The GamE

I. Saturday night

We were playing the game again at Darren’s dinner party. The rules were simple: One person threw out a controversial topic or big idea, and everyone else offered a proposition related to it that they may or may not believe. It was a variant of two truths and a lie, invented over several long dinners when no one wanted to leave without finishing the next bottle of wine.

For instance, earlier tonight, after dinner concluded, Darren said: “Proposition: The United States Women’s Soccer Team and the pay thing.”

Orit: “Of course they deserve to be paid more than the men.”

Jim: “Fill a 20,000-person stadium 20 times a year and then ask for the same money as the men.”

Darren: “Ban all straight women.”

S: “Abolish salaries in professional sports, make everything sponsor-driven. Athletes become influencers.”

S laughed as she talked. I wished I had thought her thoughts. She frequently bewitched me into believing her.

I didn’t, in fact, believe that female soccer players should make money as if they were influencers, which I supposed meant having salacious social media accounts, posting about their fruit bowls and footwear, attracting subscribers and advertisers. But part of the game’s informal rules were to never challenge a proposition directly; if you didn’t like or agree with something, just raise the stakes, come up with something more outrageous. Taking the questions seriously made the game worse.

S chose the next topic: the afterlife.

I said that it doesn’t exist.

“If you don’t believe in the afterlife, how do you account for ghosts?” S asked.

“Well, I’ve never seen them,” said Jim. It wasn’t his turn. He stood up to get a new bottle of wine from his galley kitchen, which was two narrow banks of matte white cabinets and chrome appliances.

 “You mean you don’t believe in them,” S said to his back.

“No, I mean, I’ve never seen them, so I’m not obligated to account for them.” Jim lifted the massive wine opener out of its case and applied it to the bottle, which was dwarfed by the complexity of the opener. Cogs turned against pumps, and the cork lifted.

 “Come again?” said Darren.

“It’s like aliens, or mutants, or even dust mites. I literally have never seen them so I don’t have to alter my thoughts or actions or beliefs in response to them.”

“The dust mites part is a lie,” Darren whispered to me, brushing my hair back absent-mindedly. We were at Jim’s apartment, where he lived with a large dog, currently spending the night at the kennel. The apartment was minimal and tasteful but full of crumbs and dust bunnies in the corners, the prerogative of a single well-resourced man.

“What if perceiving ghosts doesn’t involve sight?” said Orit.

“Wait, I want to follow up on Jim’s claim,” said S. “So have you ever seen a planet up close?”

“Yes, of course.” Jim possessed a telescope in his Catskills house.

 “Ok, bad example,” she laughed again. “Have you ever seen a polar bear?”

“No. But other people have and have documented it.”

“So if I document a ghost, you’d be obliged to account for its existence.”

“Yes,” Jim acknowledged. “But I’d be suspicious of your documentation.”

Orit tried to back up S: “What if it’s not a photograph or miasma that would be tangible but a sound or a feeling. How do you document a feeling?” Her hair was a massive tangle of loose dark curls, and her eyes were so black it was impossible to distinguish pupil from iris. Her hands were like a second speaker for her, moving before her center slowly: Just what I said, just what I said, they echoed.

“You don’t,” said Jim. He finished his second glass of Bordeaux and stood up again, walking toward the kitchen. He was a tall, solidly built, restless man, who despite all his money, had never found life easy, and now found it half gone, which made him wander more.

“I can. She wonders why she’s spending the evening with us,” I laughed, nodding at S, whose eyes had shut momentarily, allowing us all to stare at her. S had the sort of beauty that caused people to look; she was ethnically indeterminate, small and muscled, with an affinity for sleeveless dresses and heels that flattered her, her hair dark and in natural waves, like a petite Athena or pliable superhero.

“What feeling can you document?” S said to Orit.

“Jim is feeling mild disappointment and chronic dissatisfaction evidenced by getting up mid-conversation,” Orit said. “There, I’ve documented a feeling. Is it more real to everyone if I write it down?” Jim and Orit had dated unsuccessfully some years back and now were friends without acrimony.

“Wrong,” yelled Jim from the hall. “I just had to pee.”

Darren massaged my temples and played with my hair as if I were the absent dog. He loved Jim and told him so frequently, and Jim laughed. It would be, I told Darren, as if I loved Beyoncé. Exactly, he said, you are moved by her in a way that possession would ruin. I felt that way about S, I suppose, admiring in a way that was almost beyond normal friendship. S visibly moved most people around her: I could see Jim following her with his eyes as well.

Jim, Darren, Orit, and I met at our first real jobs, different offices, but same enterprises, editing and designing and that sort of thing. Now we were three or four jobs on; some of us on our second spouse. More recently, we’d begun to lose pieces of our families—parents, somewhat predictably, and less predictably, an accumulation of early deaths—one friend in a terrible swimming accident, another to cancer.

Among us, S had endured a series of tragedies in her youth that would make anyone else melancholic but had for her almost the opposite effect. She was temperamentally giddy, almost gleeful, in a way that was not maddening but charming. It was as if the tragedies had happened to someone else long ago. Her mother had a debilitating and institutionalizing mental illness that came so early and swiftly that S effectively lost her early, in her teens. (I had forgotten if it was something ominous such as schizophrenia or tragic like dementia and was now too embarrassed to ask again.) Her first marriage was to our friend Mark, a confirmed asshole who cheated on her. Jim and Darren even debated before the wedding: Do we tell her? Mark had a type and a pattern.

But then they looked forward to a baby, who came very early and died a few hours old. Occasionally S would refer to her first child, and we took that to mean this lost one. After the loss and the divorce, she remarried quickly, someone wealthy and distant to us, and had a son, whose father doted on him and was happy to have S go out for the evening to meet us.

As precise as she was effusive, S was a biochemist at a tech startup and was relatively new to our group, having known us just 5 years, not 15. We took her in toward the end of their relationship, after the death, when Mark would show up already drunk, and she was, for her, distraught. At one of the last dinners where Mark also came, she arrived with her hair wild and uncombed, and it flew around her face as if wind were blowing; I brushed a small white stain off the front of her dark shirt. It fell off easily, but she looked completely surprised, as if such a thing had never happened to her. Mark left her soon after (he was an asshole, remember), and we never forgave him.

Unlike S, I had lots of melancholy, little tragedy—my ratio was off. We were inverses: The worst thing that ever happened to me was my parent’s divorce in middle school, and my heart-broken father driving to the other side of the country. When I saw him the next summer, he said, “Have you gained weight?” I had a tendency to worry over such small comments as if someone had really hurt me, which they hadn’t.

I sometimes imagined horrible things happening to explain how I felt: my childhood dog getting hit by a bus and dragged down the street as people watched and pointed and I stood aghast; getting caught in the subway doors as they closed and being dragged along until the passengers screamed at the conductor to stop and making it but just barely; hiking in a forest alone and eating the wrong berry and dying alone. I didn’t feel good about these fantasies, but they kept coming to me in the early morning hours or as I drifted to sleep at night. I wrote down the scenarios in a notebook by my bed, as if to get them out.

I had told Orit about the fantasies, and she sympathized. She too had had little disadvantage: her parents loved her, were still alive, were financially stable; her siblings companionable though distant; life had preceded since college as a series of career triumphs, one magazine after another hiring her until at last she was art director for a national women’s magazine. The decoupling from Jim was possibly the worst thing that happened to her.

Orit now asked a follow up. “Jim, how do you account for scientific phenomena that you can’t see, like gravity or momentum?”

“That’s deduction not induction, honey,” he said. “We don’t need examples; we have proofs.”

Orit rolled her eyes. “Ok, ok. Does S’s dead child not exist then since it wasn’t born and no one saw it?”

S flinched and nearly gagged. Orit turned pale. “Oh my god, I’m so stupid. I just—please, please take my apology.”

S rearranged her features; you could almost see her inner temperature go from cold to warm. She slowly opened her arms, and Orit leaned into them. I heard S say to her: “It’s nothing to me, you will see,” and it appeared like all was forgiven.

Darren arrived with a bottle: “Another glass?”

S rose and said it was late. Jim whispered something in her ear, and she tilted her head, agreeing or demurring, I couldn’t tell. I followed her out the door, riding the elevator with her and saying goodnight on the street corner, as she smoothed down her hair and waited for her ride.

II: Tuesday/Wednesday

Orit called me to tell me about the strangest thing that happened to her two days ago. She had called Jim the morning after our last get together to offer to host the next dinner at her place in the far reaches of the city—a ways out but still on transit. She had a yard and a porch and a flock of starlings woke her in the mornings. She had plenty of room for everyone. Jim had equivocated. Usually we came to his place, but maybe it was good to mix it up, he said, leaving it open. She hung up and lingered on her small porch above her small yard, thinking once again how lucky she was to have found this place before the neighborhood started to be discovered.

Orit would say these things carelessly—the neighborhood was discovered, as if the black and brown people living there until she moved in had not already been there—and we would move on from them without comment, as she was so lovely and it was not intentional and she was not from here originally. Or at least, S and I would move on after talking about it. We weren’t sure Jim or Darren noticed.

Anyway, she was thinking this about the neighborhood and her home, she told me, when suddenly something fell from the sky practically on her lap, something heavy and dark. Startled, she went first to a very dark thought—it was a piece of a person from an airplane accident above. She rose and looked to where it had fallen, and it was in fact a bird, not a starling, as it had a beautiful streak of blue on its chest.

She went over to the bird and saw its chest pumping in and out. Its head was turned to one side, and one eye looked at her as she came into view above it. She was about to put her hand under it to put the bird in her garden so it could try to struggle to live when she saw that its head was nearly severed. There was a great gash on the side of its neck that lay on her porch. To move it would certainly kill it. So she was faced with a problem: actively put it out of what must be considerable pain or attempt to move it and risk inflicting more pain and probably death anyway. She went inside to think about it, looking for numbers of local animal hospitals, then realized that she was being ridiculous—this was something she should handle herself. When she went outside again, she was not sure what she was going to do, though she was leaning toward trying to save it, against the odds. Yet the bird had vanished.

There was nothing to show it had been there, no feathers, no stripe of blood, and she half thought she had imagined it. She looked back through the door from her small porch to the kitchen and saw her cat, Booker T, sitting inside looking out the glass, twitching its tail. Did she imagine, too, that he was licking his lips?

She laughed as she told the story, but it was clear she was upset by it. I gathered the bird’s injury and disappearance truly bothered her, as she repeated several times: “It just wasn’t there.” Usually she moved so swiftly from one thing to the next as she talked that I sometimes had trouble following her. But on this call, during which I pruned and watered my own potted plants on my small balcony, she took long pauses before saying something she had mentioned already.

I hung up, and the incident left my mind until Orit’s next call, the following day. “Booker T,” she said breathlessly. “He’s been hit by a car or something and is at the hospital.” It took me a second to understand she meant the animal hospital.

“He’s been sedated, and they are working on him,” she continued. “I’m outside, going crazy.”

“I’m so sorry,” I said. “Do they think he’ll be ok?”

“I don’t know, no, probably not, it’s 50/50 or 25/75, I forget. It was so strange,” she told me. She’d come home from work that day, and he was not in the house. She had a small cat door that allowed him to wander her yard, which was bordered by an invisible sonic fence, while she was at work. Her long back yard was separated from the neighboring townhomes to either side by an actual wooden fence, which provided an illusion of privacy, as one could peek over while standing. As she walked back through her flowers and plants into the underbrush calling his name, she startled a bevy of flies. She looked down to where they buzzed off from, and there was Booker T, lying in his own pale vomit. She screamed and picked him up without thinking and ran to the animal hospital four blocks away.

At the vet’s, she was able to stare at him on the table as they prodded him. He looked as if he had been hit by a car—there was even a faint rut in his fur, like a tread—but there he had been in her own yard. Had someone in the neighborhood who recognized him then carried him over the fence and placed him in the yard so she would find him? And who would do that rather than calling her number on his collar tag? And the flies? It was as if he had lain there all day, slowly dying. She couldn’t imagine what he had gone through. Even when she had carried him, running, his vomit and blood staining her, he didn’t move or mew, as if he was already preparing for death. Even if someone had placed him in her yard, how had he ended up in the bushes? Had he dragged himself there, as if he knew this was it for him?

As she thought about it, waiting for him as the vets did their work, she began to consider these questions. She felt targeted. Someone who knew her and knew her cat had put him in the yard after a terrible accident—perhaps this person had even hurt Booker T.

I reassured her that this would be sadistic, bordering on the pathological. Couldn’t there be other explanations? I understood her panic and worry. She was not irrational, I told her. As concerned as I was for her, I also noticed myself enjoying the conversation. I liked feeling useful.

“Could he have gotten in a fight with a raccoon or other cat or eaten something off?”

“No, nothing,” she cried. “He eats the same food every day. There’s nothing to eat in my yard . . .” She slowed and said. “I’ll call you back.

It took a day, and it was all I could do not to text her. I was mostly unoccupied these days; my own freelance worked had slowed to the occasional copy editing gig for a fitness magazine or a short service piece for a friend of a friend. I felt like aging was the worst thing that could happen to a fitness journalist—other than getting fat. I was two for two. I wanted to write about this, but the dark side of body image was left to one or two contract magazine writers at the very big newsmagazines: serious topic, serious writer, not the workaday freelancer who has filled copy for years. In between gigs, I tried growing new plants on my patio, moving beyond household herbs and cherry tomatoes to unusual varieties I’d find in the local garden store, which was run by a happy octogenarian who freely suggested plants via their Latinate names. Earlier this week, she told me that the capsicum chinense or the habanero chili would give me more energy “down there,” as she put it. I declined that one.

When Orit finally called, I was happy to interrupt copy edits to a piece on “8 new moves to plump your rump.” Booker T had died of poisoning.

III: Saturday

I texted S and told her Orit needed some distraction. The death of Booker T had sent her to a dark place. Another bird had fallen in her yard, and she was convinced that the yard and her home itself were being poisoned.

I had been out for drinks with S a handful of times. It was inevitably tough on my self-esteem. One time, a man at the end of the bar where we were sitting sent a drink via the bartender to the “exotic beauty.” We knew it was not me. I had asked S once where she was from, originally, and she said New Jersey. But she knew what I meant. Visually, she could be from the Caribbean or the Bosporus. Together, S and Orit would toss their hair, and drinks would start flying at us from around the room. Both were dark and alluring, but S was angular and small, like an ethnically vague Audrey Hepburn, whereas Orit practically seeped out from herself, her hair flying, her arms moving, always talking.

It could be dispiriting, unless I was a couple glasses in and feeling my own jokes. I felt like the elderly owner of the garden store, winking about capsicum, pretending to be clever but just coming off as dirty. Last week, the old witch had waved aconitum napellus at me with gloved hands and said, this one needs handling with care. Ha, I thought at the time, knowing that aconite was quite deadly to touch or eat, though some herbalists downtown would still sell it to you as women’s bane and claim it healed all kinds of ailments.

I’m not entirely invisible, but with my extra weight and round pale face and dark page-boy hair, I tend to attract a particular type, depending on the neighborhood (well-muscled young men in Flatbush, butch dykes in Park Slope, portly comic nerds in Gowanus). My role here was to nod and ask questions. We sat at the back of the bar, where we had a view of the bearded men standing in front with beers in their hands by the window to the street.

“I feel like someone is watching me, but he or she is not real,” said Orit.

S nodded and stroked the back of her hand. “I know,” she said. “It’s hard. It feels so real.”

“It does,” said Orit. “Sometimes I reach out to pet him and feel him move beneath my hand, but nothing’s there. Other times, I am sure I am being watched.”

“So do you feel like you are being watched by Booker T, or the poisoner?” I asked.

“I don’t know, sometimes either, sometimes both,” she said.

“But there is no real poisoner, no?” S asked.

“What do you mean?” said Orit.

“It was of course an accident.”

“I don’t know.”

“Well how could it not be?” S asked.

“I don’t know.” Orit started to cry. S looked at her strangely as if she was trying to decide whether to be sympathetic or angry. It’s unnerving to see a decision pass so obviously across someone’s face. It made me uncertain, which was uncomfortable. 

At this moment, Darren entered and I waved to him so he would see us.

“Honey, I’m so sorry,” Darren said to Orit. He hugged her and ordered a whiskey neat. “Let’s distract ourselves with a game.”

“Yes, let’s,” said S.

“Too soon?” I asked.

“Of course not,” said S. “She lost a beloved small creature. But they are hard to keep.” She laughed after she said this, though I didn’t see the joke.

Darren suggested the topic of mixed drinks.

“Completely acceptable of course,” said Orit firmly through her tears.

“Completely not,” said Darren. “Disgusting.”

“What is this, the 19th century?” Orit asked. “Anyone can love who they love.”

Everyone was silent for a moment, confused.

“Did you think he said mixed race?” I asked.

S began laughing again. “Thank you,” she said to Orit, “for that rousing defense.” It was the first time I could recall hearing her use sarcasm and that made me uncomfortable. It was like watching your parents fight.

Orit tried to make a joke out of it. “I like both mixed drinks and mixed races very much.” She blew her nose loudly as Jim joined us. Darren must have texted him we were here.

“What’s this?” he said. “You started without me?” Though he was addressing the group, he looked at S as he spoke. She had the glowing quality of a statue at night, smooth and enigmatic.

Jim’s presence seemed to knock something loose in Orit. She turned to S and asked a question that surprised us all: “Do you know anything about Booker T and the bird business?”

“What do you mean?” S said.

“The sudden deaths? Poison? I mean, this is your line of work, isn’t it?”

 S’s voice turned low.

“Do you know how it could happen?”

“Easily,” she said, and threw a twenty on the table and stood up. “Your neighbor bought rat poison or the corner store cleaned with bleach and hosed it into your yard or your other neighbor planted nightshade or wolfsbane, and the animals were curious. The world is full of potential killers. You don’t need to be a specialist to know that.” She paused. “But to feel absence—you need a sensitivity born of experience. Perhaps you now have some too?” She walked out of the bar.

Jim got up and followed S. We could see him striding forth on the sidewalk in front of the bar, trying to catch up to the long tail of her shadow.

“What was that?” Darren asked. “The world is full of killers? Melodramatic much?”

I shrugged and sipped my mixed drink. For some reason, my father came to mind. I imagined him standing on a high cliff, staring at the Pacific Ocean. I looked at Orit, brooding against the wall. S was right, though; she had proven Jim wrong. Orit would be haunted by invisible forces that would make her look at the material world and doubt what she saw. She would live with an absence that would change her thoughts and actions. We would have lots to talk about.