Of course the planes weren’t going to explode on their way to JFK. But we liked watching them just in case.
“Don’t you remember on 9-11, how they said that the buildings were bombed?” King asked.
“You remember 9-11?” King had that look in his green eyes, dreamy yet determined, that I’d known since high school. The look when he declared that mushrooms were fertilized by dead fish, and therefore were not vegetarian, much less vegan. Or the look when he announced that the Ant Liberation Front (ALF) was responsible for the release of Mr. Murphy’s ant colonies.
King turned to face me, leaning on his side. “I remember 9-11. I remember tons of stuff from that age. When I was two I fell down the stairs and peed blood in my diaper. I remember my mom changing it.”
I didn’t believe him, but I liked pretending. “There’s another one,” I said, pointing at the sky.
The plane was low, and in the early morning light its belly looked soft and pink as a puppy’s. King took my hand as I lifted it, and pinned it gently to the roof. The black tar held April’s warmth. I knew what he wanted: he wanted to fuck one more time before the sun came up. He liked racing against time, running late, and he liked almost being caught.
But King didn’t ask me to have sex. He held my hand and looked at me for a long time as we listened to an ambulance call down Flushing Ave on the way to Woodhull Hospital. We had been up all night together, and his eyes were as pink as the bellies of the planes. I listened to the unguarded silence the siren left behind, and wondered what he was seeing. Then King spoke. “Belle, do you want to come to Marion with me?”
That was the thing about King. On the J train he put his hands up my skirt, and in the Chicken Hut he wanted me to touch him by the wall while everyone else danced to Big Freida. And when I didn’t want to he told me about the girls who did want to, who had done it, at some point in college or high school, way before we started: Katie and Olivia, Meredith and the other Belle. He liked telling me how good it was with them. Which was why he wanted to do it with me. “Who’s Marion?”
“Illinois. Where Darius is,” he said, his face hardening at the sound of his brother’s name.
“The jail?”
“The prison.”
“Oh,” I said, searching his face and trying to understand why he was asking me. “Umm, I don’t know. When?”
King leaned over me and checked his phone. “He’s being released in six weeks, and it’s a two-day drive. We’d leave on May 20th.”
“I can’t,” I said, relieved. “I have my final teaching practicum then.”
“So do it online,” King said, loosening his grip on my hand.
“The schools will be open by then,” I said. “Right? I’m pretty sure I’ll have to go in. Do you want to ask, like, Tatiana?” Tatiana was my roommate, and besides being prettier than me, she was also much, much smarter.
“Maybe, Belle.” He checked something on his phone. “It could be, you know. Kind of an adventure.”
I took a breath and tried to connect myself to him. My head never worked right around King; I was too swept up in the ocean of him. We’d met in high school and orbited each other for years, never quite part of the same friend group. I’d see his green eyes across a flood of people in the cafeteria and something deep inside me would bend; water shaping itself over the continental shelf. “Maybe,” I said. “Are you sure it wouldn’t be weird?”
“Why would it be weird?” King pulled his shirt on. “I should get going.”
“Okay.” Another siren sang down Flushing. It felt like they never stopped. “I’ll see you later.”
King left, and I logged onto Google Classroom. My students didn’t have the resources to log on to the classroom at certain times, so everything was asynchronous.
There wasn’t much to do. Yesterday, in the bitterness of isolation, I had made a week’s worth of worksheets and uploaded them. I’d also made a video about how to make an abstract drawing and uploaded it to YouTube and Google Classroom. It wasn’t clear if any of them had watched it. If they even could watch it.
How long would this last? I looked out the window onto the driveway, feeling inside me the loneliness that only the classroom took away. There was a buzzing warmth to elementary schools, to kids, that I couldn’t find anywhere else.
And so I missed the kids—not just missed them, but missed them, physically. I missed their skinny arms and the way their bellies paunched out. I missed the way they couldn’t say “R”s, and I missed the way they talked while they ate, with their hands pinwheeling and their eyes growing huge with concentration.
But I didn’t have any theory to back up my feelings. King, Tatiana, the people they introduced me to—they all stood for something. They all had purpose. They believed in anarchofeminism, and ecoprimitivism; they knew the intricacies of squatting. They could tell you what was wrong, and their theories could explain why, and then they had a solution. Meanwhile, I was scrounging for new markers and debating the best size of crayons for three-year-old fingers. I was wiping muffin crumbs off sticky faces and giving hugs. I didn’t know if I was fixing any problems or making them worse; I didn’t know if I was showing kids love or teaching them how to obey a fucked-up institution.
The closest I came to believing in something was believing in King. Following him into dumpsters. Helping him organize fundraisers for his brother. Serving drinks at the performance space at the John Bosch House.
Tatiana interrupted my wallowing. “Hey,” she said, leaning against the door. “You working right now?”
I looked at the screen. The cursor blinked on an empty Google Doc. My whole fucking life depended on Google. “I don’t know,” I said. “I was thinking about making a podcast that the kids could listen to.”
“Come to my office with me,” Tatiana said, her Russian accent as crisp as my parents’. “I’m going to 3D print masks.”
I stared at her for a second. She wore all black and dyed her dirty blonde hair black, too. But you wouldn’t know that unless you lived with her. I was the only one who saw her roots. “Seriously?”
She nodded. “Hammer is providing us with the supplies. You can use his bike because it has a trailer. We’ll ride the plastics there, print them using the code, and give them to Woodhull.”
I looked at her and blinked, wondering, for a moment, what it would be like to be heroic. To be Hammer and know how to steal from Home Depot. To be Tatiana and know how to 3D print masks. To be King and drive across the continent to pick up Darius. To be anyone, anybody, but myself. “Are we taking the Williamsburg Bridge or the Manhattan?”
“Williamsburg,” she said.
“Sure,” I said, closing out of the Google Doc. “Just let me get dressed.”
We called our house the John Bosch House because of some tiled lettering on the front stoop, but it was really two houses. The main house had seven bedrooms over three floors, a classic Brooklyn brownstone. We lived in the garage behind and to the side of it, Tatiana and I upstairs, and Hammer downstairs, next to the performance space. Before the pandemic, it had felt like one house. In the mornings, I would leave my door open before leaving to student teach, and Hammer would come in at 6 am, just as he was coming home. We took turns bringing home dumpstered juice and Whole Foods treats.
But with the pandemic, we had cleaved. Or maybe I had.
Tatiana and I unlocked our bikes from the performance space and pushed off down Willoughby Avenue. We rode slowly, pacing ourselves, pulling the heavy supplies on trailers on our bikes. The Williamsburg Bridge crested, and without speaking, we nodded at each other and stopped at the top.
The J train passed by, rattling the bridge. I hoped no one else would be riding near us. What if someone came too close and we breathed in their air? Below, the water was choppy and green; above, the sky gray and damp.
Tatiana took out a water bottle, and I checked my phone. We had one downhill to get to Delancey, then it was flat crosstown, then the hills of the Upper West Side, then Tatiana’s office at Columbia. Tatiana noticed me looking at my phone. “Did you see what King posted?” she asked.
“No,” I said, my stomach sinking. I opened up Instagram. Photo dump, his caption read. I scrolled through the ten photos. There were the bare branches of the tree you could see from outside my window, not filtered black-and-white, but looking desaturated in a cloudy sky. Empty Times Square.
And Tatiana.
Tatiana on the other side of a dumpster, their hands reaching for the same apple. Tatiana on our roof, staring up at the planes. A screenshot of Tatiana facilitating a prison support Zoom meeting. I swiped right, and right again. Finally, I appeared on the last slide—our ankles, tangled together. “When did you guys hang out on the roof?”
Tatiana put her phone away and closed her water bottle. “I’m not sure. It might have been when you were in Florida.”
Fucking Florida. I had my cousin’s wedding in West Palm Beach in February, during midwinter break. “Oh, that’s cool.” My hands were shaking. I rubbed them on my shorts and stared at the holes in my black tights.
“Is it, though?” Tatiana laughed. “We went to the fundraiser at the Knockdown Center. It took forever to get back. The bus never came, and we had to walk the whole way home.”
I looked down at the East River. King must have slept over; where else would he have slept? But did he sleep on the floor, or in Tatiana’s bed?
It always felt easy to distance myself from my body while having sex with King. It felt better that way. He was attentive, but also precise; I couldn’t help feeling, while we were having sex, that I could be anyone; that the basic anatomy was the same from person to person, and what he was doing wasn’t so different.
But sleeping in bed together felt different. That was when I could look at him and see him vulnerable, his eyelids turning purple-ish. The moments when he didn’t have to be King of anything. It took a long time before he fell asleep with me. I loved the gentleness of his breathing, and how he slept with his arms crossed, as though he were covering himself.
The thought of him having sex with Tatiana was not so bad. I had already accepted it. But the thought of him sleeping in bed with her felt like a betrayal.
I kicked the pedal of Hammer’s bike and watched it spin in the air, moving but going nowhere. “I might go to Illinois with him. To pick up his brother from prison.”
Tatiana nodded slowly. “You better prepare yourself. Prison is another world.”
“I know,” I said, even though I didn’t.
She leaned over the bridge. “What about your students?”
I laughed an empty laugh. It sounded more like a cough, which then, of course, freaked me out. “I didn’t just cough,” I said. The waters lapped at the feet of the bridge. “I haven’t really been able to get in touch with them. They’re too young to have laptops or phones. Some of them have tablets. There’s not really much you can do through a screen.”
“You just seem so happy when you’re teaching.” For some reason her accent kicked in strong, and each syllable was musical. “Is there any other way you can connect with them?”
“I don’t know.” And it felt, then, like my students had sailed off somewhere, had been abandoned. That I had abandoned them. I shook my head. “Yeah, maybe. I’ll try to figure something out.” I put my foot on the pedal. “Wanna keep riding?”
“The world won’t end,” said King. “Humans will end.”
We were in a lush Pennsylvania hollow, one of those places where the Allegheny mountains dip into valley. “You don’t think that humans will destroy the earth?” I asked. The green outside was encompassing but fragile, a mist that might dissolve at any moment.
King scoffed at this. “With any luck, humans will kill each other and the dolphins will take over.”
“Unless we kill all the dolphins first.” I gazed at his profile. “Wait, really? You think the world will be okay?”
“If you were on a life raft, and it was you and a cow and two other people, who would you throw off the life raft?”
I knew this was a trick question. “The cow.”
“See?” He thumped the steering wheel with his hand. “But the cow won’t kill anyone. The people on the life raft would kill animals. The cow wouldn’t.”
“That’s true,” I said. “So do you not like people?”
He shrugged. “I don’t think their lives are worth more than any other lives.”
The rolling hills were making me nauseated—that, and I was expecting my period. Today, or if not today, tomorrow. We’d been on the road now for five hours and we were making terrible time. First, King was late picking me up. Then he wanted to see the field hospital set up in Central Park. Then we hit construction outside of Harrisburg. “I have to puke.”
“Again?”
Right. That was the other thing making us late.
The car rumbled to the side of the road, and I sprinted out to the tree line. Only bile was left in my stomach. I sat down, dizzy, and took a sip of ginger ale. Tears came to my eyes, but I brushed them away. I was supposed to be helping King, not having him take care of me.
My hands shook. I felt like shit.
“You okay?” King asked when I made it back to the car.
I nodded. “Sorry.”
“It’s okay,” he said, but his voice was flat.
He pulled out onto I-76, and I willed my stomach to calm down. “What were we talking about?”
“I dunno,” he said, chewing his lip, suddenly looking worried.
“I’m sorry,” I said again. “It’s just—I haven’t been in a car in a long time—and—”
“It’s not that.” He took his hat off and put it on the dashboard.
“Oh,” I said, wondering, then what it was.
“Did you know that Darius has a job already?”
It was weird to hear King call his brother Darius. This whole time, he’d existed as part of King, like one of King’s limbs—or a phantom limb. Missing but felt. Always present, but invisible. “Wasn’t that part of his release? Like the condition of release?”
King’s face was tight and twisted. “He’s doing PR for the ACLU.”
“Isn’t that—isn’t that—” I took a sip of ginger ale. “I mean, isn’t that a good thing?”
“It’s not fair,” said King.
“Of course not,” I said, reassuringly. “He should never have been in prison.”
“Not that.” King sped up and passed a double tractor trailer. “That now he has a job. And I’m still stuck in the same place I’ve always been.”
“You want a job?”
“He’s coming out of prison and he’s got a support network, he’s got people rooting for him, he’s got me coming to pick him up. And I’ve spent the last three years making all that happen. What do I have to show for it? Nothing.”
I thought back to the benefit show I had helped King put on in the performance space. Booking bands, buying alcohol, counting bills at the end of the night. And that was on top of King’s GoFundMe. “You’ve done so much for him.”
“My parents’ house is double mortgaged to pay for his lawyer. They do everything for him. And I’m expected to do more.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, lamely.
“Sometimes I wonder what my life would look like if it had been me in prison.”
“Are you . . . jealous? That he’s in jail?”
I didn’t mean for my tone to sound accusatory, but King grew silent, a silence I could only read as anger. Finally he spoke. “I thought you’d understand, Belle.” We rolled over more hills. “And it’s prison, not jail.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Stop apologizing.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. There was nothing to say. I looked out for a signpost, any sign, besides mile markers. I remembered when the feds were first investigating Darius. They subpoenaed all the electronics in King’s house, so he lost his laptop our senior year of high school. He had to write his papers in the library. He never told me that; I found it out through friends.
And that was how all the information came. Rumors, drips, texts. Sometimes facts drifted to the surface: an article in NPR about Darius’s case and what it meant for the Earth First! movement, or King quoted in the New York Times about his brother’s gentle nature.
“If I had been in prison instead of him, what would we be?”
“What would . . . who be?”
“Us,” said King. “Would we be together?”
I stared out the window, but the mountains gave me no answers. Were we together now? But I knew what he meant. He wasn’t my partner, but he wasn’t my nothing, either. We were something, even if we hadn’t defined it. I tried to picture myself organizing a GoFundMe, planning a concert fundraiser, posting pictures and updates from prison. I tried to picture myself being that person—King’s person. I tried to picture myself and King together without his physical presence. Without sleeping in bed together, and waking up together. Without his fingers on my thigh, and my hands reaching.
Would I have waited for him? For how long?
Would I go three years without sex? Would I schedule my life around his phone calls? Would I go to Marion, IL every other month to see him for a few hours two days in a row?
I glanced over at King, his olive skin and strong features. His parents were outsiders in Belle Harbor, Persian Jews who somehow didn’t make it over the Gil Hodges Bridge to Brooklyn. My parents, the few times they saw him, asked me if he was an Arab. I decided to lie. “Yeah,” I said. “You’d be getting sick of me sending you letters,” I joked. “And books.”
King relaxed into the seat cushions. Then he reached out and took my hand as I asked him to pull over, once again.
That night, King wanted to have sex in the hotel room, but I was spotting. “It’s light,” I said, relieved.
“I don’t care,” he said.
And then he was bloody, and I pretended it was my first time.
King fell asleep, and I touched the blood that had flowed out from me when we had sex. It didn’t look like normal period blood. Have my period but the blood looks weird, I googled. Nothing about pregnancy came up. So I was probably not pregnant. I put my phone away and looked at King’s face.
The first time I slipped into a dumpster with King, I couldn’t believe the sense of possibility. Here was capitalism, wealth; here were $8 juices still sealed. And just beyond, I could make out the Manhattan skyline.
If he had been in prison, not Darius, then I would have a sense of purpose, I thought. I would know what was right and what was wrong. Because right now, I couldn’t figure it out. I wasn’t an ecoprimitivist; I didn’t want a world where kids died from cancer because we were against technology. And I wasn’t an anarchist; hadn’t Occupy Wall Street dissolved? Some of the older activists had been part of that, and when they talked about it, I wondered, if it was so wonderful, so powerful, why it hadn’t changed anything. Why we weren’t doing it again.
And I wasn’t a socialist, either. Because the services that were supposed to help my students hurt them—like the homeless shelters, and ACS. In Bed-Stuy, when I saw those wheat pasted black signs that said they separate kids from their parents in Brooklyn, too—I found myself nodding. Fuck liberalism. Fuck the idea that the government is going to help you.
But who was I if I didn’t believe in anything? It made me nothing. A shadow of King. A sidekick. A housewife in training decorating a Pinterest-ready classroom.
King rolled over in his sleep, and I looked at his body. I felt addicted to it, wanting him even as he slept. Was my emptiness how he liked me—why he liked me? Maybe this was the answer. He could fill me, over and over again, and pour me out, and I would fit the shapes that he wanted.
I went to the bathroom. The blood was already gone. I tried not to think about what that meant. If it meant anything at all.
“Sir, I cannot let you in.” The prison guard slapped King’s driver’s license down. “This license expired two years ago.” Her mask hung loosely around her chin.
King’s jaw set. I watched a vein pop out of his forehead. “We need to secure his release.”
“Sir.” The word was a whole sentence, saying everything. “I cannot release Inmate 56835 to you without a valid form of identification. If you cannot provide me with identification, there is nothing that I can do.”
“I have something,” I said. “I have ID.”
The guard swung her head slowly. “Ma’am, you are not on the approved list.”
King scrolled through his phone. “Here is a copy of my passport,” he said, holding the phone up to the plexiglass barrier.
The guard’s eyes flickered over the screen. “I cannot accept a copy of a ID. You need the original.”
King’s eyes bored into hers. “We drove two days to get here.”
“I’m sorry to hear that, sir.” She did not sound sorry.
“Is there any way I can get on the approved list?” I asked. King rolled his eyes. I guess I said something dumb.
The guard almost looked sympathetic. “Ma’am, the list needed to be submitted six weeks in advance in order for the Department of Corrections to run the necessary background check.”
“So what now?” King broke in.
The guard looked at me, and I tried to look as harmless as possible. “If no one is authorized for the release, then Darius will depart today in a prison van for the Greyhound Station and will be provided with a ticket to his destination as well as $40 to cover incidentals.”
“Thank you,” I said. “I really appreciate it.”
King visibly flinched. “Where’s the Greyhound Station?”
“It’s fine,” I said, touching his arm. “I can find it on my phone.”
“You have a blessed day, ma’am,” said the guard. “Next!”
We walked out of the prison into the blistering sunlight. Endless fields stretched around us, the earth made industrial. Monotonous fields of corn and alfalfa. Feed for animals, fertilized by—by what? Some chemical brew from Monsanto. I hated the Midwest. I searched on my phone. “Here,” I said, pushing my phone into King’s hands. “The Greyhound Station is only a ten minute drive. We can go there and wait for your brother.”
King dropped his head into his hands. “Fuck. Fuck!” He kicked a tire.
“It’s okay,” I said. “Look. We’ll go to the bus station. It can’t be that big. We’ll find Darius. We’ll bring him the food we brought. And we’ll drive straight home.”
King spoke through clenched teeth. “You mean drop him off at the halfway house.”
“Yeah. Exactly. And the halfway house is right near my place. So you’ll be able to see him . . . whenever.” I shook the brown bag we had, which unfortunately sounded like I was shaking treats at a dog. “His food is right here. He’ll be really happy to see us.”
“This better work, Belle.”
How is this my fault? “We don’t have another choice.”
At the Greyhound Station, we waited, we waited, we waited. I stood outside, hoping that sunlight killed Covid, trying not to think of the crowded air of the prison van. And then the van appeared, and I ran inside and grabbed King, and he ran out.
The men filed out of the vehicle wearing nondescript clothes. The clothes they came in with—blue jeans, t-shirts, some of them carrying sweatshirts and winter coats, wearing Timberland Boots. They were mixed, some Black, some white, some Hispanic, some looking Middle Eastern. And then King took a step forward, and there was Darius. They hugged, and I glimpsed his face before it disappeared into the warmth of King’s shoulder.
The hug lasted too long. King was supporting Darius.
Darius lifted his face, and King spoke. “Darius, this is my friend, Belle. She drove with me.”
“Hi,” I said, waving one hand a little bit.
Darius nodded at me. His face looked like King’s, but white and gaunt while King’s was olive and filled out. His breathing was shallow, open-mouthed. “I remember you.” His neck strained. It took a moment for him to fill his lungs with air to breathe out his words. “You wrote me letters from the tree.”
“Umm, no,” I said. “That wasn’t me.”
He nodded again, and King steered him towards the car. “Here’s some food, man.”
Darius looked inside approvingly. “This looks great. Thanks.”
But he didn’t eat any. He sat in the car and put the bag by his feet, then leaned his head back.
We drove east. Sometimes Darius coughed. There was a strange energy in the car. I had expected to feel love, warmth, closeness, gratitude—something big, something to fill up the space. Instead the car felt more empty. This was it? This was their reunion?
“Just let me know if you want to stop, man,” said King.
“Thanks,” said Darius. And then they were silent for another five miles, punctuated only by Darius’s coughs.
“We were planning on driving straight through,” King said, breaking the silence.
“Sure,” said Darius.
From the backseat, I tried to see Darius’s breathing. And then I couldn’t stand it anymore. “Darius,” I asked through my mask, “do you have Covid?”
He shrugged. “I got sick about a month ago. The doctor gave me some cough drops. I didn’t take them, though. They contained honey.”
“And—you’ve been sick this whole time?” King was trying to make eye contact with me in the rearview mirror, but I resisted. Darius didn’t say anything. “Darius, can you breathe?”
He gave a depressing chuckle.
Now I found King’s eyes. “King, maybe we should go to the hospital.”
King tightened his grip on the wheel. “No.”
“Why?”
Darius spoke. “Belle, it’s really nice of you.” He paused to breathe. “I don’t have health insurance.”
“So what?” I said. “It’s your life.”
“Hospitals are just there to make money,” said King. “They don’t do anything except watch you die.”
“King, my mom is a doctor.”
He paused, then said icily, “Don’t you think that proves my point?”
I flinched. “Fuck you.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I do about this,” I said. “Darius, you need help.”
“I’m fine,” he mumbled.
“See?” said King. “He’s fine.”
“He’s not fine.”
Still the fields swooshed past us. My hands were shaking. “King, he can’t breathe. Millions of people are dying from Covid. Okay, maybe not millions. But you’ve heard the sirens. He needs to see a doctor.”
“You think he’s going to see a doctor in the hospital, Belle? No. He’s going to die in the waiting room just like all those other people.”
“Not if we go to the hospital here. If we wait until we get back to the city, yeah, that might happen. But the hospitals here are empty.”
“I’m not going to drop my brother off to die somewhere.”
Darius shook his head back and forth. “Guys, guys. Let’s not fight.”
“Fine. Let’s stop at a CVS.”
“What’s a CVS going to do?”
A pulse oximeter, I thought. A thermometer. A pharmacist who can call an ambulance, and then he’ll have no choice but to go. “I have to puke,” I declared, and the car screeched to the shoulder.
Okay. I actually didn’t, this time. But I walked away from the car towards a field of alfalfa that smelled like burning and leaned down. I waited, hoping that this would work. And eventually it did, because King came out. “You okay, Belle?”
I wiped my face and looked up at him. “Yeah. Are you mad at me?”
“Why do you always think I’m mad at you?” His hand reached for my side; I curved into it. I was watery near him. I leaned into the pressure there, about to apologize, but stopped. We kissed, and I hoped he couldn’t taste my lie. “I love you,” he whispered. His hands moved over my waist and hips, and I looped my fingers around the back of his neck, making a net that would keep him near me. “I love you too,” I whispered.
“Listen. I know you’re worried about Darius. He’s going to be okay.”
I looked towards the car as though I could see something there. Of course I couldn’t. “King, what if we get to the halfway house and they don’t let him in? Then he’ll have to go to Woodhull.”
“That’s not going to happen, Belle.” He hooked a finger between my shirt and jeans, let it rest on the bare skin. If I was water, he was lightning, and together we were an ocean made electric. “Trust me.”
I sometimes hated King, and sometimes loved King, but I always, always wanted to fuck King. I searched his face for the answer to the question I hadn’t asked, the question my body was asking. He closed his eyes and kissed me again. Every time we had sex—no, every time we kissed—no, every time he looked at me—I thought it was going to be the last time. I thought there would never be another moment, ever again. This time, when we kissed, his hand unbuttoned my pants, and I leaned into him, like a ship opening to salt water. Something breaking, something beautiful, and then a storm.
We walked back to the car together, hip to hip. Darius was sprawled out in the backseat, his head leaning back against the window. “You okay?” I asked him.
He gave a silent thumbs up.
“Mind if I drive?” I asked King.
“I should probably drive.”
I looked at Darius, but his eyes were closed. “What about your brother?”
“What do you mean?”
“I’ll drive and you can help him,” I said, getting into the front seat before King could stop me.
I pulled out from the shoulder and onto the road. King dozed in the front seat: like always, I was energized after orgasm, while he was sleepy. There had to be a hospital somewhere. Didn’t farmers get injured all the time? Losing fingers, chemical burns, stuff like that? I wished I knew something, anything.
The road unspooled before us, humming and empty. Straight and flat. We were nowhere. I drove ten, fifteen, twenty miles, waiting for a sign for a hospital, and then, when there was no sign, waiting for a sign for an exit. There was only the humming of the road. And then there was more humming, because my phone was buzzing. “Hey Tatiana,” I said, pressing the buttons on the car’s audio screen. “You’re on speakerphone.”
King shook himself awake.
“How’s it going?” she asked. It was always strange hearing American-isms in her Russian accent, the same way I felt when I heard my father say “like” in a sentence.
King glanced into the backseat. I watched concern flicker over his face—the first moments of remembering where we were and realizing that things might not be okay. “We got Darius,” he said.
“Is it okay for me to post an update for the GoFundMe?” Tatiana asked.
“Sure,” said King.
There was an awkward silence. “What do you want it to say?” Tatiana prodded. I could practically see her in her room in Brooklyn, fingers poised over the keyboard.
“We’re on our way home with Darius,” I said. “Thanks for all your support?”
“Sure,” said Tatiana. “Send a picture over, too.”
New pictures meant more shares, which meant more posts, which meant more funds. I looked in the rearview mirror. Darius had not stirred. “Darius? Darius, are you awake?”
His shoulders lifted as he tried to breathe: a gasping inhale, then exhale.
“Thanks, Tatiana,” King said, then hung up.
“Why’d you hang up?”
“Why’d you try to wake up Darius?”
“He’s not even in good enough shape for us to take a picture of him. And I’m supposed to pretend everything is fine?”
“No one is asking you to pretend anything, Belle. Why do you feel like you always have to pretend?”
I kept my hands steady. “Look, I’m getting off at the next exit. Darius needs help.”
King turned in the passenger’s seat and reached his hand out to Darius. “Darius, how are you doing, man? You okay?”
“Don’t bring me—to the hospital—” Darius exhaled.
The fields moved past, monotonous, green, unnamed. “You’re really sick, Darius,” I said. “We’re trying to help you.”
“Don’t leave me,” he said. I tore my eyes from the road and met his in the rearview mirror and nearly hit a discarded, shredded-up tire.
“Sorry!” I yelped. Uncertainty spun within me as fast as the car’s wheels. “Darius, what about urgent care? They won’t keep you there.”
We passed some white low-slung buildings: egg farming. I tried not to think of the horrors contained within, the birds birthing, over and over again, pushing out almost-life ceaselessly, white moons dropping from their bodies. King spoke. “They can’t cure Covid. They won’t do anything there.”
Straight ahead through the windshield: a brilliant sky, aching with spring. Below: the unceasing green fields that at first glance are beautiful, but, closer, are another factory, industrial corn and alfalfa, poisoned earth, poisoned leaves, poisoned insects, poisoned weeds, poisoned farmers—and us, in the hermetically sealed car, breathing in Darius’s poisoned breath. The unnatural landscape, natural disease. Or was it the other way around?
And suddenly, there it was. I was in danger. King was in danger. And—was there—in me—also in danger—
“We have to go to CVS,” I said. “I need a pregnancy test.”
King leapt up so quickly that the car tilted, his strength unbalancing our metal and rubber ship sailing across the continent. But he said nothing as I took the next exit, pulled to the shoulder, and googled pharmacy locations as the corn waved at us in its loneliness.
It turns out you don’t pee on the stick. You’re supposed to pee in a cup and put the stick in it. Just another way the media has lied to us!
While I waited, I checked my texts. Send picture for update when you can, Tatiana wrote. There were also Instagram notifications and an email from my professor confirming that my student teaching practicum was submitted. I hope this email finds you well. In these trying times . . . . I scrolled past it.
I took my phone out and took a picture of the pee cup with the stick in it and sent it to Tatiana. Not for update. 🙁, I wrote.
She called immediately. “Are you pregnant?”
I was sitting on the bathroom floor of a Starbucks while Darius and King waited in the car. Neither stubborn boy would agree to urgent care, but I got them to at least stop at a CVS, where we bought Acetaminophen for Darius’s fever and a humidifier for his cough. A humidifier that could do absolutely nothing in a car. I scooted my butt closer to the cup and tried to peer in. “Yeah,” I said, poking at the stick. “I see a line.” I waited for that feeling to come back, the feeling in the car with the open sky and the knowing, but I didn’t feel anything.
“You’ll be okay,” Tatiana said. “Do they have Plan B there?”
I dumped the pee in the toilet and flushed. “Hold on a sec,” I said, and took a picture of the stick. The line was really pink—more magenta. Did that mean something? Then I threw that out, too. “Sorry, I couldn’t hear you.”
“Belle—” I could see her running her hands through her hair, twisting it up, her nervous habit, “whose is it?”
“What do you mean?” I asked, turning on the water. “It’s mine.”
A Russian curse on the other end of the line, then laughing. And then I was laughing, too, and crying.
“Belle! This is why you do not use dumpstered condoms. No. More. Dumpster. Condoms.”
I couldn’t tell if I was crying because I was laughing or laughing because I was crying. “Do you really think that King gets his condoms from a dumpster?”
“Probably! From where else would he get them?”
“I don’t know. The store?” I wiped my nose on the back of my wrist. “I guess I always figured that he shoplifted them.”
“And you’re not on birth control.”
It was half a question and half a statement. I thought about trying to explain to Tatiana how precarious all of it felt. My relationship with King. If it was even a relationship. Which it was not. How I was afraid that if I took any step towards him, the whole edifice would shatter. And so going on birth control would have come too close to promising myself that it would happen again. That each time wasn’t the last time. “I just figured that . . . like that it wouldn’t . . . I don’t know. I didn’t know he would still . . . .” I swallowed. “Birth control takes like a month to work.”
“Mmm,” Tatiana murmured. “Well . . . now you’re fucked.”
“I know!” I said, wiping tears from my face. “What the fuck!”
Tatiana dissolved into riotous laughter.
I smiled at the face I saw in the mirror, blurry with tears. “Hold on. I have to wash my face.”
“I’ll get Plan B for you at the pharmacy,” Tatiana said. “You don’t need a prescription.”
“Thanks. Yeah it would be a pain to get it here.” Someone knocked on the door. “I have to get going. I miss you.”
“Wait,” she said. “How many weeks pregnant are you?”
“Umm, I was supposed to get my period yesterday. So that makes me . . . two weeks pregnant?”
“Let me check,” she said. “That doesn’t sound right.” I stared at the door. “Belle, you’re four weeks pregnant.”
“No I’m not,” I said. I pulled up the calendar on my phone. “I had my period four weeks ago.”
“You start counting from the first day of your last period,” she said. “I’m reading it on WebMD.”
I started laughing again. “I hate this,” I said. “Okay. So can I still take PlanB?” I wiped a few more tears from my eyes, and then I started crying a lot.
“Let me look this up. I don’t think so. I’ll call you back.”
“Thanks,” I said, wiping the tears away. I wasn’t sobbing or anything like that. Just a lot of water everywhere, running down my face into my chest and shirt, snot on my sleeves. And then, even though it was so, so, gross, I slid down until I was lying on my back on the tile floor. I put my thumbs in my belly button and pointed my index fingers down to my legs, and I felt my hands on my body and imagined what was growing inside me.
It’s not like I was struggling with a choice. That would mean that I had a decision to make. But there was no decision: I’d have to get rid of it. I just couldn’t put it in the words I knew. It didn’t feel like reproductive freedom. It didn’t feel like control over my own body. It felt, instead, like someone had made the choice for me by ensuring that I wouldn’t be eligible for paid time off until I’d worked a certain amount of months. And that daycare was too expensive. The world I lived in didn’t want me to have a baby, and so I wouldn’t have it. I breathed in and felt my low belly rise and fall, and I cried a little more for the poppy seed inside me, splitting and growing and splitting and growing. “I’m sorry,” I said to it. It didn’t matter if it was alive or not. You can love something that’s not alive. You can love your future.
And then I realized that there was still one life I had left to save. One life, that is, besides my own.
I carried some ice water back to the car for King and Darius. “Sorry I took so long,” I said. “It’s positive.”
“Congratulations,” said Darius, at the same time King said “Oh, wow,” and took his hat off.
“Crazy, huh?” I said, plopping next to King, who was sitting in the driver’s seat. “I’ll take care of it when we get back.”
“Do you need me to do anything?” asked King. He looked worried.
“No, that’s okay. Tatiana is going to—” King’s expression froze me. “What?”
“Tatiana?”
The car suddenly felt very hot. It was too much to look at King, so I looked at Darius. “Yeah. Umm. She called while I was in the bathroom. So . . . .”
“You told Tatiana before you told me?”
The pain in King’s voice thudded. “I—” The truth was, it hadn’t even crossed my mind to tell King first. Whose is it? Tatiana had asked, not knowing that I was sleeping with King, and my dumbass answer: It’s mine. “I’m sorry. I’m such a dumbass.”
“Fucking shit, Belle! I’m not calling you a dumbass.”
“It’s yours,” I said. “Like, it’s definitely yours.”
“What are you talking about? Of course it’s mine. Who else’s would it possibly be?”
“We shouldn’t be having this conversation,” I said, desperate to stay in the parking lot, but also desperate to escape. “I’m going to have an abortion as soon as I can.”
“You’re going to kill it?” King got out of the car and walked away. He wiped his face and stared at the sky as though drinking in the blue.
And then the sirens came. Slow at first, far away. They pulled into the parking lot. I climbed out of the car and waved my arms, directing them over. “Here,” I said, when the EMTs came out. “This is Darius Kneiger. He’s having trouble breathing.”
King followed behind the ambulance while I stayed at the Starbucks, drinking an oat milk latte and drawing. My pen followed the same instructions I’d given my students, that abstract drawing video I’d posted in another lifetime, and for the first time, I listened to my own voice.
Look: here’s a room of bubbles. A room of poppy seeds. A room of triangles, of rectangles, of squares, of hearts.
I call him King; his parents named him Eric Kneiger. Two names for the same life.
Here’s a shape that has no name. And another, and another.
Here’s a map of my pain. Here is my body, here is my phone. Here is the Communist Manifesto and Adam Smith. A Modest Proposal of tiny bodies. There’s my father’s green card; there’s my mother’s asylum application. The seas rise around Belle Harbor. The virus sweeps the streets of New York City until they empty.
This whole time, I had been thinking that I needed a theory to make sense of the world, thinking that I couldn’t decide anything. But I’d forgotten that existing was an action. The act of living can be a rebellion.
For a long time I sat, letting the pen lead my hand. Letting the ink decide what to draw. I wondered if Darius wanted his life saved. If King did. I touched the drawing. But the only answers there were the ones I created. The only place I would be able to find an answer was the place inside myself.
