West Virginia. Joe Halstead
pointed and Jamie looked and saw his leather jacket draped neatly over the back of the futon. He didn’t know what to say after that. Just paused and smiled.
“Thank you,” he said. “I really appreciate you bringing this back.”
“I had to see you again,” she said. “I woke up this morning and ate a handful of cereal because I was high. It sounded like a good idea but that was the worst decision of my life—because I was high—and then I wanted the entire box because all I really wanted was you.”
She took a step toward him and was looking at him through a filter of love and pity. He thought she looked like a Cranberries song that was too beautiful to be written. He was confused and felt wretched but was unable to pull away.
“Well, uh,” he said, “I really enjoyed the other night and—”
“I fucking enjoy you. I love your corniness. I want to play in your fields of corn and germinate your corn. I forget what that term is. Thrashing, I think?”
He already had a medium hard-on. “Thrashing, yeah.”
She came close and he was unable to resist her. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail and he reached out to grab it—a gesture that widened her smile. He made the effort to stop kissing her, but it was, he thought, like when you see those burned-in patches on the backs of your eyelids after you’ve stared at a light for too long, and the longer you stare at the patches the more they seem to spell out something, as if there’s a secret message hidden in them, some code being spelled out, and you want to learn it. She slid her hand under his waistband and grazed his cock and his skin shivered and she bit his lip. He took her tongue deep in his mouth and she had a metal piercing that clunked on the back of his teeth.
They went down to the floor and he tore her top off and kissed her neck and nipples and down her stomach, and she arched herself up until her back was a parentheses as he pulled off her pants and then spread her legs and he kissed her thighs and her breaths were coming in short clips and he never felt so good with anyone and then he licked her and she hit her head on the coffee table. She grabbed the coffee table with her right hand and his head with her left. She bucked against his mouth, pressing hard against him as she pulled him by his hair. When she was about to come, she ripped down his pants and he thrusted inside her and he came and she screamed loud enough he worried someone would hear.
Later that night, she slept with her head in his lap and he stared at the black TV screen longer than he should have. He touched the top of her head and felt two knots just above her forehead. His face was cold and wet and he felt the hypnotic rumble of the refrigerator’s compressor vibrating the floor, and he looked at Sara and thought that a succubus might as well feed on someone else’s blood and that he needed to remember that. Once she was good and asleep he got restless and started wondering where his arrowhead was, and then he went to his jacket and reached a hand into the pockets and brought out nothing but lint and fistfuls of old receipts. The arrowhead was gone. He became more and more anxious about the whole thing, even angry; he paced around by the window and then stared at his reflection in the dark glass and noticed his hair was turning white in places and his skin looked dehydrated. He thought about his family in the abstract—people without faces—and thought about how he didn’t hate them, how he just found them frustrating, or so he told himself.
ON CHRISTMAS MORNING, Jamie got up and stared out the window and looked at the traffic going down Second Avenue. He stood there, nude, by the window and smoked a cigarette. He took a shower and kind of remembered the night before, and when he got out of the shower he checked his e-mail and then he dug around in his jacket pockets again, searching for the arrowhead, but they were empty. Even though he thought it might’ve reflected badly on him, he sent a group text that said “Merry Christmas!” to his mother and sister. He felt guilty afterward, like he was being insensitive, or like he’d gone too far, like he was just deceiving himself with all the banal stuff. It was all too close to an uncomfortable truth that he wasn’t ready to face.
Sometime later, Sara woke, and he smiled at her hesitantly.
“Who are you and what fuckin’ planet did you come from?”
“I’ll tell you, but it’s a secret,” she said. “I was princess of the Kitsune Forest but decided to live as a mortal, so I came here on a giant fox I rode covered in fairy dust.”
“That sounds very magical.”
“It was.”
Sara said she didn’t want to act like a leech, but she “didn’t think” she had any money and she needed tampons and toothpaste, weed, and, oh, Cheerios.
“Let me ask you a question,” he said. “There were things in my jacket pockets, things that mean a lot to me. Things I can’t replace. Where are they?”
She scrutinized him. “Oh god. The arrowhead.”
“So you do have it somewhere.”
“You know what today is? I love this day.”
He just stared at her blankly like he didn’t hear a word.
“And I would love it if you spent today with me on Christmas Day. Spend Christmas with me and I’ll take you to it.”
“I need to go home.” He’d been seized by something—what? Something he’d been trying to say for a long time. “And I’d like to have it back before I go.”
“Great,” she said. “Spend Christmas with me.”
Again, he didn’t say anything and she asked him about the arrowhead—was it his Horcrux or something? was there a piece of his soul trapped inside it?—and he shrugged it off. They shared a joint and watched a vaporwave music video on his MacBook: images of the World Trade Center in flames, a Windows 95 landscape with NYSE figures scrolling across it, crows flying against a scarlet sky, all through a bleak VHS filter. He’d lost count of how many times the red progress bar had reached the end and he’d started the video over again. Sara lifted her hand to type something into YouTube, saying she wanted to listen to Grimes’s new album, and he saw faint white scars crisscrossed with thinner red ones across her wrists. He took a hit and offered a tight smile and she noticed him staring.
“Oh, just—when I was a kid I was bored,” she said.
“Really,” he said. It wasn’t a question.
They spent the day around Rockefeller Center and then, that night, for Christmas dinner, he chose Royal Bangladesh Indian Restaurant because he knew it was BYOB and he was in the mood for their saag gosht and two or three IPAs, but, just in case, he took a Mason jar filled with something that looked like red Hi-C from the refrigerator and they left. Walking down Second Avenue, he stopped at an ATM and got cash for Sara’s forty-ounce Coors Light, which she bought at the bodega along with his IPAs, and then they walked down Fifth Street and the street was empty and the air was thick and loud, “thundersnow,” they were calling it, with pitchforks of lightning flashing over that Freedom Tower thing, and an old man emerged from behind a car parked across from the dry cleaners and he was homeless and begging, hunched over, his face burned, and Jamie gave him two dollars. They turned onto First Avenue, and when they got to Royal Bangladesh there were two Indian men outside, one from Royal and one from Panna II, its competitor, and predictably each was offering free things to get them to come to his respective restaurant, and Sara was about to toss a coin to decide when Jamie walked into Royal because its guy offered him free wine.
The waiter came and said the special was mixed biryani and that it was “really good,” and he asked if they’d like some sparkling water and Jamie reminded him they were supposed to get free wine. They ordered saag gosht and lamb vindaloo, and the waiter left and they both put on their Wayfarer sunglasses since the light inside Royal Bangladesh was disorienting and tended to make everything look the same reddish color. The waiter brought their wine a bit later and Jamie remembered that he had, at some point, touched two hornlike calcifications on the top