Ghost Pains by Jessi Jezewska Stevens

Author:Jessi Jezewska Stevens
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: The Visitors;The Exhibition of Persephone Q;contemporary fiction;literary fiction;novel;women’s literary fiction;millenial;New York;Berlin;Germany;expat;Michael Leonard;Sam Lipsyte;Rivka Galchen
Publisher: And Other Stories
Published: 2023-12-22T13:59:29+00:00

Three hours with the bureaucrats and seventeen new messages awaited her on her phone. She flicked through the banners while walking back to the hotel. The director of the mathematics department at the Lithuanian university wanted to confirm her visit later in the month. The founder of a cryptocurrency had left a message about possible collaboration. A colleague, overly enthusiastic about his work (overly enthusiastic, Tina felt, about her), had just arrived this morning; he’d texted four times, called twice. What was she doing for dinner tonight? It seemed she was forever doomed to attract the wrong sort of person. Meanwhile, the old ache had returned. In line at the pharmacy, Tina made some futile adjustments to her layers of fleece and cashmere. The courthouse had raised her temperature, and now she was cold with sweat.

She charged the saline solution to the company card.

In her room, she struggled with the shower knobs, hot versus cold, the plungers to redirect the water flow, gave up and settled for a bath. While the tub filled, she mixed warm saline in a complimentary cup, then leaned over the counter to soak. She rose and looked at herself, the one breast red, the other coolly lunar, untouched. Ripping open another packet of saline, she mixed a second dose to gargle, because it was flu season, she still had tonsils, and fate did not seem on her side. She felt in desperate need of a deep, internal cleanse.

It wasn’t true that she’d been no help at the appointment. The truth was far worse: she’d said hardly a word, which had somehow made her seem complicit. At the archives, as Dave argued with the attendant, she’d interjected only to de-escalate. Would it be possible to … ? Could you direct us toward … ? Who might be the appropriate point person for … ? “Cunt!” Dave had sworn as they left. Not a workplace-appropriate turn of phrase. Tina was still debating whether he’d said it loud enough for the official to hear. She’d tried to comfort him. “We’ll try again tomorrow,” she’d said. Stupid. Now, easing herself into her bath, she wished she hadn’t.

The piercing—also stupid—was not faring especially well on this trip. It was hard to say why—perhaps it didn’t agree with her recent change of bra. Sometimes it responded to the cold, other times to heat, keeping her all too aware of how the barometer of her body expanded, retracted, galvanized attempts to eject foreign objects. Multiple times over the previous decade, she’d considered removing it. She’d considered how different life might have been had she nabbed a sober appointment between the hours of nine and five. A lot had changed. The friends’ faces were now vague; they were no longer friends. It was the piercing that remained. It was the friend. It was simply a part of her now.

By the time she went to bed, the third vodka from the minibar was working through her veins. She planted one foot on the floor and her laptop in her lap.

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