Bunker Dweller

She was a weirdo.

What—she didn’t know?

She knew.

Knew how, at least. If not exactly why.

Start with the PhD in philosophy. That was weird.

Start with the since-forever makeup-lessness. The affinity for boys’ jeans, Oxford shirts, high-tops. The whole butch-straight-chick thing. Gender rebel without a cause.

No: start with the introversion. The thousand childhood summer days spent writing and drawing at her desk. The years spent strip-mining the public library. For kicks. Because who does that? In America? Excepting, maybe, the Harvard Law POTUS and Princetonian FLOTUS whose intellectualism wasn’t, let’s face it, rubbing off on the country?

When was the books-are-my-best-friend kid ever not weird?

She’d thought, too, during the belated tornadic adolescence of her grad-school years (speaking of weird), she’d finally outgrown her “Amish phase,” quoting her mother, and would be a sociable modern human henceforth. But it was back again. With a vengeance. The introversion. If that was even the word for it anymore, as it tipped—morphed, molted—into something new, something alarming. Something making her make choices she wasn’t making.

For instance: murdering the Facebook page.

For instance: hitting the supermarket only on weeknights after nine, so as to be, as nearly as possible, the only person in the place.

For instance: flipping the iPhone over on the kitchen counter or empty pillow beside her (formerly Gabe’s) whenever either “Mom & Dad” or her sister’s name lit up that beastly thing’s face, made it perform that awful sex-toy seizure.

Letting voicemail deal with it.

Except voicemail was full.

She didn’t want to do these things. Any more than she wanted, exactly, to keep her door shut (and locked) during office hours at school, waiting fully thirty seconds to open for any always-startling knuckle rap, lest some obnoxious boy from PHIL215 or road-warrior textbook rep otherwise persuaded she was out barge in, plop down on the guest chair under the big Pier 1 paper lantern and spend a fucking hour free-associating about, respectively, how “existentialist” Grand Theft Auto is or the revolting norovirus outbreak on the cruise ship last summer.

All this before the problem of prolix colleagues who’d spend geological amounts of time sitting humblebragging about the NEH grants they’d scored for sabbatical travels or the “phenomenal” and “brilliant” HUMN433 students they were bussing to the Folger to paw the white-gloves-only shit.

Not that a day no one knocked wasn’t a little scary.

What was this new door-locking, phone-flipping, night-shopping thing in her?

Was it in fact new? Or was it the same thing that parked her at her desk in her bedroom when she was a kid, only she didn’t particularly remember it now—didn’t recognize its lumpy, clammy psychic contours—because pre-adolescent her was (duh) a totally different person from thirty-two-year-old her, and who knows what goes on in another person’s head, much less some nine year-old’s who, never mind she’s you, is gone?

Plus which don’t tell her that kid wasn’t happy. With her Madeline L’Engle novels. Her markers, pencils, sketchpads, India-rubber erasers.

Her bedroom-window view of those skateboarders and Rubik’s Cubers on the Columbia Heights sidewalk down below.

Had she decided sometime recently (post-Gabe) she was too weird an animal to hang with humans? And better stay away? Lest they, like, notice her? Chase her off with torches and pitchforks?

Well, maybe. Though was she any weirder now than a few short years ago? When she was out drinking with the humans three and four nights a week? Getting all tangled up in their affairs and dramas? Even sometimes being the drama, as on nights she herded the crew to the bar or mornings she woke up in beds (say, Gabe’s) not her own? Its oh-so-human protag? And wasn’t it true she had to lock them out of her space at work? The humans? This suggesting it wasn’t a weirdo they saw when they looked at her so much as just some bunny-cute-if-tightly-wound tomboy sis or aunt they knew would indulge their blather because that’s what feminine and/or female persons—even those in trucker jackets and calculator watches—do?

What if she wasn’t weird but queer?

She’d been setting off people’s gaydars her whole adult life, hadn’t she?

Was it unthinkable other people knew something about her she didn’t know about herself? Was some shadowy chamber of her heart singed in the latest hetero dumpster fire not letting her back out in public till she confronted this long-suppressed…thing?

It sure might explain the hellishly awkward foyer run-ins with Josie. The pretty ER doc who lived downstairs from her in the giant, genially crumbling Victorian mansion she’d been renting a dusty, dusky corner of these last five months.

She hated her blundering bee-stung-tongue ineptitude around that woman. Not only because they might have been pally peers (“Doctor,” “Doctor”) but because Josie was one of those people at breezy ease with the world in a way she herself couldn’t fake being with a gun to her head. She herself, getting “home” from school, would trot like a nervous fox—head down, eyes up—from the mini parking lot around back to the mansion’s palatial front entrance, fearful of being spotted, spied alone and pitiful (newly uncoupled) by anyone gazing down from one of those grand old double-hung windows. Josie, meanwhile, would sit alone back there in her VW for fifteen minutes at a stretch. Texting. Listening to NPR. Just resting, probably, after some two-ladder-accidents-and-a-kid-who-ate-all-the-Flintstones shift at their little college-town hospital. Ambling, then, unhurriedly—mind-blowingly un-self-consciously—up the long gravel drive. Pausing to text more. To excavate her keys from her bag. To squat and spend a minute with the Manx mansion cat that always materialized from nowhere to greet her.

All this she’d observed from her bedroom window.

(She was herself, naturally, the double-hung gazer she feared.)

This would all seem to support a case someone might make that someone was crushing on Josie.

And: okay: yes: she fantasized about women. Occasionally. Maybe out of some Judith Butler-derived sense of progressive duty, maybe to shake up the tired, faded, thousand-times-broken-and-respliced porn reels in her brain that didn’t always get the dopamine spurting like they used to. Except the women in these fantasies were blurry. Amorphous. Always (this was embarrassing, for its rank maleness) faceless. And while anything with a pulse might be forgiven for wanting to sink teeth into Josie’s glorious behind when she wore her tight day-off jeans, the possibly case-wrecking fact was things just didn’t achieve the event-horizon slipperiness one might hope for when she tried undressing her—specifically, vividly Josie—on the backs of her eyelids.

Not that this took the sting off their most recent encounter. That freakishly gorgeous late-October day they’d collided, almost, on the mansion’s fulsome front porch. “My strange neighbor!” Josie had greeted her. Squint-smiling, orange sun on her face, in her weapons-grade charming way. Blanking on the prof-upstairs’ name was the safe bet. And though it was no doubt meant kindly (strange like ships forever passing?), if not, who knows, flirtily (strange like queer?), she still hadn’t been able to trot up the foyer’s monstrous walnut staircase fast enough. To get behind (and lock) her apartment’s arch-top hobbit door. And cry.

She might as well have called her weirdo.

What other honest word for a grown-up who doesn’t answer her family’s phone calls?

She didn’t have much time left, she knew, on that front. One day soon she’d get “home” from school, round the bend in the gravel drive. Find her sister Fiona’s tortured Saab in the guest spot. Fiona, like, in it. Waiting.

Sick with worry, she was going to say.

Can’t just ignore, she was going to say.

Mom didn’t mean, she was going to say.

Or, at least as likely as any of those: pregnant.

Any minute now. What with November having pounced. The wretched holidays looming like something wretched.

She knew, of course, America’s prescription for her. Therapy. Only she’d tried it. Last winter, couples-style (with Gabe). The whole thing so grotesquely ripe for Deleuzean and/or Foucaultean critique—all the mommy-daddy-me shit; all the procrustean subject-engineering—she’d had trouble not finding it comical. When she wasn’t checking the walls for yellow wallpaper, that is.

When she wasn’t feeling like Regan in The Exorcist.

Their therapist was an escaped Jesuit. Admittedly kind. Totally decent. Though it wasn’t exactly confidence-boosting when she brought up Anti-Oedipus in one session and got back a one-hundred-percent-baffled look in response. (From Gabe: a fuck’s sake one.)

Kind and decent were nice and all. But you do a psych program in the ’70s and don’t know that book?

Jesus.

Was it her fault the universe didn’t want smart things controlled by less-smart things? (Unless, of course, we were talking mothers and infants?)

Anyway, didn’t Freud say psychoanalysis doesn’t work on the Irish?

Maybe it was Joyce.

Don’t ask her old therapist.

Funny: the Anti-Oedipus debacle (Gabe about lost his shit when they got out of the Jesuit’s that time) might have occurred the exact same day she discovered the bunker.

This at her school’s satellite “campus.” A decades-old glass-and-I-beam folly plonked into the middle of an ancient cornfield, nether edge of the next town over. Some corporate bank’s abandoned regional headquarters, repurposed, sort of, for higher ed. The PHIL110 she was teaching there met around a long cherrywood table in what had undoubtedly been one swank-ass boardroom back when Purple Rain and Thriller were duking it out. After her dozen-or-so adult students split this particular Tuesday night, grumpy spouses and screaming toddlers and pee-desperate dogs to get home to, she stuck around emailing long enough to avoid parking-lot bullshittery with any colleagues or quasi-deans ready to lurch at her from the shadows out there. Then, up and going, finally, about ten, she found herself shoving, delirious with exhaustion but still not ready to go home (to Gabe), the crash bar on an intriguingly unmarked end-of-hallway door. Which clattered open. Revealing a dim, echoey concrete stairwell, wall-mounted fire extinguisher in it oddly spotlit like a religious object. She followed, for no reason whatsoever, the stairs to their bottom. Pulled open another door. Stepped into a suite—a confusion—of little windowless office spaces empty but for some ratty old office chairs and dented file cabinets. Disassembled cubicle panels. Battered wood-veneer desks with random drawers sticking out like dead deer’s tongues. A troop of vintage-beige computer monitors huddling for warmth in a corner.

The bunker.

What a delight.

Because wow the baby bliss she felt hoofing around that little labyrinth. Switching on buzzy fluorescent lights, surveying scuffed walls and mildew-stained drop ceilings. Hearing the distant whoosh of forced air. Wow the pleasure of being utterly alone in a place America forgot. Like, really forgot. Not just alone but semi-unlocatable, the satanic iPhone someone (Gabe) gave her for Christmas out in her winter-cold Subaru’s cupholder, paperweight-dead, ungratefully unrecharged. She sure loved a nice non-place. The sort unregisterable in normal-people consciousness. Baggage claims and bus stations. Hotel hallways and parking garages. Interstate rest stops and dead shopping malls.

The supermarket at night.

Anywhere personhood got put on pause.

The bunker. An instant classic. A real redoubt, if intellectualizing it wasn’t betraying it, against those two’s (i.e. Gabe and the Jesuit’s) tag-team efforts (they’d howl) to turn her into a right-desiring human.

She entered what a cracked plastic placard proclaimed Room 19. Slid, ataraxic, down a wall to a threadbare fire-retardant carpet, peacoated spine athwart a cockeyed phone jack spitting out a vinyl cord connected to nothing.

A redoubt against that boy from PHIL215. And the fucked-up thing he’d shown her on his laptop.

Someone had magic-markered a smiley face on the whiteboard by the door. Who knew how many years ago.

Bad ugly things she’d have done, there in Room 19, for a Marlboro Light. And a slug of freezer-cold Grey Goose. Because what a kick that would be. Marrying the principal pleasures of her belated tornadic adolescence to this one.

Alas: she’d long since kicked the Marlboro Man to the curb. Before moving in with someone (Gabe) uninterested in a threesome.

The Goose, however, was still hanging around.

The Goose, in fact, got the Facebook page killed.

Ironic and infuriating, for sure, that Goose had been the main bond, just being honest, between her and her grad-school besties Mel and Ally. Because those sure as shit looked, in the last Facebook photo she ever examined, like Goose martinis those two whores were hoisting under the unmistakable vaulted ceiling of the Grand Central Oyster Bar—and on the very same night, by the time stamp on Ally’s “wall,” she was herself putting some serious hurt on a bottle of same on her own sofa in her own (Gabe-less) apartment in a handsome if somewhat mouse- and wolf spider-infested Victorian mansion a mere two-hour train commute, had anyone thought to invite her, from Manhattan.

She’d felt slapped. Punched. For the second time that no-good-very-bad evening. And since Ms. Hyde was not, with a half-dozen shots of France’s finest in her, what you’d call a temperate or judicious sort, inclined to chill herself the eff out by contemplating, say, the bazillion circumstances by which two old friends might find themselves throwing one back in a big-city train station without it being particularly feasible, even, to get their dejected compatriot there speedy-like from seventy-five miles away, her Fake-book page, which had, by its complicity in a worldwide plot to transmogrify all interesting people everywhere into soma-scented 32-bit versions of themselves, been nauseating her for months anyway, was dead inside fifteen minutes. And would have been dead sooner if choking it out hadn’t proved a byzantine, multi-stage operation requiring her at various points, drunk and half blind with rage tears, to click on all pictures of, like, sunsets, then all pictures of, like, clocks and/or watches, the whole thing a memento-mori mind-screw (what: no skulls? no tombstones?) clearly intended to unnerve anyone aiming to stick their digital head in the oven. Except then, abruptly, it was done, apparently (as she’d been warned several times) irrevocably, and also maybe a little regrettably, because Mel and Ally would think what when they saw she’d deleted herself right after they’d posted that pic?

Goose, always, because it was expensive. And who with a nasty habit would choose it over the two-liter-plastic-bottle swill on the liquor store’s bottom shelf?

For the second time that no-good-very-bad evening owing to what she’d seen out her bedroom window a couple hours earlier: her landlords—the retired couple in the antique-stuffed carriage house next door—shouting out to Josie (who was making her prettily wilted post-shift stroll up the gravel drive), summoning the squint-smiling doc over to their sunset-dappled patio, dragging over a wrought-iron chair for her, pouring her a fishbowl-size glass of something red while their bonkers chocolate lab nuzzled her crotch.

Thing is, it wasn’t half an hour since she herself had fox-trotted by those two, exchanging waves and hollered hellos, the elderly couple’s big-eyed, clownishly amiable expressions somehow embarrassing her, making her accelerate to a near-jog to escape into the mansion already. So watching them summon Josie now—the two retired lawyers calling over the practicing MD—wounded her. Made her feel childish and small, like she’d been relegated to the kids’ table at Thanksgiving. Like she’d spent all that time in school studying something ridiculous, becoming a philosopher, of all whacked things, exactly what nobody wants at a party, a permanent junior to all the world’s real professionals, real grown-ups, a babysitter of some sort to those kids at the state “university” (former teachers’ college) across town. Hearing them laughing out there, that comfy little Elks Club, audible through the lumpy lead glass of the big window frame whose edge she peered past, made an unholy panic blossom in her chest—panic at how totally alone she now was, how helpless she seemed to stop making it worse, ignoring phone calls, locking doors, neglecting the digital version of herself modernity insisted supplant the bar-hopping, cigarette-smoking, boy-kissing version of her she’d been amazed to discover at twenty-five, she couldn’t stop, and what if the same way some people got brain cancer in their thirties, got MS, she’d got a bizarre and incurable predilection for self-isolation that might actually kill her?

Once she got a couple shots of Goose down her gullet, she started thinking she’d go outside. Hoof down the gravel drive. Lurk in the shadows under the nearly naked elms in the smidgen of sunlight still remaining. See if they’d spot her, those in-crowd kids, and call her over.

Before her trucker jacket was on, though, she was thinking of Regan again. In her nightdress. Blithely descending the living-room stairs to her mother’s fancy Georgetown cocktail party. Opening her mouth. Scaring the bejesus out of everyone.

At least it was a hilarious thought.

And wasn’t that what one went to the Goose for? A no-choice-in-the-matter change of brain weather? Even if it was a school night?

Before she passed out later on the sofa, Facebook page well and duly murdered, she blearily acknowledged it. What would have happened if her gurning landlords had hoisted up the Bordeaux as she trotted past. Hollered, “Join us!” The sorry excuse she would have shouted back. A thousand papers to grade. Think I might have a fever.

She acknowledged, too, what she’d have done if Ally had called that afternoon to tell her to quick—quick—get on a train!

Not answered the phone was what.

Why was she such a weirdo?

Why was she the Girl Who Wanted What She Didn’t Want? The company and esteem, namely, of other people, except kindly keep that shit away from her?

Was that why she was weird? Because she was that girl? Or was that just another how she was weird? Like having the PhD in philosophy? Like feeling actual heartache the night she found the door to the shadowy stairwell to her underground bunker locked?

“What is that even supposed to illustrate?” Gabe said when she confessed it during the Last Dismal Dialog. “You want a place to be alone at the end of a workday and this makes you—what? Unfit for parenthood?”

“That’s not what I’m saying!” she’d said.

“You think I won’t be there to—spell you? I don’t know you need time to be alone? To read and write and stare at your navel?”

She glared at him.

“Same as I do?” he added quickly.

“It’s not about being alone,” she said. “It’s about liking that kind of place. It’s about how people who want to hang out in a bunker should not be parents!”

“What on earth are you talking about?”

Christ. She should what? Explain non-places to him? Explain the joys of anti-subjectivity? Give him a primer on Baudrillard’s strategy of the object?

He was a software engineer. They’d met at a grad-student mixer in the catacombs at the glorious alma mater. A friend of Mel’s boyfriend.

She surprised herself.

“No kinds of people are the kinds who should be parents.”

Genuine bafflement. Same as the Jesuit’s that time.

“No one,” she went on, liking it, “should make new human beings who haven’t asked to be here. I mean, the presumption of it. The narcissism.”

“Well how,” fingertips to temples, “do people ask to be here if they’re not here? How are any of us here without—narcissists?”

“So what if we’re not?”

“Not….”

“Here!”

He sat there.

“You don’t bring someone you don’t know into a situation where they’re going to suffer. They’re going to get old—if they’re lucky. And they’re going to die! How does anyone think it’s permissible to do that to someone you’ve never met?”

“Fuck’s sake.”

“What if they’re miserable?” she said. “And then it’s you who brought them to this place. At this time.”

“This place.”

“This—country!” she said. “With all this shit happening.”

“Shit like….”

“Like Katrina,” she said. “Like the school shootings. Like all the idiocy around that man’s—fucking—birth certificate!”

She saw something novel on his face. A hint, maybe, of defeat.

“Aren’t there always disasters happening?” he soldiered on.

“Duh.”

“Isn’t there always—friction? Political drama?”

“Duh!”

“And still. Has there ever—I mean this, okay? Has there ever been a better time in, like, human history to be alive? Or to have—”

“Do you know,” she interrupted, “what this student of mine showed me? On YouTube?”

“Who?”

“This horrible—boy. During his essay conference with me. He gets out his laptop and shows me this—joke of a video. This thing so edited and doctored it might as well be a Loony Tunes cartoon for how realistic.”

“And?”

“And it’s Obama,” she said. “Saying, like, thanks for coming. To everyone in the press room. Then he turns and leaves the podium and crosses the stage and—like he’s enraged or something—lifts his foot and—kicks the door open and storms out!”

It was interesting what five seconds of silence could convey. These five told her he was afraid for her. Maybe even of her. Like he’d possibly been the time he’d told her they’d have to start seeing a therapist.

“And it isn’t,” he said, “maybe what you said? A joke?”

“It’s not the video. It’s that boy! That college student. He sat there and insisted to me that shit was real!”

Gabe sat silent.

“So there’s your future,” she said. “And I’m in there trying to talk to these idiots about Plato and Kant and—Sartre. And they’re out there on YouTube and Fake-book.”

“Okay,” he said.

“I mean, the vitriol they’re aiming at those people. The Obamas,” knowing his next question. “And it’s obvious where it’s going.”

“Is it?”

“And I’m not bringing children into it!”

He sat looking at her.

“I’m not doing it!” she shouted.

She was crying.

They were curb-parked on the Columbia Heights street she’d grown up on. Or grown up gazing down at, anyway. Just a few doors up from her parents’ house. Just a couple dozen blocks, she sometimes forgot, from that press room.

Gabe looked numbly out the windshield of the brand-new Volvo. Which would soon simply be his brand-new Volvo.

“Sweetie,” he said.

Her diaphragm was spasming. It was infuriating, not being able to stop it.

“This isn’t about the Obamas,” he said. “You know? It just isn’t. And I wish you could hear Jerry”—Jerry the Jesuit—“when he tells you you’re not your mother. I mean, you just aren’t. For real. And it’s not like you’d suddenly turn into her if we—if—”

“This maybe isn’t helpful to hear right now,” she said, “when I have to go in there and see her.”

“All right,” he said. “But let me just say I’m sorry. For what it must have been like for you. Growing up with her. But….”

She wiped her nose on the back of her hand.

“But,” she said.

“It doesn’t change the fact I love my parents,” he said miserably. “You know? And I want to pass it on. Everything I got from them. I want to share it.”

“You can share it with me!”

“I want to,” he said. “And I would. But I just. I want to have a family. I mean, I have to. I just have to. I want to have a normal life.”

Normal.

He couldn’t have known he was echoing her mother.

“Normal people want children,” she’d gotten from that woman on the phone not a month before.

Gabe, at least, had the decency to wince when he heard it come out of his own mouth. Before the last syllable was done echoing inside the car.

He’d had the decency, too, to drive her away from there. To not make her go into that house.

Well.

She’d done the only decent thing she could do. Which was let him go. Especially unavoidable after the way she’d messed up in their earliest days. Telling him on two different Goose-sodden occasions they’d have beautiful kids.

It was a fatal error, of course. The sort there’s no coming back from. And best, probably, the karmic bill came due three years in instead of ten.

Ten and there’d have been a kid around.

To punish.

She had just so wanted to reel him in. Gabe. Permanently. And he was so good-looking she’d been afraid he couldn’t see it. How pretty she was. Even in her Chuck Taylors and flannel shirts. Even without earrings or tattoos. Even without any whisper of lipstick or blush or mascara, because she wouldn’t. Ever. Any of it.

Why not?

She was a weirdo.

At some point you stopped trying to untangle why from how.

What does a philosopher know anyway, if not that it can’t be done?

The morning after the Facebook page’s murder she was too sick for school. Called the department’s secretary. Used the fever excuse she hadn’t needed with her landlords the night before.

Dangerous. She was nowhere near tenure.

Having nothing to eat at “home” but garbanzos and toothpaste sure didn’t help the hangover. Which fact made a nighttime grocery run seem prudent.

She snuck out into the damp night. Pausing statuesque in the mansion’s foyer a long moment to listen for front-porch footfalls.

Minutes later she was trotting across the supermarket’s misty parking lot, feeling the iPhone vibrate in her peacoat pocket. She plucked it out. Discovered “Mom & Dad” lighting up its face.

Too much. Too, too much. A clear violation of the non-place’s sanctity.

Before she knew what she was doing she’d tossed the godawful thing in the trash bin outside the supermarket’s automatic doors. Thunk, it said from the bottom of the can. Inside she braked hard. Stood panting by a row of gleaming shopping carts. Turned and trotted back outside. The can’s lid was fastened on somehow. The phone had gone in through a slot she couldn’t get her arm into. Not far enough, anyway, to reach bottom.

She walked blankly back into the store. Didn’t get a cart or basket. Just stood there alone, mouth-breathing, hands at her sides, at the nether edge of the deserted, brightly lit produce area. Waiting for someone to spot her. Someone who might recognize her. Might know her name, even. Someone who’d approach her, smile at her. Take her hand. Hold it. Say to her:

Cara. Whose name means beloved. And friend and companion, too. You’re not so weird. Not in this country. Not at this time. Not for being lonely.