The Guest

But then, like all feelings, it passed.

Hundreds of years ago, their parents might have abandoned their babies in the woods. Instead, the neglect was stretched out over many years, a slow-motion withering. The kids were still abandoned, still neglected in the woods, but the forest was lovely.

People just wanted to hear their own voices, your response a comma punctuating their monologue.

People, it turned out, were mostly fine with being victimized in small doses. In fact, they seemed to expect a certain amount of deception, allowed for a tolerable margin of manipulation in their relationships.

At the same time, she knew she would never go crazy—which was worse. She’d been almost jealous of the people she’d known in the city who’d totally cracked up, spiraled into some other realm. It was a relief to have the option to fully peace out of reality.

It made Alex uncomfortable, someone demanding love so overtly, showing all her cards. As if it were that easy, as if love were something you deserved and didn't have to scramble to earn.

Younger men had to make everything mean something, had to turn every choice and preference into a referendum on their personality.

But that had been Alex's immediate thought how easy it would be to take things, out here. All sorts of things. The bikes leaning against the fence. The bags unattended on towels. The cars left unlocked, no one wanting to carry their keys on the beach. A system that existed only because everyone believed they were among people like themselves.

Alex had the sick sense that she was a ghost.

But maybe some things could never be erased. Maybe they tinted some cellular level of your experience, and even if you scraped away whatever part was on the surface, the rot had already gotten beneath.

People like Helen loved to display the artifacts of creativity as if that implicated her in the process.

A problem of emotional excess, psychological gout.

So much effort and noise required to cultivate this landscape, a landscape meant to invoke peace and quiet. The appearance of calm demanded an endless campaign of violent intervention.

What seemed so peaceful, the black stretch of ocean, was frightening when she got up close. It would be easy to lose yourself. One step into the water. Another. Simple, all the questions answered.

All the women in the show hated each other, hated each other so much, just so they could avoid hating their husbands. Only their little dogs, blinking from their laps, seemed real: they were the women’s souls, Alex decided, tiny souls trotting behind them on a leash.

Alex could see Simon was no longer engaged, that he no longer felt implicated in whatever drama Alex was creating.

That’s what they all wanted, wasn’t it? To see, in the face of another, pure acceptance. Simple, really, but still rare enough that people didn’t get it from their families, didn’t get it from their partners, had to seek it out from someone like Alex.

Amazing how little you had to give, really. People just wanted to hear their own voices, your response a comma punctuating their monologue.

How do you know them?” “School, I dunno,” Jack said. “Some from out here.” “High school friends?” “Elementary school, too.” That continuity seemed nearly impossible to Alex: imagine the thread staying the same, the world remaining static. Would it be stifling, punishing, or was it the reason why all these people had this peculiar certainty about who they were, confidence that their identity had a context? In her hometown, there was context, but the context was negative, a vortex. The arc of your life was already determined, its limits already visible. This was something else.

What were people seeing in her aura, what stink was emanating? Maybe she was imagining it. But maybe not.

Logistics were already crowding in, making her tired—this is what people like Simon got to avoid, the constant churn of anxieties somehow both punishingly urgent and punishingly boring.

Such shocking cleanliness, edging on the perverse. She wanted to throw herself on those perfect uncreased sheets, but didn’t. The perfect sheets, the chilly rooms: they were stupid things, taken one by one, but all together they were a convincing substitute for a life. One where suffering seemed to have no place, the idea of pain or misfortune starting to fuzz out and seem less likely. And who could argue with that, with wanting to be protected? No problem was unsolvable. Could she imagine the trajectory continuing upward? Good fortune accruing and accruing, the world suddenly opening in any direction, like one of those trick boxes, the sides falling down and revealing there were no more limits.

Why are you like this?" he said. And he was really asking. Expecting some explanation, some logical equation— x had happened to her, some terrible thing, and so now y was her life, and of course that made sense. But how could Alex explain— there wasn't any reason, there had never been any terrible thing. It had all been ordinary.

The louder they talked, the more Alex felt her headache pulse, piercing the painkiller fuzz. You could occasionally be overcome by dislike for strangers: if these boys got zapped into nothingness, would the world really miss them?

The situation must have been familiar to Lori—perhaps this happened regularly, some young woman, some girl, needing to be spirited away while Simon kept himself conspicuously hidden, deputizing Lori to clean up his mess.

But better to believe your life was valuable, under attack, than the alternative.

She took an anxious little shit in the upstairs bathroom.

He assumed her attention when he spoke. He had his insecurities, his anxieties. But underlying it all was the certainty that the world would be generous in its orientation toward him.