The Route

As Nasim waited at the café for Marlin, he avoided thoughts of consequence. He’d come here straight from the cardiologist. Today she’d said the words “blood pressure” with new gravitas, her voice low and urgent. Now he reviewed the menu’s salads. House, Greek, Caesar, Cobb.

On his phone he watched videos of cats and magicians and men diving off cliffs into the ocean. He texted Anna to remind her to remind the cleaners about the dust behind the TV. He stared at a photo taken at a recent dinner party—himself and Anna, Marlin and Paula—and found his eyes resting on Paula’s face. He set the phone on the table.

Beyond the café window was a pedestrian mall filled with pedestrians. Nasim scanned for signs of Marlin, who was twenty minutes late. Marlin was his friend, or his boss, he couldn’t decide which. This was the café where Marlin took everyone—coworkers, interviewees, clients. Close to the office, uncontroversial food. It reminded Nasim of a restaurant his father used to like for special occasions. Once, on Nasim’s eighth birthday, Nasim’s father took him there as a surprise. They ordered French onion soup. Afterward they drove to the mall, where his father told him to pick out anything under ten dollars. In the atrium they stopped at the fountain. For a long time his father stared at the gushing streams. When Nasim tugged on his father’s old khakis to show he was ready to leave, his father grabbed the front of his own shirt, made a noise Nasim had never heard, and tumbled into the water. Someone screamed. Someone else jumped in after him. Pennies scattered underwater. Nasim, frozen in place, stared at his father’s splayed legs.

Now he picked up his phone. Three texts from Marlin:

Won’t make it to lunch after all Loverboy

Construction crew coming by later

Want to see my mind?

Nasim stared at the messages. He read them aloud to the server. The server nodded as if everything were normal.

“Our soup today is artichoke vichyssoise,” the server said.

At home that evening Nasim planned a route. If he got up at six, out the door at seven, smoothie from the smoothie place, he could jog north on Willow, east up the hill to the mansions of Rockwood, take the park trail south along the stream, west on Tulip Tree. A three-mile loop.

That night as he slept, his heart left his body and ballooned into a muscly cloud that rained blood on the city. The neighbors danced half-naked in his heart’s rain and sang a song in a major key. The escaped bullfrog emerged from its hiding spot. It bathed in the blood. Danced on those strange bent legs.

Nightmares are a symptom of stress, he thought while brushing his teeth the next morning. As the jogging goes, nightmares go the opposite way.

Every morning that spring he jogged the route. He hated it. He hated that the air felt not like spring but summer—air almost edible, air like a roasted pepper. He hated the way his body felt before and after. He hated his neighbors watching him huff around. Most of all, he hated that he’d failed to consider that the route passed by Marlin and Paula’s. After the first week, he considered changing the route. But he worried that changing the route would remind him he could change anything, like whether to jog the route in the first place, or quit his job, or ask for a divorce.

The four of them were having dinner again. Weekly routine now, it seemed. Marlin and Paula’s turn to host.

“Mykonos,” Marlin said. “We’re right on the Aegean.”

“Must be beautiful,” Anna said.

It was always better at Marlin and Paula’s, Nasim thought. Always catered. The lawn enormous and predictably manicured. Square bushes. Patinaed statues. Tall flowers of every color imaginable. At the center of the universe of the lawn was a wide, dark pool.

Marlin and Paula were discussing their newest house.

“You’ll have to come visit sometime,” Paula said.

“We’d love that,” Anna said. She pointed a thumb at Nasim. “You’ll have to let this one take a vacation.”

Marlin laughed. “Loverboy’s a workaholic. Isn’t that right?” And he jabbed Nasim in the chest. Nasim had not been ready, and he spit out half a shrimp.

“My God,” Marlin said.

“Are you okay?” Paula said.

Later in the evening, after a Madeira nightcap, Marlin pulled him aside into the bushes.

“It’s scratchy here,” Nasim said.

“I got a new thing,” Marlin said.

Nasim looked at him.

“A new toy. It’s down there.” Marlin pointed to the pool.

“What kind of toy?”

“More like a room. A thought theater,” Marlin said. “You’ll see. It’s almost ready. Not exactly legal, though. My people do the work at night. They get here in an hour. I’m not supposed to say anything. Signed all sorts of forms. What I mean is, you guys have to get lost.”

“Like now?”

“Like right now.”

One morning, 6 a.m. came and went and Nasim didn’t wake up. The power was out in the neighborhood, so his sunrise alarm clock had failed to illuminate the room with the orange hues of SoCal Sunrise.

Anna poked him in the belly with the stick end of a plunger.

“Why?” Nasim said when he woke.

“You want the other end?” Anna said.

He got dressed. The power returned as he was brushing his teeth, and for a moment in the mirror he saw what he really looked like.

At the smoothie place that same morning, twenty minutes later than usual, Nasim said hello to fellow joggers Ed and Tina, who were already on their way out. They gave him a certain look, like they suspected he was falling off the horse. Ed and Tina wore matching neon-yellow jogging outfits. They did not return the hello.

Nasim drank his smoothie at the bar. As always, it tasted like wet sand. When he was done, he hollered a thank-you into the empty kitchen and left.

He jogged up the hill into Rockwood.

“Hey, you,” someone called from an expansive porch across a mile of lawn. Nasim pretended he didn’t hear and kept jogging the route.

A fire hydrant gushed water into the street. He jogged around the water.

The birds were louder today. He was jogging later than usual, he thought, so maybe the birds were more awake.

Tacked to a lamppost was a new version of the sign he’d been seeing everywhere. This time with a photo. Offering a reward for information leading to the retrieval of a pet bullfrog named Larry. Larry was massive. Larry was simply exploding out of his slimy skin.

Nasim wondered if he was being tested.

Two joggers passed him on his right.

“So did you hear?” one jogger said to the other.

The joggers jogged out of hearing distance.

One stretch of road led him by stately mansions in the Tudor style. English ivy, fountains, gardening staff. He stopped. On the corner, a few people had gathered by Marlin and Paula’s. They were jockeying for a view over the backyard fence and taking photos. He wondered if it had to do with Marlin’s illegal whatever.

But a dark place inside him hoped the thing they wanted to see was Marlin’s dead body. He considered the possibility of Marlin’s office. Beautiful corner office with views of the whole city. You could watch a baseball game from Marlin’s office chair.

He paused the route and approached the fence.

No dead body. No secret something. Only a family of deer that had wandered through a gate left open on the other side of the lawn.

Then Paula stepped onto the terrace, and the deer ran off.

She saw him and waved. He waved back.

At work one day, the door to Marlin’s office was closed and the lights were off, which made Nasim both relieved and suspicious.

He poked his head into Linda’s office. “What’s going on?” he asked, pointing at the wall she shared with their boss.

Linda looked left, then right, as if her office were large enough to hold more than herself and a desk and two filing cabinets. She whispered: “I heard.” She looked left and right again. “I heard he killed someone and fled the country.”

Nasim nodded sleepily and walked back to his office. A fine office. Floor-to-ceiling windows. Cedar hardwood. A partial view of the city’s prettiest building.

His office phone rang. It was Linda. “He’s on vacation at that Greek island house. He won’t shut up about it. Oh, he left you a note, hold on,” she said. Through the phone, paper crinkled. Linda cleared her throat. “It says, ‘Hey Loverboy. Tell my wife I say hello.’”

Nasim hung up and stared at his desk. Then he spent a few hours combing through a transcribed deposition for contradictions in the plaintiff ’s argument. But he couldn’t find anything.

“I don’t want them to come over today,” Nasim said.

“We have to. It’s our turn. It’s what we have to do,” Anna said.

“I don’t want them to look at me. I’ve been looked at too much today.”

“Fine. You’re making the phone call.”

They went through with it anyway.

They sat on Nasim and Anna’s veranda by the garden. The fans were spinning insufficiently. Marlin and Paula had returned from their spontaneous trip to Mykonos, which was wonderful, Marlin said, except for an argument he’d gotten into with a market vendor about the price of a hand-stitched hat. Marlin wore the hat to dinner as a demonstration of something.

And then, so quickly Nasim almost didn’t see it, a small brown toad hopped from the garden onto Paula’s bare foot before disappearing into the lawn.

Nasim imagined a dot moving around a square, each side of the square worth a few seconds of breathing. Out, in. A practice he’d learned. He gripped the table and waited.

Paula made a face of concern. Marlin made a face of confusion.

“It was a toad or a frog,” Anna explained. “Must’ve been. We don’t even talk about those. He’ll never see the end of Magnolia.”

“I had no idea,” Paula said. She reached a hand toward him, then pulled back.

“Ranidaphobia,” Anna said. “Tell them, honey.”

“Ranidaphobia,” Nasim said, after a beat.

“No shit,” Marlin said. “What’s that about?”

Nasim was silent. He needed a hobby. He needed to find something else to do on the weekends. Then he said, “All the other animals were taken.”

“I don’t follow,” Marlin said.

“Honey,” Anna said, placing a hand on his hand and whispering, “are you trying to make a joke?”

“When the kids at school were picking what animal to be afraid of for the rest of their lives,” Nasim continued. “Wolf, alligator, the big cats of the African plains. I drew short straw.”

Anna poured more wine.

Paula was silent the rest of the night. She nodded toward the fading sun whenever anyone began to speak. If Nasim positioned his body in his chair just right, he could make it appear as though Paula were pulling the sun down behind the horizon with a thread tied around her front teeth.

Her earrings were silver. Delicate spirals that sometimes kissed her neck.

Nasim and Anna started going to couples therapy on Thursdays after work. Anna’s idea, like most things. But one Thursday afternoon Nasim forgot and drove straight home from the office. He was watching TV in the living room when she walked in. She went up to her study without a word. Nasim found her later, asleep in her reading chair. He didn’t realize what he’d done until the next day.

Anna and Paula went inside to look at photos from the recent Mykonos trip.

Outside, Marlin was naked except his underwear, feet in the pool. “Let’s go,” he said. “This is the only way.”

Nasim dove in. He opened his eyes underwater. The water was cool and well lit. There it was—the new thing. Something had been built down there. Marlin swam down to the bottom and pressed a button, and a whoosh of bubbles and water blasted past. Nasim followed Marlin through an underwater doorway. Marlin pressed another button, and the door closed behind them. The water drained through holes in the floor.

“You like it,” Marlin said. A command more than a question. “There’s some real science-y shit happening down here.”

They walked into a small room with a white bed, a computer, a projector, and a metal contraption that looked like an octopus.

“You won’t believe it until you put it on. You have to put it on,” Marlin said.

Marlin, dripping wet, sat at the foot of the bed and patted the sheets. Nasim followed orders and sat. Marlin strapped the octopus to Nasim’s head.

“You’re going to feel a tingle.”

The octopus hummed.

“Do I have to lie down?” Nasim asked.

“No. That’s the thing—you don’t even have to be asleep.”

“Are you going to fry my brain? Will I be a new person when I swim out of here?”

“No. Yes.”

Nasim closed his eyes. He heard the whir of the projector.

“Oh my God,” Marlin said.

“What?” Nasim said.

“Nothing, nothing. Keep your eyes closed. Keep thinking about stuff.”

“You know I ought to run this whole thing by my cardiologist.”

“Loverboy. Relax.”

Marlin played the video back for him. Then he paused it. Projected on the wall was the silhouette of a woman. The silhouette was standing in what Nasim knew was his own shower. A daydream. A passing thought. To anyone else, the silhouette on the screen might not have been a person at all. The whole thing looked like a photo taken before photos were possible. But Nasim knew who he was looking at. He’d been imagining her only moments before.

“Who is that?” Marlin said.

“This makes me uncomfortable,” Nasim said.

Marlin smiled with satisfaction. “Amazing, isn’t it?”

He jogged the route.

Today he was granted an especially wide berth by bicyclists and other joggers.

There’d been a fender bender in front of the smoothie place. Both parties refused to exit their vehicles.

In Rockwood people were climbing things. Painters on ladders. Arborists pruning trees. Residents on roofs sipping from coupe glasses. Today was a day of verticality. One man had managed to climb a wall of English ivy halfway up his house and was shouting at the leaves. “Get off me, get off me.”

Ed and Tina jogged ahead of him. He sprinted faster than Dr. Park would’ve liked in order to pass them, and he shot them a look to say: See me, giddying up.

Once, on a whim, he stopped by Marlin and Paula’s and opened their mailbox. He left anything addressed to Paula and stole everything addressed to Marlin and stuffed it all into his back pocket.

Now Marlin wanted to dive down to the octopus room after every dinner.

One night, in the middle of dessert, Marlin stood from the table and pulled his shirt off. “It’s time,” he said.

“What do you boys do down there all night?” Anna asked. Earlier that week, Paula had taken Anna down to the room, but Anna had not been impressed.

Marlin gazed at the stars. “We think.”

Anna and Paula laughed.

“My dad would arm wrestle his friends,” Marlin said. He was already down to his underwear, his clothes in a heap at his feet. His body was smooth and firm-looking. “Every Saturday. They’d drink and smoke and hold sweaty tournaments in the kitchen. It was loud. In rage and triumph they broke various household objects. But this apple,” he pointed to himself, “fell far from that tree.”

“Because you don’t smoke?” Anna said. “Because you’d never put an object in danger?”

“No, no,” Marlin said. “Because Loverboy and I are modern men of the mind. We study our dreams and learn why we hate ourselves.”

Anna rolled her eyes.

Paula took Anna by the hand and said they should walk around the neighborhood.

“I’m onto you,” Anna said, seemingly to everyone. They left, and Nasim and Marlin dove into the pool.

But of course this was a wrestling arena, Nasim thought as they swam to the underwater door. Today, the water felt too warm against his skin. He considered swimming in the opposite direction, pulling himself out of the pool, running off somewhere.

In the room, Nasim pointed to the octopus, which was resting on the bed. “You first,” he said.

“I insist,” Marlin said, lifting the octopus onto Nasim’s head.

So Nasim sat on the bed with his eyes closed and did his best not to think about the lunches at the café he’d been having with Paula. Anything would do. Cake, cars, trees, mountains, the great flood of ’73.

“What’s that?” said Marlin’s voice. “What’s happening? It’s changing too much.”

“Sorry,” Nasim said. “Racing mind.”

“Wouldn’t’ve pegged you. Stay focused, Loverboy. More fun that way. More like a movie.”

Nasim nodded like he was learning.

“Let your mind tell a story,” Marlin said.

So out of anger or weakness, Nasim let himself remember their most recent lunch. He and Paula had eaten sandwiches. That was all. They’d ordered the best two on the menu and asked for them to be cut in half so they could share. As they ate, Paula described her three experiences in the octopus room. The first time, Marlin showed her how it worked. The second, Paula showed Anna how it worked. The third, Marlin insisted it would be fun to have sex while switching who was wearing the octopus and who was watching the screen. He’d been wrong. “It was uncomfortable,” Paula told Nasim after she licked salty chip dust from her fingers. “I gave him nothing. Blankness. And what I saw was what you’d expect. You know, body parts mostly. Tits. Somebody’s ass. Maybe mine, hard to say. Something resembling teeth. I don’t know why he wanted to do any of that. I don’t know why he likes it down there. You know, we’ve gotten to the point where almost every day, I have this thought, like, I don’t understand this man at all. Do you ever feel that way? Do you ever look at her and think, Who the hell is this, what is this thing, taking up my space, breathing all over my house? Is that just me?”

Nasim nodded. “I think I know what you mean.”

“I knew you would,” she said. She set her hand on his.

Now, Marlin was suddenly impatient and asked for the octopus. He attached it to his head and lay down.

Nasim watched the screen. They were silent for several minutes.

“Why’s this illegal?” Nasim asked.

“Safety regulations,” Marlin said. “Failed something or other. The people aren’t ready for a machine like this.”

The image on the screen swirled into a vast expanse of gray.

“Look. I’m fishing,” Marlin said. He slid a pillow over his face. His sculpted chest expanded and contracted. “This one’s a memory.”

“What’s that? Came out of thin air.”

“Must be the marlin.”

“You caught a marlin? Is this a bit?”

“Not at all. Actually it haunts me. You know, I don’t do therapy. So I thought we’d discuss. Help me come to terms.”

“It’s fishing. Seems like a good time.”

“I pulled my namesake from its home. I killed it and grilled it and washed it down with a cheap pilsner. What kind of a person am I? Who am I?”

“I see. Are you fish or man. That kind of thing.”

“No, no. I’ve got something to say here. Never mind.”

“I get it. I get it.”

“I’m turning it off.”

Soon Nasim and Paula were having lunch every day. Then one day they skipped lunch and met in a hotel room.

“We shouldn’t see ourselves,” Paula said as they slid around naked under the covers.

She pressed her fingers hard against his eyelids and forced them closed. They kissed. His eyeballs were sore.

“We can’t remember any of this,” she said. “We have to misremember. We have to get each other wrong.”

“Okay,” he said as her hand drifted down to his linen shorts. She undid the drawstring and slid her hand inside. “Does this feel good?”

“Oh god,” he said. “Paula, is this really happening?”

“No,” she said. “Say someone else’s name. Say her name.”

Paula’s hand moved up and down. Her hand was cold.

“Anna,” Nasim said.

“Marlin,” Paula said.

One night Marlin went hours without relinquishing the octopus.

Nasim watched a gray blob chase another gray blob. Then it seemed like the gray blobs were doing it. Nasim yawned.

“What do you see?” Marlin asked. He was lying down, grinning, pillow over his eyes again. Nasim sat at the foot of the bed next to Marlin’s bare feet.

He watched the gray blobs go at it. “I don’t know,” Nasim said.

“I’ll give you a hint,” Marlin said. “It’s me and someone you know.”

Nasim didn’t say anything. After a silence, he said, “Dream or memory?”

Marlin laughed. “What’s wrong, Loverboy?” He removed the pillow and opened his eyes. “I thought you liked this kind of thing.”

Nasim turned away. On the screen was the faint outline of a person, head bent upward, shoulders slumped. Me, Nasim realized. This is how he sees me.

“I’m going to murder you,” Anna said. She picked up Nasim’s cell phone, which she’d been going through while he showered, dropped it into the sink, and plugged the drain. She turned on the water, and together they watched the basin fill up. “She was my best friend. Now I have to move away.”

Nasim saw that she was trying not to cry, which made him cry, which made her angrier.

“I’m going to cut your body into little pieces,” she said. “I’m going to paint the walls with your pancreas and move to Montana or someplace.”

Nasim stood by the counter and studied the floor. “I bet it’s not so humid there,” he said.

Anna went to her study to read. Nasim sat on the living room couch. After a few minutes, he decided to open Marlin’s mail. Most of it was junk. Magazines and belated birthday cards.

One was a handwritten letter from Marlin’s sister. Nasim didn’t know Mar-lin had a sister. Why won’t you return my calls? Angie asked. Angie had excel-lent penmanship. A lost art, Nasim thought. I thought we’d found our footing after all these years.

Later that week, on a gray and misty day, he completed his route and opened the door to a house full of large, sweaty men. Furniture had been gathered into the middle of the living room. He turned around to face the street. A moving van was parked out front.

Anna racketed down the stairs with a suitcase. They went onto the veranda for a chat.

“Come on. It’s not like I don’t love you anymore,” Anna said in a way that made clear she didn’t love him anymore.

“This hurts,” Nasim said. “I don’t want to be alone.”

“I know, Nincompoop,” Anna said. An old nickname he hadn’t heard in forever. She stuck her hands in his hair. “And I don’t want to murder you. Not mostly. Mostly I want you to live.”

She kissed him on the mouth. She had not kissed him like that in a long time. Quickly, easily, they removed their clothes and had sex on the couch on the veranda.

The movers were very professional and drove off. On the kitchen table, they’d left a note with a number to call to reschedule.

But Nasim and Anna didn’t call. Too complicated, they decided, to change everything at once. Starting a new private life would be hard enough. Starting a new public life would be entirely next level. Maybe they’d revisit the decision down the road. Maybe they wouldn’t bother.

A few weeks later Nasim lost the case he was working on. Marlin’s secretary told Nasim’s secretary to tell Nasim to go to Marlin’s office.

“No raise for you this year, Loverboy,” Marlin said. He was writing something down with a heavy-looking pen. On the floor, beside Marlin’s desk, Marlin’s shoe shiner, Azhar, was shining Marlin’s shoes.

“Because of the case,” Nasim said.

“Sure, sure,” Marlin said, setting down his pen. He swiveled away from Nasim to face the window. Azhar scurried to follow Marlin’s feet. “The case. Why not.”

Nasim looked out onto the city. Hundreds of buildings with thousands of windows shone bluish-gray. Azhar’s rags and brushes squeaked and buffed and swept. Azhar finished and left the room. Marlin’s hands were clasped behind his head. Nasim stared at those hands. The smooth knuckles. The gold wedding band.

Nasim said, “You two still coming for dinner tonight?”

Nobody moved. The lights in the room went out. But no, Nasim saw—the lights had never been on. It had only been a cloud moving in front of the sun.

And so it was—another night at Nasim and Anna’s. Something in the air this time: They got drunk fast. Straight from champagne to whiskey. Paula brought gummies. Everybody took one.

“Tell us a story, Loverboy,” Marlin said. He pointed a finger in Nasim’s face. “Something you’ve never told us. I’m always yapping away. Take a turn at the microphone, good sir.”

“Oh no,” Nasim said.

“He’s being modest. I’ve seen this guy orate like a madman in court. I’ve seen him rip a judge’s balls off. Not a witness! A judge! Swear to God.”

“Okay. Let me think.”

“Put them in his mouth and chewed.”

“I can’t think of anything.”

“Nom nom nom.” Marlin made a noise like having balls in your mouth.

“My aunt raised me after my dad died,” Nasim said. “My dad migrated from Lahore when he was a teenager. But I’ve never visited my family there. Isn’t that awful?”

“What kind of story is that?” Anna said.

“Oh,” Nasim said.

“I’ve got one,” Paula said.

The table was quiet.

“You see this scar here, under my chin?” Paula said. She showed them. “I got it when I was a kid. I’ll tell that story. And keep in mind, my neighborhood back then wasn’t anything like this place. Everybody was poor. Every Sunday the neighborhood kids played hockey in the street. We cut up these garbage bins for goals. Moved everything into the yard when cars came through, moved it back when they sped off, called out the score. So, this one day we’re playing, and it was getting dark, and there were lightning bugs everywhere. My friend Suzy—I’d kind of forgotten about Suzy until just now—I remember she tapped some of the bugs out of the air into her mouth, and it was like they were swimming in there, in her mouth, and her mouth glowed. I think she swallowed some by accident. Anyway, out of nowhere, real late at night, this girl shows up, this girl from out in the boonies, big and strong. Turned out she was on this dead-serious derby team. I mean, she was built too much like a grown woman to play with us, and everybody knew it, we were all looking at each other, but who was going to be the first to say no to this chick? Right? So, pretty soon this girl-woman from the boonies checks me right into my own mailbox. Wind knocked right out of me. And I cut my chin and lip on something metal. So there was all this blood pouring down my neck and shirt. I remember I was wearing a white shirt that day, and that shirt was never white again. My blood went everywhere, and usually that kind of thing would’ve made me rush back to my house to cry with my sisters. But the other kids, they ran over to me, and I’ll never forget this, the way they talked to me. They lowered their voices to this soft, careful tone I’d never heard from anyone but my own mother, before or since. And then the girl-woman ripped her shirt off, and for a second I thought, Are you serious, she’s gonna celebrate after taking me out, but instead she crouched by me and cradled my head in her huge hand and wrapped her sweaty shirt around my mouth to stop the bleeding. And I was just a kid, but I remember thinking, even in so much pain, blood on my clothes, I remember thinking—how wonderful is all this?”

Anna’s head was down. She was pretending to sleep on the table.

Marlin had finished his drink. His eyes were glossy with absence. He rubbed Anna’s sleepy shoulders.

Nasim stared at Paula. Paula stared back.

After Paula and Marlin left, Anna crawled onto the couch and fell asleep. Nasim went to the bathroom. In the mirror he studied the skin under his chin. It was smooth.

In the kitchen he sat at the counter and drank more.

He went outside. The night was full of moths. He decided to jog the route in his loafers. Slow, clumsy. Somewhere a loafer fell off and he left it behind. He stopped at Marlin and Paula’s lawn.

There she was. Dancing alone by the pool in her purple dress. Soft piano seeped from the lawn speakers. He watched her. He should call out, he thought. He should climb the fence. Take her hands. Wrap them around his waist and dance. Whisper something about taking a leap.

Then his eyes drifted.

At the pool’s edge, by the diving board, was a dark muscly frog the size of a cat.

It started to rain. He couldn’t move. His clothes sagged with rainwater.

He breathed around the square. And inside the square, Paula went back inside. She closed the door behind her.

He thought, I know this will end because it always does.

He thought, Nothing to do but wait.

Read more from Issue 23.1.