The Host Body

When the girl pours the bottle of Vicodin onto the glass coffee table, the pills slide around like pucks. She’s sitting on the brown leather couch in the living room. The back of the couch is made up of thick flaps of cushion stitched only across the top so that you can reach up under them. The girl does this sometimes when she’s watching TV, reaching one arm up under the heavy cushions. There’s something perverse about it, she knows, like she’s reaching up a skirt.

The pills make a satisfying tap against the glass. The girl slides them around. The TV is on. Always the TV is on. For the girl, the TV is like an organ that lives outside her body. Sometimes the difference between having it on and off feels like the difference between breathing and not breathing. On the weekends, when the days are splayed open and waiting, the girl watches reruns for hours, until the episodes bleed together. Eventually her mother will lean over the back of the couch and announce how long the girl has been lying there as if it is proof of something. When that happens the girl clicks the TV off. As the screen goes black, the girl feels a vacuuming suck at the base of her throat.

Today the girl does not have to worry about anyone counting up her time in front of the TV. It is winter break—she is alone. Though she always looks forward to being free from the sharpness of the parental gaze, when she is finally by herself in the house, she feels a gasping sort of loneliness.

As the girl lines the pills up end to end like a snake, she doesn’t think about the noose of her family history. Her grandma lost a father and a stepfather to suicide. The girl was alive for the second of these deaths. As a kid she noticed the flatness of the grief, like some wild thing had been tamped down in her mother and grandmother. But those memories have receded. If she were to try to conjure them up now it would be like looking through the wrong side of a peephole.

On the TV, a personal injury lawyer leans against a desk like he’s not sure it will hold him. His suit doesn’t fit right. The girl hates these cheap local commercials, where the characters too closely resemble real people. She prefers the glossiness of national TV, the slick world where somehow nothing casts a shadow.

The girl has friends. She plays sports. She’s not pretty, but she does not envy the girls who are. They have to carry the longing of all those boys. The girl knows she is expected to feel embarrassed about her body, which is thick through the middle. She pantomimes shame even though when she

sees the lithe bodies of the pop stars on TV, she thinks, we are not so different. She looks at the flat planes of their exposed stomachs and pulls up her own shirt to examine her gut. They are both stomachs, she thinks, even as she knows she’s supposed to see how impossibly far apart they are. At school, she wonders sometimes how much bodily shame from the other girls is real and how much is manufactured like hers.

The girl slides the pills around, making shapes—a flower, a circle, a star. She has not made a plan really. She’s pawed this bottle of pills out from the medicine cabinet, but this decision is not something she’s thought much about. It’s more like an impulse—the way you swallow when food pushes toward the back of your throat, the way you can’t help but swallow. The day is already tipping into the afternoon when the girl slips the first pill into her mouth. She has to drink water quickly to keep the capsule from turning to chalk on her tongue. She expects to feel something with that first pill, some sense of the weight of her decision. But instead, she just feels in her gullet the pebbled sensation of swallowing something whole.

For months now all the girl’s actions have been sapped of their meaning. It’s like watching a movie without a soundtrack—both eerie and off-kilter. The girl finds it impossible to figure out which moments in her life matter and which don’t. She puts a pill between her teeth. Still, she feels nothing. Lately the girl has been having daydreams of a surgeon cutting her open and finding her chest cavity rotting and dusty. In the scene, the doctor slides a scalpel down her chest, and the sternum pops open like it’s spring loaded. Multiple times a day the girl sees this image—her ribs snapping open like a jaw and nothing but a cobwebbed emptiness inside.

After six pills, the girl closes her eyes. She thinks maybe she can feel the pills taking effect, ribboning into her brain like a smooth piece of silk. She has never had a sip of hard alcohol, so she goes to the liquor cabinet and pulls out a clear bottle. Her parents leave the alcohol unlocked, but as she rolls the bottle between her palms, she sees a line drawn on the plastic. This is something her parents must have started when her brother was in high school. If anything, the girl’s parents would be pleased to know that she is dipping into their collection. They always seem to be longing for proof that she is deviant in only a predictable teenage way.

When the girl tips the bottle to her lips, she tastes paint. The disappoint knifes into her. She hates the sensation at the back of her throat—it’s as if she’s being unzipped by a flame. Adult privileges seem to be like this—glittering with promise when they’re far off, but ugly and sour up close. The girl’s jaw tightens at the corners. She doesn’t want to drink any more, but the vodka tastes so much like poison, she keeps sipping, keeps pushing the pills between her lips.

When the girl swallows the last pill, a sudden panic blooms in her chest. All afternoon she has been focused on the task of swallowing these pills one by one, but now that she’s untethered from it, she feels like she’s suspended over something impossibly deep.

A note. The thought comes screaming to the front of her brain. She has not written a note, has not even thought about writing a note. She hates the feeling she drops into, like she’s shown up to school without her homework. Even now, with death bearing down like a train, the girl can still be embarrassed by her own thoughtlessness. She’d expected to feel a relief from the pettiness of everyday life, but now she understands that it is too close on her heels. It will follow her right up to the end.

The girl pulls a sheet of paper out of the printer on her father’s desk. She stares at the blank page. She has nothing to say. Her parents are no longer people to her. In fact everyone has become a collection of shapes, a tension at the other side of a conversation. The girl could write something easy and untrue, something someone else would say. But when she readies herself to do just that she finds her mind dropping off to nothing, like a cliff’s edge. Trying to find the right words feels like trying to grab a fist of wind. She slides the piece of paper back into the plastic tray.

Loose in the mess of papers is a three-by-five notecard. The girl picks it up. Its size is so much less expectant. With a sharpie the girl writes I love you and then I’m sorry. She does not address the note to anyone, and she does not sign her name.

The clock is ticking now. The girl can feel it, or at least she thinks she can. Death has never come for her before, but she has twinges of some blunt thing sliding between her and her body, like a butter knife trying to pry apart a frozen loaf of bread. She climbs the stairs. This is the last time she’ll climb these stairs, the last time she’ll feel the distinct carpeted hollowness below her feet. The thought doesn’t make her sad exactly, but for a brief moment she feels a sense of loss. This house has become so familiar— the smell of it, the textures, and the creaking of its skeleton still after all these years settling into the earth. Soon the house will be gone, or rather the girl will be gone, and to her it is the same thing.

In her bedroom, the girl looks around. Everything is hers—her clothes in the closet, her shoes on the floor, her collection of pictures cut out from magazines and taped to the wall. But now when she examines it, the room seems generic somehow, like anyone could live here. Even though she’s picked out everything, she can see now that she’s just been choosing the things that are in front of her. Anyone else might have chosen the very same things.

The girl crawls into her bed. The sheets have the clammy texture of midday, as if they haven’t cooled from the night before. She sets the notecard

on the shelf next to the bed. Okay, she thinks, her body relaxing into the mattress. I’m done.

It is like the opposite of sleeping—lying in bed waiting for death. The girl closes her eyes, but the afternoon light presses too hard against her eyelids. She stills her body, but she can feel every breath, she can feel the air curl down her throat and lurch into the branches of her respiratory system. Now, she thinks. Now. But minutes later she is still there, awake. The word echoes in her head like a bell that won’t stop ringing. Now. Now. Now.

The girl is lying on her side when she feels the house shudder, the familiar rumble of the garage door, which makes her heart feel like it’s been stitched too tightly together. Maybe I’m already dead, the girl thinks when she hears the squeal of the hinges on the door from the garage into the house. “Hello?” the girl’s mom calls from downstairs.

The girl does not move. She can hear the rustle of plastic bags in the kitchen, the puckered suck of the refrigerator opening.

“Hello?” the mom calls again.

“Here,” the girl shouts. She’s surprised by the strength of her voice, by the sheer aliveness of it.

The girl sits up. Her skin is warm. She puts her fingers against her face. The pills have not yet taken effect. She thought they would be quick to dissolve, but now she can tell that she’s misjudged the timing. They are still just a sludge in her stomach. When she leans forward she can feel the puddle in her gut.

It’s strange to hear the sounds of the mother one floor below—cabinets opening and closing, footsteps, the rub of a stool across the floor. The girl knows she has to go down. If she doesn’t, her mom will come up, and every time one of her parents comes into her room, the girl feels cornered like a wild creature.

On the way down the stairs, which she takes slowly, the girl can feel that the pills are snaking into her system. It’s like her whole body is distracted, like every cell is turning to look at what’s coming, as if the Vicodin is a pair of headlights at the other end of a tunnel.

In the kitchen, the mom is unloading groceries. She’s buzzing with end of the workday nerves and the girl feels unkempt, almost feral in comparison. “Hi honey,” the mom says. The counter is cluttered with old food. The refrigerator is never clean; it’s packed with cheese going green at the edges, shrunken fruit, and container after container of leftovers. The mom will clean out enough to fit the new groceries in. No one in this house is good at getting rid of things.

The girl slides onto a stool. She looks at her mom and feels the guilt loosen the base of her spine. It’s not guilt about what she’s done, but guilt

in knowing what’s coming, in staring her mom in the face and not warning her that her life is about to break into before and after. The girl lets her arms fall onto the counter. She likes the way it feels against her skin— smooth and cool like a pane of glass.

The mom is talking as she moves, recapping her day, interrupting herself to ask if she should throw out this or that. The girl lets out little hums of agreement, though really she is thinking about death closing around her like a fist. It is a relief. These moments of interaction make the girl feel like she has been transported to another planet, like she is operating her body across a great distance.

“You okay?” the mom says. She holds a container of reddish brown leftovers that have congealed at the bottom of the Tupperware.

“Not feeling great,” the girl says. It’s true. It’s an odd sensation to say a true thing to her mom. The girl has found that lately she is almost always lying to her parents, always turning away from them, even when the questions are simple. Saying something true feels like performing a magic trick—like she’s pulling a needle out of her cheek.

“I wonder if you’re coming down with something,” the mom says. “Maybe,” the girl says. She can feel her body spoiling like a carton of milk left out.

The mom gets out a casserole dish for dinner. Her movements are jolting, like each thought is arriving separately. She pulls out a shrink-wrapped packet of chicken breasts. The girl folds her arms and drops her head, which feels like it’s been filled with wet sand. She rubs her chin against the back of her hand and she can feel the bones that run between her fingers and her wrists. For the first time in maybe her whole life, she considers her body as something made up of an impossible number of intricate pieces. She feels a twinge of regret that she is destroying it.

The door into the garage groans open. The dad is home. The girl feels his arrival like a change in the barometric pressure. The dad is most like the girl, the one most likely to see through her untruths.

“Hey,” the dad says. The girl shifts her head to look at him. His whole body is alert—this is how he looks when he drives, like he’s hunting and being hunted at the same time.

“Hey,” the girl says.

The dad and the mom talk. The girl likes these moments—when their attention is focused on each other, when the white heat of the spotlight is not on her. She listens to them, to their easy back-and-forth. They are treating each other better now that the dad is working again.

“You okay?” the dad asks the girl.

“I think she’s coming down with something,” the mom says. The girl feels a little burst of satisfaction. All her life, during every illness or injury,

the girl has always felt the burden of proof. As a little kid, the girl discovered some of her power lay in her ability to pantomime pain. When she and her brother played and fought, the girl’s best move was to cry. Sometimes the pain was real, sometimes there was blood even, but other times it was just a tactic. Soon enough, the girl found that her pain was met with suspicion—not only from her parents—she often doubted herself.

At the beginning of last year, the girl injured her shoulder playing basketball. Though she could feel something loose in the joint and she couldn’t raise the arm above her head without wincing, she had trouble believing the injury was real. There was nothing she could see. She spent the season trying to decide whether the pain was real or invented, and when the surgeon finally went in almost nine months later, he found a tear in the cartilage. During surgery, they thread a tiny camera inside her. The surgeon sends her a picture weeks later. It is hard to believe that this is her body— this ribbon of tissue that floats like it is underwater. But there it is, a jagged vee where the flesh has been ripped apart. The girl cries when she sees this photo—it is such a relief to have evidence of her pain.

“You should take some echinacea,” the dad says.

The girl nods. The distance between her body and her parents expands. This is what happens when she tells these half-lies. The dad looks the girl in the face. She wants to tell them what she’s done, but it’s impossible. It reminds the girl of the dreams she has of being chased. In the dreams, when she tries to scream for help all that comes out is a hoarse silence. She knows if she opened her mouth now, that’s what it would feel like—that terrifying failure of the body, of not being able to do the very thing that might allow her to save herself.

“Can you set the table?” the mom asks.

The girl nods, pushes herself to her feet. The room wobbles like the surface of a lake. Her parents do not seem to notice her unsteadiness. Or if they do, they must think it is only her being dramatic.

The girl collects the knives and forks, the cheap dimpled napkins. The silverware is long and skeletal. As the girl orbits the table to set each place, she can feel that time is moving differently. For the girl, there is nothing beyond tonight. This makes time loop back on itself. Each minute has become weightless.

When they sit down together to eat, the girl feels like she’s playing herself on TV. Every movement is an attempt to convince her parents that she is herself. Her cheeks are stiff and her teeth feel too smooth and boxy against her tongue. She puts chicken on her plate even though her stomach has turned inside out. It feels like a hand is crawling up into her throat. The girl stands. She’s felt this before, this loosening at the base of her sternum.

Her throat is dilating like the dark pit of an eyeball. The girl runs to the bathroom. She opens the toilet and vomits.

It is like a chemical burn on the roof of her mouth. The girl vomits again. The acid seeps up into her sinuses. She’s clutching the rim of the toilet. Sweat spreads across her scalp. Her body collapses to the floor.

“You okay, honey?” the mom calls out.

“Okay,” the girl says. Her voice is rough like her vocal cords have grown calluses. She feels like her insides have been shredded. She lays her head against the toilet. She feels so stupid; she thought death would come like an afternoon nap, but death is here and it has teeth and claws.

The girl folds herself onto the floor. Her limbs fall together. She can hear her parents murmur quiet worry at each other. She can hear their silverware scrape across their plates. She’s sure that this is the last thing she’ll hear—this tapping, this muted conversation. The girl closes her eyes. The bell-toll of the Now, Now, Now is gone.

The girl is still on the bathroom floor when her parents move to the kitchen with their dishes. Her body is curled around the base of the toilet. The roots of her hair are damp. As sure as she is that she is dead, she can still hear the clink of dishes lowered into the sink, the rush of the faucet, the jostle of the plastic wheels on the dishwasher shelves. Her limbs feel like they’ve been hollowed out and her skin is tingling with either heat or cold—she can’t tell which.

“Should I check on her?” the mom asks the dad.

The girl hears this and she feels something in her chest tuck itself away. A half-knock on the door. The girl picks up her head. She braces herself for her mom’s overwrought reaction. She’s sure that it’s obvious what’s happened—the smell of the vomit is too industrial, the onset is too quick, too violent. The door pushes open.

“You okay, honey?” the mom asks. Her voice has that forced whisper quality. Even when she looks down at the girl, the mom shows no signs of panic. The girl pushes herself up so that she’s sitting with her back against the wall. Her arms shake. She stares at the open mouth of the toilet. “Something got you,” the mom says. The way the phrase sinks at the end, the girl can hear the mom’s surprise at finding the girl is actually sick. It sounds like pleasure almost, and the girl can understand why—it’s the same relief the girl felt staring at the photo of the inside of her shoulder. “You should get up off that floor,” the mom says. She’s still speaking with a forced gentleness.

“I will,” the girl says.

The mom stays in the doorway for an extra beat before returning to the kitchen. Maybe she is considering what it would be like to step into the

small space and offer a hand. The girl is always shrinking away from touch, always stiffening when someone pushes too close. She’s like a dog that does not like to be petted. Maybe that’s why the mom does not come any further into the narrow bathroom. Or maybe the mom is just following her impulse to turn away from the sour stench of vomit.

Alone—that is how the girl climbs to her feet. The girl has been sick before, but she’s never felt like this, like she’s been split open and drained. She uses the toilet for leverage and pushes her palm up the wall. Even now, she’s trying to measure whether her movements are genuine or whether there’s something theatrical about them. Maybe she is just being dramatic. “Must be the flu,” the dad says when the girl emerges from the bathroom. This is how it’s been for years—each of them encased in their own stories, pressed right up against each other.

“Must be,” the girl says. She feels like a corpse.

“You should lie down.”

The girl winces in the sharp light of the kitchen. She takes in the image of her parents. Her dad is stooping toward the dishwasher. His body has always been a paradox. From afar he looks relaxed—his arms hang easy and his head is often cocked at a boyish angle. But up close, it’s easy to see the tension holding him together. The mom is sweeping the newspapers into a pile. She is lean with a small head, and she reminds the girl of a bird, not because she is fragile—quite the opposite—because her small frame has a certain alien strength the girl knows she will never possess.

The girl goes to the couch. Through the sliding door, she can see the neighbor’s giant TV pulsing. She lets her body sink into the cushions. It feels like the couch might swallow her whole. She turns on the TV and when the screen lights up she feels that familiar relief, like a valve is opening inside her. She changes the channel, finds a movie she’s seen before. In it, an innocent man is stuck in prison.

The first time the girl ever watched this movie, she was too young to understand much of it. As the youngest, this happened a lot. So many times, she agreed not to be upset or scared by a movie everyone else wanted to see—to cover her eyes if she had to. There was violence and sex of course, but the most unsettling thing about these adult movies was how spontaneously the story shifted, how time warped and important moments slipped by too easily. It made the girl feel like she didn’t know where to look, and she feared that the adult world would be this way. She remembers the first time she saw this movie, how she couldn’t figure out what happened to one of the characters. The man gets out of prison and walks around morose. The last image is his shiny black shoes tipping over a table and wiggling in the air. Near the end of the movie, the girl asked where the

man went. “He’s dead,” her brother had said like it was the most obvious thing in the world.

The girl’s body is wrung out. Her legs writhe. She can see a reflection of herself in the glass of the fireplace. She’s sure that death is still coming for her. She watches as the innocent man cowers unshaven and filthy in the corner of a dark room. When the door opens, he shields himself from the light. The mom leans over the back of the couch.

“You doing okay?” she asks.

The girl can smell herself—sweaty and metallic. “I’m okay,” she says. “I’m going up,” the mom says, but she doesn’t leave. She’s hooked by the scene. The warden steps into the cell, leans over the innocent man. The girl watches her mom, whose lips are parted. The blacks of her eyes are lit up with a reflection of the screen. When the warden steps back into the hallway, the cell door slams shut. The movie cuts to commercial, and it’s like the spell is broken. The mom looks down at the girl, reaches out like she means to touch her, but instead she lets her hand fall onto the cushion. “Goodnight,” the mom says.

“Goodnight,” the girl says.

“I bet you’ll feel better tomorrow.”

The girl nods. As the commercials run, the girl listens to the mom’s steps—into the kitchen, down the hallway, and finally up the stairs. In this house, when someone is upstairs, the movements that are silent to them—a shuffle across the carpet, a shift of weight from one foot to the other—will make the ceiling downstairs creak. The girl likes hearing this—the evidence of someone in the house, someone close but still separated from her by a thick layer of wood and drywall and carpet.

“Do you need anything?” the dad asks. He’ll go upstairs too, but he’ll come down later to watch TV until he falls asleep.

“I’m good,” the girl says.

The dad lets out a breath, and then he too pads down the hallway and up the stairs. The girl sinks into the cushions, which have the doughy texture of flesh. Her eyelids are thick and sticky like a second layer of skin has been glued to each one. She watches the innocent man tunnel through the prison wall and elbow his way down a pipe full of sewage. The girl tries to surrender, tries to still her own heart and quiet the synapses firing behind her eyes. But she goes on breathing. It occurs to her that maybe death is not on its way. There is no relief at the thought, no secret regret that comes slithering out. Instead, the girl just feels stranded—that lonely twist of the knife in realizing that the person who has promised to pick you up is not coming at all.

The girl is still awake when the dad comes back down and lays out on the other couch. The crooked warden has just put a bullet into his own head.

“Haven’t you seen this a million times?” the dad asks. He takes control of the remote, begins flipping through the channels.

“Yeah,” the girl says.

They lie there together for a while, the pale light washing over them. The girl’s skin feels like it’s seeping into the couch.

“You should probably get to bed,” the dad says. He says it like he’s been waiting for the girl to figure this out for herself, as if he’s giving her the answer to a very simple question.

The girl sits up. The air against her damp shirt bites into her. She feels a rustling in her head like a beetle is scrabbling across the folds of her brain. She pushes herself to her feet. Her legs wobble and lock at the knee. “Goodnight,” she says.

“Night,” the dad says without taking his eyes off the TV. “I’m sorry you’re not feeling good.”

The girl keeps her hand on the couch as long as she can. When she finally lets go, she feels like she’s been set adrift too far from shore. She totters unsteadily, but once she reaches the hallway, she can lean into the cold cream of the walls. Her hands trail along next to her like spiders.

The staircase seems impossibly slanted, but the girl uses the banister to pull herself hand over hand to the second floor. Her feet flop as if bones have been removed from her ankles, as if she needs the pressure of the ground to keep her legs attached.

When she looks into the dark cave of her room, the girl pauses. Her body is too wrecked to allow her a complete thought, but she feels a staticky sort of dread like she is preparing to talk to someone she does not want to see. Stepping into the room, she smells herself—not her body, but the scent of her that’s built up over the years. Every once in a while she gets a whiff of this smell. She hates these moments—it’s like coming unexpectedly upon a mirror and seeing herself the way a stranger would.

The girl collapses into her bed. Her body feels like something she possesses, not something she is. The pillow is still concave from earlier and she burrows her head into it. She holds herself under the covers and closes her eyes.

When she wakes in the morning, the girl has the brittle-skinned sensation of sleeping in clothes. The sleep, a medicated slumber, has made her brain feel compressed as if it’s been flattened by a hot iron. Her muscles are rigid like she’s been clutching onto something all night. She listens for a minute, strains to hear evidence of someone else in the house. But it’s too late—her parents have already left for work.

The light coming in from the window has an overcast pall. Here is a day that should not exist. The girl feels a prickly sort of pleasure at the

thought—not because she’s happy to be alive, but because there is satisfaction in knowing something that no one else knows.

The girl is slow to pull herself out of bed. Moving gingerly, she curls into a sitting position, her feet hanging off the side. That’s when she sees the note card perched on the shelf. I love you, it says. I’m sorry. The girl feels no tenderness toward herself. Instead, she shrinks with embarrassment at her juvenile attempt at gravity, at her ineptitude to capture her own depth. She tucks the card into the bottom of a drawer.

Today is not different. Waking up has not cured the girl of anything. She puts her head into her hands. Her throat feels blistered and burnt. The air getting down to her lungs tastes bitter. She is exhausted, and this has dampened everything, but the urge to end things is still there. She can feel it like a heartbeat under her skull. But there is something new that catches and snags in the unthinking part of her brain. The person she was yesterday is not gone of course. But there is someone else here too. Someone who has survived the night. There is no celebration, no relief exactly at being alive. But the girl understands that the rest of her life—whatever it may look like—will be two-hearted, shared between the both of her. One who cannot quite imagine living another day and the other, who can.