Believe anything but the Truth
Excerpt:
Baltimore: July 3, 20X3
2 p.m.
She makes it half a block before consenting to its caress, its minimalist, brutalist geometry. A shard detached from a plane of abstraction, frozen between space and time. As the lid moves under her touch … stroking, circling, nudging … the mutual exploration between flesh and object. Plastic? Paper? Metal? Impossible to tell. It’s white. She knows that much. Could be a box of snow. Or uncut business cards. Shooting little nor'easters into her cuticles. Her fingers fondle its contours to unlock its mysteries. A groove under her thumb. Cleaved by a letter: two diagonal lines converge at their base like perfect canyons gashed a millimeter beneath the surface suddenly terminating in a joined arrowhead. She runs a finger down one slit and up the other of the tall V. She could almost cut herself on its sharp grooves. To its right, much smaller, is an eggy letter cut in half and its outer oval incomplete on its right side: e. Next to that, as Sloan hangs a right on Charles Street, is an easy one. A vertical slash: l. Two, actually. She’s trying to snuff the urge to feel beyond, to preserve the suspense and allow the finality to reveal itself … to tease her answer-desiring brain to assess and project and guess what the total word will say, but she loses the fight. Her finger threads right, then retracts, gliding over two more letters. Hard to say what they are based on the quick movement, but she definitely felt breast-like shapes. Just whip it out and look but her brain refuses to give Stanley the satisfaction. What kind of therapist kills a session after forty minutes and has the balls to murder the whole thing? It negates the trust built of confessions. A body of work grown over three arduous years, beheaded. She should report him. The old fuck would eat during their sessions. Hoagies, HoHos, Cheetos. He’d take calls while she was confessing, putting the caller on speaker as they badmouthed their spouse or shit on their boss. What kind of therapist does that? In a session with another therapist? She could have his head. “How bout that, Stanley?”
Outside the pub, Sloan realizes that her phone is vibrating.
“Hell—”
“What is it, Sloan?”
“Mom, you called me—”
“You sound upset.”
“No, you sound upset.”
A pause.
“I saw him.”
The box a fading memory as Sloan pins a finger to her free ear.
“Mom—”
A pickup roars by, a sign in the bed advertising mattresses half off: 4th of July Sale!
Carol Slagg says, “I saw the white-eyed man of the mountain. The man of the snow.”
A pigeon pecks at pita. In the glass door of a Tibetan diner her reflection fixes her hair. It’s a mess. And Sloan holds the phone so close to her ear that she can hear into the kitchen of her mother’s house.
The man of the mountain was a myth, a weird and unsettling legend from Sloan’s childhood, a tale of dishonest living about a broken man—literally broken to pieces, dragging a long chain of shards up and down a snowy mountain. William Slagg, when he'd near the end of his torturous story, his teeth crooked, cheeks lined by whiskey, face distorted cartoonishly, would announce, “our old man beats and beats for that which he believes.”
What or whom he beat was never clear. Nor why his eyes were white or why he lived on a mountain of snow. The white-eyed man of the mountain beat because he believed in something. Beat. With hand or stick or club? It made him all the more terrifying when Sloan closed her eyes at night and passed over the border of her twilit mind. Another country, a different world where lines of thinking followed different tracks. In her dreams of the white-eyed man, in place of violence was its promise, a red haze rimming the outline, threatening to fold in and draw her into its implosion.
Eventually she forgot about the beating man, the broken man, her teenage brain swamping the snow man into the lower levels of consciousness. Then one day in American Lit, Sloan encountered Wallace Stevens’ The Man on the Dump. She moved her finger along the stanzas until arriving at:
“One beats and beats for that which one believes.”
What did it mean to him? Why tell it to his daughter?
For all his posthumous acclaim, William Slagg wasn't a natural storyteller. The few times he narrated the story of the white-eyed man, key elements changed and no moral or takeaway emerged. At the end of the story, the man remained on the mountain, longing for someone or something he couldn’t have.
“Can we talk about this later?” Sloan says.
“I have a new stone for you.”
Sloan runs a hand through her hair as the pigeon takes flight.
“That’s very thoughtful.” The leaves of trees glow brilliant from the sun. “Mom, I gotta another call coming in.”
Indeed. Her iPhone suddenly feels cold to the touch as though pulled from a freezer. She has to change hands and hold it away lest it stick to her temple. And now that she thinks—really thinks about it—she has to hold very, very tightly, to stop from falling.
The caller—this caller—calls periodically sometimes systemically always tyrannically manically psychotically calling. Sloan has never asked the caller’s name, has never met the caller in person but the caller identified by her phone as Snowwoman knows a lot about Sloan.
As a wintry bolt of ice-lightning forks down her insides, Sloan says “What.”
“Well seasons greetings to you too.”
Nothing. Sloan responds with bullish, nasal breathing.
“I’m surprised you picked up,” Snowwoman says. “Normally I have to keep calling.”
“What do you want.”
“I detected more period than question mark but if you must know—”
“Oh I must.”
“Sloan?”
“What?”
“Did you take your pills?”
“Pills …”
“Do you remember?”
“Remember?”
The phone crackles electrically.
If she looked at its screen, Sloan’s quite certain her iPhone would reveal a portal, a window, some transgressible filter to some EMP-ravaged landscape of armored vehicles driving caravans through lightning strikes and funnel clouds over the fiery lips of a volcano.
“I’m starting to think it’s intentional,” Snowwoman says. “I think you don’t want to remember a God. Damn. Thing. Do you know what happens without your pills? Jesus aged Christ, Sloan, you’re gonna break the phone in pieces if you don’t stop shaking.”
Sloan grips with both hands.
“It’s the middle of July. Stop. Shaking. Now,” Snowwoman says.
“I’m trying.”
“Sloan Slagg, embodiment of ineptitude. Queen of incompetence. If you were a man, the limpest smallest penis on earth would dangle between your legs. I know why you go to the gym all the time. I know, Sloan.”
“You’re not helping,” Sloan says.
“You want my help? Allow me to help. Once. Again.”
“Smell?”
“Smell, goddamnit.”
“I smell soap,” Sloan says, smelling Ivory Springs.
“That’s not Ivory Springs.”
Nose to pits: like stale crackers in a cupboard.
“I smell Byron.”
“Because you stole his shirt, thief. He’s a good man, Sloan.”
“Can we not have this conversation?”
“Look, bitch.”
Above the domed Basilica an airplane trails a banner: Say no to intrusive thoughts at Sheppard Pratt.
“I spy with my little eye … a sign for … for … an asylum—”
“Asywhat?
“Where Zelda Fitzgerald got treatment.”
“And Judy Garland—”
“I see a courthouse. Rowhomes. I see a mountain.”
“There are no mountains in Baltimore, Sloan.”
“I said mounted him. What do you think I said?”
“I know you mounted him. He doesn’t think about sex the way you do.” The thing about Snowwoman, besides her aggression, is her voice: a disconcertingly squeaky girlishness ordering her to touch something “Now. And not yourself. Don’t be revolting.” In her other pocket Sloan finds the hard-soft velvet shell of another box.
“Go on,” Snowwoman says.
Sloan can only crack it open at first, letting a kiss of sun penetrate its dark wonderland. Then Snowwoman tells her to be brave and Sloan pries the lid like an oyster, its shell revealing the gem inside.
“Preeeeeetty,” Snowwoman says.
It is pretty—harnessed in white-gold clasps. Objectively pretty. He made it himself. Not just shaped—but actually created the diamond. Grew it from seed to rough under intense heat and pressure in something called the growth chamber. Byron said he also invented a new cut. “A rock for Sloan Slagg had to transcend the princess cuts of the world. I thought long and hard before the idea came.” He was researching the cubists when he got the idea to apply a classical diagonal grid to the foundation against which he carved a pattern of interlocking diamonds. “Representing strength, complexity and beauty.”
“He’s a good man,” Snowwoman says.
“Will you stop saying that?”
“And you failed to answer the most binary of questions. And still took his ring anyway. You humiliated us. Do you remember that at least?”
“I didn’t—”
“You were hanging from his balcony, Sloan. From the fourth floor. At two in the morning. Naked.”
“I wasn’t naked.”
“You were in your underwear. That makes it so much much better. Hanging—just hanging on. With your goddamn Beats blasting that same song over and over. Why? Because you were too chickenshit to go out the door. And you’re too … I don’t even know what you are anymore. Sloan Slagg, always in love but never enough, fervent professional and professional fuckup, incapable of neither knowing nor changing.”
Sloan hangs up and her mind, on its own, continues the conversation with Stanley Farragut:
“And why is the shirt wrinkled?” Stanley says (would have pressed). And she says (is saying, would have said) how she’d balled it in her purse before taking Byron’s ring.
What happened was (she would have told Stanley if they were really talking), her boyfriend of two years had sent a formal invitation (an actual handwritten note sealed in an envelope he must have licked shut), to a “Romantic Eve of Opera, Cobras and Aurora.” She would have laughed as she explained how she’d almost tossed it out with the junk mail but for its elegant cursive, especially the arabesque S’s. “They captivated me,” she would have said, to which Stanley would have replied, “Captivated because …?” “It was my first time seeing his handwriting and I dunno, doesn’t your script mirror your self? Mine’s fucking illegible whereas his …” “Is graceful.” “Yeah.” Byron barely makes any money as a lapidary and so— “Lapidary?” Stanley would have said. “Cuts gemstones. He’s really gifted. You should check him out on Etsy. Sacred geometry—” “Etsy?” “My point’s that Byron doesn’t have a lot of money.” “Okay.” “And yet he’ invited me to the opera. And I didn’t want to embarrass him by offering to pay and I knew what turns him on is when I wear a suit and tie.” “Interesting.” “There’s a story there.” “I bet.”
The story she wouldn’t have shared is how, early in their relationship, they were scrolling through PornHub in search of a mutually compelling video. That’s how you establish intimacy, she would have said—seeing what actually turns the other person on. They scrolled through five or ten pages before stopping at one with a blonde in a suit and tie with three Black guys. She and Byron had fucked before, but he fucked differently that time. The next time she saw him, Sloan knocked on his door wearing an Armani suit and found the quality of sex consistent with the prior time, and not wanting to ruin a good thing she chose to wear the suit sparingly thereafter.
In retrospect, she would have told Stanley, she was confusing “romantic” with “sexy.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning we came from different places last night, not exactly with competing expectations but out of sync. Actually, let me back up.”
They spent the afternoon wandering around Fort McHenry’s pentagonal fortress, Sloan fingering its old-timey cannons, humming the Star Spangled Banner before ducking into an officer’s quarters with no one around and Sloan, in a summer dress at the time, lifting its frills, bending over, holding the bunk timbers and just as Byron was starting, a park ranger came in. “Guys, c’mon, not in a historic shrine.”
Then going back to his place and tossing the dry-cleaned suit over her shoulder, and looking back at him over her shoulder as they fucked before dressing, including Byron attaching his best prosthetic (one of the few without death-metal stickers) and taking two cars the Lyric Opera House because she had to work in the morning. In the dark of the theater, her running a hand up his thigh as the baritones barraged. The scrummy dinner afterwards at Cobras in Fell’s Point (she can still taste the hazelnut gelato), still feel her toe running up his ankle (the one still there). For a nightcap they went to the Science Center to see the Northern Lights streaking down the Mid-Atlantic. When it was her turn, she stuck out her ass, bending her leg coquettishly, and leaned in and nestled an eye into the cup and failed to see anything but starlight crucified into the night sky and all she wanted was to pry one loose because to ease the pain of one would release the pressure of all. After that, aquarium lights in the harbor, bright streaks in exhaust fumes, hot wind blowing her hairs, gut knotting as she strolled along Federal Hill and something—some premonition—said to look back. And there was Byron under a lamp, bending a knee—his remaining one—asking her, Sloan Slagg, to tie the knot. In that golden light, sweat dripping down her spine, she saw how pretty the rock was, how everything had led to that most binary of questions.
“And?” Stanley would have said.
“And I said ‘Thanks.’”
“Thanks?”
“Yeah.”
“Interesting.”
“Next thing I knew I was in my car hitting 80 on 83 and thinking how tomorrow—today—was, is, the most important day of my professional career, and Byron knew it and he still sprung that shit on me.”
“Do you think for him it was a joyous occasion, Sloan?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Actually it does.”
“No, Stanley,” she would have said, “it doesn’t. I mean, I fucking pulled a U-turn and he opened the door before I could even knock and I unzipped his pants in the hallway and—”
“And?”
“And I screwed my mouth to his before he could fuck it up.”
“Why do you think you turned around?”
“The song.”
“Song?”
“Why do you think I’m wearing this shirt, man? It was the first concert we went to and nobody except my dad … very few people know, let alone, like the band, okay?”
“Okay.”
“And then— Jesus this is embarrassing.”
“Go on.”
“After all that, I tried sneaking out of his place.”
“When he was asleep?”
“I didn’t want to wake him and I knew the dead bolt is loud as fuck—”
“Yes?”
“My brain is … like … insane sometimes …”
“What did you do, Sloan?”
“Your patient—”
“My client.”
“Your patient slash client decided to climb down four flights of balconies in the middle of the night.”
“Sloan—”
“Not one of her better decisions.”
“It stormed last night.”
“It did indeed.”
“Why would you do that?”
“I was sitting on his kitchen floor with my Beats on— headphones. And I sat in the moonlight listening to the same song and I realized all my clothes were in his room and I thought how crazy that I couldn’t answer a simple yes or no question. And then I went on the balcony—”
“Unclothed?”
“Don’t get excited.”
“And?”
“And I fucking went over and held.”
“You kept holding on.”
“I hold on.”
“Then what happened?”
She wouldn’t have told Stanley how she felt her mind splitting even deeper … Or maybe she would.
“You’ve mentioned the split before,” Stanley would have said.
“Yeah.”
Her phone: it’s so fucking cold and Snowwoman is calling again, calling insistently, calling unstoppably calling Sloan on her freezing-to-the-touch phone.
“Hello?”
“Then you tried sneaking out this morning but he caught you,” Snowwoman says. “In revenge you kept your clothes off and the door open putting on your makeup. He leaned a forearm on the door and you got horny.”
“It reminded me of something.”
“Your second date, I know. Arm wrestling in a bar—you pulling with both hands, standing and cheating, and Byron still won. You had to drink your second martini in a single gulp. ‘God that’s good,’ you said, slamming the coupe glass to the bar. ‘But here’s the thing, Byron,’ she said that night, trying to be sexy, trying to be cool. ‘My exes could shoulder-press me—my memorable ones. But you?’ You flicked his bladed leg. ‘I have doubts.’ He asked what was at stake and you hooked your lip like and bent your leg coquettishly. And Byron flipped you sideways, log-rolling you to his chest. As you almost peed herself laughing, the bar cheering him on, as Byron power-cleaned and pressed you ten times.
“Well?” Byron said—the Byron from this morning—the one in the doorway.
“I was thinking,” she said, pencilling her eye, “of how it works.”
“And?”
“And I wish I knew.”
“You wish you knew,” he said.
“Yes, Byron. I wish I knew.”
“Is it that your mom can’t handle a Black in-law?”
She didn’t dignify a response.
“Is it this?” —he pointed to his blade.
“That’s your best feature,” she said, delicate with the pencil.
“Then what, Sloan? Because I haven’t found success yet?”
She put her pencil down. “Do you honestly think I give a shit about that?” It came spitting out. “How could you raise that with me?” She went back to lining her eye. “Don’t you think I want to say yes? I can feel it right here,” she said, thumping the center of her body. Then wanting to hear it. The thing she would have said if the situation was reversed. But he watched—tenderly, with compassion. She threw the pencil in the case. “Can I see it again?”
“Yes, see again,” Snowwoman says.
They met in kettlebell class. Seeing the viciousness with which he swung 50 kilos between human and non-human legs intrigued her. She approached him in the parking lot.
“Stalked,” Snowwoman says.
There she learned how he lost his leg in combat—that coped by reframing the loss. “Put all my rage into that leg.” —His therapist’s suggestion.— “It vaporized in the blast.”
Most of the vets she’d dated shared the same interests: weaponry, camping, boating. Sloan liked firing an assault rifle, liked sex under the stars, liked skinny dipping in the bay. But Byron was an outlier. The game they’d play in restaurants, where they’d choose the oldest--
“So he came back,” Snowwoman prompts.
“And tossed the box,” Sloan says. And she opened it.
“Put it on,” Snowwoman says.
Sloan pictures Byron holding the uncut stone to wet saw, bare-handed, sloughing off imperfections in search for the core—for her essence—the Sloan in the rough, the Slagg in the shit. Trying to capture or liberate the essence of Sloan from everything that was unessential. Byron would have held her to the light, examining her facets with his loupe, continuing to cut away her impurities. Is that what knotted her stomach?
“Put it on,” Snowwoman says.
“Shattered Goddess.”
“What?”
“That’s what he named the cut,” Sloan says, closing, pocketing the box, thinking, as she ends the call, how she’d trashed the suit and tie she’d worn to work after her failed consultation this morning, and wondering, for some reason only her brain would know, when was the last time she washed, really washed, her hair.
Baltimore: July 3, 20X3
2 p.m.
She makes it half a block before consenting to its caress, its minimalist, brutalist geometry. A shard detached from a plane of abstraction, frozen between space and time. As the lid moves under her touch … stroking, circling, nudging … the mutual exploration between flesh and object. Plastic? Paper? Metal? Impossible to tell. It’s white. She knows that much. Could be a box of snow. Or uncut business cards. Shooting little nor'easters into her cuticles. Her fingers fondle its contours to unlock its mysteries. A groove under her thumb. Cleaved by a letter: two diagonal lines converge at their base like perfect canyons gashed a millimeter beneath the surface suddenly terminating in a joined arrowhead. She runs a finger down one slit and up the other of the tall V. She could almost cut herself on its sharp grooves. To its right, much smaller, is an eggy letter cut in half and its outer oval incomplete on its right side: e. Next to that, as Sloan hangs a right on Charles Street, is an easy one. A vertical slash: l. Two, actually. She’s trying to snuff the urge to feel beyond, to preserve the suspense and allow the finality to reveal itself … to tease her answer-desiring brain to assess and project and guess what the total word will say, but she loses the fight. Her finger threads right, then retracts, gliding over two more letters. Hard to say what they are based on the quick movement, but she definitely felt breast-like shapes. Just whip it out and look but her brain refuses to give Stanley the satisfaction. What kind of therapist kills a session after forty minutes and has the balls to murder the whole thing? It negates the trust built of confessions. A body of work grown over three arduous years, beheaded. She should report him. The old fuck would eat during their sessions. Hoagies, HoHos, Cheetos. He’d take calls while she was confessing, putting the caller on speaker as they badmouthed their spouse or shit on their boss. What kind of therapist does that? In a session with another therapist? She could have his head. “How bout that, Stanley?”
Outside the pub, Sloan realizes that her phone is vibrating.
“Hell—”
“What is it, Sloan?”
“Mom, you called me—”
“You sound upset.”
“No, you sound upset.”
A pause.
“I saw him.”
The box a fading memory as Sloan pins a finger to her free ear.
“Mom—”
A pickup roars by, a sign in the bed advertising mattresses half off: 4th of July Sale!
Carol Slagg says, “I saw the white-eyed man of the mountain. The man of the snow.”
A pigeon pecks at pita. In the glass door of a Tibetan diner her reflection fixes her hair. It’s a mess. And Sloan holds the phone so close to her ear that she can hear into the kitchen of her mother’s house.
The man of the mountain was a myth, a weird and unsettling legend from Sloan’s childhood, a tale of dishonest living about a broken man—literally broken to pieces, dragging a long chain of shards up and down a snowy mountain. William Slagg, when he'd near the end of his torturous story, his teeth crooked, cheeks lined by whiskey, face distorted cartoonishly, would announce, “our old man beats and beats for that which he believes.”
What or whom he beat was never clear. Nor why his eyes were white or why he lived on a mountain of snow. The white-eyed man of the mountain beat because he believed in something. Beat. With hand or stick or club? It made him all the more terrifying when Sloan closed her eyes at night and passed over the border of her twilit mind. Another country, a different world where lines of thinking followed different tracks. In her dreams of the white-eyed man, in place of violence was its promise, a red haze rimming the outline, threatening to fold in and draw her into its implosion.
Eventually she forgot about the beating man, the broken man, her teenage brain swamping the snow man into the lower levels of consciousness. Then one day in American Lit, Sloan encountered Wallace Stevens’ The Man on the Dump. She moved her finger along the stanzas until arriving at:
“One beats and beats for that which one believes.”
What did it mean to him? Why tell it to his daughter?
For all his posthumous acclaim, William Slagg wasn't a natural storyteller. The few times he narrated the story of the white-eyed man, key elements changed and no moral or takeaway emerged. At the end of the story, the man remained on the mountain, longing for someone or something he couldn’t have.
“Can we talk about this later?” Sloan says.
“I have a new stone for you.”
Sloan runs a hand through her hair as the pigeon takes flight.
“That’s very thoughtful.” The leaves of trees glow brilliant from the sun. “Mom, I gotta another call coming in.”
Indeed. Her iPhone suddenly feels cold to the touch as though pulled from a freezer. She has to change hands and hold it away lest it stick to her temple. And now that she thinks—really thinks about it—she has to hold very, very tightly, to stop from falling.
The caller—this caller—calls periodically sometimes systemically always tyrannically manically psychotically calling. Sloan has never asked the caller’s name, has never met the caller in person but the caller identified by her phone as Snowwoman knows a lot about Sloan.
As a wintry bolt of ice-lightning forks down her insides, Sloan says “What.”
“Well seasons greetings to you too.”
Nothing. Sloan responds with bullish, nasal breathing.
“I’m surprised you picked up,” Snowwoman says. “Normally I have to keep calling.”
“What do you want.”
“I detected more period than question mark but if you must know—”
“Oh I must.”
“Sloan?”
“What?”
“Did you take your pills?”
“Pills …”
“Do you remember?”
“Remember?”
The phone crackles electrically.
If she looked at its screen, Sloan’s quite certain her iPhone would reveal a portal, a window, some transgressible filter to some EMP-ravaged landscape of armored vehicles driving caravans through lightning strikes and funnel clouds over the fiery lips of a volcano.
“I’m starting to think it’s intentional,” Snowwoman says. “I think you don’t want to remember a God. Damn. Thing. Do you know what happens without your pills? Jesus aged Christ, Sloan, you’re gonna break the phone in pieces if you don’t stop shaking.”
Sloan grips with both hands.
“It’s the middle of July. Stop. Shaking. Now,” Snowwoman says.
“I’m trying.”
“Sloan Slagg, embodiment of ineptitude. Queen of incompetence. If you were a man, the limpest smallest penis on earth would dangle between your legs. I know why you go to the gym all the time. I know, Sloan.”
“You’re not helping,” Sloan says.
“You want my help? Allow me to help. Once. Again.”
“Smell?”
“Smell, goddamnit.”
“I smell soap,” Sloan says, smelling Ivory Springs.
“That’s not Ivory Springs.”
Nose to pits: like stale crackers in a cupboard.
“I smell Byron.”
“Because you stole his shirt, thief. He’s a good man, Sloan.”
“Can we not have this conversation?”
“Look, bitch.”
Above the domed Basilica an airplane trails a banner: Say no to intrusive thoughts at Sheppard Pratt.
“I spy with my little eye … a sign for … for … an asylum—”
“Asywhat?
“Where Zelda Fitzgerald got treatment.”
“And Judy Garland—”
“I see a courthouse. Rowhomes. I see a mountain.”
“There are no mountains in Baltimore, Sloan.”
“I said mounted him. What do you think I said?”
“I know you mounted him. He doesn’t think about sex the way you do.” The thing about Snowwoman, besides her aggression, is her voice: a disconcertingly squeaky girlishness ordering her to touch something “Now. And not yourself. Don’t be revolting.” In her other pocket Sloan finds the hard-soft velvet shell of another box.
“Go on,” Snowwoman says.
Sloan can only crack it open at first, letting a kiss of sun penetrate its dark wonderland. Then Snowwoman tells her to be brave and Sloan pries the lid like an oyster, its shell revealing the gem inside.
“Preeeeeetty,” Snowwoman says.
It is pretty—harnessed in white-gold clasps. Objectively pretty. He made it himself. Not just shaped—but actually created the diamond. Grew it from seed to rough under intense heat and pressure in something called the growth chamber. Byron said he also invented a new cut. “A rock for Sloan Slagg had to transcend the princess cuts of the world. I thought long and hard before the idea came.” He was researching the cubists when he got the idea to apply a classical diagonal grid to the foundation against which he carved a pattern of interlocking diamonds. “Representing strength, complexity and beauty.”
“He’s a good man,” Snowwoman says.
“Will you stop saying that?”
“And you failed to answer the most binary of questions. And still took his ring anyway. You humiliated us. Do you remember that at least?”
“I didn’t—”
“You were hanging from his balcony, Sloan. From the fourth floor. At two in the morning. Naked.”
“I wasn’t naked.”
“You were in your underwear. That makes it so much much better. Hanging—just hanging on. With your goddamn Beats blasting that same song over and over. Why? Because you were too chickenshit to go out the door. And you’re too … I don’t even know what you are anymore. Sloan Slagg, always in love but never enough, fervent professional and professional fuckup, incapable of neither knowing nor changing.”
Sloan hangs up and her mind, on its own, continues the conversation with Stanley Farragut:
“And why is the shirt wrinkled?” Stanley says (would have pressed). And she says (is saying, would have said) how she’d balled it in her purse before taking Byron’s ring.
What happened was (she would have told Stanley if they were really talking), her boyfriend of two years had sent a formal invitation (an actual handwritten note sealed in an envelope he must have licked shut), to a “Romantic Eve of Opera, Cobras and Aurora.” She would have laughed as she explained how she’d almost tossed it out with the junk mail but for its elegant cursive, especially the arabesque S’s. “They captivated me,” she would have said, to which Stanley would have replied, “Captivated because …?” “It was my first time seeing his handwriting and I dunno, doesn’t your script mirror your self? Mine’s fucking illegible whereas his …” “Is graceful.” “Yeah.” Byron barely makes any money as a lapidary and so— “Lapidary?” Stanley would have said. “Cuts gemstones. He’s really gifted. You should check him out on Etsy. Sacred geometry—” “Etsy?” “My point’s that Byron doesn’t have a lot of money.” “Okay.” “And yet he’ invited me to the opera. And I didn’t want to embarrass him by offering to pay and I knew what turns him on is when I wear a suit and tie.” “Interesting.” “There’s a story there.” “I bet.”
The story she wouldn’t have shared is how, early in their relationship, they were scrolling through PornHub in search of a mutually compelling video. That’s how you establish intimacy, she would have said—seeing what actually turns the other person on. They scrolled through five or ten pages before stopping at one with a blonde in a suit and tie with three Black guys. She and Byron had fucked before, but he fucked differently that time. The next time she saw him, Sloan knocked on his door wearing an Armani suit and found the quality of sex consistent with the prior time, and not wanting to ruin a good thing she chose to wear the suit sparingly thereafter.
In retrospect, she would have told Stanley, she was confusing “romantic” with “sexy.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning we came from different places last night, not exactly with competing expectations but out of sync. Actually, let me back up.”
They spent the afternoon wandering around Fort McHenry’s pentagonal fortress, Sloan fingering its old-timey cannons, humming the Star Spangled Banner before ducking into an officer’s quarters with no one around and Sloan, in a summer dress at the time, lifting its frills, bending over, holding the bunk timbers and just as Byron was starting, a park ranger came in. “Guys, c’mon, not in a historic shrine.”
Then going back to his place and tossing the dry-cleaned suit over her shoulder, and looking back at him over her shoulder as they fucked before dressing, including Byron attaching his best prosthetic (one of the few without death-metal stickers) and taking two cars the Lyric Opera House because she had to work in the morning. In the dark of the theater, her running a hand up his thigh as the baritones barraged. The scrummy dinner afterwards at Cobras in Fell’s Point (she can still taste the hazelnut gelato), still feel her toe running up his ankle (the one still there). For a nightcap they went to the Science Center to see the Northern Lights streaking down the Mid-Atlantic. When it was her turn, she stuck out her ass, bending her leg coquettishly, and leaned in and nestled an eye into the cup and failed to see anything but starlight crucified into the night sky and all she wanted was to pry one loose because to ease the pain of one would release the pressure of all. After that, aquarium lights in the harbor, bright streaks in exhaust fumes, hot wind blowing her hairs, gut knotting as she strolled along Federal Hill and something—some premonition—said to look back. And there was Byron under a lamp, bending a knee—his remaining one—asking her, Sloan Slagg, to tie the knot. In that golden light, sweat dripping down her spine, she saw how pretty the rock was, how everything had led to that most binary of questions.
“And?” Stanley would have said.
“And I said ‘Thanks.’”
“Thanks?”
“Yeah.”
“Interesting.”
“Next thing I knew I was in my car hitting 80 on 83 and thinking how tomorrow—today—was, is, the most important day of my professional career, and Byron knew it and he still sprung that shit on me.”
“Do you think for him it was a joyous occasion, Sloan?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Actually it does.”
“No, Stanley,” she would have said, “it doesn’t. I mean, I fucking pulled a U-turn and he opened the door before I could even knock and I unzipped his pants in the hallway and—”
“And?”
“And I screwed my mouth to his before he could fuck it up.”
“Why do you think you turned around?”
“The song.”
“Song?”
“Why do you think I’m wearing this shirt, man? It was the first concert we went to and nobody except my dad … very few people know, let alone, like the band, okay?”
“Okay.”
“And then— Jesus this is embarrassing.”
“Go on.”
“After all that, I tried sneaking out of his place.”
“When he was asleep?”
“I didn’t want to wake him and I knew the dead bolt is loud as fuck—”
“Yes?”
“My brain is … like … insane sometimes …”
“What did you do, Sloan?”
“Your patient—”
“My client.”
“Your patient slash client decided to climb down four flights of balconies in the middle of the night.”
“Sloan—”
“Not one of her better decisions.”
“It stormed last night.”
“It did indeed.”
“Why would you do that?”
“I was sitting on his kitchen floor with my Beats on— headphones. And I sat in the moonlight listening to the same song and I realized all my clothes were in his room and I thought how crazy that I couldn’t answer a simple yes or no question. And then I went on the balcony—”
“Unclothed?”
“Don’t get excited.”
“And?”
“And I fucking went over and held.”
“You kept holding on.”
“I hold on.”
“Then what happened?”
She wouldn’t have told Stanley how she felt her mind splitting even deeper … Or maybe she would.
“You’ve mentioned the split before,” Stanley would have said.
“Yeah.”
Her phone: it’s so fucking cold and Snowwoman is calling again, calling insistently, calling unstoppably calling Sloan on her freezing-to-the-touch phone.
“Hello?”
“Then you tried sneaking out this morning but he caught you,” Snowwoman says. “In revenge you kept your clothes off and the door open putting on your makeup. He leaned a forearm on the door and you got horny.”
“It reminded me of something.”
“Your second date, I know. Arm wrestling in a bar—you pulling with both hands, standing and cheating, and Byron still won. You had to drink your second martini in a single gulp. ‘God that’s good,’ you said, slamming the coupe glass to the bar. ‘But here’s the thing, Byron,’ she said that night, trying to be sexy, trying to be cool. ‘My exes could shoulder-press me—my memorable ones. But you?’ You flicked his bladed leg. ‘I have doubts.’ He asked what was at stake and you hooked your lip like and bent your leg coquettishly. And Byron flipped you sideways, log-rolling you to his chest. As you almost peed herself laughing, the bar cheering him on, as Byron power-cleaned and pressed you ten times.
“Well?” Byron said—the Byron from this morning—the one in the doorway.
“I was thinking,” she said, pencilling her eye, “of how it works.”
“And?”
“And I wish I knew.”
“You wish you knew,” he said.
“Yes, Byron. I wish I knew.”
“Is it that your mom can’t handle a Black in-law?”
She didn’t dignify a response.
“Is it this?” —he pointed to his blade.
“That’s your best feature,” she said, delicate with the pencil.
“Then what, Sloan? Because I haven’t found success yet?”
She put her pencil down. “Do you honestly think I give a shit about that?” It came spitting out. “How could you raise that with me?” She went back to lining her eye. “Don’t you think I want to say yes? I can feel it right here,” she said, thumping the center of her body. Then wanting to hear it. The thing she would have said if the situation was reversed. But he watched—tenderly, with compassion. She threw the pencil in the case. “Can I see it again?”
“Yes, see again,” Snowwoman says.
They met in kettlebell class. Seeing the viciousness with which he swung 50 kilos between human and non-human legs intrigued her. She approached him in the parking lot.
“Stalked,” Snowwoman says.
There she learned how he lost his leg in combat—that coped by reframing the loss. “Put all my rage into that leg.” —His therapist’s suggestion.— “It vaporized in the blast.”
Most of the vets she’d dated shared the same interests: weaponry, camping, boating. Sloan liked firing an assault rifle, liked sex under the stars, liked skinny dipping in the bay. But Byron was an outlier. The game they’d play in restaurants, where they’d choose the oldest--
“So he came back,” Snowwoman prompts.
“And tossed the box,” Sloan says. And she opened it.
“Put it on,” Snowwoman says.
Sloan pictures Byron holding the uncut stone to wet saw, bare-handed, sloughing off imperfections in search for the core—for her essence—the Sloan in the rough, the Slagg in the shit. Trying to capture or liberate the essence of Sloan from everything that was unessential. Byron would have held her to the light, examining her facets with his loupe, continuing to cut away her impurities. Is that what knotted her stomach?
“Put it on,” Snowwoman says.
“Shattered Goddess.”
“What?”
“That’s what he named the cut,” Sloan says, closing, pocketing the box, thinking, as she ends the call, how she’d trashed the suit and tie she’d worn to work after her failed consultation this morning, and wondering, for some reason only her brain would know, when was the last time she washed, really washed, her hair.
