I was told that I could no longer come into the office, but I still had to work. So my apartment became my office. And because the two were one and the same, I never left. Even for running errands and seeing friends, I ordered everything in. Only the groceries and the takeout came, though. All of my friends moved away. This happened in the span of two years. And at the end, when I was no longer working at home, I decided to get myself back out there and meet new people.
I wasn’t picky, so one day I looked up events posted on the local arts magazine’s website and chose the first one that I could go to after work (and was close to somewhat decent takeout). The event that fit the criteria had something to do with reality, which seemed promising. It was hosted in a red brick building in a part of downtown that I had never noticed because there were no restaurants or shops nearby; instead, only buildings of a similar ilk filled the surrounding blocks. Fortunately, a food truck had been hired just for this night. And it was one of my favorite places in town, a fusion of Irish and German cuisine. So, once I had my fair share of fried, vinegary potatoes, I entered the building’s lone gray door – so small, in fact, (when compared to the rest of the building) that its presence seemed like an accident of design.
Inside, there was a single room that was large enough to fit a few hundred people with plenty of space in between them. The floor was concrete, so the voices echoed, creating a din not unlike that of a cafeteria at noon. Everyone was dressed well, informal yet sharp. My business casual barely fit the mood, but it was enough to keep my mind off my appearance. Though doing so was still somewhat of a challenge because the entire room was lined with mirrors and naked lightbulbs, like what you’d see in a backstage dressing room, except there was no stage, or this room was also it.
Either way, by the looks of the place, I wasn’t sure what the purpose of the event was. There were no stalls or bands playing. There were no keynote speakers or Q&As. There was nothing, really, except for the people. (Of course, in a few places off to the side, there were bars stocked full, with counter service.) Many of these people were in groups, but some were standing on their own, looking at their phones. Nearly all of them were wearing backpacks.
To keep things simple, I decided to approach the people closest to the entrance. There were several of them cradling their drinks and scrolling through the web, like figures of wax nearly come to life, studying one last bit of humanity before committing to it.
The first person I talked to was a woman wearing a black leather backpack that looked like it had been polished vigorously. I greeted her and introduced myself, and after typing out a message on her phone, she did the same. Then she asked me whom I was representing:
“What’s your brand?” was how she put it.
“My brand?” I replied.
“Yeah; which one are you an ambassador for?”
“Oh,” I said, grinning nervously. “None. Just myself.”
“Even better!” she said, taking off her backpack and unzipping it. She pulled out a baseball cap whose texture reminded me of bear fur and stuck it right on my head. She then snapped a photo of me and typed something on her phone.
“You too,” she commanded. “Post a picture on social media, with the hashtag –—.”
I did as I was told.
“Awesome,” she said. “What’s your email? You’ll get discounts and special offers.”
I gave her my email.
“Cool! Well, it was nice meeting you.”
“You too,” I replied, and then we parted ways.
For the next five people I talked to, each interaction was basically the same as this one. After the greeting, I would state that my brand was myself, a revelation that would then trigger my new acquaintance to take off and unzip their backpack, sticking whatever item lay within it on my body with freakish haste. Afterward, they would snap a pic and tell me to do the same. Then, once they said, “It was nice meeting you,” the conversation was over.
Having talked to six people in no more than thirty minutes, I was now decked out in the bear-fur baseball cap, a shark tooth necklace, a raccoon eye mask, doggy ear muffs, eagle-talon rings, and a rabbit’s tail pinned right above my ass.
In short, I needed a drink.
I looked around the room and noticed that one of the pop-up bars had a cocktail that was stuffed with leafy vegetables and colorful ice like nothing I’d ever seen before. So I went over to the bar and peered at this cocktail up close, soon startled when something inside the glass moved – something brown and craggy, and shaped, vaguely, like a question mark. After my initial surprise, however, I couldn’t stop staring. There was definitely a spunky garnish in this drink, I thought, just doing its thing.
“What’s it called?” I asked the bartender, pointing downward.
“An aquarium,” he replied.
“Is it a vodka drink?”
“Huh?”
“The liquor,” I clarified. “Is it vodka or tequila or —”
“— No, no, no,” interjected a woman who was standing nearby; she was wearing a clear vinyl backpack. “It’s an actual aquarium! Cool, huh?”
I took a moment to process everything; then I tapped the part of the glass where the craggy question mark floated:
“What’s that, then?” I asked.
“It’s a seahorse!” the woman said, almost as a cheer. “Want it?”
“. . . What?” I replied. “. . . like, for free?”
“Yes! All you have to do is sign up for our subscription. Every month you’ll be sent a box of supplies!”
To put things simply, I became the owner of a seahorse that night. And after the woman handed me the portable components necessary to keep the aquarium functioning in transit, as well as my first month’s supplies (all of which she had stored in her clear vinyl backpack), she told me this:
“Its life is precious, so don’t waste time talking to the others. Go home now. Go!”
I did as I was told, awkwardly cradling the aquarium and its loose cords and battery pump like a newborn (the eagle-talon rings didn’t help) out of the building.
Back home, I set up the aquarium – which was a little bigger than a mason jar and had a soft, cozy light – on the table next to my bed. Before going to sleep, I peered at the seahorse, whose movements were hard to discern, and asked it straight up:
“Are you dead?”
Then, within a minute or two, it jolted across the glass, obviously alive. And so I went to sleep.
For the rest of the week, I would ask the seahorse the same question every morning and every night: “Are you dead?” And I couldn’t go to the office or off to bed until it zipped across the aquarium. Such a sign, I later learned, could take a while to appear, so I was often late for work or got fewer hours of sleep. Still, for that whole week, the seahorse wasn’t dead. And that made me happy. I was so glad that I didn’t kill it.
On the weekend, I stared at the aquarium for hours, watching the seahorse while eating takeout. It was spring now, so I opened the bedroom windows, giving the seahorse fresh air, even though it didn’t really need fresh air. It just needed salt water and algae and love. In that regard, things were going quite well.
Everything was going quite well, in fact, until 3:47 p.m. on Sunday. That’s when I noticed the seahorse moving in a way that I had never seen before. It was sneezing violently, it seemed, but not from its beak-shaped mouth; instead, tiny, golden masses were tearing open a large slit in the seahorse’s gut. Eventually, a bright haze filled the aquarium.
Fortunately, the seahorse didn’t die. In fact, the opposite was truer than ever: the seahorse had given birth to a dozen baby seahorses. To my surprise, nothing in the manual mentioned birth. And the monthly supplies, it turned out, were only enough for one seahorse. Was it a mistake? I wondered. Could twelve baby seahorses be such a thing?
I watched them all for the rest of the day, and right before I went to sleep, I posed this question thirteen times:
“Are you dead?”
None of them were.
I asked the same question the following morning, but my conclusion wasn’t the same. One of the babies wasn’t moving, and it was awfully close to the colorful rocks at the bottom; perhaps it was even lying on the bottom.
When my boss called me, asking why I was two hours late for work, I told her that I needed two days of sick leave. The baby seahorse still hadn’t moved, which meant that I had to act fast. I won’t go into all of my frenzied thoughts; the bottom line was that I wasn’t cut out for taking care of seahorses, not twelve, possibly thirteen, of them. And there was no way that I’d separate a parent from a child. That was abominable.
So I drove three hours to the ocean and released the seahorses back into the waves that looked like my bedroom, or, simply put, their home. And within a matter of seconds, they all zipped away, into the depths, even the one that I thought was dead.
I was relieved, to say the least, but also sad. And since I knew that I wouldn’t be in the best headspace to drive back home, I booked a hotel room right on the shoreline, ordering room service and watching movies for the rest of the day. At night, there was a reception of some sort, open to all of the guests, and thinking it’d be best to get back out there, I went and danced with strangers, fighting back tears during all of the slow songs.
For the next few weeks, I put the whole episode behind me, focusing entirely on work. However, at the beginning of the following month, I received a package in the mail – a somewhat heavy box, which, upon opening, I realized was the first shipment of seahorse supplies. Quickly I hid the box underneath my bed, crawled into my sheets, and stared at the ceiling. At some point, I drifted off to sleep, but it was a sleep filled with “Are you dead?” reverberating throughout an empty ocean.
For a long time after, I had trouble sleeping. And when the next package came, a month later, I also hid it under my bed. In fact, I repeated this cycle – barely sleeping, hiding the boxes – for three months, until my performance was flagged at work. Thankfully, my boss was understanding, especially since I replaced the word “seahorse” with “grandmother” during my explanation.
“You just need to get out more,” my boss concluded, looking out her window.
I nodded and later obliged her in the best way I could: I returned to the event in the red brick building, which, I learned, met every month.
Once I was inside, I knew that I needed to steer clear of the woman with the clear vinyl backpack, who had also returned and was hovering around the same pop-up bar, where another aquarium was set up. The truth was, I couldn’t bear updating her or attempting to lie, about the whole ordeal, so I walked in the opposite direction, across the room, getting outfitted and snapshotted once again, until I needed a drink.
I adjusted my butterfly-wing shoulder straps and lizard-tail belt and leaned against the bar counter, surveying the room as I sipped on a vodka tonic. The room seemed fuller than last time, with fewer spaces within the crowd, and the voices were starting to drown out my thoughts. I yawned several times. Then I yawned several more times.
“Feeling tired, little kitty cat?” asked a woman wearing a purple backpack; she had approached the bar from some corner that I hadn’t noticed.
I touched the cat ears on my head. “Me?”
“Put your forearm here,” the woman said, ignoring my question. When I hesitated, she patted the black tablecloth on the counter. “Here, kitty, kitty.”
I did as I was told.
Then, without taking it off, the woman unzipped her backpack just enough to pull a miniature purple blanket, as she later called it, out of a slit on the side. She then laid the blanket over my forearm. Under its surprisingly massive weight, I could barely move. Or, put another way, I was entirely at rest.
“Kitty like that?” the woman asked; by her tone, you’d think that I was actually a cat.
“It’s perfect,” I said.
“Great,” she replied, using a neutral voice. “Now, if you download this app, I’ll give you the real thing.” She held out her phone, showing me the screen. Then she pointed to a group of purple boxes off to the side.
After a pause, I pulled out my phone, downloaded the app, and showed her my screen.
“Looks good,” she confirmed.
A few minutes later, she handed me a purple box and told me this:
“Now go get some sleep.”
I went home immediately after, stripped into my pajamas, and laid the weighted blanket over my body. It was eight o’clock when I fell asleep, and it was eight o’clock when I woke up. During those twelve hours, I didn’t once hear, “Are you dead?” In fact, I didn’t hear anything at all. And I didn’t see anything, either. It was all a black void.
So I slept like this for the rest of the week – in twelve-hour cycles, basically right after work until I had to go back in. Then, on Friday night, I crawled under the blanket, closed my eyes, and woke up on Monday morning. By then, the dreamy black void had started to shimmer into new colors and shapes, and, thankfully, none of them had anything to do with seahorses.
At work, my boss took note of all the sleep I had been catching up on:
“Someone’s been getting out more,” she said, laughing as if she knew my dirty little secret (as if I had one).
“I’ve gone so far out,” I admitted, chuckling, “that I’m pretty much back in.”
“And your work is so fresh!” she shouted gleefully. “So inspired!”
After a few months, I was feeling rested enough to actually get back out there. So I went to the red brick building again. This time, I sought out the woman with the purple backpack and told her how great the weighted blanket was, erupting into a long, spontaneous monologue about my improved sleep.
“Say it again,” she told me when I finished, now pointing her phone’s three lenses right at my face.
I obliged, repeating what had amounted to a five-minute testimony on the blanket.
“Now I’m free!” the woman declared, once I had finished speaking and she had tagged me across the web.
“Free?” I repeated, confused.
She grabbed my hand with her silvery kitten paws. She had cat ears and a cat tail, too. “Let’s get out of here,” she said.
“Huh? But what about the boxes?” I asked, nodding to the group of them off to the side.
“It doesn’t matter anymore!”
Before I knew it, the woman was leading us through the crowd, so I asked her, “What’s your name?”
“Katherine,” she answered. “With a ‘K.’”
I told her my name.
“It’s nice meeting you,” she said. She was still holding my hand.
Within minutes, we were outside, facing the street.
“I’m hungry,” Katherine said. Then, after a pause, she added: “Let’s get something to eat. I’m buying. Today’s a good day.”
“Fish and chips?” I suggested.
“Oh! A pub!” she cried out in joy. “Yes, please!”
We walked several blocks down the street, close to the river, where the bar district was already boppin’. In particular, the public house was exploding with traditional music.
Katherine and I grabbed a booth in the pub’s dimly lit backroom, away from the stage mobbed with violinists who were piss drunk at 9 p.m. For three hours we talked and drank and ate baskets of fish and chips. Then, at midnight, Katherine invited me back to her place, which was a somewhat longish walk from downtown, but after eating so much fried food, we didn’t mind the exercise.
We held hands the entire way back.
In her living room, we talked and listened to records for a while, drinking a few glasses of red wine. Then we went into her bedroom, which was furnished with a purple bed and a purple dresser and a purple desk and a purple nightstand. She told me to lay down, and I did so immediately.
“I don’t usually do this on the first date,” she said, removing her top.
“I don’t usually do anything,” I replied with a grin, stripping off my clothes.
We went at it for a long time, like two people who had been cooped up since the dawn of man. And we kept at it for weeks. In fact, it was so rough, so raw, that one night, as we lay naked, arm in arm, sweat dripping all over our bodies, I sneezed through a giant slit in my stomach.
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