Room-with-a-viewmaxxing

“Here’s where I put the tanning peptide,” she says pointing to a fresh bruise below her cream-colored underwear. “On the other side, I do the NAD.” She places her bare feet into the bathtub. Out the window: the Empire State Building, New York, etc.

I am in the bath with my husband because I have just gotten married and this is my wedding. It’s maybe 3 am. We are in a charcoal-carpeted hotel suite on the sixteenth floor. “I spent seven hours driving around in a Sprinter van with him,” the peptidette continues. She’s talking about Clavicular. “I was just injecting him the whole time. I don’t know, I needed a job.”

I am superficially aware that countless articles have discussed this man, his presence at that fashion show, lookmaxxing, body fascism and fascism more generally.

I haven’t had time for the gym nor for discourse. I mean I have chosen to do other things with my time.

I’ve read only thirty pages, maybe, in the past week—rereading Harrow by Joy Williams. “After they released the ball they held the afterward of their poses for a vanity of time” is a sentence only she could write. (She is describing bowlers.)

In Harrow the world has “pretty much” ended; the teenage protagonist Khristen is at a former lakeside hotel that is possibly also a hospice and/or nursing home and/or training ground for terminally ill and/or geriatric and/or suiciding revolutionaries. At least in the chapter I’m at. The elderly await or activate the deaths of vivisectionists, animal experimenters, so on. There are also some more typical guests, whom the hotelier-cum-terrorist-leader Lola dismisses as delusional given the aforementioned-mentioned apocalypse. One guest is a ten-year-old would-be lawyer who speaks of legal fictions. “He did not wear glasses but if recalled by others he was a frail little boy in large smudged glasses” is how Williams describes that child.

Two pristine floor-to-ceiling panes frame the pines and, further, the Catskills, from this IRL honeymoon resort room. Or cabin. The room or cabin is a standalone prism so I keep calling it a pavilion. The room-cabin-pavilion features pamphlets describing both the local flora and the spa and restaurant’s modernist decor, which possibly results from a brand partnership with a high-end furniture retailer. The resort prefers not to replace the sheets daily due to washing and drying’s resource demands but its heated pool is always on. The pool overlooks the mountains through an open portal. At sunset the peaks haze Barbie pink. Once I could only see life as desktop images and thought this was a personal failing but now I can only see life as desktop images and realize that this isn’t seeing the world as other than it is, it is simply seeing it as I am, and, also, the always-on heated pool is fantastic.

Around Lola’s morbid property the wildlife has perished. Upstate I marvel at the hoof prints and little pellets of poop as I step with my inadequate shoes into others’ footsteps which have packed down the ice-crusted snow. Perhaps these are wetlands beneath me. It is warm today, over forty degrees. I haven’t seen the deer out our windows but my husband has. I have ordered raw venison as an appetizer. If the world has “pretty much” ended then I am enjoying a vanity of time.

“Being in the world is significantly different than thinking about the world, as writing is different than reading,” says Williams in a lecture on fiction and the world we’ve wrought. “Being is a spooky space, unfamiliar, momentously other.”

We turn off the lamps but white blazes in my right eye—a visitor or voyeur outside? (We do not close the curtains.) No, a migraine. It is painless and I do not see anything less than real.

Joy Williams, Harrow (Knopf, 2022)