The Fruit of Dead Things

The papaya sat on Mara's counter like a foreign object, bright and obscene against the gray of her Minneapolis apartment. Julian hadn't seen papaya since their Peace Corps days in Paraguay—twenty years and three lifetimes ago.

"You remembered," she said, not looking at him. She was curled on the couch, eyes fixed on the cable news flickering silently. She'd lost weight. Her skin had that papery quality he'd seen in his mother during chemotherapy.

"I didn't know what else to bring." He set the wine on the counter. "Everything else felt wrong."

She laughed, dry and startled. "Everything else is wrong, Jules. My whole life is wrong. Can't you see it?" She gestured at the room—at the cable spilling across the floor like surgical tubing, at the boxes of files she'd brought home from the law firm, at her own body, failing her at forty-three. "I've been a zombie for ten years. Just walking through the motions, billing hours, signing papers, coming home to this box and doing it again."

Julian remembered when they'd been different. When they'd sat on a riverbank in Paraguay, eating fresh papaya with their hands, drunk on the certainty that they'd save the world. Before he'd become a corporate lawyer and married a woman who despised him. Before she'd become this.

"You could still leave," he said, and heard the bull in his own voice. He was forty-five and owned nothing worth keeping—his marriage, his partnership, his soul. All leased, all temporary.

"Leave and do what? Start over? At my age?" She turned to him finally. Her eyes were bright, feverish. "We sold out, Julian. We made our bargain with the devil, and now we're surprised he wants his due."

The cable box blinked 3:00 AM. They'd been talking—or not talking—for hours. The papaya had softened in the heat, its flesh yielding under his thumb.

"I never stopped being your friend," he said, and the inadequacy of the words made his chest hurt.

"Friendship doesn't save us," she whispered. "Nothing does. We're just meat that learned to worry about its own mortality."

He cut the papaya in half. The seeds slid out dark and slick, like something organic you'd find at an autopsy. They ate standing up, leaning against the counter, juice running down their wrists. For a moment it was 2002 again, and they were young, and the world hadn't broken them yet.

Then the cable news flickered to life, sound rushing in—war, corruption, disaster—and whatever they'd almost touched dissolved into the predawn gray. Julian finished his half of the fruit, wiped his hands on his expensive suit, and drove home to his wife, who slept like she'd never known him at all.