Tonight I'm Someone Else Read online

  In the morning, she texted me, I’m afraid you believe whatever he told you, and it was true—I loved him enough to look away. That’s how much he loved me. We were even.

  A caption for a photo of morning frost on Mars: This false color image has been enhanced to show color variations.

  I put Cody in an essay once before, but I wrote it wrong: I made him the villain. I forgot women can be wrong, too—I forgot I could be. Against all logic, I perceived touch from a burned hand as a form of greatness. I hope to make a mistake like that again someday.

  Phoenix’s signal officially died when ice appeared on its solar panels. The attempts to reach the lander were called listening campaigns.

  From the press release: The Phoenix spacecraft succeeded in its investigations and exceeded its planned lifetime. Although its work is finished, analysis will continue for some time.

  We cleaned out our desks, wiped our hard drives, went out for lunch, ate french fries covered in ranch and bacon bits. The principal investigator of the Phoenix mission said to the press, Somewhere in that vast region there are going to be places that are more habitable than others.

  Some men never loved me. I didn’t care. Their names sounded like answers, and I used them as such.

  In one of the last photos received from Phoenix, its solar panels looked like an umbrella protecting the—I want to write earth here, but that’s incorrect. The red dirt made everything red. Then the photos stopped.

  Cody kept staying out all night. I kept not saying anything, kept thinking eventually he’d come back to me for good. My room was too bright for sleep, so I held my pillow over my face, exhaled into the black of it. I saw beautiful things.

  Simple Woman

  Sexiness dates. Beauty, on the other hand, does well with a touch of the archaic: it does not need us.

  —JAMES RICHARDSON, Vectors

  The fancy gym near Bryant Park in Manhattan costs $220 a month. I bought my membership online, late at night, without thinking too hard, looking for something to make me happy. Money can do that if you let it—if you close your eyes and enter its dream, the one where you are well dressed, fit, successful, in love with exactly the right person. The gym I used to belong to cost $30 a month, but sound judgment gets lost so easily in unhappiness: the new price seemed justifiable because I would have paid almost any price to become a new person.

  The treadmills at the fancy gym offer a selection of videos to watch while I run. The videos I scroll through on the touch screen include scenes from faraway cities, forests, deserts. I forget I’m in a basement, running in place, or at least that’s the idea. Some of the scenes go places only a drone can go: the tops of cliffs, jumping from one balancing rock to the next, or through a flooded canyon. I pay to use the treadmill even though I could run outside. It’s not the same. Running outside is full of cars ignoring red lights and men calling out to me and unforgiving concrete. Running outside is real, but what I want is the less real: I want the path unfolding on a screen in front of me, I want to run through a place I’ve never been.

  I never used to exercise, not even when I was modeling. The only kind of preparation I did then was to stop eating the day before. There was always food available on set, but no one cared if I ate or not, they only cared about the way I fit into the clothes and the ways in which I angled my body in front of the camera. I liked it that way.

  What I miss most about modeling, besides the money, is the way I was touched on set. Someone was always helping me step into clothes, or putting them over my head so my makeup didn’t transfer onto the collar, or pinning the clothes tight against the back side of my body, clips invisible from the front. I miss the way a makeup artist would be brushing my face with powder while another stylist fixed my hair, arranging it so that just the right amount fell in front of my shoulders versus the back. My mother used to lightly touch my head or my arms when we watched television together, and the touch of stylists brought me back to that place of my childhood.

  When I first started modeling, my only tricks and methods were from America’s Next Top Model—smile with your eyes; put your hands on your hips and arch forward like a hunchback if you’re wearing couture; model with your whole body, all the way down to your fingers and toes. But as I got older, I narrowed it down to one trick, one simple, private action: think of someone you want to touch whom you cannot touch, someone forbidden. Think of a room where there is nothing except the two of you: still, you cannot touch them. Think of the heat between two hands about to touch, the language that exists in that silence. Now, turn the camera into the face of the beloved and tell it everything without speaking. You might think this is too subtle, but, if you live in your mind, the heat of your longing can be captured on film. I have proof.

  I can look at photos now and remember who I was thinking about that day. It’s so obvious. My longing sometimes kept me up at night, which was the opposite of what I wanted: to dream. I bought a white-noise app on my phone, turned on the thunderstorm setting, and closed my eyes.

  Money is a dream, which makes it as real or as unreal as the rest of my life.

  Dream logic seems fine for a world that has been theorized to be nothing more than a simulation—a big video game where we think we play the world, but in fact someone else plays us. I buy what I can’t afford; I idolize people who have nothing to do with me; I refuse to believe one thing leads to another, which is to say I don’t believe in logic, not all the time—not the way this world rotates and orbits. I feel slower than it, too poor to live in it; I want to sleep until I’m someone else.

  Modeling sometimes felt like a way to make up for all the status I’d missed out on as a child. Now I could be the one. When I paged through magazines as a teenager, I assumed every model was a wealthy star.

  I’ve never had a job that had benefits of any kind—health insurance, sick days, stock options. Jobs like that always felt like traps to me. I understood, though, when my friends got in and then couldn’t get out. It was safer than my erratic life and unpredictable income. But I thought I’d never have to struggle to get out if I just never got in.

  I’ve worked for enough millionaires to know that more money doesn’t mean more happiness. But facts were never enough to cancel out my dreams. Wake me up from a nightmare and try to tell me it’s not real. Try to tell me more money wouldn’t fix my life.

  When I was very young and my mother picked me up from a wealthy friend’s house, I said in front of both mothers, Her bedroom is bigger than our entire house!

  I never have fantastic dreams with elaborate landscapes and neon colors. My dreams usually take place in small, plain rooms and have very little action: it’s about the dialogue. I sometimes wish I could unhear it, I sometimes resent my subconscious for its self-destructive tendencies. Like the trance I enter when I am engaging in masochistic behavior (picking at my skin in a magnifying mirror, looking at the Instagram profile of someone I despise): time stops; I enter a space where nothing else matters except the action I’m conducting right there, right then. Nothing could be more important than hurting myself in these small, private ways.

  I like that phrase I kept hearing when the eclipse happened: path of totality. I didn’t have eclipse glasses, I wasn’t in the right city to see the sky go black, but I watched the live stream from my iPad in Bryant Park. There was something emotional about it, even within my virtual disconnect—something about the perfection of one black circle covering one white circle. How is it that we were born on just the right planet at just the right time? How is it we know exactly when and how to look up? How is it we never remember how small we are until a planetary event arrives, and how does this realization move so quickly from comfort to assault?

  In my dreams, there are no planets, just bodies, no ring of light, just the promise of something, which, now that I think about it, might be the same thing.

  I have listened to music I hated until I loved it. I have looked at ugly clothes so long they began appearing as desirable objects
. I have lived in America so long that money started to seem like a good idea.

  We assign meaning to money the same way we assign meaning to dreams. By that logic, money could be a dream. And what else would it be? I always want more of a good dream, but how quickly a nightmare descends.

  I assign meaning to love as well. So could money be love? No, because it doesn’t linger. As soon as the desired object is purchased, the heat of the wanting is transferred elsewhere.

  In 2007, I really wanted a job at American Apparel. I was living in Tucson then, and I had been working in retail for a couple years at that point. I even became one of the top sales associates in the southwest region for a store that sold overpriced white and black clothes for women. They paid by the hour, but they also offered commission on big sales. I thought I would be bad at the job, but the middle-aged clientele trusted my judgment, and soon I was spending hours waiting just outside the dressing rooms—How’s everything working out for you in there? A woman would emerge in a billowy blouse that was just perfect for the cruise she was about to embark on, and soon I would have convinced her to buy twelve other things that went with the blouse, and then she’d be spending a thousand bucks.

  I thought the job would feel sleazy, but I loved being in a store full of women, and most of them were using their husband’s credit card anyway. However, the store moved from being down the street from me to the mall all the way on the other side of town. I hated working in the mall, with the smell of pretzels wafting in from the food court, and the store was so big that no one could track who was buying what, so I stopped making commission. People waddled in drinking soda and asking, What’s the deal with the black and white? and I knew I had to quit.

  At my American Apparel interview, I wore my black spandex turtleneck dress—it was too hot to wear that day, but it was the only American Apparel I owned, and I knew my body looked good in it. The woman interviewing me had come from Los Angeles to help set up the store—she was gorgeous and competent and effortlessly cool. I don’t remember what kinds of questions she asked, but I remember it all seemed like a formality, as if the answers didn’t really matter. She then asked if she could take a photo of me, making a big deal out of the fact that it was only so she could remember me later, since she was interviewing so many people. I agreed and posed in my dress, careful not to smile too much.

  The next week, she called to tell me I was hired and asked me to come in for the store’s first meeting. I think the rest of the new employees realized what I realized at exactly the same time, but no one dared say it out loud: we all fit an archetype. There was a blonde, a redhead, a brunette, an Asian, a Mexican, a half-black guy with an Afro, a gay guy, a curvy girl, a short girl, a six-foot-two-inch-tall girl. It was the strangest thing, the way no one ever addressed this directly. Of course we had been hired for our skill and ability, we wanted to think. When the local newspaper came to photograph us modeling the clothes, it became pretty obvious what was going on. But to point it out would mean that we weren’t grateful: the only people who complained were the people who didn’t get hired. We were the good-looking ones, the cool ones, the ones who were paid almost twice as much as the Urban Outfitters employees across the street. We must have deserved it, we thought.

  The atmosphere was lax: the store was always busy, but we never really rushed, and at night we took turns sipping rum and Cokes in the back room. We played music at a volume unbearable to adults—any parents who accompanied their daughters or sons would just sit outside until it was time to check out. One time I worked the register while a dad paid $200 for his daughter’s new spandex bodysuits and thigh-high socks while Peaches’s “Fuck the Pain Away” played. One time I was so helpful that a guy posted a Craigslist Missed Connections ad about me that said, You were the angel in sea-green corduroy shorts.

  We drank in the back as a kind of pre-game move—there was always a house party somewhere. One night the blond employee, Lindsay, and I rode our bikes to the front yard of someone’s house and never made it inside. I spotted my ex-boyfriend, who had broken up with me a few months prior (said he didn’t love me, then said he did, then changed his mind again)—he was in the yard talking to some girl, so I turned to kiss Lindsay. This attracted two guys who had just moved from Portland, or maybe they moved to Portland later, I don’t remember, but their personalities relied on their fixed-gear bikes. I didn’t understand how a bike without brakes could be an identity, but they wore cycling hats with the fronts turned upward, and they always had their jeans rolled up on the right side so as not to interfere with their gears. They looked foolish, but they had faces like actors. And here they were, and so were we.

  First I kissed the tall one while Lindsay kissed the short one. Then I kissed the short one while Lindsay kissed the tall one. Then the boys kissed each other, which was thrilling because everyone was always worried about being gay, even then. I could feel my ex-boyfriend watching me, thinking maybe I wasn’t a virgin anymore, but who could be sure. We just went around kissing in a foursome, and we weren’t even sitting—we were just standing there in a square like idiots, reminding me of the time my parents drove my sister and me to Four Corners, where you can touch Arizona, Utah, Colorado, and Nevada all at once.

  For a Halloween party, I tucked To Kill a Mockingbird into a vintage fur coat and called it Harper Lee, and my best gay friend already looked like Truman Capote, so off we went into the night. The man I loved was there—no costume. Why hadn’t I thought of that?

  How lovely to be young enough not to know any better. I fell in love with anyone with a scar on their face.

  I romanticize the desert because there’s so much quiet, so much empty space. It feels as if anything could happen there, that I could meet anyone, that a coyote could emerge from behind a saguaro and wear sheep’s clothing and I could fall for it and I could be happy.

  Once, I awoke in the middle of the night, sensing something in the backyard but not hearing anything. I opened the second-floor window and listened—still nothing. Come back to bed; you’re dreaming, my man said. In the morning, the backyard fence gate was open, and his bike was gone.

  Years later, I awoke in the middle of the night next to another man and announced, I’m dreaming of you, even now. I couldn’t wait until the morning to tell him—I wanted him to know that I never stopped dreaming about him, not even when I managed to capture his attention the way I’d wanted to. When I told him about all the detailed dreams I’d had, it was as if I was telling him about a life we’d already lived together—the prequel to the novel of the one night we had. That night, there was a big metal bowl on the steps leading to his front door, and when I asked about it, he said, I don’t know where it came from, but now I want to see if something will appear inside it.

  But even when he was holding me, I wanted the dream version of him. Something didn’t match up.

  I sometimes have phrases that won’t get out of my head until I write them down. Here’s one: You were in my dream but not in my life.

  When I run on a treadmill, I have to imagine a future version of myself that kept running, the version of myself that decided to endure, to suck it up, to dream of a possible outcome.

  The years back when I tried to put a price on myself: that wasn’t so long ago, was it?

  I like walking into the unknown the way I spend money: with my eyes closed.

  With my eyes closed, I heard him say, I don’t love you anymore. The man whose bicycle was stolen but wouldn’t believe me—now he didn’t love me, either. I could hear the words but I couldn’t quite access them, couldn’t quite accept that it was me living my life at that moment. Surely he was telling this to someone else, surely we would be together forever, the way we’d talked about. This was before I needed passion and wildness and to be on the verge of every emotion at once—I wanted safety and beauty, and he looked like Bob Dylan in the middle of the desert, and I thought that was what the love of my life could be.

  Eventually I let out a laugh, the kind
you might make in the middle of an emergency, just to hear yourself make a sound. Watching your life burn up—nothing left to do but ha. Ha. O. Kay. I was doing that slow-motion thing I do. I could feel myself delaying the inevitable: my life with him was over, a new life was about to start. When I walked through the door, five feet away, it would all begin, but I couldn’t quite get there. I felt relief, even in that moment of agony—now I wouldn’t have to marry him—but it was a story I’d told myself for so long that I wanted to delay the ending. Just one more minute.

  Are you okay? he asked, after I don’t know how long. Yeah, I said, and the word gave me enough strength to open the front door, push my bike out, and shut the door behind me. Two years. I was free.

  I rode my bike up University Boulevard until I was out of breath. Yeah. We fell in love and fell out of it. That was the first time that had happened to me—it seemed impossible somehow. When I rode my bike alone at night in Tucson, it seemed as if I were the last person on earth. That’s a wonderful feeling if you’re a certain kind of person (I am).

  Money needs us, depends on us to mint it, distribute it, exchange it, make it mean something, make it last. Dreams, on the other hand, don’t need us at all. Some people have needed me, but the ones I wanted most didn’t need anything or anyone.

  My credit card debt gets higher and higher, seems to mean nothing. Maybe my monthly bill goes up $50. That’s nothing compared to the thousands that went to black dresses, leather boots, cross-country flights, hotel rooms—all things that made me happy in the moment that I received them or spent time in them, all things that didn’t last. But no amount of money can buy the love I’ve had. The way I loved was so wonderful that it seemed as if it must belong to another person. In those moments, I wanted only what I already had. But then it became something else.