Half Life................................................Jason Lalljee

HALF LIFE

JASON LALLJEE (AB’21)

You tell her you were in Whole Foods when it happened. That’s when you heard about it, at least, and that was the more important part of it. You, balancing the cans of sun-dried tomatoes in one hand, the shopping cart cradled absentmindedly by the other. The cell phone was sandwiched between your shoulder and ear, so that when you heard the news, you became frozen there, like the woman in that Klimt painting craning away from a kiss. Your fingers were the first to unfreeze. They unfurled, letting the cans drop, the tile denting the metal. He kept rambling over the phone, desperate to explain himself as you kneeled against the linoleum, hastily picking up the tomatoes and returning them to the shelf. You shifted them to the back, where no one could see them, obscuring them with a line of untouched cans that you swept toward yourself in a single motion, like a magician vanishing coins under cups. You don’t ask Naomi why she wants you to relive this moment. It’s about color, you think, journalists like color. And if you’re being honest, it’s nothing like the type of landmines she could be walking you through.

“What did you do next?” she asks.

“I called my lawyer,” you say, after sipping your cortado. You don’t tell her that before that, you left the Whole Foods without buying anything, and hung up on Aaron without saying something of consequence. You don’t tell her that you got in your car and drove aimlessly along the Long Island Sound, blurring past the ocean and cemeteries and skeletal swaths of trees, cobwebbed with Christmas lights they were either too early or too late for. You don’t tell her you eventually pulled into a car wash off the I-95, becoming engulfed in a clamor of hot water jets and rubber tongues. How, glancing through th fretwork of soap and sponge, you felt like you were being masticated.