Vacuum in the Dark

FROM THE AUTHOR OF BIG SWISS

Jen Beagin

• Publisher: Oneworld Publications
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781786075314
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Letteratura generale

FROM THE AUTHOR OF BIG SWISS

From the Whiting Award-winning author of Pretend I’m Dead comes a new hilarious, edgy, and brilliant one-of-a kind novel, for fans of Sally Rooney and Joshua Ferris

Twenty-six-year-old cleaner Mona has just had a bad break up with a boyfriend named Mr Disgusting (don't ask...) But her plans for a fresh start go awry when she meets a new man, this one called Dark. He's probably not ideal boyfriend material: a little bit arrogant and a little bit conceited. Oh, and a little bit married.

Wacky, outspoken and one-of-a-kind, Mona is on a mission to escape her past. But she's about to discover that it's easier said than done... Hilarious and shocking, exuberant and compassionate, Vacuum in the Dark is the perfect antidote to the times we live in.

MOMMY

THE MIDDLE FINGER OF HER RIGHT HAND REMAINED IN THE fetal position. The rest of her fingers behaved normally, but the middle one refused, even after three cups of coffee. She tried ice, heat, and aspirin. Her efforts at straightening it reminded her of the times she tried to bend spoons telekinetically as a child. Perhaps her finger felt threatened, subjected as it was to daily chemical baths and vicious scrubbing, and was simply taking a defensive posture. In any case, she stayed in bed, petting it occasionally with her other hand. At least it didn’t hurt or smell bad.

The only discomfort she felt was the nearly physical pain of having a word on the tip of her tongue. The sensation had been nagging her for a day and a half. She searched for the word in the novel she was reading, Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians, but it wasn’t there. She found this little gem, though: “I sleep badly and wake up in the mornings with a sullen erection growing like a branch out of my groin.” That’s what the word felt like, a sullen erection she wasn’t able to bring off. Only it wasn’t a word, she realized now, but rather someone’s name, and it began with the letter M.

Luckily, it was Sunday. But she had two houses tomorrow and, naturally, each required her entire right hand. She decided a visit to the ER was in order, even though she had no insurance.

She drove herself to Holy Cross, shifting gears with her thumb and forefinger, and saw Martin in the waiting room. Not the M name she was hoping to find. She and Martin had met at the Laundromat where she washed her cleaning rags. He’d been reasonably attractive and reading a book by Alice Munro—impressive—and had caught her smiling at him. He jotted his name and number on the cover of The Beggar Maid and handed it to her before leaving. Nice touch. On their coffee date, which Terry Gross had talked her into, she discovered that the book hadn’t belonged to him. It had been left behind at the Laundromat, possibly by Mona herself. Also, he preferred tea. She detested tea drinkers. In the parking lot afterward he’d said, “If I can guess which car is yours, I get to kiss you.” She’d laughed and said, “Don’t try to rom-com me, dude. I’m too old.” He’d ignored her and pointed to the wrong car, thank goodness. Now Martin was three rows away with his arm in a sling. She kept her head down.

Twenty minutes later, a doctor examined her finger. Old guy in his seventies. White hair and eyebrows, kind eyes, a bit of eczema on his chin and forehead. He introduced himself as Dr. K.

“Trigger finger,” he said, after ten seconds.

“What?” she said.

“Trigger finger,” he repeated.

She laughed. “You mean like an itchy trigger finger?”

“Does it itch?” he asked, smiling.

“No,” she said.

“‘Trigger finger’ is the medical term,” he said. “It just means the tendon is irritated. Are you hard on your hands?”

“I treat my fingers like little barbarians,” she said.

“So, you hold things with a firm grip for long periods of time?” he asked.

She nodded. My despair, she thought. And my vacuum. Oh, and my shovel.

That’s probably what did it—the shoveling. On Saturday she’d spent several hours digging a grave in her backyard. A baby grave for her portfolio, which she’d placed in a trash bag and then buried. There had been no eulogy.

Dr. K prepared a syringe of cortisone, which he hid behind his back like a magician. She told him she wasn’t afraid of needles. He presented the syringe with a flourish and inserted it directly into her finger, which came instantly back to life. He ordered a splint and recommended limited use for three days.

She was ready to leave but Dr. K put his large, pillowy hands on her throat and massaged her glands. Any tenderness? A little, she said. She liked the feel of his hands on her neck. Open your mouth and say ah, he said. He shined a light down her throat and then up her nose. She imagined him finding the elusive M name lodged in her nostril. Meryl, he might say. Malkovich. Marlon. Mia. McDormand.

“Mother of God,” he said instead. “What’s going on up here?”

Dreadfully, she knew what he was referring to. Weeks ago, she’d woken up unable to breathe through her nose. She’d cleared the passage before, but the crust kept growing back thicker each time, and she took a keen but relaxed pleasure in hacking at it with trimming scissors. Sometimes her nose bled for a few minutes. The taste of blood had complemented her morning routine for weeks now.

How long had this been going on, asked Dr. K. A fair question.

“Couple days,” she mumbled.

He abruptly excused himself and left. She inserted an exploratory pinkie into the tiny cave with broken limestone walls. So hot and dry in there! She inserted her other pinkie into the right nostril. The cavity was smaller on that side and in desperate need of excavation. At home she would have been dig, dig, digging, pausing only to tilt back and swallow the blood.

Dr. K returned with two wiry Indian physicians wearing lab coats and mustaches. Drs. Narahjan and Mehta, he said. The ear, nose, and throat specialists at Holy Cross.

Indians from India in New Mexico? They took turns looking up her nose while she tried not to laugh.

“Okay,” one of them said.

“Yes,” the other one said.

They twitched their mustaches at each other.

“You have a serious staph infection,” the first one announced.

“If you had let this go much longer, the infection would have entered your bloodstream,” the second one said.

“Do you know what that means?” said the first.

“Trouble?” she offered.

“It means you would have died,” Dr. K interjected.

How close was I to death, she wanted to ask, but the Indians were looking at her funny. Not at her face, but at her feet. She was wearing old Vans high-tops held together with black electrical tape.

“What did you think was happening?” Dr. K asked.

She shrugged. “To be honest, I blamed it on the climate. It’s so dry here, my face is falling off. And it’s wind season so I’m dealing with a lot of dust.”

They seemed to mull this over.

“If it doesn’t start to clear up in forty-eight hours you must come back,” Dr. K said. “Understood?”

“Yes, sir,” she said.

He splinted her finger and prescribed something called Levaquin, which she filled at the hospital pharmacy. She swallowed the first pill in her truck in the parking lot, followed by a few stale Oreos. As she turned the ignition, she felt immediate, palpable relief. The name that had been eluding her was suddenly there, right in her goddamn mouth. The name—God help her—was Mommy.

Not Mom. Not Mother.

Mommy.

Not a name that typically escaped a person. Neither obscure nor hard to pronounce. She felt so basic and ordinary. She also felt the sudden urge to eat something out of a bowl—cereal, yogurt, ice cream, anything—and swerved into the parking lot of a Smith’s grocery.

Unearthed, the name infected her vision. Mountain High Mommy Yogurt. Chunky Mommy. Sweet Mommy and Cream. She left quickly. Back on the road, it inserted itself into bumper stickers:

I’d Rather Be Mommy

One Mommy at a Time

This Car Climbed Mt. Mommy

Practice Random Acts of Mommy

Mommy Loves You

At home watching television, she ate an entire pint of Chunky Mommy left-handed, which took forever.

“Like masturbating with your nondominant hand,” she told Terry.

Terry didn’t laugh.

“Whose mommy?” Mona asked Terry. “Any ideas?”

No answer.

Not her mother, she decided. Not for a very long time had she heard the word “Mommy” or “Mom” and thought of her mother. She repeated Mommy, Mommy, Mommy out loud, testing for buried thoughts and feelings. Nope. All it seemed to give her was the munchies.

Perhaps it was time she followed the advice of that drip Eckhart Tolle, author of a self-help book she liked to call The Power of Poo, a book for which several of her clients had had a total boner a few years back. She’d reluctantly read a few pages while sitting on their toilets. His basic advice was that she spend less time in her head, identifying with her stupid, ego-driven thoughts, and more time in the rest of her body, and to take in the goddamn surroundings as much as possible, blah, blah, and to just live in the Now. If she were fully present and unattached to her “pain body,” she wouldn’t feel the need to devour an entire pint of Chunky Mommy. According to The Power of Poo, everything she needed was already there, inside her.

Back in bed, she listened to the wind tearing through town. Right now, it was groping her pink linen curtains. It blew the curtains into the room and then sucked them against the screen, over and over. It occurred to her that the words “wind” and “window” were probably related, something she’d never considered before. She fetched her laptop and looked up the etymology of “window” (from an old Norse word meaning “wind-eye”), which in her mind earned her a short visit to Pornhub.com.

Now she was in the Czech countryside, watching some lady with sad tits get banged by strangers on the highway. Dogging, it was called. The strangers stood in line with their pants unz...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Dedication
• Contents
• Poop
• Barbarians
• Mommy
• Little Sweden
• Acknowledgments
• Copyright