani unrolls our blanket. I sip the coffee we bought from the self-serve counter at the Mohican Trading Post, which had zero Mohicans and six white people inside. I’m procrastinating because I do not want to submerge myself in this cool, blue lagoon. 

“Come on,” Dani says. “Get in.”

I strip and pull on the garish pair of swim trunks I bought when I was a teenager—a tattered vintage Marvel Comics themed pattern with a torn velcro fly. Dani takes off running again, making for the estuary nearest the boulder they like to dive from. It’s all too much, but I refuse to back out now. 

A group of beautiful thirtysomethings congregate on the easier incline across from our rocky shore. Just as I take my first tentative steps into the water, a fifth man appears, sharply-dressed, and I furrow my brow. Is that…?

There’s no way.

I shove my hands in my pockets, hyperaware of how childish I look. Aware of the man’s eyes meeting mine, the way they linger as he tries to place my face.

When he calls to his friends, his soft, fluted voice all but confirms his identity for me. Troubled, confused, a little afraid, I let the water swallow me whole.

Besides telling Dani about where I might have seen this man before (Baltimore) and under what circumstances (fine, until maybe I made it weird, but he was already pretty odd to begin with) and why he might be this far out (he is on a noble quest), I try to think no more of it. Instead, I marvel at how the water seems to cradle me. How, despite my fear, I can work with the deep, dark currents to get from point A to point B. 

“That’s why I come here,” Dani says. “It teaches me to trust my body.”

We jump off the rock, Dani diving, me cannonballing, before we return to our flat stone and dry off in the sun.

Do I trust my body? On the Adbry and my vitamin regimen, my flesh has smoothed out, softened more than any adult’s skin should be. I heal at an alarming rate, but I also grow new intrusive clusters of inflammation faster than others, too, recalling the carbuncles of 2021, the herpetic lesions covering my face in 2023, the hard, round, burning pockets of cystic tissue near my lymph nodes in 2024. When I’m sick, I get sick fast. I need a cane most days but I walk with it only half or a quarter of the time I should be, until I’m worn and out of breath and ashamed of the tired way I glance up, then down, leaving my line of sight there, on the ground, because I cannot bear to speak to you, because I hate the way my words twist and scramble.

But I can do such wonderful things with this body. Pets melt into my hands, joy apparent in their tiny faces as I touch them. Aquatic creatures seek me out, curious, and let me near enough for a strange intimacy to pass between us. Big and small. I can bring myself and others pleasure or pain, can take a person apart to their barest, most vulnerable selves, if they want me to, and I can remember where we put them if they need to be reassembled. I can hold babies or carry toddlers on my shoulders. I can spot my friends in a crowd or be spotted in turn. 

I can remake myself. I can apologize. I can mean it. 

After Biden drops out, all of the weekenders in the Hudson Valley are aflame with questions, comments, concerns, complaints. I text Jack, suddenly angry at how ugly and untalented so many of these wealthy strangers are, “amazing how you can just do whatever if you have endless money. can’t believe they colonized hillbilly country.” To which Jack replies, “and then generations later their wealth will be dried up and they’ll be the new poor hillbillies.”

Again, I think: you hate these people because they’re just like you. Indeed, nearly a thousand years ago, a direct ancestor of mine conquered Europe. His violence brought him and his family all the riches of the Western world. The resulting empire became responsible for the invention of the English language, a language of commerce, born of necessity. When he died, his funeral devolved into an “orgy of bloodlust and greed” as his children set upon his corpse, tearing it asunder, ripping jewelry from his rigid fingers, his neck, his cock. I imagine this scene with the same coldness I imagine the CrowdStrike shutdown. Generations later, I touch my chin—his chin, I recall, shaking my head—and try to curb my prejudice.

That night, I dream about rich people. In the dream, they live in my childhood home, four men and one woman all in their own rooms. I walk the long, knotty pine hall, looking in on them as they go about their subtle lives. One by one, a wendigo sickness takes them. They chew their fingers until the nail-beds slough off into their blackened tongues. Then they eat through their own lips, trails of pitchy spit dribbling along the serrated edges of their mouths. They get it into their heads that this is a new plague, like Covid, that it’s contagious and that everybody else but them has it. They hire a security guard, ex-military, former cop, to patrol the halls of my childhood home. But my family still lives in the house and we have to avoid this new intruder, this bloodthirsty automaton who’s been trained to shoot on sight. We lose access to the living room first, then the dining room with its gaudy chandelier. Then the kitchen, where my father had fried that egg for me. Finally, we’re all hiding in our old playroom, and I lock the window to the backyard, where shadowy figures watch us cower, restless, faceless. 

“It’s in the house,” wails the woman. Her rotting tongue lolls out of her unhinged jaw. “Good God, it was always already in the house.”

She tricks the security guard into putting down her male companions one by one before she turns the gun on herself.

Without his employer, the guard’s life has no meaning. He stands at the mouth of the stairwell. Lets himself tumble down like a rag doll.

I open the window to the shadows outside.