by Katie Frank
Brie was sitting in her parents’ dining room eating potato chips on a Sunday summer morning. Months ago the Virus had arrived in New York and closed the city down. Newly unemployed, she had come to stay here, upstate, telling herself she was doing it for her parents, so she could go to the grocery store for them, protect them from the unseen enemy. But her parents were Buddhists, and their influence on Brie had probably exceeded their intention, to the point where, if she was honest, she didn’t exactly view the virus as an enemy. She thought it was more like an ambassador from the real world to America, the real world where death was ever-present.
The decision to escape from the city to the mountains had really been solidified by the severe bout of adult acne that had emerged all over her cheeks, chin and forehead in the past few months, as if her face was trying to grow more eyes, clusters of them, but couldn’t make it past forming the whites of the eyes, couldn’t muster pupils and irises.
As she munched her chips Brie was staring out the window at a toxic-yellow bird nibbling at the birdfeeder, while unconsciously leaning back in her chair so it was standing on its two back legs, her knees against the table and hands gripping it so she could keep pushing off and bouncing back.
“I always used to do this," she said to her dad, realizing she was doing it as he walked into the room and she was reminded by the presence of another human that she had a bodily form. "I wonder why I do this."
"Because sitting still makes you claustrophobic and afraid?" said her dad, smirking.
Brie put her and the chair’s feet on the floor. She was already tipsy from the vodka she’d downed at dawn to avoid a hangover, and stoned from the weed she’d smoked. She lifted her mouth like a baby bird and dumped the remains of the potato chip bag into it. She wanted more food so she went back into the kitchen and peeled a banana, put it on a plate and smeared cashew butter on it. But when she went back into the dining room, where her dad was now sitting staring at his laptop and scrolling his pointer finger energetically along the wheel of the mouse he had plugged into it, Brie found she didn’t want to sit at the table and eat her phallic snack in his view, so she went back upstairs to her attic bedroom.
As she passed the dusty mirror over the dresser she saw a crusty yellow streak on her cheek, emerging from a giant cyst. She brought her cheek up close to the mirror and placed each index finger on either side of the cyst. She squeezed slowly, and the goop emerged, almost fluorescent, almost miraculous in its flow, how it just kept going. It was, she realized, the same color as the bird she’d just seen at the birdfeeder, and as her stoned mind attempted to reach for conclusions from this coincidence, she reached for the vodka bottle and drank. It was from the local distillery, made from local apples, and smooth. Or at least, the knowledge that what she was drinking was made from local apples, made it seem smooth. Local apples, she whispered to herself several times like an incantation.
Brie lay stomach-down on the bed and looked at Twitter on her phone. She had tweeted a selfie in the middle of the night, when she had been on mushrooms, with a blanket arranged over her head so she looked like a wise or evil hooded being from a movie, her face in shadow. It had been hours and the selfie had garnered one like, from a rando. She deleted it.
Her friend Sarah, a therapist, sent her a video chat invite. Brie sat up on her bed, propping her phone on a pillow, attempting to smooth her bangs over her forehead. But then she just hit Decline. The last time she’d talked to Sarah, she’d started crying, compelling Sarah to start doing free therapy, telling Brie to tune into her body and locate a place, like inside her knee or at the scruff of her neck, somewhere in her body that felt grounded or peaceful, but all Brie had been able to think about was how it felt like she was being manipulated to feel happy, and she’d hung up feeling like an ungrateful bitch.
She needed to get out of the house. Her mom was napping and her dad gardening so Brie gained permission from him—standing at a distance sufficient to diffuse the smell of alcohol—to drive their SUV to a hiking trail outside the next town over. She drove there fast, blasting an old mix CD she’d made her dad, and parked on the side of the road. She took her time in the sweltering car packing her weed pipe and transferring a beer to her thermos. As she got out of the car a man climbed out from the mouth of the trail, which led steeply up the mountain. He was wearing an army jacket and boat hat, gripping a cane as he sauntered toward her on the small road in the bright sun.
He quickly told her he was 95 years old and he was there looking for ginseng. His accent was unplaceable, seemingly a mixture of Midwestern and East Asian, and his skin was tan and freckled.
"Don’t see many hikers out here," he said. "You enjoy yourself, my lady."
Brie felt him noticing her face.
"You have a nice face though," he said. "Apple cider vinegar. Mix a shot in with a glass of water. Cold water. Not warm. Close up the pores. Tight skin."
She said thank you. People always wanted to help. Brie was trying to give up. She was hoping to transcend material reality somehow. Hoping there was some spiritual reason she was turning into a monster.
The old man told her millionaires liked to ask him questions. That a book was being written about him.
"What did you do?" she asked.
"Long lifedy," he seemed to say.
She nodded, smiling, and started up the trail.
"You stay away from those bad boys," he added.
"Can’t promise anything," she mumbled.
She climbed and climbed, sweating. Her beer was gone soon enough so she sat on a boulder and smoked weed from the pipe she had brought in her pocket. As she stared absently at the surface of the boulder, it began to churn psychedelically, rearranging itself in an elusive pattern, a not uncommon phenomenon in her life which she simultaneously attributed to the Great Mystery winking at her, and to presumed permanent brain damage caused by too much past hallucinogenic drug use. She crouched to pee behind the boulder and started back down the trail.
As she pulled into her parents’ driveway her dad popped out of the garden and said she was just in time for the Zoom meditation class he and Brie’s mom were hosting. Brie actually felt grateful for the opportunity to do something that felt somewhat like she was doing something. She went up to her room and sat on the floor with her laptop facing her on the bed, entering the Zoom room but turning her camera and sound off so she could smoke more weed and stare out the window at a mountain.
Her mom rang a tiny gong and the group of seven or eight elderly upper middle class mountain dwellers and Brie began to sit quietly. Brie held herself up with her spine and slowly coaxed her stomach muscles to relax, which led her awareness down to her crotch and how badly she wanted to be touched. She got up and positioned herself against the corner of the bed, thrusting against it making swallowed throaty sounds until she came, almost jolting her laptop onto the floor in the process. As she hovered over the edge of the bed panting she heard her mom’s gong again, signaling the twenty minutes of meditation was up. She sat back down on the floor.
Her dad read an excerpt about fear from his guru. Something about how all of us humans are afraid of boredom, how we always fidget because we’re afraid of death. Brie zoned out for a minute, staring at her half-hidden pile of White Claw cans in the corner, reminding herself to deal with them, then heard the words, "Imagine if you found out you live forever, you’d kill yourself eventually.”
Then it was time for a discussion. She pulled her laptop off the bed into her lap and let her attention weave in and out, checking her email at the same time. She’d received an email from a tantric self-help guru she didn’t remember signing up to receive emails from. The subject line was, Are You A Tantric Priestess in Hiding, Brie?
"It is a truly horrible thing when people try to change the story by creating a fictional narrative," she heard someone in the class say. She opened a Google doc and started taking notes.
"We need to somehow internalize the understanding of suffering,” said a man Brie’s parents had been lightly roasting the previous night at dinner for being a know-it-all. “Intellectual understanding, frankly, is sometimes…”—he paused to sigh heavily—“...detrimental."
This elderly lady with bright white hair spoke up. She was sitting in a dark kitchen illuminated only by the glow of her computer screen, ghostlike. "The reading reminded me of something I’ve always wondered, which is, am I a physical being having a spiritual experience, or am I a spiritual being having a physical experience? So. I’ve just, always wondered that."
Brie smiled and nodded, briefly wishing her camera was turned on in the Zoom call. She wanted to know what the old lady was going to do when she left the call. Brie had always thought she would kill it as an old lady. It was the intervening years that presented a problem for her. The years she wasn’t supposed to be relaxing into her decline.
The sky turned pink over the mountains as Brie descended the stairs and went out onto the porch for a better view. Her mom was sitting there smoking weed and invited her to go to the dump.
In the car Brie turned on the radio. Someone was saying, “That’s why I’ve been emphasizing dancing. It’s always good to get moving.” Then the DJ dedicated a song to African Americans, lamenting the disproportionate impact the virus was having on them. It was called "Inner City Blues."
Her mom braked suddenly. “There’s an eagle,” she said. She put the car in reverse and backed up a few yards on the deserted road. The eagle was perched on a tree above the stream that ran along the road. They stared for a few moments. Brie’s mom started to put the car in drive.
Brie said, “Don’t you kind of want to keep staring?”
Her mom put the car in park. Brie turned the radio off. They were silent for a while. Both a little stoned.
“Since my dad died I’ve had this thing about him becoming an eagle,” Brie’s mom said, then told the story of how, after fighting with her mom and brother on her birthday, she’d seen an eagle perched in a tree in the neighbor’s yard for an entire afternoon. “I always thought he was the only sane one in the family.”
At the dump Brie and her mom each heaved a black bag into the overflowing dumpster, and a white bag into the overflowing recycling bin.
“I just think people don’t realize how bad this virus is. I think it’s the end of the world. It’s just a slow burn,” her mom said as they got back in the car. “It’s just revealing how fucked up all the parts of our system already were. Like 35 kids to a classroom? That was too many to begin with. Now we can only have 15 but how can we possibly do that?”
“I don’t know,” said Brie. In her stoned state her mom’s voice sounded shrill and Brie wanted her to stop talking. She turned the radio back on, but they were playing that song "Takin’ Care of Business" which sounded even more grating so Brie turned it off again.
They drove back in the dusk in silence. Brie needed to pee badly and distracted herself by thinking about all the other people all over the world who also needed to pee at that moment, but had to wait. By the time they were back Brie’s dad was almost done making a salad and reheating a pasta dish, so after peeing she bounded up to the attic to have a little vodka first, smoke more weed and catch up on her Twitter feed. Annoyed, moved, jealous, amused, confused, paranoid, she filled herself at a rapid pace with emotions that had nothing to do with her real life as she scrolled and judged until she heard her dad yelling her name up the stairs.
At dinner, Brie’s parents seemed loose and carefree. Her dad had put on an Otis Redding record. He said, “The world is ending.” He was drinking whiskey.
Brie said, “Are you drunk?”
He said, “Am I?” Then into his whiskey glass, in Darth Vader voice, “I find your lack of faith disturbing.”
Brie’s mom got up to get more wine and Brie saw her dad watching her go with a lusty look in his eyes. Her mom sat back down and started doing dance moves at the table looking back at him and repulsion simmered in Brie’s core. There was something about smoking weed that made the reality of her dad’s existence as a sexual being strangely unbearable. It was unclear what exactly she feared. She felt uncomfortably untethered, like physical space, whether inside her body or outside of it, was penetrable by her and everyone else’s thoughts.
Sometimes, when Twitter had hit a lull in its ever-refreshing fount of nuggets as she lounged in her bedroom, she would switch to the Kindle app on her computer to continue reading a PDF of The Way of the Bodhisattva, a long poem, almost a series of tweets, by an ancient philosopher, and now she thought of the last section she’d read, which referred to the human form as a cage of bones tied fast with sinews / plastered over with the mud of flesh. The poem expressed disgust at all the ways humans groomed themselves in order to attract each other, and urged contemplation of dead bodies in the charnel grounds. Reading this, Brie had comforted herself about her skin, telling herself her acne was a means for her to meditate on her identification with her body, to face her fear of death. Now, staring at the mound of twisted pasta on her plate, she wondered if the ancient philosopher was maybe just gay and closeted or something. She needed an Accutane prescription, and she needed to get out of here.
Brie’s mom said the vice president went to some event and didn’t wear a mask.
Brie said, “Maybe his guru told him he can prevent transmitting the virus if he has the right intentions.” She glanced at her dad. He gave a little nod while narrowing his eyes.
When her parents’ guru had died, the student he had appointed as his interim successor had knowingly exposed other students to HIV without telling them, leading to at least one death. But he claimed the guru had told him he wouldn’t transmit it if he had pure intentions when fucking, if he was fucking for the sake of the Dharma, giving spiritual teachings in the form of fucking.
As they finished eating Brie’s mom said, “This is gross, but, I made it,” as she took the serving spoon from the pasta and stuck it in her mouth.
Brie lifted the large blue bowl toward her face and said, “It’s okay, just, go for it.”
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Katie Frank is your friend.
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