My first week in Los Angeles, I drive from one end to the other, past billboards for divorce lawyers and casinos, through chaotic intersections lined with identical Priuses. The city is two hours wide with articulated neighborhoods like the organs from an open cadaver. The sun is the same bright, flat sun every day; the sky is the same blue. I go to the beach. I go to the boardwalk. I hike toward the observatory and take a selfie with the Hollywood sign in the background. I perform how I think someone would perform if they’d just moved to Los Angeles. The green juices and photos of palm trees and matinees with a bucket of butter popcorn in my lap. After a screening of a horror film, an old man follows me out of the theater and says, “Makes you look behind you, doesn’t it?”
I hadn’t thought through my move to Los Angeles beyond liking it that one time I visited a few years ago. I couldn’t stand New York any longer. It had become this layered cake of memories. Every street corner came with a reminder I didn’t want. In New York, I was a trash-compacted version of myself. Los Angeles seemed like it might let me feel broad again, but now that I’m here, I don’t know what I’m doing. I got a job bartending at a cabin-themed pub. I found a sublet in the middle of the city, wedged between two neighborhoods. I can’t remember the last time I had a conversation with someone beyond, “do you wanna make that a double?”
§
The night I decided to move, I went to party at a friend’s in deep Brooklyn. She lived in a former storefront with five other artists. The front area was built out like a showroom in a disaster zone Pottery Barn: couches with shredded cushions, a papier-maché bust of Guy Fieri, a plaid beanbag chair. Out back, an ice luge had been fashioned for shots. Strangers in loose flannel cheered as their friends ducked down and let the chilled vodka flow into their open mouths.
I drank two lukewarm beers and moved onto shots. The party got increasingly dark, pulsing with bass-heavy music and strobe lights between bodies. I didn’t know many people there, the faces vague reminders of other drunk nights at other parties, conversations I couldn’t remember and promises I would never keep. With my back against a wall, my shoulder just to the left of a Scarface poster, I felt a hand on my elbow.
“Lost?” I didn’t recognize the man staring up at me, but he was smiling and tipped up onto his toes so he could speak into my ear.
My tongue slipped across my teeth. “No, no, I was just looking for someone.”
“I’m someone.”
He had this generic, slightly blurry face with glasses. Maybe. I don’t remember. I don’t want to remember. He asked me about my job and I told him that I’d quit that afternoon and was moving west. Then the host came through and grabbed me by the hand and grabbed him, too, and we tripped down the street toward a bar with an open backyard and lights strung through scraggly branches. We sat at a picnic table and took more shots and that man who hadn’t given me his name pressed his knee to mine.
When I woke up the next morning, my sheets felt warmer than from just one body. My skin had a slick of memory I couldn’t place. A row of bruises constellated up my left arm. I slipped my hand beneath the band of my underwear, feeling around like maybe the answer would be down there: what my body had done without my permission. Someone had touched me and I couldn’t remember his name.
§
The bar I found work at is long and narrow and dark. Antler chandeliers dangle from the ceiling and the booths are made to look like the guts of redwood trees. I work most shifts with Mikey, a short woman with an endless supply of cut-off tees and low-rise jeans. A tattoo of snakes coils up her left arm. Watching her work is like watching someone use their body as a language. She doesn’t pause as she upends the tequila over a rocks glass and pours an IPA into a tilted pint and grabs for a shot glass that dangles on a rack overhead and fills it with Fireball, which she makes a face over and laughs and the guy she pours it for laughs too, but he takes it and asks for another.
Everyone is “on,” even here, the place where they should be coming to turn off. I don’t have to try very hard to listen in on every conversation happening along the bar. Maybe I’m invisible to them. Maybe being listened to by just one person isn’t enough. A couple on a first date, both drinking Moscow mules, make fun of a roommate with a porn addiction; two women loudly discuss projects they have in development and the short skirts they wear to pitch meetings; a small group complains about their bosses and significant others and the endless construction outside their apartments.
I wonder how they’d respond if I told them the story of that night. I wonder if Mikey would come over and say, “Girl, you really can’t remember his name?” or “Honey, just because you can’t remember doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.” I could describe the bruises to her and she could grip my arm in the place where they’d been, acting out what might have happened. Thinking about putting words to the absence makes my gut cramp. Instead, I focus on pouring a line of shots, on a glass of house red wine, on achieving the perfect head of foam on a pint of beer.
§
On my day off, I find an empty square of grass along the lake and spread a towel out. I’ve decided to treat myself to a picnic—a burrito and Topos Chicos and a book about whales I’ve been meaning to read for years. The towel is depressing, ragged, but it’s all I have. I remind myself that no one knows me here. No one will see me and think, “that’s depressing,” and then tell me later at a party, “saw you the other day” and I won’t have to feel the nut of repulsion at the idea of being seen. Here I’ll be seen, sure, but no one will bother telling me, which is almost like not being seen at all.
I curl the foil back from the burrito and watch swan-shaped paddle boats maneuver clumsily around over-sized lily pads. The burrito is still warm. I let chunks steam on my tongue. The sun burrows into my pores. I imagine my skin freckling, Barbie-pink. I know I should put sunscreen on, but it seems too hard to remember, so I never do. There’s something nice about knowing I can fix something and choosing not to.
Halfway through the burrito, someone behind me clears their throat. A middle-aged woman is standing over me, waggling a clean popsicle stick in my face.
“You’re having lady problems,” she says. Her voice comes out like a swarm of bees. She tugs on the shower cap pulled over her head. Finger-like hanks of hair stick out around her temple. She’s wearing an oversized, red crew-neck sweater with a Santa pattern down the arms and a pair of purple flip-flops with rhinestones along the straps. Looking up at her, she seems like some kind of neon monolith. The patron saint of Christmas in the spring.
“Excuse me?” My voice sounds weak and young. I try to casually push my hand beneath my butt. My fingers come away clean. I’m not wet and red down there, just sweaty.
“Lady problems,” she says, again. “You have a ghost baby.”
“No,” I say. I repeat myself. The second “no” comes out like a question. My stomach pulses.
“Good luck, dearie,” she says and drops the popsicle stick onto my towel. Her hips flounce away like two opposing pistons. My period is a week late, sure, but stress always affects my schedule. I press my fingers into my side, expecting there to be a bruise, some kind of pang, but there isn’t anything. A flat lack.
§
I spend the week bartending and oversleeping and feeling undone in my body. I overhear a customer talking about a nearby spa she went to, where a woman walked up and down her spine and somehow it fixed her chakras. Maybe my chakras are wrong, and that’s what the old woman meant when she said I had a ghost baby. The next morning, I find a nearby Korean spa with a blooming lotus logo. The yelp photos make it look bright and clean and big, and there’s free parking.
In the spa’s locker room, the other women drop their robes and walk down the aisle, their flanks like beacons. I duck my chin into my chest, too aware of my blemishes, the extra rolls, the dimpled fat. I’m surrounded by middle-aged women scrubbing dead skin off their feet. I imagine the mats beneath us dusted with flakes of skin, and how, perhaps, from all these excised cells, we could build the perfect human, calibrated to the correct height and width and weight, a human that says the right things at all the right times and never loses touch with her body.
After going to the sauna and watching the women around me lower into the steaming baths, after fiddling with the tie around my robe, after thinking about my body next to these other bodies, after touching the rolls of my stomach and pushing a pointer finger into my belly button, I tie my robe tighter and go back to the locker room to get dressed. In the café, I order a bowl of ramen and canned chai tea. When the bowl comes out, it’s steaming and huge, larger than my face. I can’t keep the noodles on my chopsticks. I use my left hand to level them against my lips before slurping. Broth sprays across the table. I love the feral hog of it. I lick at the noodles and gulp down the tea. My body feels sated, even as my knees burn on the slatted mats where I’m kneeled, even as I can feel the nut of what might be growing in my stomach like a threat. I order more: the spicy squid combo, a cup of shaved ice, an extra helping of rice. I crowd my body’s insides.
§
Mikey’s invited me over for a party—just a few friends, she said, bring a bottle of wine if you want. I worry over my outfit for an hour. My body has been pressing outward since I moved here. I’ve been struggling to zip myself into my jeans, this new extra flesh growing over the waist, and the dip in my v-neck shirts now feels obscene. Most days, the only outfit I feel comfortable in is an old shirt from high school and a pair of workout pants that violently compresses my belly. I don’t mind that compression, though. I make a series of safe-ish decisions—t-shirt and jeans, cat-eyes, boots with a small heel—that I regret as soon as I get in the car.
The front door of Mikey’s house, a craftsman she shares with four friends, is open when I walk up. I fold myself between the bodies crowding the front room. Strangers pass a joint over my head; someone behind me sings the National Anthem. I push myself forward, down a hallway with boob-patterned wallpaper, the nipples perky and triangular, into a back kitchen that’s astonishingly large, with all white tile and drinks scattered across the counters and big windows that look out onto the rest of the party, puddled across a scraggly backyard.
“You came!” Mikey in this context is a different Mikey. She has on a silver caftan and her hair is a halo of curls, bright and huge. She hands me a red cup filled with a pinkish liquid. I take a drink and wince at the sugar but thank her. She’s surrounded by people that look just as ethereal and beautiful. She doesn’t introduce me and I don’t volunteer my name, just settle in and listen to their conversation about some shitty guy they had to ban from the party and all the shit he pulled. They sound like they’re joking but I can hear the tension between the anecdotes, like this is a bruise they’ve pressed so many times, it’s become habit. Across from me, a woman with long black hair has her arms crossed and her gaze pointed down. She must be the victim of the man, I’m sure, by the way she flinches when another story is brought up with a, “And can you believe this” or “Don’t forget about that other time.” She looks up and we make eye contact. Her gaze darts away and then back again, like a cornered raccoon.
The woman standing next to me says in a stage whisper, “She lost his baby and then he left her so we hate him.” I recoil. Maybe she interprets this as confusion, because she takes my hand and presses it into her stomach, which feels plush and welcoming. “Had to get a cleaning crew in, cause the bathroom was so bad.” My body gets warm with nausea. I take my hand back and nod my apologies. I need to be somewhere else. I take a back set of stairs up and find myself in a narrow corridor. Alone. Thank god.
I lower myself to the flower—ignoring its dust and speckling of dirt—flatten my back to the wall, and close my eyes. I haven’t been with this many people since I moved out here and I’ve lost that muscle, the part of me that used to be good at this. I see people at the bar, sure, but it’s different when I have that slab of wood between me and them. I don’t have to absorb them in the way I do when they’re right next to me, their fingers around my wrist, their pulse thick next to mine.
“Hey, you good?”
Another body, this one belonging to a lanky man with fluffy, blonde hair and frayed jeans. He introduces himself as James and says he needed a break and do I mind if he joins me. He seems young and unfinished, like he was pulled out of the kiln too soon. He doesn’t wait for me to answer before he’s talking—his voice gives away his intoxication, although I suspect it’s not just alcohol he’s had. He loves fish, he says, and the ocean, and sometimes he likes to imagine himself sailing off into the sunset because doesn’t that sound so great.
While he talks, I imagine what it would mean to have an alien inside me, the shape and size of a pebble. I press my fingers into my gut and feel how plush my skin is, the lack of anything there but fatty tissue. Perhaps it would be nice to have something to take care of. Still, I haven’t told anyone. Still, I refuse to admit that it may be more than a hypothetical pebble. Still, my period hasn’t come.
“Wild, right?” he says. I haven’t been listening. I nod. “I was out there, like all the way out in Alhambra, looking for this dumpling place, but the directions I got off the internet were silly or wrong or something. It directed me to park in this lot behind a movie theater and then I had to walk down the alley, count the three doors and go through the red one. But it wasn’t a dumpling house at all, it was like, this shack?” While he spoke, James traced circles over the scratched hardwood floor between us. “An old woman came out and told me where to sit and then she sat across from me and started talking. For like, I don’t know, thirty minutes? She told me all kinds of things about myself and what I was going to be doing for the next few years and what I should be afraid of. Finally, I asked her where the dumpling house was and she said she didn’t know and stood up and went into the back. Didn’t ask for money or anything, either, so I don’t know what that was.”
A thrill ticks up my spine. I sit up straighter, press my hand to his forearm. I say, “Tell me everything.” I make him describe the woman—short with gray hair, wearing a pink jumpsuit with purple seams—and then I make him tell me what she’d told him to be afraid of—spiders, hikes without railings, ski lifts, manholes, microwaves that don’t beep, telemarketers, his parents, any corner market that doesn’t sell Pepsi.
I watch his face as I pester him with questions. It’s like no one’s trained him to keep his feelings on the inside—I can see his eagerness, then his confusion, then the small smirk when I keep going. He’s enjoying this now, maybe for the wrong reasons, but that’s fine with me. I try to commit the list to memory. Maybe I should be afraid of these things, too. But then the moment curdles. He has one hand on my cheek and the other on my thigh and his face is closing in. My skin is cold. I think about that other knee pressing against mine. Maybe in New York I would’ve let this play out, but I can feel myself lifting outside of my body already. Before I lose my body completely, I excuse myself and drive home.
§
During a slow shift, Mikey pours two shots of tequila and hands one to me. The alcohol is sharp down my throat. “Heard you met my friend James at the party,” she says. For a moment, my vision blurs, like I’m back in New York, hearing another blacked-out story about me, but then I remember his blonde hair and frayed jeans. Still, there’s a feeling of betrayal like a stone in my throat, like I’ve come so close to being that person I wanted to forget all over again. “I gave him your number, is that okay?”
“Yeah,” I say, although I don’t know if it is. “What about your friend, the one who miscarried?”
“Oh, Kara, totally sucks, right? I can’t believe she’s even still talking to the guy.” I’ve been thinking about her since the party, how she stayed quiet. The way she flinched.
Mikey doesn’t wait for me to tell her why I’m asking. She says, “The story is crazy, too, wanna hear?” Her words are punctuated by the glasses she swipes clean and the chalkboard she erases to write out the next night’s specials. Kara’s guy had been a fan of the pull-out method, she says, which obviously doesn’t work all that great so it was really like, ‘when not if’ she’d get pregnant, and then she did. She didn’t tell him, even though all her friends told her to, especially since she said she wanted to keep it, but then one day she woke up and her bed was soaked red and when she called the guy crying, he didn’t respond for days. I can tell Mikey relishes telling this story because it lets her flex her anger, like a muscle built into the words. I’m not the first person she’s told this all to, and I won’t be the last.
That week, it’s like every other customer tells their version of the story. I overhear a female executive describing the miscarriage she had while seven months pregnant; she was in the middle of a meeting with the CEO; she sat through the meeting and then, after, called her assistant to come help clean up the blood that had puddled around the chair’s legs. The next woman says she locked herself in a Motel 6 room for a weekend, drank two handles of vodka, and bled all Sunday morning, staining the sheets with blots like spilled, sacramental wine. A third woman found out she was miscarrying seven weeks in, so had to exist for a week knowing she was miscarrying in the present tense. The woman after her had to have two abortions because the first didn’t take.
Sometimes, I have to resist the urge to vomit. I press my fingers into my stomach and count down from ten. I look at these women, the way they hold their bodies, like these disasters have been etched onto their bones. I try to listen to my bones—maybe they know my story better than I do—but I don’t hear anything, just this constant, roaring silence. When another woman sits across from me at the bar and says, “I should’ve known my eggs weren’t viable,” I say, “Will you keep it to yourself?” and go into the back to change a keg.
§
I get James’s number from Mikey and text him, “hey, could you give me the address for that dumpling place? thx.” When he doesn’t answer within five minutes, I download Tinder. I swipe while I cook, when I’m on the toilet, between reruns of a depressingly canned sitcom. I match with three men in a row. I message the first: “have you heard about this dumpling place out in Alhambra? the one near a movie theater?” then copy and send that message to the other two. I walk the mile down Sunset to the lake. I sit on the towel where I was sitting before, my unopened book next to me, watching for the woman, but she doesn’t show. On my way home, I step into a CVS. I circle the pharmacy again and then again before pausing in front of pregnancy tests. The boxes are purple with clinical, optimistic lettering. I pick one up, then put it back, then pick it up again, then move that box into the shampoo section and leave it there.
§
There are surprisingly few tanning salons in the neighborhood. The only one I can find is between a store that sells bedazzled trinkets and an abandoned psychic storefront. I’m showed into the back by a young woman with hair as white as her bleached teeth. She instructs me to take my clothes off and keep the goggles on and, when I’m ready, to climb onto the bed, which is pulsing low and blue. The girl hands me a sticker of the playboy bunny.
“We’ve run out of sunshine,” she says. I know she means a sticker of the sun, but I like the idea of running out of sunshine, too, especially in this city. When she’s gone, I press the sticker to the handle of my hip. I drop the robe and look at myself in the mirror: the bunches of my body, the skin that folds in on itself, the bush between my legs, the sag of my breasts and the sharp bones of my shoulders. I climb into the bed and close my eyes. I imagine what I’ll look like when this is all over and how much farther I can go from New York. I relish in the feeling of my body baking, Barbie-bright.
§
I wake up to two empty wine bottles next to the inflatable mattress and a series of texts that I sent James. They start comprehensible and then diminish. What is the address to the place becomes I want to meet the old woman becomes I think there’s something inside of me and it won’t come out and I know that’s gross but I need that woman becomes give me the fucking address becomes I don’t know where I am but I think I’m okay I think I’m okay are you okay where are you. He didn’t respond. I block him and delete his number.
§
There’s a makeshift movie set on every street corner here. Streets are retrofitted to look like they might have in the 70s or the 50s. Tables are rearranged. Groups gather on the opposite sidewalk to watch, hoping, probably, to see an actor they love. Today, I’m following behind a woman in a pantsuit and eavesdropping on her phone conversation as she describes her first vampire facial, how the doctor needled her own blood into her pores. She’s worried about how raw and red her face looks.
We’re stopped on a corner by a short man wearing a vest and wielding a walkie-talkie like a weapon. Rigs and trucks and chairs and tents fill the sidewalk, so I know it’s a set before I see the scene they’re filming, across the street in front of a diner. Out of shot, a woman leans against a concrete wall, smoking and scrolling through her phone. She’s caked in a mixture made to look like blood. Even her skin has been smeared with the stuff. Her clothes hang heavy. As I watch, she brings her phone up and takes a series of selfies—seductive, thoughtful, cute. Her teeth glint like knives.
“My girlfriend looked like that,” the woman beside me says, no longer on her phone.
I’m not sure what she means, so I ask, “Covered in blood?” The woman laughs. Someone yells “cut” and the PA waves us through. I try to keep following the woman, but she disappears past craft services. I can’t remember where I was going to begin with. Sometimes, it feels like this city could swallow me if I let it, like I could take a wrong turn down the wrong street and never show up on the other side.
§
The twenty-third match I message about the dumpling house in Alhambra responds, “yeah, I know the one.” He gives me the name and asks when we should meet up. I unmatch with him and laugh, my burbles of joy like acid bubbles in my gut. Finally, I have an answer. I’m going to find that old woman, who is probably the same old woman, because how many old women can there possibly be, and that woman is going to tell me how to fix everything. She’ll tell me how to bleed.
§
The directions for the dumpling house from my Tinder match are vague. I drive for an hour, take three freeways west, then turn off after an exit that advertises a long-closed visiting center. I drive from the heart to the liver to the lungs. I park in the movie theater’s empty lot. My heart flicks like a hummingbird. To get to the alleyway, I have to walk to a stairwell at the back of the parking lot, go down two stories and through a metal door that clangs shut behind me. On the way, I think how excited I am to not have to look behind me anymore. From here on out: only forward. I straddle a gutter in the center of the road as I walk down the block, across the street, and down the next. The entire way, I imagine the old woman, wearing her Santa sweater and rhinestone flip-flops. I think about all the questions I’ll ask and all the answers she’ll give and how, finally, I might be able to put my bare feet flat to the ground and understand the make of my own body.
One block further on, I reach a trio of doors set back beneath a patio that juts out from a restaurant above, the shelf held up by wooden stints. It looks poorly made, like the stinks might give at any moment and the entire floor above would collapse around me. Of the three doors, two are painted white and the third is painted a bright, visceral red. This is the door I focus on. I don’t knock. I don’t feel the need to. It’s like I can smell the clove-scented candles, can feel the scratch of the couch on the backs of my thighs, so when I open the door and step into a dumpling house, humid with slick linoleum floors and mirrored walls, it’s like I’ve stepped from one world into another. The wonder I was promised is plain and I don’t understand. Instead of ornate rugs, there’s linoleum flooring; instead of tapestries and magic eye pendants, menu pages are laminated to table tops. I go back outside and try the other two doors. They’re both unlocked. One opens into a dentist’s waiting room; the other is a storage locker with three damp boxes pushed against a far wall.
In the dumpling house, I go up to the hostess and ask, “Is there an old woman here?” The hostess rolls her eyes, like she’s heard this too many times before. She hands me a menu and leads me to a corner table. Only one other table is occupied: a mother and her baby, maybe a year old, bouncing on her lap and playing with a pair of chopsticks while the mother flips through a coupon catalog. With the chopsticks, the baby flicks a napkin away and the mom laughs. I expect to feel that nut of repulsion in my stomach, but I don’t. The baby is cute and round and small and blameless.
The waitress brings out the four servings of soup dumplings and carafe of wine I ordered. As the steam blooms across my face, I wonder if I’m fighting the wrong thing. The old woman will know the answer. She knows me better than I know myself and she’s still coming, I’m sure. Her room must be out back, beyond the kitchen, around the corner from the bathroom. She’ll be waiting for me, ready to grasp my hands and tell me that what happened isn’t still living inside me, that my body is my home, it’s taken care of me, and that’s enough. The red, plush juice of my insides are empty.
I hold a dumpling up to my mouth, bite into the wrapper, and slurp its soup leak.