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*   *   *

Jackie's been here for nearly a month, and I worry that her generously open-ended work sabbatical has begun to take on the drudgery of a prison sentence. I return from fish counting expecting to find her chalking off day 27 of her incarceration in slash marks on her cell wall; instead, she greets me in a heightened state of clinical hysteria:

“MyhighschoolfriendCelesteishavinga
COSTUMEPARTY
you
HAVE
togowithmeIwillabsolutelyfucking
DIE
ifImissit!
”

She's actually shaking me by the shirt, and her face, although joyful, looks like it might explode from the front of her skull, so I try to settle her down.

“How is it possible you still know these people? I'm not in touch with anyone from high school. Not that I'm complaining…”

“Because I was insanely popular and you were a comic book–reading dork? Come on, it'll be fun!”

“It sounds to me like less fun than staying home to scare trick-or-treaters with my nub.”

Her face falls a little, and I can see how much she wants to see her old friends again and relive the former glory of her high school days, and who can blame her? Jackie looks a decade younger than her years and is in great shape, and this is her chance to leave a mark on her
old
friends dressed as a slutty fill-in-the-occupation while they struggle into plus-sized fruit. I'm about to relent anyway when she sweetens the pot:

“Who knows? Sunny Lee could be there!”

 

COSTUMES THAT DON'T WORK WITH ONE ARM

Juggler

Oarsman

Accordion player

Guitar god

Pool shark

Boxer

Bowman

Weight lifter

Atlas

Vitruvian Man

The Two-Gun Kid

Sword-and-shield knight

Toga guy

Suspenders

Crucified

Abe Lincoln

 

MASQUERADE

I'm not strong enough, like Randy Fucking Pausch, to flaunt my condition however convincingly as a character in
Saw
. Given the choice, I would choose shark over shark victim. I can however disguise my condition the same way Jackie's friends will attempt to camouflage the unkindness of years, neglect, and childbearing under an angel's flowing robes or SpongeBob's rectangles. I can disappear into robot, Transformer, astronaut, gorilla, or the ass end of a zebra.

Another option is to go as the person I used to be.

I put on a sleek, tailored suit, a navy pinstripe Hugo Boss that I wore back when I cared what I looked like. Not a costume per se, but once I pad the arm and add the fake hand, it is as transformative and misleading as any disguise. The figure in the mirror looks like I used to when I was whole, only better—because it is after all a party: I've struggled to shave and smooshed product in my hair, draping a vintage necktie from Dad's closet around my neck, still bearing a price tag (I snap it off between my teeth and my good hand). Still, when I move I appear awkward, the fake arm dangling like a hanged man. Placing it in a sling completes the costume: I look completely natural and restored to the pre-accident, pre-divorce, previously whole
me
.

When Jackie sees me, she starts to cry. Then she punches me in my good arm because now she has to go back upstairs and redraw the giant black ring around her pit bull's right eye. Dad shuffles into the room, leaning as he always does slightly to one side, a probable result of lugging a briefcase in the same hand for four decades so that even now, long after he stopped carrying it, he's used to compensating for its weight. Or it could be another toll of time travel. (There are no official studies of the possible long-term effects of piloting a Lincoln twice daily through the time barrier.)

“Nice tie,” Dad notices.

“How come you never wore it?”

“I kept waiting for the right occasion. Then you run out of occasions, but still have a closetful of ties. Here, let me…” He reaches out and takes both ends of the tie, holding them as if about to steer a chariot. He crosses one end over the other, slowly, trying to figure this out backward. “This could take a while,” he warns me.

“You should buy more clip-ons.”

“Patience is undervalued.”

“A virtue, I'm told.”

“We race race race, always rushing to no place in particular, only occasionally stopping—”

“Long enough to blast a hole in a target.”

Dad laughs. “The biathlon's a good life metaphor. Over twelve miles, you only stop five times. In between, you sprint so fast you don't even look at the countryside. Maybe to see your split times. But those quiet moments at rest—”

“Punctuated by gunshots…”

Dad smiles, silent. That's when the ringing in my ears kicks in, but I enjoy the moment, just being here with Dad as he squeezes the knot up into place at the collar. We stand there a long time before Jackie clomps back into the room and declares, “We should get going.”

“And then, just like that,” Dad releases me, “you're off again.”

*   *   *

We glide into the house party unnoticed amid a sensory assault of frenetic movement and astonishing volume, a raucous scene that belies the expectations of a gathering of fortysomethings. This is the one-last-fling party of a dying teen, a convicted criminal about to begin a long prison term, a politician who just lost an election but has to spend his remaining campaign funds before morning. Generational denial; only instead of a sense of desperation there's a shared commitment to the suspension of reality—of age, responsibility, identity. Tomorrow they'll all feel terrible, and resume the drudgery of their lives … but tonight they have the music of their youth, communal sense of purpose, alcohol in abundance, and the transformation of disguise.

Squealing like a train about to leave its tracks and destroy everything in its path, Jackie's old friends suddenly surround her. I try to escape between a fat witch and what appears to be an attempt at “slutty dowager” before awkward introductions can leech all life from the room, but that's exactly what happens.

“You remember my brother, Aaron.”

It's like a needle scratching across a record as all eyes lock on the arm that's not supposed to be there.

“I thought—” the witch manages, more confused than wicked, before being elbowed sharply by a Roller Derby girl, suddenly unsteady on her wheels.

“It's nice to see everyone,” I lie. “I have no idea who you are, and it isn't just the costumes. My memory isn't what it used to be.”

“Because of the accident?” a cowgirl wearing a papier-mâché horse asks, and she too is elbowed by Derby girl, causing her to roll backward.

“Yes,” I lie some more. “I have face blindness.”

Jackie rolls her eyes.

“Prosopagnosia,” the slutty proctologist clarifies the diagnosis.

“He has weird baby-brother disease,” Jackie says, moving in for a group hug.

They all squeal again and I use the diversion to make good my escape. It's only later I wonder,
Could one of them (maybe the slutty rodeo clown?) have been Sunny Lee?
but quickly realize that nothing, not the happiest of occasions or the knife thrust of a serial killer, could ever make Sunny squeal like that.

I haven't been around so many people in one place since the accident. In other circumstances I'd be the most conspicuous person in the room and the subject of stares and conjecture, instead of the least remarkable—a guy in a suit too repressed to put on a costume. It allows me to observe instead of suffering the scrutiny of others, to enjoy an invisibility lost to me since the day I walked out of the hospital. Drifting from room to room I watch unwatched, and amid the colorful revelry, the gruesome decorations that mock death, and the party games that prompt shrieks of howling, drunken laughter, what I see has nothing to do with spooky traditions, pagan rituals, saints, spirits, or Celts, but a universal desire to be someone else. And if we could make it last more than just a few hours, we would.

I scan the store-bought and homemade masks and makeup, feathers and glitter, poster board and papier-mâché (and even someone dressed as a bloody head on a plate on a table), imagining who hiding behind them might be Sunny Lee. Aware that her possible attendance was only a lure dangled by Jackie, I nonetheless responded to its tantalizing flash and movement like any hungry fish would, with the hope that it might sustain me; hooked and reeled in, I can only flap around with the unlikely hope of thrashing into Sunny. It's as implausible a delusion as any here.

The bartender pours what a reasonable person would consider too much vodka into a tall glass with a splash of tonic, an inverse formula engineered to accelerate me into the mood of the others like a migrating sea turtle slipping into the East Australian Current. Peering over the glass, my eyes meet an adorable drunk. She's not adorable because she's drunk; her drunkenness and adorability are separate, nondependent things. She is innately adorable, and would be under any circumstances—working behind a desk, walking a dog, eating a giant hoagie, or drooling in a dentist's chair. And dressed as slutty Viking, she vanquishes any further thoughts of Sunny Lee.

“Boooo!” she chides me over the music, shouting, “A broken arm is no excuse for no costume!”

“I'm Aaron,” I shout over the music, offering nothing to correct her.

“Ariana,” she laughs.

“Aaron and Ariana, that is some sickly sweet alliteration! If we got married, we could name our kids Ari and Arial.”

“We could never get married! It's too cute; people would want to vomit.”

Free from any pressure to pursue couplehood, we dive into the party and alternate frozen Jell-O shots with reckless dancing to classic late-eighties music that wasn't good when it was new yet is now somehow perfect, like twenty-four-year-old scotch. For a brief moment I'm seventeen again, drunk in a neighbor's basement, grinning like a fool at a sexy, carefree spirit, ecstatic and whole.

I pull one of THC's professionally rolled joints from my jacket pocket and Ariana's face does exactly what I'd hoped, signaling approval. She grabs my free hand and leads me out to the backyard where our sweat doesn't exactly freeze on contact but hardens like the chocolate shell on soft-serve ice cream. On the street an assortment of zombies and ghosts, vampires and oversized cats ring doorbells and demand their loot. If anyone rings the doorbell here, no one answers, impossible as it is to hear over the noise. Showing the effects of our many Jell-O shots, Ariana staggers over to a side fence.

“You're pretty unsteady on your feet for a Viking.”

“Sea legs,” she laughs. “So tell me something about you most people don't know.”

“I'm an expert at traditional Viking mating rituals,” I say, passing the joint.

“Confession: I'm not an actual Viking.”

“That is disappointing. What do you do?”

“I'm a physical therapist. Mostly bad backs. I also teach dance,” she says, lifting a leg vertically and plunking her foot at the top of the fence effortlessly.

“You have very impressive hamstrings,” I marvel.

She hoots a long, deep laugh I want to dive into and drown in. If I were still thinking about Sunny Lee I might have been pondering (in her voice) the marvel of pheromones, explosive hormones, racing hearts and flush faces, the wonder of goose bumps and the weightlessness of joy, the survival by procreation of all living things, the DNA programming of our ancestors, and the inevitable extinction of all we were or ever will be by exploding sun. But I'm not thinking about Sunny anymore—or my armlessness, until on my way out the door with Ariana when Jackie grabs me by the shoulder and whisper-shouts into my ear,
You have to tell her!

*   *   *

Back at Ariana's apartment her armored chestplate hits the floor like a car crash, revealing sumptuous breasts I will recall on my deathbed. Her mouth swallows mine and our three arms collaborate in undressing me and by the time my fake arm hits the floor, Jackie is proven right: Ariana stares at my quivering serpent-faced nub, a look on her face that can only be described as adorable confusion. Then she vomits—adorably!—what appears to be blood (until I remember: Jell-O shots), and passes out in front of me.

Lifting her onto her bed is less romantic than I might have envisioned, somewhere between a graceless fireman's carry and how a hunchback might dispose of a body. Watching her stomach rise and fall, I notice her “outtie” belly button protruding like a thumb, as if some vestigial twin were seeking a fingerhold to tear itself free. Upon emerging, it too might take one look at me, vomit, and pass out.

I clean up the vomit, dress quietly, gather my fake arm in my good one and let myself out, hoping Ariana's memory of our time together is swallowed whole by alcohol blackout.

 

INFECTIOUS

I enter the kitchen after a late-morning jog more plodding than usual to find Jackie looking worse than she's ever looked, worse perhaps than she'll ever look, blanched white, sunken-eyed, straw-haired, hunched over, a perfect zombie in no need of makeup or costume. But grinning like an idiot.

“
God,
that was So. Much. Fun!” she croaks.

“Me too.” I lean in and kiss her on the top of her head, all boozy smoke.

“Really?”

“Except for the last part.”

“Ohhh…” she grimaces, knowing exactly what I'm talking about. “She was cute.”

“Adorable,” I correct her. “And I won't even tell you how she looked naked.”

“Don't!”