MADELINE CASH / EARTH ANGEL
Anika’s little brother is on the couch and watching Frozen 5 in Arabic. He tells her that Helen Keller was gay. There’s new evidence. She nods. She asks if he’s up for a walk. They used to walk every day before Dominic incurred several injuries to his tibia from the skateboarding incident. But he’s probably fine now. Milking it, Anika thinks. She walks with Dominic limping several feet behind her. They stroll through the canyon until they crest the hill and look out over the city with ownership.
“Los Angeles is a fortress city,” they say.
“Horribly disparate wealth distribution.”
“Partisan officials. Draconian law enforcement.”
“Built on oppression,” Anika says, squeezing lemon into her hair because it’s summer and the citrus gives her highlights.
“Osama Bin Laden was gay,” says Dominic and Anika gives him a look meant to convey amusement with the younger generation. While Anika feels that she has plateaued culturally, her brother is perennially upgrading like a smartphone. He takes 60 milligrams of Adderall per day and speaks five languages. He’s fatally allergic to shellfish and dairy and tree nuts and the sun’s ultraviolet rays. He will grow up to be beautiful like Anika and gay like Osama Bin Laden.
They pass a hideous house.
“That house is hideous,” says Dominic.
“That’s the CEO’s house,” says Anika.
They tilt their heads at the house. It looks like a Soviet tenement building, lacking charm or empathy or landscaping. No discernible entrances or exits. Nowhere to welcome girl scouts or trick-or-treaters. It doesn’t have clotheslines or a wrap-around porch or wind chimes or decals to keep birds from flying into the windows. It doesn’t have windows. It has a “shot on sight” vibe, at stark odds with the rest of the cottagey properties that exude mirth and reverence for a simpler time. The canyon residents attend drum circles and contribute to community libraries. They know their rising signs and shop at farmer’s markets and their unvaccinated children are “visual learners.”
The canyon looks like this:
And the CEO’s house looks like this:
“Do you think he’s in there?” asks Dominic.
“I’ve never seen anyone come in or out,” says Anika.
Dominic flips off one of the cameras protruding from the CEO’s house.
“I’m going to call the city,” Anika continues. “We must have some architectural consistency laws or something.”
Dominic hits his electronic cigarette which is flavored peaches-and-cream. Anika takes a pack of regular cigarettes out of the band of her leggings. She smokes three back-to-back Marlboro lights, depositing the butts in one of the canyon’s many eco-blue recycling bins. They walk back to their house. Their parents are in Europe for the month. The house was bequeathed to the parents as a wedding present by their paternal grandmother who owns a foundry that manufactures steel for missiles. Their house is adequately bucolic, vine-swathed, paint chipping adorably off the little gate.
The AirMasterPro emits the smell of Rising Sourdough into the living room. Anika has a contract with AirMaster that she cannot dissolve. She clicked a box during her free trial that seems to have indentured her to the company, charging her $49.99 a month for the rest of her life. Every Wednesday she receives a shipment of scented pods from their extensive aroma catalogue to feed the AirMaster. Lately they’ve been sending Anika Rising Sourdough so she can enjoy the olfactory sensation of bread while continuing to monitor her caloric consumption. But there’s no limit to what you can smell: Christmas at Grandma’s, Monday Night Football, Sweet Morning Dew, Shabbot Dinner, Craft Brewery, Factory Farm, Berlin Warehouse, Electrical Storm, Man-Made Lake, Hospital Cafeteria, Pacific Rim Wet Market…Anika has tried calling, emailing, canceling her credit cards. She was ready to throw in the towel until she learned that the CEO of the parent company, Nosi, built the hideous house right up the street.
The AirMaster’s pods are extremely lethal when consumed, like pleasant-smelling cyanide tablets. There are rampant mass suicides and protests and a litany of lawsuits against Nosi. Those who ate the pods and survived later developed grotesque ailments like flesh-eating rashes and fevers and late-onset Schizophrenia and the longest recorded nosebleed in history. Anika assumes the CEO built the bunker to protect against the process servers, angry mobs and hitmen who, like Anika, try to reach him daily. But perhaps, she thinks, he just wanted to create an eyesore to mess with yet another of Anika’s senses.
Anika’s phone rings, and her voice dances up an octave as she answers. It’s her boyfriend Jake Willner. Jake Willner is a regular on a popular sit-come called Ghosted about five twenty-somethings who move into a haunted loft in Portland. It’s available on most streaming services. Jake Willner subjects Anika to frequent and primal psychological tortures. Sometimes he tosses the scent pods to the squirrels in her front yard and makes her watch as they eat them, their little bodies writhing and contorting until they slowly shut down. Anika tries not to read too much into this.
Jake Willner makes plans to have dinner with Anika then resumes watching accounts from Holocaust survivors. He looks up animals being slaughtered, cruel inhumane conditions, abused dogs. He googles bestgore and watches ISIS beheadings. He looks up incest porn. He takes a safety pin and pricks his arm several times. He holds a lighter to the tip of his dick. Okay, that hurts, but not in the way he wants. He imagines Anika being held down and gang-raped by a band of attractive burglars. He imagines her terminally ill, her body riddled with fast-growing cancers, lying in a hospital bed, holding his hand, saying she loves him and will wait for him beyond. Nothing. It’s the fault of women, he thinks. Women cornered the market on pain—labor, heartbreak, etc.—leaving nothing left for him.
Anika picks up Jake Willner for dinner. She tells him she’s made reservations. Jake Willner says he doesn’t feel like going to dinner, he feels like going to her parent’s house to fuck. Anika tells Jake Willner that they can’t go to her parent’s house to fuck and he asks why and she says because Dominic is there and he asks why and she says because he’s a fourteen-year-old with an injured tibia from the skateboarding incident and where else would he be? Anika suggests that they return to his house, the house he alone owns at the age of twenty-five, after dinner for which she’s already made a reservation. This suggestion fills Jake Willner with rage. He asks Anika to drop him off.
“I thought we were going out.”
“I don’t feel like it anymore.”
Anika pulls the car over to the side of the road. There are billboards for AIDS and strip clubs and small defense lawyers above them.
“This isn’t where I live,” says Jake Willner.
“I’m not your driver,” says Anika.
They sit in silence. Jake Willner imagines scraping out Anika’s tongue with a soldering iron. There’s an ad on the bus stop across from them for a skin care line featuring some famous model.
“She’s so pretty,” says Jake Willner. “Perfect body.”
“She doesn’t have arms or legs,” says Anika.
“You’re just jealous of her,” says Jake Willner.
“She’s literally a torso,” says Anika.
They stare at the model in florescent light hocking face cream. She stares back. Anika thinks how beautiful she is, how she really deserves to be a model and didn’t deserve that quadruple amputation. Unless it was a career move in which case she gets it. It’s hard being a woman in the workforce.
“Come on, Jake. What do you want?” Anika asks.
Jake Willner considers the question. Tonight he wants to punish Anika, but not so much that she’ll leave him, just to test her limits. In general, he wants Anika to be lithe and chic and upbeat despite his despotism. He wants her to audit her weight when she’s alone but not seem to watch what she eats when they go out. He doesn’t want to know about the intricacies of her beauty routine. He wants to be perfectly clear that he’s not the type of guy whose thoughts and desires are dictated by feminist rhetoric. He wants Anika hairless like a little girl but strong and opinionated like a woman. He wants to know that he comes before her career and wants her to know that she doesn’t come before his. He wants her to understand that when they break up he’ll find someone skinnier and chicer and better in bed and he wants her to question what she could have done differently, to understand that it was ultimately her shortcomings that drove him away. And he wants her to feel inclined to keep quiet so that her accounts of their relationship don’t later damage his public image.
“I want to go home,” says Jake Willner.
“I don’t understand.”
A couple breezes by on an electric scooter. Anika stares out the window. Jake Willner stares back from one of the billboards outside. Ghosted Season 7. Who will be giving up the ghost? Anika starts her car and drives Jake Willner home.
“I love you. I’m just feeling off tonight,” says Jake Willner.
“Okay. Whatever,” says Anika.
“What does whatever mean?”
“Whatever means whatever.”
“It sounds like you’re tacitly implying that I don’t love you,” says Jake Willner. “I’m lucky to have you. You’re my rock. My earth angel. You hang the moon for me. I’d walk through hot coals for you.”
“I just wanted to have dinner.”
“I’ll call you tomorrow.”
“Okay,” says Anika.
*
Anika drives back to the canyon and walks through the streets which are now lit with old-fashioned lanterns, LED lights burning instead of Kerosene or whale oil or whatever—she doesn't know. The CCTV cameras on the streetlights are disguised inside of birdhouses. The cool night air is thick with 5Gs. She walks until she crests the hill and looks out over the city with ownership.
She passes by the CEO’s house. It looks abject in the dark. A prison. One of the metal panels opens and a car starts to pull in. Anika is surprised by the house’s activity. She’s used to its sitting dormant and stoic in the face of riots, protestors launching scent pods like tomatoes against its walls.
“Hey!” Anika yells at the driver.
The car stops. She approaches a tinted window. She doesn’t recognize the brand of car but assumes that the doors open upward like bird’s wings. Assumes that there aren’t any fuzzy dice on the mirror. The window rolls down a crack.
“So you’re my stalker,” says the CEO.
“Hardly,” says Anika.
The CEO slips her a piece of paper through the window. It’s a note embossed with her initials on Hello Kitty stationery, one of many she’d written that week: How dare you build a house like this in my neighborhood! PS Your company SUCKS. Love, Anika.
“You left this outside my house, yes?” asks the CEO.
“You don’t have a mailbox,” says Anika.
“It’s nicer than a lot of my other mail, I’ll give you that. By the way, I have all my zoning permits. There aren’t any architectural consistency laws here,” says the CEO, rolling the window back up.
“Where are you going!”
“If I wanted to get accosted by crazy women I would have stayed in Long Island.”
“I just want to talk,” says Anika.
“There is a ‘feedback’ section on my website,” says the CEO.
“Can’t I come inside?” asks Anika. “It’s freezing.”
“It’s summer,” says the CEO. The passenger door opens upwards like a bird’s wing.
Anika knows that Jake Willner can see her movement. She’s virtually accounted for at all times. She’d a red dot on a map. He’s probably tracking her right now, waiting for her red dot to land obediently back on her home coordinate for the evening so he can digitally tuck her in. She turns off her phone.
*
Anika is disappointed by the inside of the CEO’s house. She expected aggressively uncomfortable furniture, exotic pets, maybe a tropical fishtank or a free-roaming anaconda, metal sculpture twisted to resemble balloon animals. But it’s normal, even a little tacky she thinks, sporting an unpleasant mixture of brown and black chairs. A Scarface poster. She notes a flannel beanbag chair with dark stains. There is one long window overlooking the city.
“I bet they don’t have views like that in Long Island,” says Anika.
“No, they don’t have views of Los Angeles on Long Island,” says the CEO.
“Do you have anything to drink?” asks Anika.
The CEO circumvents a marble kitchen island to the refrigerator and opens it. There’s nothing inside but sparkling water and some baby bottles of breast milk.
“Oh, are you going to murder me?” Anika asks.
“They’re my sister-in-law’s. She and my brother are staying with me.” The CEO gestures into the depths of the house. “She nurses all the time. It’s pretty weird.”
“Nursing isn’t weird,” says Anika.
“It’s weird because her kid is like twelve.”
Anika stares into the house where the brother and sister-in-law must be sleeping. She’s never seen them come or go. They must stay holed up here. She imagines the bored preteen, the milk giving him strength to play Fortnite.
“I’m too high-profile to murder you anyway,” says the CEO.
“If I had twenty dollars for every time I’ve heard that,” says Anika.
“It’s funny how that phrase changes as currency inflates,” says the CEO.
“I guess. Not ha ha funny.”
“So I’m not the only high-profile person in your life?”
“My boyfriend. Jake Willner. He’s on that show Ghosted.”
“Mazel.”
“You are kind of a murderer though,” says Anika. “I mean, people are literally dying at your hand.”
“The pods really aren’t for consumption. It says so on the label,” says the CEO
“You’re killing the environment too,” says Anika. “They aren’t recyclable.”
“True, but do you know that 30% of our proceeds go directly to saving the children?”
“Which children?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why did you build a house like this here?” asks Anika.
“I’m trying to avoid assassination before my fortieth birthday. Anyway. There isn’t a property here under four million. Why should I pretend to be living in a hippie commune?”
Anika thinks about the cameras. The Teslas with coexist bumper stickers. It’s a shabby-chic surveillance state. She’s Mr. Rogers in Foucault's panopticon. She sits down in the beanbag.
“I’m not sharing muffins with my neighbors like it’s Burning Man when I make...well it’s gauche to specify but suffice to say I can buy my own muffins,” continues the CEO.
Anika turns on her phone to find eighty texts from Jake Willner. She turns it back off.
“Can I smoke in here?”
“No.”
“My boyfriend is upset with me,” she says.
“The high-profile boyfriend?”
“Yes.”
Anika tells the CEO about Jake Willner. His famous parents, a supermodel mother and movie star father, the product of what tabloids label a very unhealthy environment for a child. The parents just surfaced from a lengthy and public divorce and now his dad is in Denmark filming the third in a blockbuster series he stars in about Vikings. She talks about Jake Willner’s charisma and how lucky she feels to be privy to his rare moments of vulnerability. How it endears him to her when he reads her texts while she’s sleeping or in the shower because she knows he cares. How their volatile fighting always teeters on violence but never escalates, not while angry anyway. A few times during sex which she pretends to enjoy. How she thrives under his oppressive control, appreciates the regimentation and thinks his pendulous mood swings keep things interesting. How she hates to pick the dead squirrels off her lawn but how she loves to feel the looks of envy when she’s on his arm at a party. Those looks alone could justify the rest.
“Your boyfriend’s TV show is trash and it sounds like he’s a psychopath,” says the CEO.
“Then I think that I might be a psychopath, too,” says Anika.
“I’m not getting that. You’re a strong, beautiful, upper-middle-class woman in modern America.”
“Exactly. I’m unassailable. I need to take responsibly for creating the conditions of my own suffering.”
“Can I kiss you?” asks the CEO.
“I think it kind of ruins it when you ask.”
“I’m just trying to be…”
“I know.”
She allows the CEO to kiss her. He leans over her in the beanbag. It sighs under their collective weight. He paws at her tights which are shellacked onto her skin. She whispers something about his extended family being home, not wanting to wake his perverted nephew. He puts a finger to his lip then shimmies her tights down enough to put his head between her legs.
“You don’t have a wife or something, right?” Anika asks.
“No, I don’t have a wife or something,” says the CEO
“I think your company is heinous,” says Anika.
“Thank you for the feedback,” says the CEO.
*
Anika tells the CEO about the skateboarding incident. About the car that pulled out of the driveway and hit Dominic, splintering his tibia and his skateboard into pieces. How the X-ray looked like cracks in a frozen pond. How the car peeled off and fled the scene but Dominic’s friend livestreamed the whole thing and the livestream went viral and the driver was caught by the police and how Dominic didn’t want to press charges because he ultimately hates cops more than he hates people who are wont to commit vehicular manslaughter or something like that. How Anika had been so mad at Dominic and pleaded with him to press charges because this felt like a precious unfettered instance of right and wrong but Dominic refused so Anika went rogue and employed Jake Willner, who has a known penchant for brutality, to find the driver and punch him out in the Trader Joe’s parking lot, breaking his nose, because then at least things were even, an eye for an eye, and if the whole world is blind, she says, then maybe its other senses will be heightened.
“I saw your brother on my security cameras early. He was flipping me off,” says the CEO. He plays with Anika’s hair, an expression of familiarity only warranted by their previous sexual act.
“You know, I have a subscription to AirMaster. I’ve been trying to cancel it.”
“I know.”
“What do you mean you know?”
“I know. I looked at everyone’s files when I moved here.”
“You know who I am?” asks Anika.
“I know your age and gender and address and that you smoke Marlboro lights and like the smell of Rising Sourdough. I know you’ve endeavored to cancel your subscription several times. The AirMaster is recording and collecting data 24/7. Don’t berate me about privacy. Nosi functions on several levels.”
“Why do you need to know that stuff about me??”
“So we can draw informed conclusions about the consumer. Knowing your age, gender, and socio-economic standing tells us a lot about what you might want to smell.”
“Wait, this is so f*cked up,” Anika says with an asterisk, swallowing the “u.”
“Scent is the bedrock of our psyche. Did you know that smell is the sense most closely associated with memory?” the CEO asks Anika. She does know. It says so on the AirMaster box. It’s the masthead on the website.
“I don’t drink myself, but do you know what my favorite scent pod is?” the CEO asks. “Irish Whiskey. And do you know why? It’s what my priest smelled like in Long Island. That’s some sick shit. See what I’m saying? There’s a reason my company grossed more than competitors like HeavenScent in its first 6 months. We personalize the experience. We’re more than just an air freshener—I take offense to that term by the way—I’m selling nostalgia. Each pod is like a crystal ball.”
“There are protests every day against your company,” says Anika. She’s seen them on the news. Crowds holding signs reading Smell No Evil or Big Brother is Smelling or AirMaster and Commander or Don’t be a Pod Person or Stop and Smell the Corporate Corruption.
“That’s nothing but theater. The people protesting outside my office don’t really care about the environment or our testing on Labradoodles or the Serbian workers in the AirMaster factories breathing in monoxide and fiber glass. It’s a production, just like your houses here masquerading as modest prairie homes as if they didn’t cost more than most Americans will make in a lifetime. See how I’ve brought our conversation full circle? What? What is it?” The CEO looks at Anika. “You have this revelatory look on your face.”
“I’m just realizing that…I have the worst taste in men,” Anika says. These men are bullsh*t, she thinks. She doesn’t need to listen to this. She’s unassailable. She’s a strong, beautiful, upper-middle-class woman in modern America. An earth angel.
“I have to go,” she says, clutching her Hello Kitty note.
“I wish you wouldn’t,” says the CEO. “You’re very pretty and I’m enjoying our discourse.”
“Please cancel my subscription and remove me from the Nosi email notifications.”
The night outside is perforated by the fake lanterns. The first thing Anika registers as she steps onto the lawn is that the grass smells like sweet morning dew. Not an aural simulacrum. She turns back and flips off the CEO’s security cameras. Her voicemail is full when she turns on her phone. She reads through a spectrum of texts from Jake Willner, threatening, then bargaining, then finally pleading her to answer. Sorry, my phone died she responds. Dinner tomorrow? She walks home. Inside Dominic is on awake, high on Adderall and making waffles without eggs or flour or milk or water.
Madeline Cash is a writer living and working in Los Angeles. She runs the Forever reading series and Forever Magazine.