Perfect Tunes - Emily Gould Page 0,33

disk of cheese with a pleasantly disgusting ease. She finished it and still felt ravenous, so she went and bought another and ate it with the same speed and gusto. Her body, at least, seemed determined to live.

She took an elevator to a random floor and exited into a mostly deserted gallery of eighteenth-century Spanish paintings in which dark figures rolled their eyes upward in various ecstasies and agonies. She tried to stare at them until she felt something, but it wasn’t happening, so instead she decided to just walk through each room of the museum as fast as she could, stopping only if something arrested her gaze and made her feel compelled to stare. She was desperate to feel anything from an external source; she wanted to be forced to feel some other way besides how she already felt. The music that was typically in her head all the time had gone silent, she realized. There were no random jingles and half-remembered melodies trickling through her brain, trying to distract her, forming themselves into new songs if she paused long enough to listen. This pleasant static had always formed the backdrop to her thoughts, and now it was gone as though it had never existed.

Ancient Egypt was the last place she tried, and at the entrance to the Temple of Dendur something finally happened; she felt angry. The people who had built this temple had built it to guide someone into a supposed afterlife; how fucking stupid was that, was all of this? Death was final, she was sure. She thought of the kids in the Mixed-Up Files and how magical they had found this place. To Laura, at this moment, it seemed to embody false hope that you could be reunited with someone you loved in another realm, if you followed the right protocols, built the right shrine. That kind of thinking was dumb and dangerous. But how could kids have understood that? She herself had not understood it until just now. She wished she could go back to not understanding.

5

Laura was sitting on the stoop outside her apartment building and she couldn’t figure out how she was going to stand up and walk. Callie stood next to her, leaning on a parked car. Laura had made it down the steep flights of stairs but then felt woozy and blacked out slightly. Now she was clutching the filthy pavement where thousands of trash bags had sat and thousands of dogs had pissed because she felt the world turning too fast, trying to tip her over, too.

She kept thinking of Dylan’s body. It had been such a perfect body, and then via some process she didn’t understand, it had now been transformed into something that his parents had transported, in some kind of small container, so that his friends could gather and say goodbye to what had been Dylan and then do something with the container’s contents, together. Did no one else realize how bizarre this was, how completely disgusting and surreal?

“I can’t go. I’m not going. I can’t move,” she explained to Callie.

Callie winced and tugged on the sleeve of Laura’s black hooded sweatshirt. “You don’t have to go, but you’ll regret it if you don’t. And I really don’t want to go without you. Come on, get up.”

She hoisted Laura up by the arm in a businesslike way. Blackness swarmed behind Laura’s eyes for a second but then dissipated. She counted her breaths and tried not to think of anyone’s body as they walked south toward Joe’s Bar, where the memorial was being held. It was midafternoon but felt later because the days were getting shorter. It was too cold to be outside in just a sweatshirt. Callie had put on her makeup for her, painting her eyelids and her lashes with layers of waterproof liner and mascara, dabbing concealer onto her puffy, tear-chafed cheeks. Still, she knew she looked bad. She had a momentary pang about not wanting Dylan to see her looking like this, then realized she’d never have to worry about that again.

There it was, on the bar, visible as soon as they walked in: a generic-looking black urn no bigger than a beer stein, flanked by vases of what looked like cheap bodega flowers and what must have been Dylan’s senior photo from high school. He looked so different in it from the Dylan she’d known: awkward and skinny, with a bad droopy wave of bangs covering part of his zitty forehead, and