By Charlie Pike
Sasha drooled on SHIFT. Keyboard indenting her face. Her camera off. To the students who’d paid $250 for nine weeks of Unbreaking the Heart, the instructor chanted: “Inhale grief; exhale peace. Inhale grief; exhale peace.” An hour later, she woke up alone in the Zoom room. A photo of herself atop Chapel Mountain, aspens dead. Add “change profile pic” to the “Wiping Brian from My Life List.”
He’d taken the picture. She had wanted to see the leaves. He was running late from fucking other women. By the time they’d found a date for the trip and booked the Whiskey & Whiskers room at Miss Murgle’s Bed ‘N Biscuits—where Miss Murgle’s calicos climbed into your lap and purred while you ate, and the quilted comforters reeked of chemical softener and cat piss, and longtime boyfriends confessed their faults, like railing Maddie from the “Twenty Somethings Who <3 Jonathan Franzen” Strava Group—the fall had bent to winter. They broke up. Months passed. Spring showed no sign of coming.
“Yo slime,” Gutter said through her door. Real name Eliot, worked for his dad’s gutter company, spent his spare time “studying for the LSAT” and smoking weed at the apartment he, Sasha, and RatCliff (real name Radcliffe, bit by a rat once, fainted during both rabies shots) rented next to Solid Rock Baptist Church. “Your heart fixed yet? I’m bored as hell.”
Sasha closed her laptop and went and opened her bedroom door to Gutter in the hallway holding a rack of PBR. Sharpie scrawled, “For my roommate.”
Next door, the church organ sputtered into Wednesday Night Service. The preacher muffled a sermon about morality in Gomorrah. Arcs of enthusiasm in his voice when he reached his line about “the riptide of sin.” A city underwater snorkels for God and swallows salt.
“He’s on fire tonight,” said Gutter.
They sat on the couch and drank each time the preacher said, “Now…” or the congregation murmured in agreement. Finished their beer at the sound of the organ, or if they felt they began to believe him.
Three hours later, around 1:00am, Sasha spun to the toilet in her pajamas, knelt on the tiles stained from Gutter and RatCliff’s piss and, plunging two fingers down her throat, sprayed up from her gut ten PBRs. She stood and flushed and got in bed. Her last thought, slanted cursive, was that she could see herself, with the tangle of her heart, forgiving Brian for what he’d done.
In the morning her head split like wood by the light from the window.
*
The next week, Sasha logged onto the second class. The instructor, Eric, played Mike Posner as people’s faces populated. He tried singing: “Design her shades… hide your place...”
“We’ll give it another minute,” Eric said. “So folks can trickle in.”
Class was a 20-minute slideshow on “resilience,” featuring the eight-legged, 0.5mm tardigrade, known to survive extreme pressures, temperatures, dehydration, starvation, radiation. “They beat outer space,” said Eric. “They lived where there’s nothing.” He looped this into a lesson about scale. How the tardigrade learned, after 500,000,000 years of extremity, to live and thrive pretty much anywhere. How we could, too, in much less time.
“Even with our broken hearts,” Eric said.
A boy in blue eye shadow cried. The class ended. Why had she joined? Because her mom had paid for it? She thought about quitting the class. Running a marathon instead. Spent five minutes perusing Hokas online, bought the highest-rated pair, then started plotting out training routes, looked at her friend Natalia’s Strava page, careful not to—she went to Maddie’s page. But she wasn’t going to, well, fuck it. Scrolling through Maddie’s posts, she found what she wanted—a wildflower field of emojis from Brian in the comment section. Heart eyes, etc. Which, as predicted, made the organs inside her leak like balloons packed with wet cement. Until everything was just one hard pile of shit.
By now, Sasha had texted Brian about meeting up for a serious conversation. She was ready to demonstrate maturity, if he was, and put this whole thing behind them. Maybe move out of San Francisco, like they’d talked about. Really commit to each other, somewhere in the Bridgeport pastures, where cheating and history, in the altitude, thinned.
He’d ghosted her. She’d blocked his number. That was that.
“Sa-ah-ah-ah-ah-sha,” Gutter sang through the door. “RatCliff’s recital. We’re gonna be late.”
“Coming,” she said. Threw her phone on the bed, now in the habit of leaving it behind when they went out. She liked giving up control, depending on others to decide where they’d go, what they’d do. She could autopilot, not launch conjectures as to what Brian was doing with who, or who Brian was doing with what. Brian Brian Brian. How he could do that to someone. After three and a half-point-three years of what she considered a somewhat relatively above-normal happy healthy relationship. Not like they were gonna get married soon. But she’d pictured it. Hadn’t he? In the church next door, haha? What did he think about her? Did he even still? After all this? Because it seemed like he didn’t, commenting on Maddie’s Strava every day—not that she checked it every day, just every post at once, every once in a while.
This is why she could not bring her phone.
*
RatCliff had been taking Beginner Fiddle lessons at the community center, prompted by a five gram psilocybin trip through the park, when the sculpture of a whale breaching asphalt had told him about Tchaikovsky. The recital was in the community center’s lobby. They’d lined up plastic folding chairs, set a table with a plastic cloth and platters of cookies and fruit, and laid a rug by some vending machines, for the stage.
Sasha and Gutter took their seats a minute before the players came from backstage (the bathroom) and onto the rug. Seven of them. Two in middle school, four in their seventies, and RatCliff, right in the middle, smiling big, for he was proud—he had followed through on something. The instructor walked to the front of the rug and addressed the twenty-or-so people in the audience. She smiled, closed her eyes. Breathed in, gathered the letters from the lining of her lungs, and said, “Welcome.”
Sasha felt a stillness fold inside her.
“We worked very hard to bring you this arrangement,” the instructor said. Bits of her smile flecked off the words. The entire gym around her lips. “I hope you enjoy the performance. I know we had quite a time learning it,” and she looked back to the students, who looked at her, and they shared a laugh, and Sasha wanted to be in on the joke.
They played, and it was terrible, and Sasha loved it. RatCliff glanced his bow through phrases and turns. Crescendoes shrieked into pitchless emotion. A heap of notes and the piece was finished, so the students took a curtsy and went to the refreshments table with their instructor, and they ate Chips Ahoy and grapes off napkins and laughed. Sasha watched them. RatCliff came over.
“Heyo,” he said.
“That was so sick, dude,” said Gutter.
“Thanks player,” said RatCliff. “I think I’m gonna sign up for the Intermediate class.”
“Nice,” Sasha said. “That was really wonderful.” Her attention pinned the instructor alone by the strawberries. “Maybe I’ll take a class or something.”
“That could be good for your deep dark hole of sadness,” said Gutter.
“Mmm,” said Sasha. Gazing at the table, imagining what it would be like to feel the instructor’s arm on her shoulder, correcting the angle of her elbow, so that the bow and string could kiss into melody. Curled fingertips slipping toward something, the legato song of her future uncoiling, measure by measure, brilliant pure white light of discovery—
“Tacos?” said RatCliff. “I think me and the class are gonna get tacos, if you all want to join.”
“Downski,” said Gutter.
“Sure,” said Sasha. She smiled.
The players collected their instruments, the audience collected their jackets off the backs of the chairs, and the groups went out in the streets, bit by bit.
The instructor did not get tacos. She had a flight the next morning, to Atlanta, where her husband was on a business trip that turned into a home-buying trip upon the instructor’s arrival, because the husband’s business trip was really a promotion trip, as they’d both anticipated, and, per the plan they’d drafted last month while draped across each other on the couch after a meal of smoked gouda, crackers, and prosciutto from Whole Foods, they were to find a house they liked, one with a yard for a dog and a—fingers crossed—kid, where they’d live until one of them died, then the other. Sasha never saw her again.
*
Weeks passed. Her Hokas came. She didn’t use them. Most Wednesdays ended the same, with the beer pilgriming from can to stomach to toilet to ocean. Some nights, Sasha pictured the bits of her DNA in the Pacific, tiding out to the Farallones, where a white shark with seal breath would filter the vomit through his lungs while swimming, because they never stopped, until they did.
One day she would die. She understood this and relaxed. She graduated from “Unbreaking the Heart” and was deemed to be healed. Gutter and RatCliff threw her a party, and 34 other friends showed up, and they did ketamine off a BPA-free cutting board, drank all the beer, went and bought more beer and some lottery tickets, stumbled with the case of beer and the lottery tickets to the ocean, where someone pulled from a duffel a stack of logs, and they dug a hole in the beach and piled the logs and ripped a piece of cardboard from the box of beer and Gutter took his lighter to a lottery ticket and took the flaming ticket to his cigarette and lit the cigarette which glowed like brake light in the cold black night. She asked for the lighter and bent with her hand behind the flame and lit the cardboard. The flames swallowed the cardboard and the wood popped into smoke heat and light and her friends rolled cigarettes, their blue bags of loose leaf American Spirits tobacco sealed and dropped to the sand, six headdresses in various orientations, and waves drummed and the fire stretched and Sasha did not think of Brian until the morning when she woke up in Tommy Harrison’s bed, who wrote code for drones that specialized in “crypto-hygienic thermal recognition” and with his six figure salary had purchased a life-size bronze statue of Atlanta Braves pitcher John Smoltz, who now stared at her from the corner of his room, glove on his hip, waiting on a signal for a fastball or change-up, retro-jersey draped across him like an emergency blanket on a marathon runner at the end of a race. She remembered the sex and that it was fine and stood and left the room with the door open and Tommy called, still drunk, “See ya!”
Sasha understood this aimless plummet as a depression. She rearranged the blur into something romantic. Her “Blue Period.” Fueling her art, which, at the moment, consisted of tiny, broken poems in a large notebook. Words like throat, teeth, moonlight. Drift. The. In.
Through the wall one Wednesday, the preacher called this type of descent, when one falls until the walls grow still from their streaking, “a pit through which there is a light beneath us.” The fall being necessary. The light being salvation.
She couldn’t make out how to reach the light.
Dark. Plunge. Thin.
*
She heard Brian had moved to New York. She heard Maddie had moved to New York. She heard the preacher through the wall each Wednesday and found herself draining beer after beer in agreement with the pews, until one night —when Gutter had a Hinge date with a woman (5’9”, Did Not Smoke, Did Drugs, and Worked in Environmental Consulting), and RatCliff was with his new violin teacher, an older ex-literary agent buried deep in Pac Heights who told RatCliff he’d tongued Arthur Russel one night at a party after Allen Ginsberg had read from his “unpublished scores of lyrical genius,” as the teacher put it, and that the kiss was nice, but what happened afterward, “the white robes of music draping over their souls,” as Ginsberg had put it, “was a phenomenal instance of uncloaking the tautological river of love that dribbled ceaseless from the cum and balls and breasts of half-naked women and men” — she decided to go to the service. To see if the words that she needed to hear to move on and then into the next part of life might be caught behind the wall of her apartment, too sure in their lightness to pierce through the wires and pipes.
In her and Gutter’s drunken projections, the church had been stones and torches. At 7:56 Wednesday night, it was wood floor and pamphlets on building houses for people in Cuba. She took a seat in the back and was sober. Ancient people in cardigans dribbled into the pews. At 8:04, the preacher took the lectern in a black robe and jeans and a white sash draped over his shoulders with a cross that was purple. Sweaty and clutching a cloth. A gold banner on the wall behind him offered a pair of stone tablets, stitched silver—the Ten Commandments. Woven squiggles stacked resembled lines of text. On either side of the banner stood a wooden cross. The preacher looked out, gathered a noseful of air, and, his gaze glancing Sasha’s, exhaled.
“I’d like to share the story of a whale named Blowhole,” he said. A man toward the front coughed gravel into his sweater sleeve. A woman adjacent plowed flakes of dandruff with her red clipped nails.
“Blowhole spends his days doing his thing, swimming through the great big ocean, swallowing krill like it’s his job. Because, you know, it is. And he’s happy to do this. Move through the ocean with the krill. Coming up to the surface to breathe. It’s a great life for Blowhole.”
The preacher wiped his forehead with the cloth. Next to Sasha, a child in a bowtie sliced a nugget of booger from the lining of his nostril, inspected the burnt-looking glob, and licked it clean off his finger. A trickle of blood from his nose. He pulled on his mother’s sleeve. She pulled a packet of tissues from her purse. The child took one from the wrapping, folded it twice, rolled the fold, and shoved it up his nose. The mother nodded. The child gave a thumbs-up.
“Then, on a particularly beautiful day, which, in the ocean, means the sunlight’s shining through the water, and all the fish and krill and creatures stop trying to eat each other for just a second, because the water is a bit bluer than usual, a bit more special… ”
An elderly woman ahead of Sasha took off her shirt with her sweater and revealed a bra and back tattoo of a palm tree that sprouted her spine. At the neck were coconuts, cloaked in baby powder, the soft smell settling into the pew.
“On a day like that, Blowhole accidentally swallowed a man named Jonah.”
The woman pulled at her shirt. Her husband smiled and helped.
“Now, Blowhole didn’t know why, exactly, a man was in the ocean. And, you know, Blowhole didn’t know that Jonah was Jonah, that Jonah was in the ocean because he’d disobeyed God’s orders to preach to the wicked people of Nineveh; a city full of Jonah’s enemies. Blowhole just knew there was a man in his stomach, when before, there wasn’t. And he didn’t know how to get him out.”
The people had settled into the lesson. A fart reverberated. The church’s radiator hissed. The preacher could feel the congregation’s attention condense in the grooves of his palms. He touched them together, as one would pray. Around Sasha, the bowtie child and the mother and Ms. Coconut Neck and her husband did the same. She tried it, felt weird, put her hands down by her side, then her lap, picking at the peeling cuticle of her left middle finger.
“On the first day of the man in his stomach, Blowhole swam around, singing to his friends. ‘Hey, friends! I have someone stuck in my stomach! How should I get him out?’ And his friends, as fun as they were during playtime, swimming fast and flipping alongside Blowhole, always making sure he was having fun… his friends didn’t really have anything to say. They’d only once or twice heard of ‘man,’ and it was always beneath the shadow of some boat, or near some hook, or next to something otherwise bad. So the sun went down and the water went dark and Blowhole rested. Inside him, the man beat the linings of his stomach and shouted, and Blowhole felt this, but not too much, and he was still able to sleep pretty well, all things considered.”
Sasha’s own stomach rumbled. She considered what was left in her fridge. Fog and wind rolled against the windows of the church, pressing the glass, waiting.
“On the second day, Blowhole decided to ask the elders for help. He swam to a coral cave where the oldest whales in the ocean were waiting to move on to Heaven. ‘Hello,’ Blowhole sang. ‘There’s a man inside my stomach, and I don’t know how to get him out.’ Three elders eyed him up and down. ‘A man in your stomach? Why, did you swallow him?’ the first asked. ‘I guess I did,’ sang Blowhole. ‘Mmmm,’ sang the second elder. ‘Then I’m afraid we can’t help you.’ The third elder sang, ‘He Who Swallows Must Solve.’ And then, all together, they chanted: ‘He Who Swallows Must Solve, He Who Swallows Must Solve.’ And Blowhole, terrified, swam out of the cave faster than he’d ever swum, a stream of bubbles in his wake.”
Bread. She had bread and eggs and hot sauce. A few more coughs. Sweat blossoming through the preacher’s robe. A handful of bowed heads. The mother stroked her booger child’s hair.
“On the third day, with nobody else to help him, and Jonah pounding and pounding ceaselessly into the side of his rib cage, Blowhole decided he would swim up to the surface and ask the sun for advice. Surely something so bright and strong, something that brought all creatures in the ocean together, would know how to get a man out of a stomach! Blowhole knew that he’d need to be in the sky for as long as possible to get a good answer. And, he figured, ‘Hey, the more of myself in the sun, the better, right?’ So he swam to the very bottom of the ocean, where all the light had faded, and all the warmth was gone, and he slapped his tail against the sandy bottom, and the man inside him kept pounding and pounding, and with a big, determined look on his face, he swam like a rocket as fast as he could from the very dark bottom of the ocean, through the brightening water, past streaks of marlin and clownfish and plankton, jetting by the cave with the elders, and his friends practicing flips, and at the very surface of the water, he made one last push and went soaring through the sky for five seconds!”
The preacher wiped his forehead. One, two, three, four, five. The congregation rapt in a gulpable silence, and Sasha wondered why whales had resigned themselves to live where they could not breathe.
“And the sun was warm and bright, and the air was lovely all over his body, and he listened with all his might to hear what the sun had to say about his problem, about the man inside him, and it felt like an eternity in the air, and he saw the mountains of Earth, and the cities of its People, and the ships manned by captains who’d hauled up his friends, and the scale of it, the shadows of trees and smoke and people and sin made him sick to his stomach, and he plummeted back to the ocean, to the ocean he knew, with the people he loved, where the light was held in the water around him, where he was always and forever bathed in the goodness of the Light of the Lord, and the sin he had saw and the sick in his stomach made Blowhole barf out the man stuck inside him, and the man kicked away through the water toward the surface, where his roiling world waited.”
The preacher, with creeks of sweat flowing over his eyebrows and lids and lashes, smiled. “And Blowhole, with a lightness inside him, swam back to his friends, understanding that all in this world was both Good and Evil, and that Evil within came from Evil without, and that water was Good, and light was Good, and these two things were enough, forever and ever, in the ocean of life.”
The preacher unclasped his palms and outstretched them. The mother of the booger kid wept. Coconut Tree rocked her head back and forth. Murmurs of affirmations and hummed agreements crossed the room. Sasha stared at the backs of her hands.
“And that is the story of Blowhole. Before I let you go, I’d like to remind you of our fundraiser this weekend at Pinball Persuasion. Folks, bring your friends! $5 for unlimited pinball, and the money will go to our mission trips. Thank you, and God bless!”
Sasha stood and watched the congregation file out, speckled with sunspots and hair sprouting from their nostrils and lips, clothes smelling like damp kitchens. The preacher blinked and smiled from the lectern, saw Sasha aside the stream of people, left the lectern and followed the people toward the church’s door. At the threshold he turned and she had not moved.
“You plan to chill a few minutes longer?” he said. “That’s cool. A lot to take in, yeah. We encourage silent solo prayer.”
He walked out the door. She stood alone in the pew in the sanctuary. Hoping to feel the breath of God on the back of her neck. But it was just the radiator hissing, the hum of a room when it’s emptied of people and full of the sounds of machines that bring comfort to life. She walked toward the front of the room and stood behind the lectern. Framed by the crosses, the banner. Hoping this would dislodge something. But what did she have to say? She left and returned to her empty apartment, cooked some eggs and toast, and went to sleep, still thinking of nothing.
*
By the morning Sasha felt that her thoughts were not nothing but a resistance to something she could not name, so she put on her Hokas and took the day from work to walk through the park in hopes of settling the thing inside her.
A few cyclists and joggers moved through the park. The daisies had broken themselves over the grass. The sky and cold fog and Sasha’s nose running. Murals on the asphalt of musical notation and potted plants and doctors shaking hands with teachers shaking hands with firefighters shaking hands with painters shaking hands with God. The Palace of Flowers looked like wet paper. A man in a hoodie played Bach on the piano that was chained to the road. A family of three inched a pedal cart down JFK, yelling, “We can pedal, we can pedal, we’re not tired, we can pedal!” A pack of retired private equity Deadheads jogged past in a cloud of Old Spice and tie-dye and New Balance Fresh Foams. Everything bloomed.
Sasha looked at each thing—the mother and daughter on roller skates dancing to a PA blasting “Love Come Down” by Evelyn “Champagne” King, the plaques detailing the apocalyptic effects of climate change, the eucalyptus and cyprus trees and hot dog carts and redwoods and fountains and sculptures of dogs cutting vegetables and rabbits eating vegetables and the bright green waterfall and cowering coyotes and fog-steamed crescent-leafed cold-breeze sunlight, and she looked at each thing hard enough to hurt herself, wringing her brain to draw meaning from the scenes.
She looked for salvation, found beauty, and it was not enough.
She came to the whale in the asphalt. She checked the mouth. No Jonah in its metal guts. She waited for the whale to tell her something about Tchaikovsky. But her mind was running on milk and cereal, not Penis Envy, like Ratcliff’s had been. She stood and looked and waited. People ran and biked and skated by. The fog and wind kept blowing. She stood and looked and waited and remembered she was alive. Standing, looking, waiting. The blood inside her moving. The air. She was taking air into her lungs and breathing it out. The light in her eyes was the light in the air. The air sipped in. Contracting, releasing. She held still. Trunks grew toward the sun. Roots plunged into soil. A runner sat on the curb, her pulse beating to life the inch mark of a silkworm tattoo on her neck. A man with a dog that was old and dying stood watching the dog as he bent his neck down to the hole in the field where a mole had just been and then gone. Sasha breathed. A woman with her girlfriend put their coffees on the pavement to each do a handstand, and the dog wagged its tail, and the jogger stood and began trodding back toward the start of the park through the fog and the light. The dog lifted his nose to the scent of something more that intrigued him. He turned and lumbered out of the field toward a thicket of rhododendron with the owner obliging. The couple with blood in their cheekbones laughed giddy from the pleasure of inverting themselves. The jogger climbed a hill out of sight. The dog disappeared into pink flowers.
Sasha stepped out of her stillness. Away from the whale in the asphalt. Toward the beach. The wind carried salt from the ocean. She knew, she was going to taste it. Knees deep in the sand in the fog chasing light.