The Death of an Author
ripping off my year of r&r i explore the abyss of unlikeable female characters and their undone houses
I dug through my purse, a half-eaten protein bar had stained the inside of the compartment, there were two dun hills tucked away in the corner, and an unsealed pack of condoms had spilled into my purse, I was rummaging through the spoils like a rat looking for a scrap of food, I found my loose pills of Ambien and Nembutal and washed them down with my fourth glass of Ballantine’s. I’d lose track of time throughout the day, weeks went by, and then months, and suddenly it was the month of April. I’d pick up food from the bodega around fifth avenue and I’d wake up sometimes to the delivery man at the door, miscellaneous objects, and ill-fitting clothes I had ordered in a sleep-like trance only to send the Amazon guy away. The bills were piling up in my letterbox and sometimes the delivery men would wear themselves out knocking down my door as I slipped into deep longing slumber. Early on in this phase, I would walk down to the laundry house ten minutes away and have it delivered once every week, the clean whiff of fabric would tantalize me awake from my sleep as the clear plastic bags rustled in the hallway. Soon enough, the clothes along with my underwear piled up in a corner of the room, like a looming heap of logs. I couldn’t bother to put them together, and I couldn’t bother to walk, it interfered with my hibernation and I resorted to going commando. When the heap began to stink, I’d toss them in the church clothes drive that’d come by every now and then, what they would do with unwashed frilly underwear was not my concern. For a while, tacky lingerie from La Sensa kept showing up in my mailbox, and a drivel of graphic t-shirts, head scarves, asymmetrical skirts, thongs, and unflattering nightgowns was beginning to arrive in crisply sealed plastic cases, I would stuff them in my drawers and continue to parade around the apartment semi-naked. Sometimes I would walk to open the door to collect the Thai bowl for dinner, eyes barely open to realize before the unlocking of the knob that my bare chest was exposed. The flimsy robe had come undone and I couldn’t stand the trampy red in the mirror, out it went in the garbage can. I would sometimes pick out Noah’s Calvin Kleins from the burial grounds in my closet to put them on, they were unflattering and comfortable. I had a ritual for taking a shower, I gave up on showering every day the same time around I started tossing the fuchsia and crimson briefs into the bin, the curtains hid behind the daylight, the nights turned into days and my sheets turned a pale yellow. The hair on my legs began to grow back, I stopped waxing, stopped compulsively plucking in between my eyebrows, the moisture left my soles, and I stopped brushing my hair if I didn’t have to leave the house.
I would leave the house infrequently, I’d called the credit card company to set all my bills on autopay, I hadn’t returned calls from my advisor after I had sent her a very short email – “I will be dropping out of the Ph.D. program.” I hadn’t opened Noah’s texts; it would be a barrage of monologues ‘deserving an explanation’ about why I had ‘left’ so abruptly and some more pathetic drivel about how he will be taking time to ‘heal’ from me. I had skimmed through the emails he had sent me, and I had selected all of them and sent them to the recycle bin. In my waking hours, I would switch through the several tabs of all the streaming sites, the torrenting would interfere with my irreverent consumption of media, and I had been spoon-fed by the invisible hand of the market to mindlessly skip through webpages. The screen would be my only source of light in the night, I had put my electricity bill on hold, I’d wake with the churning noise of the radio right outside my window and I’d go to bed to the grating voices of the phony men on sitcoms talking about tits and taxes. I couldn’t stand plugging in my earphones anymore, it would whirr in my ear like a little snail scraping the insides of my eardrum, telling me to run a bunch of credit cards and overdose on the Ambien. I had to throw them out and the price I had to pay was the jarring sounds of voices and laughter on the streets every time I stepped out, the doorman would greet me as I would step into the revolving door, he would greet me without fail every single time I would look down at the stained marble every single time and keep walking straight ahead. I would flip through the news at the shawarma truck, the unseasoned meat at the deli would make me nauseous and irritable, I was almost like a newborn – the smallest of things irked me and my skin was hyper-sensitive to light, I had abandoned sunscreen and the abrasions on my skin would disappear over time. The papers offered me no foresight, it was always the same, a senator had swindled money, the ice caps were melting, a woman gets stalked and murdered, a millionaire gives out money that isn’t his, a sale at Costco, a footballer cheats on doting wife, the raging homophobic lawmaker is secretly a homosexual, buy 3 get 1 free at the Victoria Secret knockoff, there were always things happening in Manhattan in the summer of 2020 – but the elusive beauty of hibernation was that reality escaped me like my dreams and the flipping channels on the TV next doors. I would buy off-the-rack gin sometimes, only when I really needed it, it was infrequent, I knew it was infrequent because on the days I would leave the house, I would join a support group for recovering alcoholics and pretend to be one, it made me feel better about myself and I would never go to the same support group twice. Switching between AA, widow groups, and cohorts of ex-inmates, no friend ever stuck, at some point in our acquaintance they would invite me over or would want to see what my place looks like and I would make up some believable lie, and dash out of the center, the lies would alternate between my boyfriend wouldn’t like that, impending renovations and paint stench. On days I’d be too lazy to take the train to the bank, I’d pop by the HRA and collect food stamps, it was much easier than making all the calls that permitted me to dip into my trust fund, my parents had been rich and hipsters, they set up a chain of paper trail that made the process of cashing out, unnecessarily long drawn. Sometimes the lady at the reception would eye me head to toe and murmur under her breath ‘You don’t look like you need food stamps’ – the hot red shimmer of the stilettos I would throw on for the performance of functionality had seemed to distract her, so I’d tell her I was a hooker, collect and leave.
I’d begrudgingly tidy up the days’ Celia would leave messages on my voicemail, the days she was home were the days I would stock up on the alcohol cabinet to drown out her voice. She had lost her father to chemo; she was going to therapy and she had begun injecting everything she learned at therapy into our conversations which made my skin crawl. She would sob about her father’s death and I couldn’t stand her. “Get yourself together Pen”, I’d say and she would wipe the snot off her nose and make this impetuous noise that only made me dislike her more. Celia was a market analyst at a firm, she had slept her way to the top, and every time she would catch me in a joke about it, she’d say “It’s not like that. You wouldn’t get it; he doesn’t want to be married but his wife is a bitch you know? They have a prenup and everything, once it runs out, he’ll propose.” Celia obsessively would comb her hair, undo the pleat of her skirt from time to time and click her tongue in a dismaying tone every time her gloopy mascara would start to show.
“You were so high last night you couldn’t stop talking about Requiem for a Dream”
“Aronofsky outdid himself with it”
“You always say that”
Celia was Scottish, with an uncanny made-up American accent, and a granola boyfriend for a boss. She would do Pilates, go for a run in the mornings for matcha which she pretended to like, and have an ouroboros tattoo to cover up the blotchy birthmark on her arm, and her arms smelled like cursory cologne bought off Target’s Sephora Sale. Every time, she’d come over, she would slouch into the throw blanket spread across the sofa, spread her legs onto my table, complain about how much of a crowded mess the furniture is, and fall asleep. She would rummage through my closet, yank out clothes that don’t fit me anymore, urge me to work out with her, and continue complaining about the men in her life.
“You should go for older men; they usually do not have the air of indignation and neediness younger men have”. She said dipping her hand into a bag of ‘nutritious’ chips.
“Okay”, I said.
“No, really. Trust me, you’ll stop moping around the house and you don’t have to waste your beach body on sloppy university graduates you kiss at bars.”
Celia was a well-meaning friend whom I loved and seldom liked. She tried too hard, was overtly feminine in a way that suffocated me, and patronized my lifestyle choices because snogging your married boss was a life pursuit more worthy of pursuing. She would coddle me in front of the mirror, raising the hem of her skirt by an inch or two, “If you got out more, you know?” she’d chide me in a desperate voice that I found especially irritating.
I knew Celia for five years now, we had met at a book club and her knock-off guess bag gave me an eye sore when I accidentally dropped it on my way out. We went to university together and I had meticulously studied her and her habits, she would religiously read sex tips from the Cosmopolitan, only ordered a margarita everywhere we went, skimmed through the names of cheese and imported wine from the coffee table books to repeat at the advisee dinner and clutch onto hyaluronic acid tester bottles from Sephora. She was a slave to consumerism and commodity fetishism and it irked me beyond doubt. I found her deliberate study of acquiring status banal and boring, I could see through it, and so did everyone else. So I loved her but on many occasions, wherein she would memorize the sale catalogues on the newsstand, I did not like her.
“Have you heard of Profilicity?” I asked her
She nodded.
“It is one of the three identities, so there’s Sincerity and Authenticity, the former demands the pursuit of originality but Profilicity is when the outside is real and the inside is truly invested in it. You’re quite like it.”
“Are you saying I’m fake?”
“No, on the contrary, I’m saying your insides are quite invested in making the outside seem flawless and impeccable. It’s interesting.”
Of course, Celia didn’t come around to what I was saying. After three glasses of wine and one scrupulous sermon on the way the world has let her down, she was sifting through my TV to watch something.
“There’s nothing interesting in here.”, she whined.
She found my collection of foreign films pretentious and obscure; nothing offended her sensibilities more than my naturally acquired tastes. The copy of Amelie she couldn’t get through, the wolf house was too underwhelming for her and not “horrific” enough for an animated horror movie, and Sans Soleil was simply too textual. Too textual, like that could ever be a thing. I let her flip through more tabs as she got herself comfortable looking at clips from Lady Bird
“I miss my mother, I haven’t spoken to her in weeks now, I wish we didn’t have such a strained relationship, It’s painfully lonely.”
“We all are”, that’s the most I could console her without telling her she was being incredibly needy.
Celia would move between worrying about me and wanting to be me, I refrained from sharing anything that happened in my life, boyfriends, a published paper, recovering from anorexia, my pill problem, anything good I would keep from her. I could hear her in the back of my head otherwise, faking an insincere tone of authenticity, she’d say she was so happy for me, and her head would drop as her made-up face would falter. My dropping out of university would be a matter of satisfaction for her, she wouldn’t confess it, but I would be able to tell. I always do.
I saw Celia a lot less after that, I would message her that I was unavailable every time she checked in. I would stay indoors, empty cans of Diet Coke, pop ice cubes off the freezer, and eat them for dinner every night before calling it a day.
Until she found out about my deferral from the university, she called me relentlessly after that, for over an hour. I think it tantalized her to know that I was failing in some way, I was finally living up to the disoriented slob she had wished me to be. She would idealize my eating disorder, “You’re so lucky you have a good metabolism” she’d cry as I struggled to finish my sandwich. She would hold our dress sizes apart and complain about being overweight when she was just fine. I think she knew she was beautiful; she was only upset that she had to try to be.
Celia showed up with three bags of Allen Solly and a matcha latte at my door, I did not know it was her, and I opened the door to a fuming little woman dressed rather oddly in all shades of green and red. It wasn’t Christmas yet and the Grinch had come knocking. She found her place in the armchair and went on a spiel about self-care and therapeutic narratives. “You need to flush the negative self-talk, okay? I read somewhere that instead of saying, I am a failure, women should practice saying, I have failed. That way, you are not defining yourself by your mistakes.” I hated when she would get like this, I knew for a fact that it was something she had picked up from a therapist speak infographic and the new issue of Girls Are Us! Towards defining a new womanhood. Celia had never been to therapy and yet she would talk in this imitative almost grating therapy speak, she would tell me how maintaining a gratitude list every day has helped her grow, and how she’s been disconnecting from friends who ‘did not help her heal her inner child.’
“Sounds like bollocks”, I said.
I was no expert in being a good friend to anybody but even I knew that it was the most insufferable way of operating within friendships and social circles. She folded her arms to let me know she disapproved, of what I said, of who I was, and almost as if, it was disapproval of what I had become. I couldn’t care any less. She walked in circles around my couch attempting to convince me to come out drinking with her, “Like old times” she chided in an exasperated tone.
I hated the old times. I told her I had a headache and I needed to sleep.
I received a voicemail from her later where she said she had forgiven me and that she would stop by soon.
Her father passed away the subsequent month, I texted her “Hang in there”
Her boss broke up with her and decided to go to couples therapy with his wife two months after her father’s death, I told her “You’ll get over it”
It was by the February of 2021 I had begun journalling and actively frequenting a support group for narcissists. My psychiatrist had grown weary of prescribing me hypnotics, she wasn’t all that good of a doctor but a year into handing prescriptions out like candy, I believe she was worried I would overdose any time now. I did not understand why she thought so, I had it all under control and above board. I rarely popped more than six at a time in three days, and the Escitalopram along with the Ambien would incapacitate me enough to fall into a trance that lasted for several days. However, I had no wish to be institutionalized so I agreed to go to this hippie support group. There were eight people in the room while I was seated at the last, they looked like normal people.
Pamela was a stout fat woman of 5’3 feet in her 40s and a self-identified narcissistic mother. She worked a desk job at the upper east side and sometimes worked the revolving door at the local makeup lounge. Her eye bags were hollowed out and her pale skin tone clashed with her bright red lipstick. She wore a metal watch around her wrist that was too small for her hand and she spoke in a thick Scottish Dialect. I had been to this group a sum total of six times, and five out of those six times, Pamela had erupted into tears. Her daughter had cut her off in a letter calling her ‘self-absorbed, abusive, and damaging”. The group coordinator would ask us to share our feelings and Pamela would read her journal entries about her daughter as if she was performing before the opera. It felt all too made up and shameless.
Cam, a middle-aged Mexican man would console her and lie to her that his daughter would come around once she received adequate help. I wanted to interject with an If but the moment had passed. Cam was an overtly optimistic man with a hankering for the past, a lot of his sharing would contain stories from his college days where he had been a bike-riding hunk with a stellar record of women, as he’d told us. He wasn’t sleazy, just pathetic in a way that made you want to gouge his eyes out. He would often get his eyes misty recalling the times when he could get with groupies and drink into oblivion. Cam’s wife and daughters had left him because he had quit going to work and had continued to get drunk and lash out at his daughters, aged 11 and 13. Unlike the rest of them, he was almost convinced he would jump right back into his college days, where his wife would come running back to him and his daughters definitely missed him. I found his uncanny zest for life oppressive.
“We are all here because we were assholes, the sugar-coating and all the medications fuelled by the psychiatric industrial complex wouldn’t change that, it wouldn’t change us.”, I interjected.
Cam with the rest of the others looked at me with a troubled look, while the coordinator followed it up by saying, “I think what our friend here is trying to say is that we need to acknowledge the harm we have done.”
“No, I don’t really care about that. I do not have a complex for self-flagellation, at the same time, it’s kind of pathetic to sit here and ruminate about what has happened. Let’s face it, Pamela probably isn’t seeing her daughter ever again, It is unlikely Cam is going to quit being a drunkard given that I just saw him sneak in a 60ml bottle in his pocket, River is not doing any better than the dirtbag men that she ends up sleeping with and they’re going to keep lacing our tongues with whatever dose of Valium and Xanax they see fit and things will go on”
The coordinator ushered me to take a deep breath, he seemed to have misconstrued that what I had just said was a result of a mental breakdown. That I had spoken out of turn and out of anguish, none of which was true. It was very matter-of-fact and my breath was composed and rested. I however decided to stay quiet for the rest of the session, I had worn my larynx out.
Cam came over later that day to my place, he had more bottles of vodka snugged away in his jute bag, and we mixed them with fruit punch and had unsatisfactory sex after. I used my electric bullet vibrator after four months that night, laying still, staring at the ceiling as I climaxed. For a moment in time, I felt something, even if it was the release of frustrated pent-up libido stored away for months in a corner of my body, it was something.
June 4, 2021
“Dear Celia,
I hope this letter finds you. I am leaving you my belongings and the apartment, I have marked off the shoes that would probably fit you, I’m not sure I didn’t really check. There’s some money under the carpet, and the trust fund, that should take care of your student debt. Feel free to toss out my clothes, or not, you can keep them if you want, whatever.
Bye
Saoirse”
Moving to Sayulita was a task in itself, I couldn’t do it without withdrawing a conspicuous sum of money from my accounts so I had to do it over a period of four months, gradually saving and stacking it away in a purse that I left with. The scheming and plotting were interrupting my immediate task of hibernation, yet it had to be done. I had taken very few things with me, and I had delivered my last performance in the desolate apartment before leaving. The bottles from my cabinet were drained out of the sink and shards of glass lay around inordinate corners, while I set up an automated message to my accountant that would reach her after I had left the country. I had to buy a new laptop and order replicas of the books I owned to take with me, anything missing from the apartment would derail the plan. I couldn’t have that, to have days’ worth of work corrupted in a tainted second, that would be foul. Celia thought I killed myself, or so I was informed in the email she addressed to me days later - emailing the dead, how awfully cliché and yet so on brand for dear Celia, I had thought to myself. In another letter, I had alerted the cops that I would drown myself in a river and that they were to not look for me. They did of course, and after weeks of an unfruitful search, they declared me dead.
In a distant town in Mexico, I was picking up fresh tomatoes and learning Spanish in the evenings with the children from school. I taught them advanced English during the day and they would school me about all the Spanish fruits in the evening, after which I would write in my notebook, it was almost full. My neighbor, an Iranian woman of 26 with auburn hair and a delectable taste for films and art, allowed me to borrow from her bookshelf in return for reading my diary, and I obliged begrudgingly. I did not remember the last time I had written for pleasure. I wrote in installments corrupting the paper with beguiling thoughts as I whiled away my time by the sea, there were rocks bigger than my fist here. The neighbor was walking towards the lighthouse from where I was standing, I ducked behind the boulder to sit down with my knees folded near my chin. This was a small town but I had to avoid running into her every day, it would dampen our semi-established relationship. At an arm’s distance, my mother had said while rubbing sunscreen all over my impish body when I was 9, she was warning me against the suburban kids around the block, don’t stray too far away, and now I was in a different country – like every other spoiled American vagrant. My advisor at university had reviewed my work once and commented, it is pertinent you avoid cliches.
July 10. 2021
I was unpacking my suitcase and I found the desolate pill boxes; I stacked them up in my bedside drawer, they didn’t have to be lonely. The clothes had been crumpled and they looked like they were crunched for time, I had tossed them in with no regard to the linen and the knits. The kitchen had been tidied up and I had managed to buy some groceries to last me a week, I cut the Bok Choy and let It boil in the curry, I had been eating better but not enough. The calorie deficit app on my phone would eat away at my insides but I had made the switch from takeout. Sayulita was a quaint town that had when I arrived, been a red herring. The first night I slept here my head was empty and barren, like an abandoned basement but I should have known that it was only temporary. I had gotten a job by lying about my credentials, the Americanness of my accent was enough to land me the spot. The children were a little too loud and I would have to quiet them with stories I concocted about western devils – I named them after the American Presidents, I wonder if these children of 9 and 10 had picked up on that. The farmer’s market was amenable and I tried to keep my eyes on the ground, avoiding accidentally making any acquaintance. There was some small talk but I wonder if that is a routine that is sustainable in a town like this where everyone knows everyone. I wish they didn’t. I had left to flee from the bureaucratic proceedings of friendships and paperwork I couldn’t stand, I had not been naïve enough to think that a new place would transform me from a pill-addled whore to a new fresh girl of spring, I had not thought that at all. A change of pace and the luxury of brewing a new identity had been the two comforts of leaving, but I had not considered that with the quickly moving faces of adulthood, I had a new problem – I did not know what part of myself to chase after, I was fraught and fragmented, it is as if the plane ride had misplaced my parts on the conveyor belt, just like that, I was 12 again tugging at my mother’s sleeve at the terminal anxious as to where my bag full of encyclopedias had went.
My train of thought had been interrupted by the vibrator being set off in my suitcase, it was convulsing like a rabbit in its last moments.
The Iranian woman’s name was Dana, she invited me out to coffee yesterday and I declined. She invited me again today and I had to lament until I went. Dana is a woman of tall stature and pale skin; her cheeks redden against the onslaught of the sun and she wears a Turkish hat with a stole that covers most of her neck. She waits by my gate in a tunic dress and is carrying what appears to be a basket of freshly picked apples. I had told her I had taken ill yesterday and she had knocked on my door with chicken broth, I considered telling her I was allergic to meat but she sat there as she administered my drinking. Feigning a cold, I had to usher her out of my house, that rose-tinted scent of hers was unbearable. Dana was nothing like Celia, she was herself and she spoke in stressed intonations of dialect that accentuated the meaning of her words and her face, nothing like the made-up impetuousness that Celia seemed to carry in her jean pocket. She tapped on her watch dial as she saw me emerge out of my door, signaling to me that it was time, it wasn’t hurried, it came naturally to her, the chokehold of time. She chatted and conversed in quick breaths over tea, she did not take any interest in where I came from, she fixated on a poem I had written in the journal. You describe life as a sedated fever dream, is that inspired? I nodded my head in derision, and she laughed. We discussed her love for the landscape and the relationship the tourists here have with the land, I checked the time, it was time to slumber. I will see you tomorrow, she threw caution to the wind sauntering away in the shade back to her apartment. I simply cannot seem to get rid of her.
Here to say i have read this multiple times and it never gets boring