The Answers by Catherine Lacey

Author:Catherine Lacey [Lacey, Catherine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

8

Ashley looked at her plate, large and white, a gallery for these lonely slivers of raw fish, so recently dead they still seemed a little alive, and being this close to this edge of life and death made her wonder which of the people in this restaurant, thousands of dollars in their mouths, had the fewest days left to live. She was wearing a dress someone else owned, these weird sensors hidden beneath it, and makeup someone had put on her face. So as she ate all this money, and knew her bank account held less than half what she owed this month, the invisible time limit everyone had, the wealth none could accrue, was the only thing that made her feel even with the people in this room. Ashley felt sure that she was the only diner in the restaurant who had mopped a floor in recent memory, though she wasn’t sure what that fact indicated, if anything.

High above her head were massive light fixtures that looked like jellyfish riddled with diamonds, and Kurt was still discussing the merits of unfiltered sake with the sommelier. The seriousness of their tone annoyed Ashley. It was fucking juice. A pinched ache moved across the sommelier’s face, as if he knew so much about rice wine that it had become painful to him, that his knowledge created pressure in his skull. Ever so slightly, the jellyfish swayed.

This was Ashley’s first public Relational Experiment, during which she was supposed to seem unanimously interested in everything Kurt said for the first hour of the date, then to turn slightly sour, to insist nothing was wrong when he asked what was wrong, but to begin subtly undermining everything he said, then to berate him for how long he was taking to finish The Walk, storm out before the dinner was through, wait in the backseat of his town car, slap him when he got in, let a tense silence grow between them before wordlessly getting out of the car, hailing a cab, and disappearing into the night.

At her apartment and looking back on the evening, she’d been surprised by how easy it had been, that one night’s work had earned her as much money as she could make in a week of good tips—more than a few sessions with her trainer.

Slapping Kurt had felt less ridiculous and happened more intuitively than she’d expected, and as they sat there breathing heavily for the required twenty seconds of silence, she felt the same elation she had after a good fight, the sensation that her body somehow contained additional bodies. There is likely a way to explain this feeling from afar—the activation of certain neurotransmitters or a chug of adrenaline—but from the inside it was mythic, as unmistakable as it was addictive, that sense of being more than she was.

The omakase’s foams and drizzles had left her hungry, so a can-shaped congeal of chicken soup softened in the pot while she watched one of her favorite fights between

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.