1

Erasure

No, fly me, fly me, far as pole from pole;

Rise Alps between us! and whole oceans roll!

Ah, come not, write not, think not once of me,

Nor share one pang of all I felt for thee.

She wakes up to an airplane crashing into the middle of her forehead, sprawling blood vessels and droplets of red paint across her barely furnished apartment.

Well, that’s what it feels like. She sits up, knocking her head gently against the paper lamp dangling from her ceiling. Frozen blueberries, must get frozen blueberries. Oddly, that had always been her best defense, back in the more collegiate days, for rotten hangovers like this one. Their dark, ripe color inspired her. “Blossoming Blueberry,” was, after all, the name on the label of hair dye that was still lying at the drain of her shower.

Walking across the icy hardwood floor, she loosens the scarf from around her neck and nearly trips over the cat, which scampers away in a gray blur. Her refrigerator is empty, save for some leftover takeout from Kang’s (this great little Chinese place down the block), a half-filled bottle of cheap vodka, and a rotten peach. It scares her that she actually reaches for the peach – it IS fruit, she thinks, but maybe that’s still the vodka talking – before thinking better of it. She could just throw it away, but currently she’s a woman on a mission. She has no time for frou frou things like housecleaning or doing the bills. It’s not her style.

She’s nearly out the door before she remembers that it’s the middle of October, and so pulls on her fur coat (it’s a bright, cheerful shade of orange, so obviously fake, and she loves that) and manages to make it to the Korean coffee shop and back before exhaustion takes over again. Shrugging her coat back off, she takes the large coffee with the convenient plastic top and retreats to the typhoon of oversized pillows and blankets on the mattress that she considers a bed.

The room is a disaster, which she realizes, but she really doesn’t want to move at the moment. She has an opening tomorrow at this refurbished warehouse in Williamsburg, and so she’s going to have to find something decent to throw over herself, and if she wants to locate something suitable beneath the layer of junk in this place, cleaning is going to be essential. Unfortunately.

The junk, as it were, is mostly her sketches, mixed in with clothes she’s worn and clothes she’s decided not to wear, receipts, mix tapes with the tape pulled out, her father’s old leatherette suitcase (which she still hasn’t unpacked, even after a month), paintbrushes crusted over with old paint, and a couple of brochures, which she looks at now, for the seventh time this morning, the twentieth time this weekend, and the forty-eighth time since she can remember. She had, at some point, ripped the cover off of it, so all she has now is a teal piece of paper with the words “Lacuna, Inc.” printed across the front in drab, Courier New text.

She shrugs, dismissing it, and brings her coffee to her lips. Good thing she’d worn that coat, really. The strap of her homemade tank top that she’d strung together last weekend with ribbon from the dollar store was threatening to snap right off. Perhaps later she’d turn it into a tube top. She likes tube tops, because she doesn’t have to worry about sweating in them.

The telephone rings. Her telephone is an old-fashioned one where you have to put your finger in the appropriate number hole and turn in order to dial; she can’t remember where she bought it.

The sound is shrill, and she’s cranky when she answers the phone.

“May I help you?”

“Pam, it’s Amanda.”

Her cousin. She hears Amanda’s husband pick up the other phone in the house, which irritates her immensely. “And Ted.”

She coughs into her hand to muffle the expletives. “Oh, hi! How are you guys?”

“Are you okay? We thought you’d have left by now,” Amanda says, and Pam can hear the reprimand in her voice – annoying.

“Left?”

“For our friends’ party!” she responds. Pam can hear Ted breathing. He’s okay, she’s okay. They always talked about having kids. God, why would anyone even want to get married? She thinks, totally astounded. Can’t two people just… be together without putting a fucking stamp on everything?

“You there?” Ted calls, distant.

“Yes. I remember now, the beach party. I don’t have to wear a swimsuit, I hope.”

There’s a pause, and Pam knows her cousin is exchanging a worried glance with her husband. She’s so out of it lately, she can hear them thinking. What is wrong with her? Maybe drugs.

“I mean, just kidding.” They never got her jokes.

“Are you going to take the train?”

“Pam?”

They’re talking to you again. “Oh, oh, right, yes, I’ll do that. And then I’ll take a cab, I guess. Can you give me the address?” They gave it to you last week. “Um, again?”

She writes it down on the back of an old photograph, because she can’t find paper in this place. The pen she’s using says Dunder Mifflin – whoever that is. She probably picked the pen up – stole it – somewhere. The bus station, the coffee shop, she’s always picking up free stuff. Extra pens, napkins, condiments, tableware. Whatever.

“I’ll see you there.”

“Oh, and Pam? You might want to dress up a bit …”

They realize she’s hung up. Her coffee’s in the trash and she’s nearly out the door before she knocks into something, left on the corner of the kitchen counter. It shatters into pieces, and she stares down at it with disbelief – disbelief that she could be such a klutz.

It was a little teapot. What the hell? Where did that come from? She wonders. She could grab a broom from the super, she should really clean it up before she leaves so the cat doesn’t get into it, but for some reason she’s purely transfixed by the pieces of this thing. She doesn’t even drink tea. Who drinks tea? So lame. She must’ve bought it at some point before she moved to New York. She doesn’t remember. Her life before moving to Manhattan was so fucking boring, everything that happened before that day she got on the train is impossible to recall. Those days just aren’t important, she thinks, taking her foot and pushing the shards of teapot into the corner (she then covers it with the quilt so the cat won’t get to it). Clearly I didn't have any taste back then anyway...