U UP? Read online

  U Up?

  Copyright © Catie Disabato, 2021

  All rights reserved

  First Melville House Printing: February 2021

  Melville House Publishing

  46 John Street

  Brooklyn, NY 11201

  and

  Melville House UK

  Suite 2000

  16/18 Woodford Road

  London E7 0HA

  mhpbooks.com

  @melvillehouse

  ISBN 9781612198910

  Ebook ISBN 9781612198927

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2020948930

  Book design by Betty Lew, adapted for ebook

  A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

  a_prh_5.6.0_c0_r0

  For Mike and Anne

  The intense desire—

  and the fulfillment of that desire—

  experienced through looking.

  —SCOPOPHILIA, AS DEFINED

  BY THE ARTIST NAN GOLD

  In the land of gods and monsters

  I was an angel

  Lookin’ to get fucked hard.

  —LANA DEL REY

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Friday, 12:03 a.m.

  Friday, 10:37 a.m.

  Friday, 12:15 p.m.

  Friday, 1:22 p.m.

  Friday, 3:00 p.m.

  Friday, 3:20 p.m.

  Friday, 6:30 p.m.

  Friday, 9:09 p.m.

  Saturday, 7:37 a.m.

  Saturday, 12:49 p.m.

  Saturday, 1:45 p.m.

  Saturday, 3:59 p.m.

  Saturday, 5:01 p.m.

  Saturday, 6:17 p.m.

  Saturday, 8:20 p.m.

  Sunday, 2:35 a.m.

  Sunday, 9:26 a.m.

  Sunday, 11:42 a.m.

  Sunday, 2:00 p.m.

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Friday, 12:03 a.m.

  u up?

  My phone blared with the incoming text, a noisy alert I was as relieved to hear as an almost–murder victim is by the wail of police sirens. For hours my phone had laid inert, as useless as a lone brick, while I watched endless Netflix lying on my back and poked at my barely concave belly button.

  How glorious it was to hear my phone, to see it light up again, at a late enough hour that it was a true surprise to hear it wake.

  u up?

  Oh yes, sweet phone and glorious late-night texter, yes I’m up.

  EzraIsTexting

  Thursday 6:55 PM

  u wanna go to that new tiki bar?

  can’t tonight, i’m knocking off work tomorrow to go to the desert with noz

  like for the day???

  she got us a room at two bunch palms for the weekend

  Friday 12:03 AM

  u up?

  The text was from Ezra Levinson, my best friend. We’ve known each other forever because we went to the same Jewish summer camps in high school, then to the same college and latched onto each other during orientation, panicked about moving away from our families, hungry for a familiar face. We got really close, we’ve continued to be really close, and over the years we’ve become a part of each other, what I imagine having a sibling must feel like—or even a twin. Our hair grows exactly the same, so over the past five years or so we’ve semi-accidentally maintained the same haircut.

  I was surprised to see Ezra’s name on my screen, I hadn’t expected to hear from him. He was supposed to be on his way to Desert Hot Springs, sitting in his girlfriend’s, Nozlee’s, passenger seat, Noz steering her ancient Jeep Wrangler with one hand on the wheel and one on the gear shift, one of Ezra’s big hands wrapped almost halfway around her thigh, the desert spread in front of them like a landscape painting, cacti growing in dirt along the freeway. I’d expected to spend the weekend watching their Instagram stories from Two Bunch Palms, the chic hot springs hotel, and liking their rusty, desert-brown pictures, then meeting them in Palm Springs on Sunday night, like we’d been planning for weeks. I’d been so ticked off at both of them when Ezra told me they were going away this weekend, before our night in Palm Springs, and even though Nozlee was supposed to be one of my closest friends, she hadn’t seemed dedicated enough to apologizing to me about it. On the other hand, Ezra had apologized profusely and promised me they’d be on time.

  EzraIsTexting

  she got us a room at two bunch palms for the weekend

  Friday 12:03 AM

  u up?

  im UP

  u wanna come out for a last one at la cuev?

  La Cuevita was one of our regular bars, recently renamed from the English (Little Cave) to the Spanish, potentially to make it seem more authentically Mexican. It wasn’t authentically anything, really, but it was cave-like to be sure; the ceilings were low and the rooms were dark and what lighting there was was red. I liked red bars. I looked good in pictures in red light.

  I jabbed at my keyboard erratically, so Ezra would see that enigmatic ellipsis, dot dot dot, appear in our message chain. Then I deleted the random letters I’d typed and closed the app, so the ellipsis would disappear, so he’d know I’d seen it and thought about responding but then didn’t, just to give him a little scare. Even though he’d apologized, I couldn’t get over being a little miffed with him. It was a bad weekend for both of us, and I had expected to spend every hour in his company, at bright brunch tables or in dark movie theaters, sharing plates of french fries and sitting in companionable silence when we ran out of things to say to each other. I had imagined the moment he would start telling me some story of our shared past, “Do you remember when we drove out to the Rose Bowl and it was suddenly raining…?” trailing off as we both remembered the moment, and who had been with us at the time. Our other best friend, Miguel. One year ago, on this same weekend, he’d hanged himself in a hotel room in Palm Springs. That day at the Rose Bowl, Miguel had pulled us both out of the car and into the rain, expecting a movie-like moment, but all LA rain is actually drizzle and the only thing that happened was that our hair got really frizzy, and that story is actually a story of nothing, and it’s only worth telling because I will never see Miggy’s hair get frizzy again. On this weekend, of all weekends, Ezra was supposed to spend time with me, and instead he’d agreed to go to the desert with somebody else.

  And yes, Nozlee was our other best friend and, yes, she had suffered/was suffering the loss of Miggy alongside us, but she wasn’t a twin. Maybe it was racist for me to think that, because she was Iranian and Ezra and I were white (Ezra’s grandfather, who had survived a concentration camp with a name I can’t pronounce, not Auschwitz, would say that Ezra was “Jewish, not white” but we knew that wasn’t true because we had always been considered white). But I wasn’t talking about appearance. I was talking about the emotional experience of being linked together. And even though I’d known Nozlee forever and loved her, and even though Ezra had dated Nozlee forever and loved her, she was not linked into us in that nearly biological way.

  I put off answering Ezra’s text again and opened my text chain with Miguel:

  Miggy

  Yesterday

  i know it’s harder for him than it is for me

  but that doesn’t mean i’m not hurt that he ran off to the desert

  You have to let him deal with his grief in his own way

 
i don’t want ot

  i want him to deal with his grief in LA with me

  Today 12:07 AM

  if u were me, and u were mad at ur only living best friend for abandoning u, and u were very snug in your nice bed, would u get up just to keep ezra company?

  I hit send and glanced back at the television screen. In the show, a lady detective who had a very dykey way of dressing was kissing a doctor guy who was so bland in his handsomeness that I’d never recognize the actor in a coffee shop, even though I’d seen every episode of his show. Seen and loved every episode of his show. I love the way formulaic cop dramas allow me to blank out, the way people must feel when they’re really good at meditating. I know a few people who stopped watching all cop shows around the time Black Lives Matter was really picking up steam, because they don’t want to watch anything that casts cops as heroes or glorifies the justice system, and I get that. And it does seem kind of weird and rude to defend the pleasure I take in the inherent emptiness of these shows, which for me separates them so solidly from the real world, so I don’t even try.

  Because she apparently wasn’t hanging out in the desert, I texted Nozlee a semi-joking text about stealing the leather jacket the dyke-dressing lady detective wears during nighttime scenes. I thought we could have a cute little back-and-forth about it, and then she’d have a perfect opportunity to segue into an apology to me for going out of town.

  The text was only half a joke because I knew Nozlee actually had access to the jacket in question, one of those strange things about living in Los Angeles, the way that movies and TV shows could accidentally break the fourth wall because I knew so many people who worked in “““The Industry.””” Nozlee worked as an assistant art director on the lady detective show and once set me up with the costume designer; so, the detective dressed like a lesbian because the costume designer on the show is a lesbian. The costume designer and I had eaten brunch on the gardeny back patio at Bowery Bungalow and I’d ordered a pitcher of sangria before she told me she didn’t like to drink in the mornings, and I’d resented her and started to hate our date. But then she didn’t make me feel bad about drinking the entire pitcher myself and fed me a bite of her shakshuka, somehow managing to make a spoon thrust across a table both sexy and not-messy, and I’d started to like our date. After, we’d gone shopping in Silver Lake and based on her guidance that day, I now had clothes that would allow me to cosplay as the lady detective. Our banter wasn’t enough to overcome the obvious difference in our lifestyles (who doesn’t drink at brunch?) and when she texted me, it was both sweet and way too normie, and I couldn’t think of anything to say back right away and then got distracted by something and then it was two days later and I hadn’t texted her back at all and Nozlee was hearing about it on set. She’d had to prod me to apologize. Suffice it to say, we didn’t go on a second date. Even though maybe we could’ve if I’d wanted to and had composed a more emotionally expressive apology text and had allowed her to verbally process my ghosting.

  My phone lit up, I looked away from the hetero kissing.

  Miggy

  Today 12:07 AM

  if u were me, and u were mad at ur only living best friend for abandoning u, and u were very snug in your nice bed, would u get up just to keep ezra company?

  You should go

  If you’re going to be upset with him bc he’s leaving, you should at least tell him you’re upset.

  In death as in life, Miggy was always annoyingly certain he had the right answer for everything; once he had an idea in his head, it was impossible to dissuade him from it. One of the ideas that he’d had for years was: “Eve expresses her anger incorrectly,” which was a hugely reductive take on my emotional state. I texted back with two thumbs.

  Miggy

  Today 12:07 AM

  if u were me, and u were mad at ur only living best friend for abandoning u, and u were very snug in your nice bed, would u get up just to keep ezra company?

  You should go

  If you’re going to be upset with him bc he’s leaving, you should at least tell him you’re upset.

  maybe getting laid in the desert is his way of grieving

  It would certainly be an effective way to honor my life.

  Most of the time when people die, they leave the rest of us behind forever, but occasionally an impression of them remains: a ghost, obviously. Some people, like me, can see and communicate with ghosts. Nozlee, too. From the ghosts we understand that the afterlife is like you’re napping most of the time, and when you’re awake you’re driven by unchecked desires; hungers and thirsts so intense they are all-consuming. In every werewolf movie, they have a scene of the body mid-transformation: a hunched and contorted back sprouting hair, claws growing where fingernails should be, eyes glowing yellow, teeth elongating and sharpening. Ghosts are creatures constantly in that mid-transformation state, their non-corporal bodies sometimes half-formed mist, sometimes a fully defined body, sometimes that body is contorted and growling and almost fully a beast.

  Most of my friends know that I “see ghosts” but almost all of them, even Ezra, think I’m being, like, hyperbolic. I’ve always been into the now-trendy pseudo-witchiness, into candles and moon ceremonies and crystals. They know I grew up in Los Angeles, and they remember New Age-y Topanga from Boy Meets World, and they remember when “being Wiccan” was a thing in junior high school, and they also watched The Craft on cable in high school and, after, bought a necklace with a Pentagram on it from Hot Topic. When I say, “I see ghosts,” they think I mean that sometimes in the corner of my eye, I see a flicker of a shadow that I’ve decided is a ghost. It’s easier to not correct them. It’s easier not to insist, I experience an actual materialization of the dead. Life is too exhausting not to make the easiest choice when it comes to the kind of thing that used to get my kind burned at the stake.

  When Miggy died, he didn’t return to me as a physical presence, but as a contact in my phone. We text a lot. Though he had little to report from life after death, it was a pleasure to still get a sense of his voice in my ear. Miggy didn’t have a voice anymore, not a throat, not the capacity to suck air into a throat to produce sounds, but I could remember what his voice sounded like. As a ghost, his driving thirst was conversation. He was like that when he was alive, too; when we die, we just become extreme versions of ourselves, our traits and preoccupations amped up so high that it’s monstrous. When he was alive, Miggy loved detailed descriptions of my days, gossip (even about people he didn’t personally know), and deep conversations about divisive topics like the efficacy of meditation and the future of the Democratic Party and if there is such a thing as a truly selfless act. Miggy still loved all those things after he died. As a ghost, he’s devoted himself to texts with me, with Nozlee, and with any other mediums I knew, or who were friends of friends and willing to provide their phone numbers and text with a ghost on those long, lonely, spooky nights.

  I keep the texts secret so none of our other friends get jealous, so I don’t have to explain to them that I can see ghosts and re-traumatize myself when they don’t believe me or have me committed, and also so that if they did believe me, I didn’t have to be the conduit when everyone else wanted to say hi to Miggy. Getting to talk to Miggy is my prize for all my early-in-life suffering as the result of seeing ghosts—visits to childhood psychiatrists who asked leading questions trying to determine if I was seeing hallucinations or just had an active fantasy life, social isolation from the other kids who thought I was a “weird Wiccan bitch,” waking up in the middle of the night to hear my mother crying softly to my father that it was her fault that I was “different” because her mom was manic depressive and her aunt had depression and it was actually so selfish of her to have passed on those genes, and I was lying awake knowing it was because of my strangeness that my parents choose not to have any more children.

  The only person I can talk a
bout it with is Nozlee. We met in this sort of witch-skills apprentice program in Brooklyn, back when she tweezed her eyebrows too much and claimed to be a bisexual. We studied under a more experienced witch to hone our otherworld communication and exorcism skills; unfortunately Witch Colleen didn’t offer much in career training, so it was about as useless as our BAs in Comparative Literature in helping us pay our rents. Some of Witch Colleen’s students tried to make witchcraft into a career, but it was harder to make a living than even if we’d been freelance journalists. At Colleen’s suggestion, Noz and I both moved to LA because it was easier here to use our skills to make money on the side. Sometimes, I did exorcisms for rich people. Before her set work picked up, Noz made good money reading tarot cards, which is completely unaffected by her ability to see ghosts. Colleen herself had vanished from New York a little while after we graduated from her program, and was rumored to have moved out to the desert to find work as an exorcist or shaman; Nozlee insists that Colleen reaches out to her sometimes, but since Colleen had never reached out to me, I was sure she was exaggerating, conflating a like on Instagram with an actual reach-out.

  I glanced again at my screen, at my thread with Miggy.

  Miggy

  if u were me, and u were mad at ur only living best friend for abandoning u, and u were very snug in your nice bed, would u get up just to keep ezra company?

  You should go