Somewhere Soft to Land

Chapter 1

new york | january | seven years of assorted lords later

I left his house at five. Tatiana refused to call him anything but “Chicago Shithead,” or, in more gracious moments, “Bootleg Barack,” because he managed to insert the fact of his being from the South Side of Chicago into conversations about tuna fish, graphic design, and Belize. This was true but unfair, I felt, to premium Barack.

Typically, I refused to call him anything at all, since I was in denial about repeatedly dating someone I did not actually like and who very much did not like me either. But he was tall, child-free, insistently heterosexual, and wore tailored suits to work; I reasoned that eventually, the sheen of these qualifications would supersede my dislike of him. And after an ill-advised phone call with my mother the previous afternoon, I craved the familiarity of any person who wasn’t her. I could have called Tatiana, but wouldn’t; I was not ready to own up to my poor decision-making of late. Therefore, I reasoned the best course of action was to make an even poorer decision.

Leaving his place before dawn was easy. I usually hit Snooze dozens of times, but not around him. It was a commonality between the men I’d been with that year—that they couldn’t or didn’t sleep. Instead, they lay alert on their sides, disrupting my sleep with the kinds of touches you’d give a pet you were about to put down. A tender goodbye in preparation for tomorrow’s kill. It was a desperate and careful touch, a sad worship without overt sexuality, though it felt sexual in ways that rattled me when I remembered them.

With women, I felt safer and further away from myself. My preferences had always been more atmospheric than gender-based, and the first time—of three, in the six months we dated—that I broke up with Chicago Shithead, I set out for more thorough field testing. In spite of a prolific effort, I came away from each encounter feeling like I could have enjoyed myself if I’d cared to, if my birth control didn’t dull my libido, if my sexuality wasn’t merely the byproduct of adrenaline and terror, if I didn’t wonder whether I had any sexuality at all.

I ordered a cab on my way out, passed the time pacing back and forth in the tiled entryway. If I walked to Eastern Parkway at such an empty, cold hour, I’d end up having to run; my head hurt as it was. I ached elsewhere, too, though I decided to chalk it up to the winter draft permeating the entryway, rather than the excess aggression of the previous evening. As I waited, I read, reread, and contemplated the deletion of the text my mother sent after our call yesterday.

The thing about coping with depression for any significant length of time was: While one could technically forestall premature unaliveness, the craving for a reprieve from active existence was at times so acute that it found creative ways to achieve its goals (e.g., “How about, instead of physiologically dying, you date a man with the emotional regulation of a toddler on high-dose steroids and the internalized racism of a Tyler Perry villain—that way, nobody will call you selfish for trying to off yourself, but you’ll still get to feel like you’ve perished?”). Who said women couldn’t have it all?

So at 5:38 p.m. the day before, leaning against the façade of a downtown Le Pain Quotidien, I unblocked his number. I felt justified: I’d endured seventeen minutes more than the self-allotted twenty of my mother’s exceptional ability to scramble my psyche, without breaking a sweat, shedding an eyelash, or getting a snag in one of her spotless cashmere sweaterdresses. I couldn’t see her reactions or her outfit over the phone, but I remembered them well enough—too well for my own good. While continuing to dodge Tatiana’s texts so I would not feel compelled to admit to my colossal, double-pronged backslide, I found myself, just a few short hours later, being medium-terrorized in Bootleg Barack’s musty apartment, once again.

I checked my phone; the taxi was still a few minutes out. Fidgeting with the neckline of my dress, I reread my mother’s message.

Hello Dzifa. I spotted this article in the Atlantic. By an acclaimed researcher. Harvard-educated. PhD. (Lost a bunch of weight, incidentally.) Per our conversation.

I could not initially view the link and should have taken that as a sign from the universe to skip it entirely. I reloaded the page and read the title: “Psychiatry Is the Only Mental Illness: My Fight to Bring Personal Responsibility Back to American Youth.”

On a better night: For example, a night where the man I backslid with was not having a rage meltdown, I might have been better equipped to respond appropriately. To force myself to laugh it off, even as the impact of my mother’s dig stung. To call Tatiana and wait for her to laugh at Mrs. Quartey’s signature brand of rubbing salt in the very wound she’d opened. But it wasn’t a better night. It was the night it was, and, as I waited for the cab, I read the entire article and let the flashbacks roll through me, clutching at my chest as if the memories were lodged there instead of in my head.

The sharp alert from my phone brought me back just enough to leave the building. I pushed open the door, stepped through. As the door swung back, I raised my leg to kick it shut, relishing the rush of cold air and the force of my boot against the thick slab of metal. When the door clicked—with agonizing ease—back into place, I released a short, grainy scream.

“Uh . . . is it . . . Mercy?”

I swiveled around, spotted the source of the low, timid voice. A black SUV idled at the curb.

I released the tension in my forehead, the tightness in my lips and cheeks. “Oh, hey!” I matched my voice to his, just above a whisper. “Yeah, that’s me.”

The driver was young and handsome. He played pop-friendly hip-hop and said nothing all the way back to my neighborhood; meanwhile, I fantasized about how I might feel if I’d spent the night with him instead. He was the sort of pretty, shy-seeming man by whom I might actually request to, rather than relent to, be touched. I said nothing either. When we were close to my place, I asked him to drop me at the corner store. “Thank you,” I said too brightly, a smile nobody asked me to force straining my cheeks.

It was only three minutes from the store to the brownstone where I’d been living for the past six months. A small plastic bag slapped against my legs as I walked. A few steps from the house, I tripped, scraping my tights across the pavement, and righted myself with a flushed, shaking hand. The flesh on and between my thighs strained against the impromptu lunge. I winced and pulled myself up, checking my hands for dust and drug paraphernalia.

The house was quiet when I walked in. Three of my housemates slept on the ground floor, three of us upstairs. I closed the front door and nudged my flats onto a thick doormat. In our big, bright kitchen, I pulled a tall glass from the cupboard and tore open a packet of Alka-Seltzer. It fizzed for two minutes. I lifted it to my mouth, tilted it back, and drank it down in big, choking gulps. I took a couple of painkillers, a rare practice even though I had accumulated plenty of meds over the years, mostly long-expired antidepressants, and a couple for the heart palpitations I’d had since I was a kid. I’d be well within my rights to take them as I needed them, but it was my policy to convince myself not to need them most of the time.

Rooms being closets were not hyperbole in New York; my room had been a closet and now housed a single bed, a small desk, a blue exercise ball I used as a chair, no windows, and me. All five of my housemates were some variation of white, ranging from fifth-generation standardly white to second-generation ethnic white. I moved to the brownstone in July, six months after my Russian live-in boyfriend broke up with me because he was thinking of joining the priesthood. I resented being forced into the tired role of jilted girlfriend crying into a tub of ice cream, even if being jilted for a lifetime of asceticism gave me slightly superior branding.

Perhaps it was his newfound spirituality, or perhaps it was that a month after he broke up with me, I projected onto him the blame for the memorably unpleasant encounter I endured during my first attempt to date somebody else. I went for drinks, then home, with a Connecticutian man who lived in a Midtown high-rise, who had large veneers and Jason Bateman energy I clocked early enough to survive but a little late to avoid a resurgence of immobilizing panic attacks that made taking public transit a greater-than-usual safety risk. Either way, the Russian Who Dumped Me gave me first, last, and security, and drove me and my belongings to the whitest part of this part of Brooklyn, this place a twenty-minute walk from my workplace, with three big boys who didn’t know me but who I assumed were hormonally predisposed to fighting should the Connecticutian show up for seconds.