Ariel died by suicide in a fairly usual way for women, which was self-poisoning. She’d attempted three times with pills—Tylenol, Ativan, Valium—and decided it wouldn’t work, although she surprised herself in the end.
After every failed plan her symptoms worsened, which only made her more eager to get the act over with. People saw her as a freak, a weight on society, a faker. Her aunt intimated that she was engaging in such behavior to seek attention. Ariel didn’t answer, but she quit her job and lived in her apartment in Petworth until her money ran out. She’d saved up two months’ worth of rent, plus utilities and food. Life was best, in her opinion, during this interim period, when she realized she preferred limbo to just about anything else. If a human being was a transitory state, she reasoned, was this not her natural habitat?
Ariel combed through her cookbooks for any and all feasible recipes: Colombian stew with milk and avocado, moussaka, chicken Provençal, sautéed cucumbers, zucchini cheese puff, Cajun dirty rice, chocolate cake without eggs or milk, grilled cheese with ketchup, celery and peanut butter, grilled tomatoes, toast. When she ran out of food she sold her Ikea couch and stools on Craigslist. An ex-Marine named Quallian purchased them for a bargain, attempted to seduce Ariel, and left with the beginnings of an unsuccessful bachelor pad.
Ariel sent Christmas cards to each member of her family, even ones she hadn’t seen in eleven years, which was when the last reunion was, and she made each card herself with a piece of folded 8.5×11 printer paper. Even though it was July.
Every day she took walks around Washington, D.C., until the sun set. She walked through Rock Creek Park to the Naval Observatory. She circled Dumbarton Oaks but didn’t wander the estate proper because you had to pay to get in. She haunted the National Zoo, which was free, and watched the small-clawed otters cavort and frolic in their private stream. Because a major grocery chain sponsored their upkeep, the rodents all bore food-related names, like Lambchop and Broccoli and Pear. Except for Derek.
Ariel followed Derek with a deep attachment, although she knew she’d just picked an otter at random and labeled him. Chances were she’d called every one of them by that name, given the frequency with which she visited, but she had withdrawn too deeply to ask a staff member to identify him properly.
Ariel walked to the Ukrainian and Thai embassies on M Street, in Georgetown. Once she’d looked at the apartment that bordered the Thai embassy and had considered renting it. She’d entertained fantasies that every morning she could walk outside and share a bowl of jok with the ambassador and his staff, and that they would be great friends. Perhaps he or she would help Ariel find a meaningful job. But this did not happen, because Ariel landed a position at a public relations firm closer to Petworth, and she did not want to commute more than fifteen minutes each way, to preserve her mental health.
Ariel crossed the Key Bridge into Virginia. She marveled at the neon lights on the Deloitte building, counted kayaks on the docks, and paced the length of Clarendon Ave. This took all night. She ate the free condiment peppers at a Baja Fresh when it opened the next morning at eleven and walked through Arlington National Cemetery, where fields of white crosses, all fallen service members, rolled into the distance. She watched the flame of John F. Kennedy burn eternally. Tourists photographed the scene with their enormous cameras, and as Ariel was leaving a couple asked her to take their picture. They were from Japan and spoke a little English.
“Smile,” she said. The composition turned out well, even though the shutter speed was slow enough to form blurred, ghostly counterparts of each human.
Ariel walked without rest to Alexandria, Virginia, and sat on the dock near the Torpedo Factory, which had manufactured missiles during World War II. Now it was a suite of studios for local craftspeople and artists. Behind her a Peruvian duo played the guitar and pan flute; a small crowd had gathered. She dangled her legs over the Potomac and watched traffic stream across the Woodrow Wilson Bridge, towards and away from the dormant lights of National Harbor.
She continued down to a park where pugs and sheepdogs leapt in the freshly mown grass. Men and women, luminous in shorts or bathing suits, played volleyball with guttural cries, spiking the white leather or slamming it with their fists. Along the riverbank mallards blatted at the unclaimed mates that still lingered in the summer.
Ariel followed a trail along the parkway to Reagan National Airport, a stately but misplaced set of buildings that mashed together Streamline and Neoclassical styles. This was supposed to suggest the fusion of history with progress.
Inside she watched the blue departure screens. Denver, Dallas-Ft. Worth, New York City. She scavenged tortilla chips from a table in the Qdoba near Terminal A and chewed them, without salsa, while pretending to ignore the streams of human life bleeding out around her.
At Gravelly Point, where the planes screamed over her head on their way to the landing strip, she stood in the short grass with the river dark and blue nearby to read the painted names: American, Spirit, United. She couldn’t tell a 737 from a Cessna Sovereign, although she figured one was larger.
She walked back to the airport and hailed a cab to the National Mall. On Fourteenth Street she jumped out while the car was waiting at a light and fled northwest to Nellie’s, where she had a drink with Clive the bartender. Sparrows camped outside the window to peck at trash.
“Smile,” said Clive. “You look so depressing.”
She did what she was told. She paid for a gin and tonic and Clive poured her another for free.
“Life’s not so bad,” he said. “I got laid last night.”
“Who with?”
“Oh, I wish I knew.” Palming the bills, he laughed at the ashen liberties of waning youth.
Ariel laughed too. She shoved off and followed Georgia Ave to the Petworth Library. There she read Don Quixote for three or four hours, falling asleep at intervals because she hadn’t slept the previous night.
Mentally hurt people roamed the innards of the building. Ariel didn’t mind, though they talked to themselves or others in voices much louder than was appropriate. A man in a bright orange sweater placed a call to someone he kept referring to as “Fatman.” A short woman rubbed her thumbs along her ribs and muttered about the price of electricity.
In Part Two of Don Quixote, the eponymous character and his sidekick Sancho Panza learn that two other people with their exact names exist somewhere in their world. Cervantes included this because some thief wrote a sequel to his book without his permission, so when Cervantes continued the real story, he tossed in a nod to the plagiarizing bastard.
Ariel checked out the book and ran her hands over the cover on her way home. In the unfurnished apartment with no food she sat on the bare mattress with her rented text and flipped idly through the pages. Don Quixote had no practical concept of reality.
When she finished toying with the novel she tied a belt around her neck and looked for her stool.
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