After graduating from college, Lacey worked remotely in a church that had recently been converted into a coworking space. It was at the top of a hill, its white steeple like an antenna connecting to WiFi. It was the space’s first summer since the transformation and the air conditioning was acting all wonky. Lacey imagined it was God punishing them for ruining His place of worship. But she assumed He probably had better things to do than torture her while she worked. She was a social media manager for a hard seltzer brand that she couldn’t drink without throwing up. Every day she interacted with posts people had made about the beverage. She only got in trouble once when she retweeted a picture of friends posing with the drink and it turned out they were all underage. In a quick Zoom meeting, her boss asked her to be more vigilant, and she nodded obediently, imagining herself as a digital bouncer carding social media users.
Sometimes Drew, the twenty-three-year-old graphic designer for a skateboard company, would roll his chair across the room to her desk and generously fan her with a big book. Anything from Knausgaard’s My Struggle to David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. She wondered if he purchased these gigantic opuses just to provide a big breeze for her. He was never reading, only ever listening to music in big headphones and bobbing his head to the beat while deep in an Adobe Photoshop trance. When she walked the few blocks to the building every morning, she could hear the wheels of his skateboard gliding against the pavement in the distance, unless it was a vague hallucination.
Lacey lived with her boyfriend Brett. Brett was thirty-one working at the local CVS. He wanted to be a musician. For years he’d been uploading videos of himself strumming an acoustic guitar and singing sappy love songs he’d written. They never gained any traction. She’d tried to tell him that people didn’t get viral from YouTube anymore. But he refused to use any other platform because he thought they were all controlled by demonic forces. For some reason—nostalgia, Lacey guessed—YouTube was not evil. Brett was also convinced self-checkout was evil. It was not that he necessarily enjoyed helping people check out at the cash register, but that he was tired of the rejection of customers passing by him without even paying him as much as a glance as they headed straight to a machine whose digitized voice drove Brett closer to insanity every day.
Brett was a sensitive soul. Lacey accompanied him on rides to his DBT therapy and then sat in the car for the forty-five minutes. His therapist was a woman named Gina who was a punk back in the ’80s. Brett would gush about how cool she was. Lacey imagined a lady with spiky, box-dyed red hair and a plaid skirt and smoky eye makeup. While Lacey waited in the passenger seat during Brett’s sessions, she’d imagine this edgy rock chick unzipping his jeans and sucking his cock. The toxic daydreams were so intense it made her feel like maybe she needed therapy too.
Sometimes when Brett was away at work, Lacey jerked off to porn in the living room. She put it on the cracked widescreen TV and felt ecstatically exposed. Her favorite video was one of a girl getting fucked during a Zoom meeting. She didn’t try to hide that she was being fucked; she moaned, she bit her lip, her eyes communicating the ache of pleasure. Yes, Lacey thought, that is me, that is me getting fucked during a Zoom meeting, so fucking horny that I don’t care that all my colleagues see me, that my boss sees me, I’m getting fucked in front of them all because I’m a slut, everyone knows I’m such a slut. And then she would come.
Brett said he was making progress with therapy. Unearthing repressed trauma. He wouldn’t reveal what it was about. She just knew he had been a troubled teenager and his dad wouldn’t put up with it. She knew that his childhood bedroom had holes in the walls. But she knew nothing else. If she did know, would it help anything? She barely knew anything about her own trauma. Some nights, though, she was awakened in the middle of the night to his groans, which would escalate into shouts. Never words, just noises, disturbing in their shapelessness. She would attempt to embrace him and provide comfort but he would push her off, aggressive in his slumber.
They were rarely intimate anymore. The passion of their three-year relationship had dissolved. Their love was no longer indulgent like romantic love between partners, but rather stale and matter-of-fact like familial love. Sometimes when she looked at him his face resembled that of her brother, whom she hadn’t spoken to in almost a decade.
The heat was getting worse. Eventually the AC wasn’t working at all. One August day Lacey and Drew were the only ones to show up. They opened their laptops and sent a message in their Slack chats as a way of clocking in. Lacey’s boss asked her to prepare posts for the announcement of the new strawberry flavor at noon. Lacey replied with a thumbs-up emoticon. Then music blared from Drew’s speakers. He was playing Yung Lean. He got up and started dancing and clumsily rapping along. Lacey laughed and awkwardly pretended to type on her laptop. He swayed over to her and held a hand out. She was relieved he reached out to her instead of her having to make the decision of whether or not to join him. His hands were transferring sweat onto hers. Her hair was getting frizzier, giving her a halo. She didn’t know the lyrics to the song so she just mumbled under her breath vaguely to the flow of the words. He twirled her in circles until she was dizzy.
In the winter, Lacey cheated on Brett for the first and only time with a forty-five-year-old man who had been a mainstay at the coworking space. She didn’t know exactly what he did, but he was always clad in a black suit despite never having any video meetings and everyone was always weirded out by it because it felt like he was dressed for a funeral. But he would occasionally bring donuts for everybody and would always fix the heating system when it was broken. One day they’d both worked late and Lacey crawled over to him on all fours. He struggled for a minute to remove his black dress pants, almost tripping over himself with eagerness. Neither of them said anything. While she sucked his disappointingly sized dick, he looked at her with crazed eyes and would not stop talking. “You’re so good, baby, yes, yes, that’s amazing, wow, holy shit, oh my God.” She wanted to cry because it was not at all sexy. She regretted it as it was happening but she couldn’t back out now. When his salty sperm filled her mouth, she was finally free and certain she would never cheat again. He never returned to the coworking space, and the winter was cold and everyone wore several jackets and even brought blankets.
As Drew riskily placed his hands on Lacey’s hips, Lacey’s phone shrieked out with a phone call. Lacey withdrew. An unknown number stared back at her. For a moment she wondered if it was God. This was His home after all. But it was not God, it was Brett calling from jail to say he’d been arrested for stealing drugs from the pharmacy at his job for months. The bail was thousands of dollars that Lacey didn’t have. But she wasn’t thinking about the bail, she was thinking about her pathetic obliviousness. How had she not noticed? He was always so sleepy, she often wondered where his spirit had gone, and she chalked it up to life, the drowsiness that came with getting older and marching toward death. When would her eyes open?
Suddenly the unbearable heat hit her and sent her into a frenzy. Her pores clogged with sweat and she struggled to breathe. Drew turned off the music and Lacey’s laptop kept dinging with Slack messages. Drew was trying to instruct her to inhale for five seconds but she pushed him away and heaved. Then the fluorescents on the ceiling started to flicker. An inexplicable, rabid gust of wind blew open the door and shattered the windows. It picked Lacey up and sent her flying into the sky. From there she could see Brett slumped on the floor of his cell in defeat, she could see his therapist masturbating in her office to videos of strangers fucking on the bus while fellow passengers watched, she could see her boss in Los Angeles freaking out as the clock struck twelve and no announcement for the strawberry flavor went up. She could see everything, yet still she didn’t know anything. But as long as Lacey stayed there, floating in the cool stratosphere, everything would be fine.
