Zhanna Slor - At the End of the World, Turn Left

Tristan looks taken aback, as if confused why his questions would cause such an emotional reaction. “I told you. The news. I have a lot of free time during the day.”

I unclench my fists, inhale another deep breath.

It had taken three days to find June because the door was shut. And every time we tried to knock or check inside, we couldn’t get the door open.

Because it was so heavy and didn’t move.

Because, we would find out, her body was against it.

“What exactly are you learning Chinese for?” I ask. This interaction is not going the way I intended, and I need to change course. Immediately.

Tristan leans against the wall near the stove and takes another drag of his cigarette. “Just for fun.”

“No one learns Chinese for fun,” I say, watching him. I move to stand in front of the door, blocking his exit. In Portuguese, there’s a term, Saudade, for the feeling of longing for something or someone that you love which is lost. It carries with it the repressed knowledge that the object of longing may never return; a bittersweet, empty feeling of something or someone that is missing. It’s this feeling that comes over me now, like a wave. I have to close my eyes to push it away.

When I open my eyes again, the expression of a trapped bird has overcome Tristan’s face, before being obscured by an aggressive impassiveness. “Sure they do. Not everyone can afford to go to college.” He surprises me by saying something in Cantonese. Something I don’t understand because I don’t actually know Cantonese.

I feel suddenly exhausted. What am I doing ? This is a job for someone competent, not a Russian tutor who only made it halfway through a linguistics degree. There’s a term in Estonian, Ei Viitsi , which means a feeling of such intense laziness you don’t want to go anywhere or do anything. I’ve gone from energized to Ei Viitsi in less than thirty seconds. I’m not a cop. I’m someone who has seen too many detective movies. I should tell my dad to talk to the cops once more and leave me out of it. I should go home. “Can you please drop the act?” I ask, rubbing my eyes with two fingers.

“What act?”

I lean against the door, giving him space.

“You’re Tristan, right?” I ask. But his face is unchanged. If he is Tristan, he’s not admitting it. “I’m not going to tell on you,” I add. “I just want to see Anna.”

Tristan’s head snaps to mine. “What?”

“Yeah. Anna,” I say. “She’s the mastermind behind this little scheme, right?”

Tristan looks past me again, blinking. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Everyone looks to the left when they’re lying. Easy tell,” I say.

“That’s not true. The only real indicator of a lie is a microexpression. You’re better off looking at eyebrows than eye direction.” Tristan takes a long drag from the cigarette, then looks down at the floor. “And I don’t know what you’re talking about, lady. If you don’t want to do this, fine…”

“I’m not the police,” I say. I point down at myself, my dirty black skinny jeans and David’s extra IDF shirt I always sleep in, my unwashed hair. “If that’s not obvious.”

Tristan takes another long drag from the cigarette, watching me. He seems nervous now, and begins slowly backing away towards the kitchen door. “I really don’t know what you’re talking about.”

I watch his eyebrows, but they don’t move. Still, I know he’s lying.

“Wait here for one second,” I tell him. I cross the checkered laminate floor to the kitchen drawers, looking through them until I find a marker and an old Center St. Daze flyer with a white back. I write down my temporary number along with the message, in Russian, “ Call me ASAP. - M .” “Give this to Anastasia. Okay? No harm in that.”

He looks down at it, then at me, his eyebrows furrowing, for a brief second, then straightening again. Is this the micro-expression he mentioned? Because what I saw there was confusion, for sure. Then something clicks in his head, and his shoulders relax for the first time. He puts the note in his back pocket.

“You should really talk to a therapist, lady,” he says. He turns back for a moment, and I’m pretty sure he winks at me. “Or your dad,” he adds, quietly. Then Tristan opens the door and disappears speedily down the hallway.

I take another one of the cigarettes and head out to the porch to smoke it. The interaction with Tristan has frazzled me to the core. I feel lost and triumphant at the same time, somehow. Was he trying to tell me to talk to my dad about Anna? Or did he think I was crazy and that I needed to talk to someone related to me? I’d spoken to my dad plenty. It’s my mom that I need to reach. But every time I call, her cell goes straight to voicemail, because this not answering the phone thing is some kind of genetic plague. Why did any of us even bother to get phones in the first place? I cannot help but wonder. We either hate them or cannot live without them or both.

Emily was probably right. I shouldn’t have stayed in an apartment with so many ghosts. Everywhere I look, I see June’s face, her giant eyelashes, the little mole on her cheek. I knew she was depressed. But I had no idea how much. I thought she was like everyone else in Riverwest, a standard mixture of high school angst with a dash of rebellion more superficial than not. She was a poet, so it wasn’t exactly unusual. She was a great poet actually. I still remember some of her poems, but especially the one that she wrote and printed on our tack board right before she died:

At the time, I thought she had written it about Liam, who I’d been dating for several months. He was a common topic of conversation in our house then. It was a wild animal, what we had; one day it was eating you alive, the next licking your wounds. It took me a while to learn that wasn’t what a relationship was supposed to be. I think June would have learned that too, had she stuck around. She had a thing for lost causes. I guess I did too, as we did briefly end up dating the same guy. Antonio. The beginning of the end. In a way it was my fault, for bringing him in the house. Of course I didn’t know at the time what would happen, that after he was done confusing me for two months, he would meet his match in emotional imprisonment.

Later, after the funeral and the wake and weeks of confusion, I looked at that poem again and I wondered: am I the other tiny brunette? Was the poem a message to me? Right before June died, after some fight with Liam, I’d hooked up with Antonio again; some silly drunken thing that meant nothing, I’d been over the guy for months. It’s easy to get over someone when you let them live with you for free and then they start dating your roommate. Especially when they’re bipolar and spend much of their time yelling at you. The problem was that Antonio was hot. And I was drinking too much at the time. No one went the committed route in Riverwest, so I didn’t have a clue that Antonio was cheating on her.

Sometimes I wonder if Antonio felt at all responsible—at times I definitely felt responsible, how could I not, when all my friends saw it that way? But I was pretty sure he wasn’t capable of taking responsibility for anything, let alone a person’s need to harm herself. I don’t really blame him, personally. Only a romance novel is about a romance, and our lives are not romance novels. In fact, they aren’t like novels at all. If anything, a life is a room filled with scattered pages. Sure, you could try to deconstruct and organize, but what’s the point? Discovering something isn’t the same as changing it. A feeling can be written about, can be painted, can be sung. The question is what to do about that feeling before it consumes you. How to stop having such feelings in the first place. This was never something June could figure out; any tiny little thing that went wrong would consume her for weeks on end. It wasn’t our fault, what happened, logically I know this. She was a troubled person from the start. She always said writing poetry was her therapy. I’d believed her because it was this way for me too. But she should probably have actually gone to treatment as well, instead of spending weeks on end re-watching episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer on the computer and drinking by herself when she got depressed.