Jowita Bydlowska - Guy

I wake up with those sorts of anxious thoughts. The cleaning lady has done a nice job while I was away in Montreal, but I notice a tiny stain on the flat-screen TV and jump out of bed, irritated, trying to wipe off the stain with a sleeve of my silk pajama top. I succeed; the stain disappears.

I unpack my suitcase; sort out the shirts to take to the dry cleaner.

I get dressed. A crisp white Etro shirt, black raw-Japanesedenim jeans Gloria bought me on sale at Saks last Boxing Day. I don’t get things on sale, but Gloria kept insisting, and I remember feeling too tired to argue with her so I let her pick my clothes. The pleasure it gave her to dress me up like I was a baby made up for the spa gift certificate I gave her for Christmas. She had deemed the certificate “so impersonal it is almost insulting.”

I think of calling Gloria but I don’t want to confide in her. Confiding in her would confuse her – we’re already a little too close, and I know she’d be eager to try to comfort me, which would mean I would owe her. I would probably have to book a weekend in the country to pay for showing my vulnerability. And then, who knows? Maybe she’ll bring up combining our lives , as she has done recently, alarmingly. Instead, I call Jason. He says it’s terrible. What happened with $isi.

“It is,” I say. “I wonder if our thing released something in her, turned on some kind of a switch in her brain that caused the tumour.”

“That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard you say.”

“An earthquake in the amygdala.”

“So poetic!”

“Thank you.” I read the phrase online in an article about brain tumours. It would make a song title, why not?

I eat very little. Smoothies and delivery from the deli in Whole Foods. I drink water from my new Aquasafe reverse-osmosis filter system I had installed a few days ago. The filter is supposed to remove major water contaminants such as lead or pesticides. I pour a glass of water from the bathroom and I drink to see if I can detect the difference between the old water and the new water. Both old water and new water taste like water. I weigh the glass in my hand and consider throwing it against the wall. I’m not sure why. To experience throwing a glass against the wall? I think about the shards exploding, finding pieces of them weeks afterwards, stepping on them unaware, glass fibres burying into the soles of my feet, the pain.

I set the glass back down on the counter.

I send Dog away to a kennel, pay somebody else to walk and feed him.

I don’t work out. I can’t concentrate on my workouts, and there’s no point in doing them if they’re not done as they should be.

Jason calls, but I stop answering my phone.

I don’t answer my phone and don’t turn on my computer.

I ignore a personal visit from the reps for the video production company behind the new Charlie video. I send them away as soon as they show up on the intercom screen, their eager little eyes staring right into the camera as if they could see right into me looking back at them.

My only contact with the world is via my mail and the mysterious roses that are delivered every second day. I guess someone got the address wrong, but I can’t be bothered to check. Just imagining myself on hold with some bitchy customer service rep makes me exhausted.

This has happened before, this sudden, unprovoked agoraphobia. This time it’s all her fault. It’s all my fault. I wish for the tumour to turn out deadly. Swiftly deadly. To erase her. And with her, erase all the guilt. Because this thing, it’s guilt – it’s guilt that I’m dealing with, isn’t it? So unexpected and violent, slick like an organ falling out of my abdominal cavity, landing on my neon-white floor.

The tumour is not deadly. Too bad.

It’s a terrible thing to wish on a young girl, death. There’s something wrong with me. Or maybe I’m just better at admitting to what I really feel about life; how human I really am. We’re here only for a short time, so why lie? But of course, we need to lie. We lie to survive. We lie even to ourselves.

I am devastated about $isi’s tumour.

I walk around. There’s lots of room to walk around. My suite is on the top floor, with wraparound windows. I can see into other buildings. People are so indiscreet – flaunting their blurred asses and blurred faces, their silly blurry lives, to the world. I’m reminded of naked mole rats I once saw at a zoo. The rats’ cross-sectioned tunnels were visible to the public. The animals, pink and blind, would try to lurch forward, frantically crushing each other inside the plastic sausage – the blades of yellow teeth, gunky paws swiping – unaware of their shame.

A feeling of loneliness comes over me sometimes when I get stuck on a particular window, watching the human mole rats go about their lives – eating dinners, hugging in kitchens, fucking in bedrooms. Bodies pressed against the glass in the more exhibitionistic dwellings; sometimes, in the next room, their ratlings’ faces, too, pressed against the glass. I could never be them, hugging in a kitchen, pressing a wife against a glass window, inserting a child into a crib.

The feeling of loneliness vanishes.

To rest from pacing, I lie down on the cool floor and look at the ceiling (steel beams, pipes). The ceilings are high, which gives me the feeling of being free, yet being locked in, stuck in a contained galaxy, a large aquarium. I keep my aquarium as plain as possible. The noise and chaos outside is enough, and even though I can’t hear it, I imagine it filtering through every little crack and open window.

For art, I have a couple of framed posters – Keep Calm and Carry On covering a safe – and a couple of black-andwhite photographs of buildings. I have one large black-and-white photograph of Gloria’s back and ass, given to me by Gloria last year on my thirty-first birthday. I don’t know what to think of it. I don’t look at it much. The most impressive feature in the main space is a mass of wires, glass and metal with seven different kinds of light bulbs that hangs between the kitchen and the pullout. It was made by a designer friend of Gloria’s. You can operate the bulbs to dim or, alternatively, shine brightly with a remote control. I enjoy playing with it, changing the moods of my space with the movement of my fingers.

I never cook for anyone here; no one stays here except for me, not even Gloria.

OUTSIDE, TORONTO TURNS FROM SEPTEMBER TO EARLY October and everything is bathed in yellowish-green-soon-to-be-red-and-brown-and-then-dead hues.

I think about $isi obsessively. Today, I’ve been thinking how I met her. She sent a demo of herself singing an Amy Winehouse song. She was raw and young and strange, but there was something to her that made me look twice, made me listen to the demo and then made me replay it twice more.

She was a serious girl in that video, with a pale face and a big nose and lips that were too big even for the nose. She wasn’t plain. She wasn’t like the girls I sleep with. She was jolie laide – an ugly beauty: a face of too many wrong angles and a smile that could fix everything in a flash.

She excited me like no one else excited me before – it wasn’t sexual, at least not all of it. It was as if her little video and her presence in it gave me some kind of elusive peace of mind that I’m so keen on. I phoned Jason and told him about it.

“You sound like you’re in love,” he said.

“I might be. I’m smitten.”

“I’ve never heard you say that before.”