Olivia made her way back up the employee stairs from meeting Sebastian, feeling like she was a drink someone had sloshed around on the inside, still spinning even though she was standing still. It was only now that she climbed the employee stairs, she realized how chilled her hands were.
She shoved them into the pockets of her apron and ducked through the double doors, back into the madness of their Thursday-night truck delivery.
What a weird week this had been.
Between living out of a motel room, and sharing it with her mom on the verge of a nervous, mid-divorce breakdown, she felt like the world around her was shifting–changing into some absurd, Kafkaesque version of what it had once been.
Olivia picked the soup cans for her first truck task and pulled out her box cutter, beginning to slice her way through the twenty layers of plastic wrap around the shipments.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Kyle, her coworker, make his way towards her down the aisle. Her stomach dropped at the thought of more human contact.
"Hey, what are you doing Friday?" He asked.
Olivia flicked her eyes over him momentarily to remember which one of her coworkers he was. Kyle was a nineteen year old with a penchant for getting coked-out and robbing people's open lockers at work. A year ago, a customer caught him napping it out in the produce section, between the yams and the potatoes.
She guessed the part she enjoyed most about that memory was how quickly the same customer had immediately assumed the best of Kyle, and said something about college kids working too hard nowadays.
"What am I doing?" she asked, turning back to her work.
"Yeah, you free?" He said, sidling up against the shelves. "I'm doing a rager at my place. We're just gonna go until the city turns our lights and water off, you know? Totally sick shit."
Olivia felt strangely blessed by the coverage of her mask, so he couldn't see her pursing her lips together. Even being around his baby's first introduction to alcoholism felt cute. Plus, the idea of Kyle's single mom coming back home from her Girl's Trip in Atlantic City to discover the house trashed and the utilities cut–well, some things just lined up beautifully in a chaotic sort of way.
"That sounds great Kyle," Olivia said, pulling the canned soups around him as he stood around and refused to help. "But I think I've got something that night."
"You can come after. Come on, this'll be great," he said, suddenly uncomfortably close to her personal space, "You can bring your Russian friend, the tall blonde one."
Olivia sucked her teeth and the sound made him back up. She looked down at the garbage and recycling at her feet, dusting off her hands. "He's Ukrainian, actually. And I think it'll be a kind of all-night affair."
Kyle nodded, doing a nervous two-step in his conspicuously new Jordans, "Maybe you can just send him then?"
"I think he's busy, too, that night," Olivia was enjoying watching him squirm as he hot-footed the line between impropriety and getting his drugs. It wasn't like she minded sending business Dima's way, she just didn't want to be this idiot's sudden middle man.
"Sure, sure, I gotchu," he said, pausing as he turned away, "Hey–you not wearing makeup or something today? You look really tired."
She finally turned to him, putting her patient hands on her hips, "Yeah, they took my makeup away in the hospital, actually. Said I might kill myself with it. Haven't really worn it since, you know? In case I accidentally choke on it or something."
Kyle's face went from entertained to horrified, "What is wrong with you?"
"A lot, Kyle, I'm paying a lot of money out of pocket to figure that out, keep up," she waved a tired hand at him, forgetting she had the box-cutter in it.
He backed up, looking back towards the end of the aisle, "I'm just gonna–"
"Good, fucking take a box, Kyle," she snapped, turning back to unpacking, "Do something around here."
Unbelievably, to her delight, she saw Kyle grab a stack of boxes and pace, very slowly, out of the aisle. She plugged her headphones back in, smiling under her mask. Maybe she'd start being a little bit more honest, a little more often.
***
Post-shift brought its usual sleeplessness, so Olivia waited for Chaka to warm up in the parking lot and she rubbed her hands together to feel the blood running through them again.
Chaka gave her customary trumpeting protests upon starting up and then her engine began to warm, too.
She looked around the empty parking lot as she did, thinking back to earlier today.
Grandpa Sebby and his grandson. Olivia snorted to herself in the dark of the car and felt somewhat cheered by the strange conversation. So she wasn't the only one both incredibly lonely and incredibly abhorrent to human interaction on a day-to-day basis.
She looked down at her work apron, and the coiled headphones peeking out of the front pocket. Music was her escape from everyone's bullshit. Sometimes plugging in and drowning out was the only way she could hear her own voice among everyone else's static.
So she guessed maybe this guy's armor was being great at avoiding the shit out of other people.
Olivia raised a quizzical eyebrow, pulling out of her spot. She respected the avoidance hustle–she really did–but even for someone as slippery as Olivia herself, things really did have a way of catching up to you fast.
Or maybe it was because she hadn't exactly been the best person, and that was what was catching up to her–who knew–sometimes it was hard enough to see over the chip in her own shoulder.
She breathed a frustrated huff, and reached down to play some music off her phone to settle the day's nerves. Dropping her phone into the cup holder, she started to feel her body unwind as she made her way back to the motel.
She drove past the halal cart that always sat along Victory and Bay, the MTA buses parked alongside the old, shady Tompkins Square Park, which was less of a square and more of a triangle of problems for the surrounding neighborhood.
Olivia submerged herself into the way that the baseline and the synthesizer notes on Any Colour You Like seem to bend and melt away, like a Dali landscape, making way for a heady, weeping melody on the guitar that spiraled in on itself with increasing intensity. It always sounded to her like the sonic representation of sex on drugs–dissolving, timeless, frenetic.
She knew the songs so well at this point that it didn't matter which order they played in. She liked to pick the songs apart by all their moving parts now, marveling in David Gilmore's solos or–which was easy to do–or the way Wright and Gilmore harmonized like a pair of stoned, joyless angels.
A few blocks later, she found herself waiting at an excruciatingly long red. Her phone began to vibrate, cutting out the Pink Floyd and startling her out of her thoughts. The caller ID read AUNT LINDA , and her stomach dropped, letting it buzz away in her cup holder.
Had her mom and Linda talked about everything yet? Like the house? And the pending papers her father had sent her mom from some PO Box in the Florida Keys? Because she didn't even have the vocabulary or the patience to be the one to break that to her Aunt Linda, who had never liked her father.
It wasn't that she wasn't wrong for seeing what everyone could see now—her dad was a philandering, forever-teenager, who wasn't interested in seeing something he'd built come to fruition—it was just that Linda would be saying I Told You Sos for months, and they'd never hear the end of it.
Her phone buzzed again, and a notification dropped down from the top of her screen. 1 Voicemail. Olivia sighed and poked at the notification, heading down Victory as the light turned green.
The voicemail loaded in grainy, the first few seconds just her aunt struggling with her cell phone.
"God dammit–ugh, this phone I swear to god. Did it beep?" Her aunt paused for a moment, catching her breath, "Olivia, I've been calling you two and you've been dodging my phone calls for three weeks. Now I'm driving past your house and there's a sold sign in front of it? You want to tell me what's going on?"
Something small and very weak crumpled inside Olivia, followed by a sudden vacuum, taking everything around it, all the light, and the day's joy, and all her plans for the remainder of the night. She took a cursory look around for cops and pulled an illegal U-turn to head towards the expressway.
She didn't lift her foot off the gas the entire drive across the island. She flew down the expressway in her station wagon, letting the cold, biting wind sooth her swollen face that was on the verge of crying–heedless of her hair whipping back and forth across her view. How long had it been since she'd slept in her own bed? Five months? Seven? Eight?
When she pulled off the highway and onto her old block, she rolled the windows back up and slowed her approach towards the house. As if on cruel cue, Breathe's reprise started up, and Gilmore, once again, began to croon from the cup holder.
Home, home again. I like to be here when I can.
Chaka rolled to a slow stop in front of her old house. Olivia put the car in park and leaned over the steering wheel to peer into the bay window.
The light was on in the stairwell, and she could see figures moving back and forth behind the frosted glass. They moved up the stairs, carrying what were most likely boxes–ready to fill her old, gutted house with their stuff. Like ants bringing a picnic to an end, taking food and carrying with them, change.
She let herself slip down in the driver's seat, and drift into a sullen mood, swimming in the melancholy interlude as Dark Side of the Moon passed from Time, into The Great Gig In The Sky.
The light in the window snapped off and suddenly Olivia was enjoying Great Gig's great big gospel solo in the dark. It made her wonder if the new family in her old house knew that the whole thing had been built from scratch when she was born, or that her dad had marked her height growing up on the wall behind the basement stairs.
She wondered if they'd already painted over all the tick marks, or the glow-in-the-dark stars in her bedroom.
What were our lives, really, but layers of paint that only saw a few good years before all our memories got painted over, to make room for someone else's?
What was the point of building all those walls, just to have them cleared away for something else? Olivia could feel the tears, buried so deep in her face that she could feel the pressure ache beneath her skull. She sniffed, giving her nose an aggravated swipe.
Her phone cued up Brain Damage, which meant that there was only one before the end of the album.
The lunatic is on the grass, remembering games and daisy chains and laughs.
She laughed and began to have a helpless, manic little cry.
She marveled at how much time had passed already since she'd parked. It was always so hard to know where all the time went. Where it goes, in general.
But it made her realize, sitting there, that maybe Sebastian Muddle wasn't the creep after all. Maybe it was her--here listening through an entire Pink Floyd album in front of her old house, sobbing in the dark safety of her car.
Maybe it was her, that was the inconvenient loose thread in someone else's story, coming undone and swinging haphazardly over the void.
I'll see you on the Dark Side of the Moon.
Olivia looked at the gentle glow of her phone and suddenly felt consumed by the need to grab it. She swiped away her music and went to her speed dial.
Just like usual, the phone rang a few times, and her heart seemed to stop each time the phone dialed out, like reality would suddenly rearrange itself and someone would pick up on the other side.
You have reached...
Olivia closed her eyes and heaved a hiccuping sigh, trying to even out her watery voice.
"Hey. It's me. It's kind of been a while since I called, so I wanted to kind of uh, yeah, just check in. Robin–she's my therapist–keeps telling me to get a 'neutral audience,' to talk to, and I figured you're about as neutral as it gets, you know? Plus, you're the only person I really want to talk to anyways. Funny how now I can't even do that properly now.
God, I didn't expect these to be so fucking hard. I just—really miss talking to you—and at the same time, it's so hard to even touch thinking about you without being blindsided every time.
It's been a year already, you know that?
A whole turn around the sun without you here, and I'm sitting here wondering–do you think the dead mourn the living back?"