by Lily Nobel

Today I went to get a better sense of how large the giant sea turtle living in the pond behind my apartment actually was. I’d been beginning to suspect after more than a year of watching her through my kitchen window that she was an ancient sea turtle, based on her size. 

I’d seen the bones of an ancient sea turtle in the Cleveland Nature & Science Museum a few months back. East and I drank red wine from a Nalgene while negotiating the packed halls and reverberations of strangers’ voices. There aren’t many places in Cleveland that are ever all that busy, but it was a Saturday in the summer. The blue plastic informational panel said turtles had existed for more than 80 million years. Based on the skeleton, they used to be much larger. I generally can’t conjure pictures in my mind very well, but I saw it clear as day: the Cretaceous period, broad expanses of seas, shallow and deep. 

All that day of work I sliced blocks of cheese and heavy, sweaty hams. I folded my fingers away from the hungry blade of the machine. I shielded my mind from my surroundings by imagining the turtle by my apartment’s leathery skin, heavy shell, imagined her in a planet of water. Lately, she’d been coming up out of the pond to lie on the beach for the last few light hours of the day. The nice part of fall was ending and she knew that. I wondered, watching her through my window as she lay in the weak sun, if she was getting ready to die. I thought that if the turtle died and winter started in close succession I wouldn’t know what I’d do with myself. 

But practically speaking, if I was ever going to know if she was an ancient sea turtle or an unusually large contemporary one, I needed to get around to investigating. 

I put my work clothes into the coin operated washing machine in the basement. I took a fast, hot shower. When I started the job at the deli, I felt like the weight of sweat could be a purpose. This feeling faded fast. Now I felt invisible coats of meat juice and lemon-scented floor sanitizer under my breasts and tickling the sole of my foot. I had to scorch it off of myself. When I was clean-ish, clean enough, I took a measuring tape from the junk drawer and headed down to the water. 

I’d second guessed moving into this apartment because I found the pond so off-putting. Why would there be a pond, maybe fifty feet in diameter, behind an apartment complex directly off the highway in Ohio? It fit its surroundings, though — sickly reeds, sand that was actually crumbled concrete. Maybe the water of the pond was snow and ice that had melted one spring and never got to leave. But there was no human litter, my hypothetical final straw, so in the end it wasn’t a deciding factor. It was cheap, cheaper than I could believe at first, considering the roof wasn’t caving in or something. That was the deciding factor. 

I’d first seen the turtle when I walked down to the shore one of my first nights living here. It’d been warm and thinly breezy outside, the weather that makes me nostalgic for cigarettes, for smoking on the balcony of my junior year dorm. 

I lit up, then saw the turtle watching me from a dozen feet out into the water. She had a pristine head, skin somewhere between leather and scales. She looked at me through golf ball-sized eyes, exhaling out of her nose. I awkwardly put the cigarette out in the sand and put the butt in the front pocket of my jeans. It stained sticky yellow through the denim because I forgot to take it out when I put the pants through the laundry. I only wear those jeans to work nowadays. 

Since then, I looked for her through my window that overlooked the pond regularly, but that was the most interaction that seemed appropriate. I feared she’d gotten a bad first impression. 

Now I walked down to the water, gravel crunching under my sneakers. I was wearing an old sweater with holes in the sleeves and nothing under it. I shivered. My nipples were hard. The light was gray. The sun was slipping down apologetically over the flat horizon. I grew up in a place with mountains, very immediate mountains, where the horizon was tall and contoured. Sometimes the endless creep of the land in Ohio occupied me like a sad poem, and sometimes it was just depressing in an annoying way. 

When I arrived, the turtle was on the beach, if you could call it a beach. Her chin was in the gravel and her eyes were open. Her skin was a warm tan, broad shell rich brown, and her eyes a jewel-y black that shimmered in the dark. She was weighty and glorious. 

I started to stretch my measuring tape as I approached, to justify myself. 

The giant turtle spoke to me in an old language. 

She said, “★★★★★★.”

She answered my question without me asking. I understood, like the waves soft and strong meeting the small coasts of the continents back then, the skinny spangles of that quiet planet of water, that she was an ancient sea turtle. Not the offspring of a lineage of ancient sea turtles, but she herself was 83 million years old. She asked my name. She was pleased to finally meet me formally and wouldn’t mind if I measured her. 

I no longer needed to measure her, because she had already answered my question, but I accepted her invitation anyway. This is how I began to chart 83 million years: stretching the tape from the tip of her bony tale to the end of her beak. Then her wingspan. I tried not to touch her, though the way she spoke put me at ease.  I didn’t know how to speak to her, but she heard my question when it was still inside of my head.

“★★★★★,” She replied. 

Yes, it was strange she’d ended up in a pond smaller than a municipal pool in one of the highway’s dirty pockets, but sometimes you stay in one place and things happen around you. And yet, she told me, she was thousands and thousands of miles away from home. 

I finished my measurements. At the longest parts, she was six and a half feet, with the distance from the tip of one of her front flippers to the other more than seven. The approximate measurements of the turtle skeleton in the museum, not that I doubted her own biography at that point. I wanted a cigarette, but was too shy to ask if she minded if I smoked. Of course she would disapprove. She was an ancient turtle. I disapproved of myself. 

“★★★★★★★★.” 

It took many feelings in the old language to articulate what she knew of me. She often watched me watching her through the kitchen window. She saw me when I walked in and out of the building, even when I wasn’t looking for her. She liked that I was vegan but my whole job was meat and cheese, liked that I was somewhat governed by disgust but craved the weight of dirty work. She thought endurance was sexy. I blushed. She thought it was interesting that I had an art history degree, even if I was in debt and hadn’t found a use for it. To her, with a history of 83 million years, studying an era of human art was like looking at a fraction of the world’s smallest cell through an unfathomably powerful microscope. An obsessive science. I didn’t know how she’d figured this out from her marginal peeks at my life. I guess my body must’ve screamed the facts of me. 

She had many questions, one of them being — what era of art was it, actually, that I had studied? 

Donor portraits from the Renaissance with religious imagery and symbolism, I told her. 

She had no point of reference for what this was. She had never seen a painting. 

The colors are very rich though the scenes are often dim. The fabrics and gold accents are often the focal point of the piece, besides angels and maybe a baby Jesus. In paying for the painting, the donors bought the right to be included in the religious scene, and some, in some sects of Christianity, believed commissioning the painting could contribute to their passage into heaven. I began telling her the story as I told it to everyone who would listen in college: You pay to place yourself in the most important history, the history of histories. It is somewhat an exercise in vanity — you signal your wealth with gold leaf in the chandeliers, the hems of Mary’s dresses, and the halos, with the costumes your representation in the painting wears, with the costumes you dress Matthew or the Mother in. But also, it is a somewhat true thing you are doing, creating something beautiful — or enabling someone else to do so — and without knowing it the donors created something that is still beautiful today, and tells us, or tries to tell us, that Jesus— 

I found I didn’t give a shit about what I was saying anymore. There were lots and lots of ugly, wormy holes in my stiff poem. It used to be so fun to recite. My fingers were getting achy from the cold. The turtle was probably getting bored of me. But the turtle just said that she’d always liked Jesus, unchanging as he was, and hoped he was still alive.

She said she could tell I was getting cold. She was not gentle, besides the gentleness of being frank.

Then she asked me if I would like to hang out sometime. Like, a date. 

I hadn’t been on a date since college, I thought first. And I didn’t have any money to take her somewhere nice, deserving of her beauty. The more extraordinary considerations came second. I asked her if I could think about it and let her know soon. 

“★★.” Sure. You know where I am. 

I rose from where I sat. My joints popped. I headed back towards my apartment, climbed the stairs in a daze, changed pajamas, and got into bed even though there was still a glint of light outside, a residual fingernail from the sun after it was gone, and I hadn’t eaten dinner. The turtle spoke like a high tide, like the moon pulling and releasing the water. 

My rest was long, warm, and dreamless. 

*

In the morning, the gray sun was more persuasive, tinted with gold. I hadn’t set an alarm because I didn’t have work, so I’d wanted to take as long as I could to process. That was an East trick — he was a devotee of sleep. When the man he’d been in love with last had broken up with him, he’d slept for a week straight, a week without rising, and emerged unscathed by the heartbreak. That had been years ago, come to think of it. It remained one of the great pieces of his mythology. 

It was past ten when I woke up. I’d been planning to call East in the morning to see if he’d like to get coffee, but by now he was probably working. So I called Elle, who picked up on the second ring. She was available every morning, most afternoons, many nights. Because, I said to myself, her job is fake. But she was my only friend from college doing something art with her art history degree. 

“Elle,” I said, “I had a strange night last night.” 

“Want to get breakfast?” Elle’s voice was gravelly and of medium pitch. She’d smoked cigarettes from when she was fifteen until she quit a few months ago. Both choices were ideological. 

I hesitated until she said she’d pay.

My shame was pointed, but my pride was less than the experience of an egg substitute sandwich with dill sauce and arugula at the fancy vegan cafe Elle always suggested, plus Elle’s presence. 

“Yeah, sure.” 

“I’m leaving for a trip at one, and I’ve still gotta pack,” she said, “So can we meet in fifteen minutes and be out of there before noon?” 

“Yeah.” 

Before I left, I went to the kitchen to look out the window for the turtle. I hoped she would be out there and hoped she would see me watching her. But she wasn’t on the beach. I thought I saw the shadow of her broad shell under the water, but I could have imagined it. Maybe I’ll never see her again, I thought glumly, and realized I better get something to eat before I really got miserable. 

I put on my new jacket, which my parents had sent me for my birthday. It made me look like I had a giant triangular torso and disproportionately skinny legs. I never had the thin thing a lot of vegans have going on. I made eye contact with myself in the mirror as I bent to put my boots on. When I was thin I looked sick and when I was normal I wasn’t thin and carried around a vague disapproval of myself. I envied the ancient turtle’s presence. 

I hurried down the murky stairwell because the elevator scared me because it smelled sick. I got in my car. It was an old Subaru that the fender had fallen off of. I bought it with cash I made working off the books at a Thai restaurant owned by Italians in high school. Probably the best job I’d ever had. The car hadn’t been in the best shape when we met, and now she was not long for this world. Her breath when I cranked the key was labored.

She hauled her tired body down the highway to the second exit, where we peeled off. The highway fed into a tiny main street whose few buildings included a courthouse with pillars, a mince pie “shoppe” that only took cash, a deli like the one where I worked but less clean, a scattering of houses designed to look older than they were, and Elle and I’s restaurant. Ohio’s pockets bulged with towns like these. They felt greasy on the inside. 

All of the restaurant’s walls were glass and the waiters had their pronouns on their name tags. And it was really expensive. 

I parked and went inside, squinting up at the sky as I walked in. The golden light from earlier had already dissipated, or maybe I only imagined it to match my dreaminess, and it looked like there might be a storm coming in. I wondered how the turtle had made it through 83 million winters. I wondered if the pond ever froze over, wondered if she hibernated, slept under the ice like a tulip bulb in the packed dirt. 

Inside the restaurant they were playing lo-fi over hidden speakers, probably from one of the playlists that comes up when you search “chill music” on Spotify. Elle was seated at a table in the far corner near a giant houseplant. She waved me over. 

She’d gotten a new piercing since I last saw her, another lip one. She had three rings on her bottom lip now, a stud in each nostril, a bridge piercing, and one in her left eyebrow. And one through her collarbone. She often wore wide-necked shirts so everybody had to look at it. Looking at that one made me feel nauseous, so my eye contact with her was firmer and more committed than came naturally to me. She had to take all of her piercings out to do her BASE jumping and rock climbing and cave diving so they didn’t get ripped out of her. 

I sat down at the table. Elle didn’t really do facial expressions, but I could tell from her posture she was at least a little happy to see me. 

“I ordered your drink for you,” she said. She remembered my order from when we used to go to the coffee shop next to our campus in Cleveland. The mildly androgynous waiter arrived with the drinks and took the food order. 

“So,” I said, stirring my latte with a paper straw. “How’s work?” I always asked even though I never wanted to know. 

“I love it.” 

“Woah.” I knew she was going to say that. Elle made custom ceramics for wealthy clients. Her work was modeled from an old Japanese practice called raku, where each piece shows the curvature of the hand of the artist. I’d known about it in class before Elle made up this job out of the blue. Historically it was practiced for ceremonial tea pieces, but Elle made whatever her clients requested. There was high demand for custom funeral urns. She charged hundreds of dollars. “Why do you love it so much?” 

“I like the feeling of having a lot of nothing and turning it into a little of something.”

“What?” 

“Taking a big hunk of clay and refining it. Shaping it into anything.” 

“You don’t shape it into anything, though. You shape it into expensive fake raku for your rich clients.” 

No reaction on her face. Our sandwiches arrived. She took a huge bite but watched me the whole time. It was unsettling. 

“I love working with my hands,” she said when she swallowed.

“Me too.” 

“You don’t work with your hands. You cut meat and cheese with a giant machine.”

“That is using my hands. Whatever. How do you know you’re doing the right thing with your life?” 

“With my sports—” That’s what she called the skydiving, the rock climbing, her sports— “I feel like I’m going to die. I feel the most intense fear. One time before BASE jumping—”

“You felt like your heart was going to come out of your mouth.” I’d heard this story plenty. Over and over it seemed, for at least three years. “I don’t think anything makes my heart come out of my mouth.”

She was put out by my interruption. “Maybe you should try BASE jumping.” 

“I don’t have the money to go BASE jumping.” 

I really wanted the issue to be that she was rich and I wasn’t. But that wasn’t it — she barely had any money either. Her fake job made more than my real job, but not that much. She squeezed the money for her sports out of her life by living in an apartment smaller and grosser than mine, basically not eating besides the occasional beer and when we went to breakfast here, and never traveling home to see her parents in New York. She was steadfast. Maybe I needed to become steadfast.

“I got asked out by a giant turtle,” I said. “I could use your advice.”

“The one from the lake?” I’d shown her to Elle a long time ago, sitting on the counter to see out the window. Elle had been suitably impressed. “What kind of dates can you go on with a sea turtle?” 

“She’s an ancient turtle. 83 million years old. 

“What kind of dates can you go on with an ancient turtle. Can she leave the pond?” 

“I don’t think so,” I said, “But I’m not certain.” This could potentially solve the problem of not being able to afford to take her nice places. 

“That’s a pretty big age gap.” 

“Back in college…” I said. 

Elle had dated the woman who had been our art teacher in seventh grade. She had run into her in a grocery store our junior year of college and she’d found herself in an efficient, torrid relationship.

“She left me for another woman in the end,” Elle said wistfully. “But I’m into that too, of course.” 

“83 million years is a long time. How do I even think about 83 million years? I’m like, 20.”

“I think you’re closer to 30.”

“That’s not true.”

“I sold a piece to my 500th customer this week. My handprints are in 500 different houses.”

“Should I say yes to the date? She seems smart and nice.”

“Smart and nice is good. Do you think she’s been smart and nice for the whole 83 million years, or did she become that at some point?” Elle was checking her phone. “I know I haven’t gotten nicer. Maybe smarter. Over like, five years.” 

“I wanted more advice, Elle. If you’re smart, I need your help.” 

“Ask her more questions. All the questions you have for me are really questions you have for her. Also, older women love to be asked questions. She probably hasn’t had an opportunity to tell anyone about her life in a long time. A lot of the time when people meet someone new, they’re really excited to tell that person about themselves, and that’s okay, that’s normal. I’m like that. You’re definitely like that.” 

“Is person the same thing as ancient turtle in this context?” I asked.

“That’s one of the main things you need to figure out.”

“I don’t think I’ve gotten nicer either,” I said. I could only hope I had gotten smarter. We considered this. Or I considered this as Elle took her car keys out of her pocket and jangled them, signaling, keep it moving. 

“I’ve gotta go. The bus to the airport only runs once every two hours, so if I miss it, I’m screwed.”

We wrapped up. Elle paid and I put the remainder of my sandwich in a to-go box. She hugged me in the parking lot, which I didn’t care for. We were wedged in the space between a massive Ford and my Subaru. 

“You’ll figure it out. Love you.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Love you too.” 

I got into my car quickly so she couldn’t leave first. 

I left the parking lot. I immediately felt totally alone. I felt I did not know where I was in space. I called East. My car didn’t have one of those systems where you can connect the phone to the car speaker, so I put the phone on speaker and held it up to my mouth horizontally and drove with one hand. 

He picked up.

“You,” he said, warmly.

“Me. I need advice.” 

“You should come over tonight.” 

“Okay.”

Then I could feel him grimacing through the phone. East was the kind of expressive where you could feel it bleeding through everywhere. “Tim’s going to be over, just so you know. At least when you get here, maybe all night.” 

“Why?” East had mostly been evading Tim recently. 

“He volunteered to help me clean up from clients last night. It’s — it was gross. I don’t want to tell the story over the phone because then I’ll have to repeat it in person. But afterwards Tim offers to help me with something, and what do I do, say no? I need to do positive reinforcement.” 

“Okay,” I said. 

“And you can’t fight with him, please. Don’t say anything about his mustache.” 

“Okay.” I didn’t remember that I’d said anything about his mustache ever, but lately whenever I drank I couldn’t remember any details of the night by the time I sobered up. 

“Fighting makes me sick.” 

“I know, East, I said I won’t.” 

“You don’t fight as much as you used to. You used to love to fight.” I felt his relief as he considered this, which was embarrassing, but it kept him on the phone longer. “Come over at six. Or seven. Between six and seven.”

“Sure.” He hung up. I drove home with the windows down despite the cold. I felt I could drink the air. 

*

I arrived at home, parked the car in the garage, and got halfway up through the stairwell, then back down, then part way up again, then all the way down to the pond, because I wanted to do what Elle had suggested before I forgot. 

And, to my luck, the turtle was sitting on the beach. She was turned away from me, looking out at the water. She looked a little pale, and I again worried about illness. But I didn’t know what a sick turtle looked like. I walked loudly so I wouldn’t startle her when I reached her. 

You, she said. 

“Me. I’m thinking about the date. I have some more questions I would like to ask while I’m making up my mind.” 

You’re taking this very seriously. I was under the impression, from the vibe of the people who visit the beach, that humans from your generation take a date or a couple dates very lightly.

I considered this. “I haven’t been on a date in a long time. I haven’t been on many dates in my life at all, actually.” 

Why is that? I think you’re pretty normal looking. And like I said, you’re very interesting.

I prepared to tell her, but recalled what Elle had suggested, and that she specifically said I always wanted to tell people about myself.

Do you think you’ve gotten nicer over time, or meaner? 

Nice and mean didn’t exist when I was growing up. I think I understand cruel, from some turtles I knew in my first few million years of life, and I think I understand benevolent in the way of — like in your paintings — the tendencies of a painter of God. I’ve had a few times where I’ve observed things that are nice and mean, for example, it was mean when the seas shrank and the landmasses condensed without consideration for the sea creatures, and it is mean when people throw trash off the highway and it gets in the pond, but also that is how I tried Wendy’s french fries, so it could’ve been nice. I think there’s an amount of mind reading required to do nice versus mean. And you asked about me, my niceness or meanness, and I guess all I can say is I can’t read my own mind.

I tried to pay attention but got lost as I tried to think of another question to ask when she finished talking.   

“Are you monogamous?” 

That concept also didn’t exist in the Devonian sea. By your standards, I’ve never been in a serious relationship. I’ve slept around a little. There used to be some beautiful girl turtles. 

“But you were never in love for the millions of the years the seas were large?” 

Are you interviewing me?

I laughed nervously, which was not a sound I was familiar with making. I was having trouble telling if this was a crush or a celebrity crush situation.

She still continued. The seas were very, very large. And turtles spend most of their time alone, at far different places in the sea. Or they did in the old days. In addition to the physical space, the sea was just a soup. We were not in the soup, we were the soup. I don’t think we had much of a sense of each other at all most of the time. I don’t think love was specific like that yet.

“Were you lonely?” 

She said she didn’t know what that was, but she looked a little shifty. It was harder to understand what she said. 

I changed directions. “Do you have a name?”

No. I feel I’m still struggling to explain this to you — I don’t know what to say besides, I existed before things were discrete from one another. All of your modern questions rely on the borders between things. 

My heart skipped a beat. “Do you still think that way?” 

No. I am pretty with the times, all things considered. 

My heart skipped a beat in a different way, a way that felt less good. I decided it was time to go inside. I said goodbye to the turtle and went all the way up the stairs.

*

Inside, I queued up on my laptop, which was on its final year, I was sure, a CGI documentary about ancient microbial life, an episode of a children’s TV show about dinosaurs, and an anime film about a magical carp with a human face, arms, legs, and breasts. I tucked into bed with the laptop and fell asleep almost instantly. 

As I drifted off, I thought: I want to be close to you. I want to be close to you. I wasn’t sure who you was. 

*

When I woke up, my apartment was already bathed in blue light. The turtle’s way of speaking drugged me, it seemed, or maybe I was very behind on sleep and trying to catch up. 

The light was blue like melancholy, but also blue like it used to be when I was getting ready to go out for a night in early college, drinking with my fake ID and lying to girls in grad school about my age, trying to get laid, which never worked. In this way the color felt hopeful. 

I had fallen asleep in the jeans I’d worn to breakfast and their creases and outline of the button were tattooed on my stomach and thighs. I changed into softer clothes: fleeced pajama pants and a black waffle-knit shirt that felt like the texture of the night. Broad, fuzzy like friendly TV static, more open than the day. I took off my bra. At night, the cold felt intuitive. Though it felt treasonous to admit, I could see the stars out here in Ohio better than I could in my hometown. The light from the city still bled into the sky like the cold into my dry hands and face. 

The turtle wasn’t on the beach. It was past the time she usually stayed out, I reasoned. I couldn’t expect her to change her plans for me. Again, I put on my coat, went down the stairs. The car seemed more lively this time. 

I couldn’t connect Spotify to the car, so my choices for the long drive were the radio or a handful of old CDs, and I didn’t feel like dealing with either of those. I enjoyed the drive in silence, cutting through the night like a warm knife. I loved blowing by those greasy towns on the highway. I didn’t even mind driving in Cleveland, stopping for pedestrians who don’t follow the stoplights, the by-and-by of tides of strangers. I don’t know if I was lost in thought or wasn’t thinking anything at all. 

At East’s, I got to park in his reserved guest spot. In his building, I felt comfortable taking the elevator, because the tint of the light was not green and it smelled classily, black-tie like, of dispensary weed and maybe a little cologne instead of citrus Windex and saturated road salt. 

He lived on the eighth floor. When he first moved into the building, I’d remember the floor by saying to myself, one step above lucky. The doors slid open silently. The carpet was immaculate. The elevator smell didn’t follow me into the hall. 

I knocked on his door. There was a delay so long I worried he’d forgotten about me and gone somewhere with Tim and no one was home. I was about to knock again when Tim opened it, wearing one of his stupid outfits. 

Tim was a short man, shorter than me, with shiny orange hair he kept cropped so close to his head you could see the contours of his skull and a distastefully large mustache. He was wearing dark blue jeans and a white t-shirt, one of those leather harnesses with a silver ring in the upper-center of his chest, and a black conductor’s heart with a chain. And reflective blue sunglasses, indoors, at night. 

“You,” he said. He said it like he’d never met me and was excited not to like me. I could feel his eyes on me, through his stupid fucking sunglasses. I hated the mustache. I hated the mustache. I wished I was drunk so I could say something about the mustache and forget whatever shitty thing he’d say to me in response. 

“Hi, Tim.” I always wanted to shake Tim’s hand like we were meeting for the first time, something to say, dude I’ll fucking kill you. I thought this and confused myself. I wasn’t sure what was wrong with me. “Is East here?” 

He snidely waved me back into the apartment. There was either East’s or his ex-boyfriend’s art on every wall. They both made Pollock-esque, dynamic paintings, boiling clouds of color and texture. I couldn’t tell East’s apart from his ex’s, and it was definitely because East copied the ex, not the other way around. I thought coldly that Tim definitely didn’t know that East’s ex-boyfriend’s art — from sophomore and junior year — was still all over the apartment. Tim himself was artless. 

“He’s in the experience room,” Tim said. 

East did his work in the experience room. He was, as he put it, a self-employed purveyor of ecstatic experiences. He sourced LSD, shrooms, ayahuasca, whatever his clients wanted, and guided Silicon Valley’s skinny, lost sons and the occasional bachelor or bachelorette party through psychedelia in the back room of his apartment. The room was decked out with projectors, cushions, and tapestries, and equipped with trip-killing Ativan for the times people freaked out, which allegedly wasn’t often because East was good at his job. He made a ton of money doing it. The clients had to park in the street, though. They weren’t allowed in East’s special reserved guest spot like I was. 

I followed Tim back into that room. The curtains were pulled aside and a beam of grey city light struck diagonally through the room. All of the cushions were packed up in trash bags. East had his back turned and was beginning to haul the cushions out.

“East,” I said. 

“You.” He spun and hurried across the room to put his arms around me. He did this with everyone. He was much taller than me and had loose, curly brown hair that hung around his shoulders. It was sometimes a little gross looking, if you didn’t see it in the context of the rest of him. Despite working in a room filled with incense smoke and sweaty people on drugs, he always smelled clean. 

Today he was wearing black leather pants and a harness like Tim’s, plus an actual dog collar. East noticed me noticing and we both looked away. 

I helped him throw the weighty cushions around the room, propping them up in corners, and lightly kicking them to fluff them up. Tim leaned against the wall watching us. It was too awkward to talk with him standing there, so East and I worked silently but companionably. East’s stupid harness seemed encumbering. 

When we finished, East slid up to Tim, trying to act casual. 

“Well, babe,” he said. “I think you should head out now.” He nodded in my direction, lowered his voice. “She’s having a hard time. I’ve gotta be here for her.” 

“Alright,” Tim grumbled. He pulled East in by the collar and I turned my entire body away and tried to close my ears. Then there was the sound of footsteps retreating, then the front door opening and closing. I turned back around. East was gazing dimly in the direction Tim had gone in. 

“Didn’t even say bye to me,” I said, mostly as a joke.

“He didn’t help. He said he was coming to help — these college kids made a complete mess of the room. They literally, ugh, they pissed on everything. These frat boys freaking out, screeching like animals, and peeing —” 

“Don’t say peeing. It’s grosser than pissing.” 

He explained dragging everything down the elevator, taking it to the dry cleaners, scrubbing the floors and the walls. “And Tim,” he concluded. “Just stands there watching me do the work. He said he was going to help! I think it was sexual for him, but at this point I don’t even want to ask. Actually, I know the answer.” He wrestled with the harness and collar. It was a little upsetting. I came and helped him take them off. 

I sighed. He sighed. 

“He didn’t even said bye to me,” I said again. 

He took off the pants and stood forlornly in his boxers. I looked around like there was something interesting on the ceiling. He threw the leather in the corner and I tried to assess whether it was made of plastic or real animals. 

“What’s with the fucking dog collar?” I asked. 

“Don’t you ever get bored?” 

“Of what?

“Of everything.” 

“Yeah,” I said. “Everyone does.” 

“So what do you do about it?” 

“Not what you do, apparently. I was asked on a date by a giant, ancient, sea turtle.” I shrugged. I tried to downplay it. 

“A tortoise or a sea turtle?” 

“A sea turtle. She’s 83 million years old.” I sat and laid back on one of the cushions. East turned on an electric kettle. I heard him putting tea bags in two mugs. Mint, probably, because he knew I couldn’t drink caffeine at night. “Do I say yes? Do I go out with her?” 

“I would need some more information to give an honest answer. First, do you like her?” 

“She’s very interesting. She’s beautiful, for a turtle, but maybe average for an ancient turtle? I’ve never minded average, in any sense. I like the way she talks. It’s like the rhythm of the seas, because of the moon. She seems to like me. She likes that I studied art history.”

“Is she involved with multiple people — talking to people — or just you?” 

“Just me, I’m pretty sure.”

“That’s good. You used to get very jealous, even if you were just texting someone for a few days, you didn’t want them involved with anyone else. And if we were drinking—” 

“You and Elle both did this today. Reminded me of things about me. I know the things about me.” 

“It’s nice to know that time has passed, isn’t it?” He sounded slightly wounded. “I’m sure I’ve changed, for better and worse. How have I changed?” 

I mostly only remembered how my feelings for him had changed. I didn’t say anything for long enough that he changed the topic.

“Are you still working at the butcher’s?” 

“It’s a deli. It’s not a butcher.” East was vegan too.

“Is there not anything else you could possibly do? Something with art?” 

“I don’t want to talk about my job. I never want to talk about my job. I want to talk about the turtle. She said this thing — that for most of her life, all things were one thing. So you would be the same as the people around you.”

“That’s enticing, isn’t it. You’d never be lonely.” 

“Loneliness wouldn’t even exist. But she doesn’t think that way anymore.” 

“She could go back, maybe? People can change for other people.” 

“I’m not sure I could ever think like that though. Is it fair to ask something from someone when you could never do that for them?” 

“This feels like a very human way to think about things. Like you’d have to figure that last question out if it was someone you met on Hinge or something. She’s a turtle.” 

“She is a turtle,” I confirmed.

“Is this date with the turtle going to turn into a weird sex thing?”

“No, I don’t think so.” 

“Good. You remember what happened with the spider,” he muttered wistfully. 

In junior year, shortly after the end of the boyfriend, he’d had a very personal, clinically psychotic relationship with the Louise Bourgeois spider statue at the art museum courtyard in the city. I remember how he had breathlessly described it to me — the spider’s arms prodding and stroking deep parts of his mind. It had, in his words, become a weird sex thing. Elle and I had to intervene. 

“I wish I had a turtle asking me on a date.” He looked somewhat rueful. “You should go on the date. It’s amazing — who else gets to meet someone 83 million years old. Maybe she can get you to quit that fucking job.”

“Okay,” I said. “Maybe. On the subject of quitting things, I don’t think Tim should treat you that way. I don’t think people who really like each other look at each other like that. I think that—” 

“Don’t say anything more about him. You don’t get how it is.” 

“Get how it is to be lonely?” I guessed. I was the only person, period, who used East’s special reserved guest spot. Even he and Elle had a falling out so bad he didn’t like to know what she was doing with her life or where she was, besides in relation to me. But hearing about him never seemed to bother her. 

“Of course you get how it is to be lonely, are you kidding? That’s not what I’m talking about. There’s stuff you can’t see.” Tim also helped East pay rent for the apartment. We weren’t very into saying that out loud. We were quiet for a moment. “I miss—” 

“I know you miss him, East. But you broke up forever ago. You have to let it go.” 

“That many years can feel like a really short time.” 

We leaned back on each other. He put his arms around me. I could feel a little edge of his stubble on my face. I could feel he was tired. Of course I had liked him, like liked-liked him, when we were closer to the age of putting it like that. Even though I was never really into men. Latently I still wanted to kiss him. Sometimes the thought would flicker through me, and I could feel him on my lips. Now I loved him. That was different. And more important, I would tell myself.

Then he asked if I wanted to take a little bit of shrooms. He’d been trying to grow something in the guest room closet, and it seemed like it was working. It always went like this with him. Sometimes I said yes. Usually I didn’t. Some things about him were different before he got into psychedelics, and some things were exactly the same. For example, he had always had a thing for short redheads and dead-end situations. 

“Not this time.” 

We talked for a while, not about anything remarkable. He thought some of the fraternity boys were cute, despite the piss. I told him he’s too old to be desiring college freshmen. 

“It might not be technically unethical, but it’s definitely creepy.” 

Then he clarified: “Don’t take my word as final on the turtle, by the way. Only you know if it’s right for you.” 

Everyone needs a friend who says that to you. 

“And don’t get stuck if you’re not into it — if you don’t want a second date, it couldn’t hurt her feelings that badly. I bet it’s hard to realize if your heart gets broken on the scale of that many years. And quit the job.” 

“You don’t even have a real job. I love you.” 

“God,” he said. “I love you too.” 

I lingered in the doorway but he’d already turned away, grinding up shrooms in the special bowl Elle made for him, measuring out lemon juice to mix them with. It was probably starting to be very bad for him, I thought grimly. In college he’d gotten the best exam scores of anyone I’d known, but now I wasn’t sure he remembered anything specific from his degree. 

*

When I sat down in my car in the parking garage, I lodged a CD into the disc drive. My glovebox was full of CDs, some not even in cases. The one I chose had a name tag on the jewel case with my name in big letters with an exclamation point with a heart as the dot. I picked it because it wasn’t visibly scratched. My girlfriend in high school made it for me — we never even kissed, but we held hands a lot. She had the purplest hair I’d ever seen before and since, and she dyed her eyebrows too.

The whole CD was swirling and slow, cut through with high vocals that sounded more like violin than a human voice. It was a little boring, but I liked it, mostly because I recalled how happy I’d been when she’d given this to me. It was cool cause it was vintage and just for me. This relic of songs like the deep and shallow old seas. The drive passed illogically — it took forever to get outside of Cleveland, then suddenly I was pulling into the apartment complex. 

*

I parked and was drawn to the pond. The turtle was out, sitting on the beach in the dark. Her eyes were open, luminous in the night. I sat down next to her quietly. 

She spoke first. It’s you. How was your day?

“It was okay. I spent some time with my friends.” 

Do you like them a lot? Do you love them? 

“Yes. I have a question for you. It’s important.” 

Okay. 

I hesitated. I counted myself down like I was preparing to jump off a diving board. I had to do it twice. 

Then I asked: “If you loved me, would you still see me as separate from yourself? 

She said: Yes. I can’t go back. Time isolates you from all things and all things from each other. 

My throat felt tight. “Why is that?” 

I’ve heard that the universe gets larger all the time, so everything is being stretched out. But I can’t remember if that’s on a scale of your life, or only of mine. 

“I’m sorry for asking how old you are when we first met. I just remembered that’s very rude.” 

I don’t mind. I’m proud of it. How old are you?

“I’m 26. But everyone thinks I’m younger than I am because my face is so round or older than I am because I’m not very funny.” 

I like your face. And I don’t really know what it means to be funny.

“I like your face, and I do know what funny means and I think you’re funny. Let’s do it. Let’s go out, see where it goes.” 

Cool. 

I laughed. “Just cool?” 

It’s just a first date. But I think she looked very happy. 

We agreed I would get us veggie burgers from Smashburger and we would eat them together on the shore on Monday, because I had work on Sunday. I would have to feed hers to her, she said, because she is a sea turtle and has no way to hold a burger, but maybe that would be kind of romantic. 

“Cool.” 

Okay, goodnight. 

I looked into her bright eyes. “Wait, actually, before we commit to this — are you sick? Do you feel like you’ll be alive for much longer? 

I have no idea, actually, she said. Sometimes I feel like I am going to die. But I think that has mostly been from loneliness. 

“So you do know what loneliness is!” 

I am acquainted with loneliness. 

I bent over awkwardly and gave her the tiniest kiss on the cheek. This was unlike me. On the walk back to my apartment building, my mind fluttered like a little creature. The next day, I supposed, I would go to work. And the day after that, I would get veggie burgers with the 83-million-year-old giant sea turtle that lives in the pond. I had so many questions to ask her. I did not know how to approach the topic of the future. 

I thought, maybe if she dies, I will clean her old bones as tenderly as I can and sell them to a natural history museum. If our first date goes well, we could go on another. And another. I smiled a little in the dark. I liked that she thought I was interesting. 

Lily Nobel is a fiction writer splitting her time between the Colorado Rocky Mountains and Great Plains of Ohio. She is studying environmental politics and law, but likes making shit up in her free time. Her recent work can be found in So to Speak, Maudlin House, and Sans. PRESS’s “Stranger” collection.