Fat Check

→ PUBLISHED IN ISSUE NO. 35: FALL/WINTER 2025

After Crystal got the fat check, she started having dreams again. They were almost all nightmares. In one dream she was lounging around with a friend she didn’t recognize, and saw that he was covered in wounds, bleeding steadily. She asked, “Why do you have all those injuries?” 

“What injuries?” He glanced down at himself without much interest. “Oh, those. I take a pill so I can’t feel them. That way, I can get cut more.”

In another dream she was the prized concubine of a Batman/Bruce Wayne type, whose castle/empire of capital was under siege. Everyone in Batman/Bruce Wayne’s crime-fighting/corporate army knew that she was the only human who had ever melted his icy orphan’s heart, so they all tried to protect her as bombs flew and artillery strafed. Then his right-hand woman, a stunningly beautiful brunette (it was odd how when her movies were plotted like Hollywood movies they were cast like them too), made a split-second decision to work for the other side, whipping around to menace Crystal with a garrote, held like a cat’s cradle between both hands. In the ensuing struggle, Crystal wrested it away, then worked it through the soft flesh of the brunette’s neck.

“This was why they were always so suspenseful: they ended right when she had gained the upper hand and was in the process of killing the killer, just before her own last breath.”

And so on. There was a variety of weaponry in these dreams, plus punching, kicking, gouging, bashing, strangling, etc. Never any guns, because it was too easy to achieve death with a gun. This was why they were always so suspenseful: they ended right when she had gained the upper hand and was in the process of killing the killer, just before her own last breath. They were all adrenalizing gorefests. If they had been movies, they’d be torture porn, a genre she’d never watched in her waking life. 

In an uncategorizable dream, she was in a doctor’s office. The doctor had dyed black hair and didn’t use gloves for the pelvic examination. The room was full of rotting food. Then she was home and opening an envelope, and inside the envelope was a check for $100,000. 

That dream was actually true. It had actually happened. It felt like a dream, but it wasn’t. The doctor without gloves and the fat check, although the check came years after. He’d been exposed as a sexual predator, and she’d been placed in a class-action lawsuit.

So now Crystal was rich. Along with wealth came responsibility. She had to be 100,000 times nobler than she’d been as a broke person. She decided to visit the doctor in prison.

The first thing she noticed was that his hair was now half-gray, half-black. She asked, “Do they not allow hair dye in prison?” That sounded bitchy, but it was honestly the only detail she could remember about him after all this time. “Sorry, it’s just that I’ve heard—in books and movies and other fictional sources—that you can get anything you want in prison?”

He looked at her and said, “I’ve been very depressed.”

He didn’t remember her at all. That was understandable; it had been so long between the day he put his fingers in her vagina and the fat check landing in her mailbox. Also, he’d been a gynecologist at a large university health center, so his workdays were just one vagina after another. That was part of the reason he was in prison: the scale of it. Not one vagina but hundreds. And she was probably not one of his “favorites.” Since receiving the fat check, she’d read some articles about him. Apparently, he’d taken pictures of some people’s genitals. She was pretty sure he hadn’t taken any pictures of hers, though. He’d taken one look at her hairy legs and said, “So you’re a lesbian!” That she did remember. 

Clearly, he was a man unlucky in the time he lived in. In an earlier era he probably could have published a book of those photos, with captions explaining the variations. A helpful textbook for other men. She herself wished she lived in an era when people communicated by letters instead of sending emails. She was a romantic, she couldn’t help it. She daydreamed about that bygone era even though she wouldn’t have been able to rent an apartment without a husband or get an abortion. Well, now she was staring down the barrel of a time when there would be endless A.I.-generated emails and no abortion. Increments. Sometimes things did get worse. 

Meanwhile, her sweetheart, Reggie, had a much more interesting time-travel fantasy: “I’d live in the nomadic days, I’d be a hunter-gatherer. It just seems like agriculture fucked up a lot of things.” 

She could picture Reggie in a loincloth easily, running and crouching and launching a spear into the air. This wasn’t what Reggie was imagining at all, because, unlike Crystal, Reggie had actually read some nonfiction books on that part of human history, whereas Crystal was basing her fantasy on the cover of a mass-market edition of a 1970s novel. 

“You’d still be chattel,” Crystal pointed out, “because of your reproductive capabilities.” 

“I know, it’s a bummer,” Reggie said. “The only way either of us could have been happy in an earlier age would be for me to be an independently wealthy madam of a brothel in Paris and you a cloistered nun, part of Hildegard Von Bingen’s crew.” 

Such humans were vanishingly rare in all eras except the one they were living in right now, when she and Reggie and their creative pursuits and dreams were almost identical to so many other people’s. Another manifestation of the era in which they lived: everyone wanted to be special. This was an irritating byproduct of all that freedom, but one that Crystal enjoyed critiquing, and that pleasure would probably evaporate sooner rather than later. This era, too, would change, was changing. Now that the legal status of half the country’s population had been demoted to that of a fetus container, delusions of grandeur would no doubt metastasize into delusions of agency. 

An earlier era with different ideas about contamination certainly wouldn’t have looked askance at the fact that the doctor liked to do his pelvic exams without wearing gloves. And an era with a less sophisticated understanding of food safety might have looked more benignly upon the fact that his exam room had been strewn with take-out containers. She hadn’t remembered that detail until she read other patients’ testimony. Then she recalled how the smell of pork fried rice had made her hungry. She’d been hungover that day. Other patients seemed almost as upset by the condition of his exam room as they were by his actions, describing it as “nauseating” and “unhygienic,” and “unprofessional.” It was honestly not really the kind of thing Crystal would get offended by, or even notice. Everyone had to eat their lunches, live their lives.

Meanwhile, the visiting room of the prison smelled like Febreze, one of the most disturbing smells in her own personal scent hierarchy. 

“Yeah,” she said to the doctor, “this is a pretty depressing place. Does your wife come to visit you?” She’d read that he’d been married for forty years and had worked at the university for thirty. “Wait, how’d you guys meet?” She loved hearing how-we-met stories.

“We met at college—” and then he started weeping. She could understand that; she didn’t love reminiscing about her college years either. He looked her in the eye and said, “My wife—she’s left me!” and then he started to sob.

The doctor hadn’t paid the money for the victims’ compensation fund out of his own pocket—if he’d had $200 million, he probably wouldn’t have kept working at the university health center, no matter how many vaginas it gave him access to. The victims’ compensation was paid by the university, which was the largest private employer in the city, and, therefore, more of a ding on their reputation than a real financial consequence. That university was an evil corporation if there ever was one. Ironically, her fat check was almost the same amount as the cost of a degree from that university. To Crystal, the insane cost of higher education was at least as immoral as the doctor’s actions, if not more so. She therefore refused to use a single penny of her fat check to pay off her student loans. Take that, evil corporation! Unfortunately, her frequent attempts to sabotage exploitative capitalist systems often looked identical to self-sabotage. 

The university had been burying complaints about him for years. When she walked into the student health center, the receptionist had asked, “Do you care if it’s a male doctor or a female doctor?” and she’d said, “Oh no, either one!” After all, Crystal didn’t believe in gender and, besides, she hadn’t had health insurance for a long time and just wanted to see whoever was available first. 

The receptionist looked her over. That’s what Crystal remembered more clearly than anything that happened with the doctor: the receptionist’s gaze. It was level, with a touch of disdain, like she didn’t appreciate Crystal trying to be cute about a serious matter. At the time, Crystal had thought she was just a garden-variety homophobe, but now she understood why: the receptionist had appraised her as too weird-looking to get the worst treatment from the doctor. She wasn’t his type. No photographs (it came out later that the photographs had all been of Asian women), no prolonged finger-fucking (although what was considered “prolonged”?), no gropey breast examination (for that he preferred petite blondes). Actually, she didn’t think the doctor had touched any part of her, besides her vagina. So, really, she had that receptionist to thank for her newfound riches. 

The next time she visited the doctor in prison, she brought him hair dye. 

“Listen,” she said, “do you remember if I have an abnormally small vagina? The queer health clinic I go to now doesn’t use terms like that, but my doctor did use a child-sized speculum.”

He startled; this wasn’t the opener he’d expected. 

“I know you saw a lot of vaginas in your day. You must miss seeing them on the daily.” 

He looked a little frightened by all the vagina talk. 

He said, “I miss… television.” He cleared his throat. “I miss driving in my car and stopping for take-out. I miss pretending to be asleep when my wife wakes up in the morning and getting in an extra snooze. I miss going to work every day and having a purpose. I miss stashing candy bars in my examination coat.”

The fact was, Crystal sort of felt like she owed the doctor something. He had changed her life via the fat check, and she, along with hundreds of other patients plus lawyers, had changed his. The doctor was in prison, and she didn’t believe in putting people in prison for most crimes. She’d always felt like the best punishment for Harvey Weinstein, for example, was to subject him to a re-education camp run exclusively by queers; there was nothing he’d hate more. Sure, he’d have preferred not to be in prison, but she’d bet he got a lot of respect from other men there, a Big Man on Campus kind of thing. Whereas Crystal wanted his ego to be utterly crushed by the tough love of a big ol’ butch dyke, who’d be paid a living wage and full benefits from his ill-gotten gains. And who knew, maybe his soul would be changed by the encounter. So, thinking about justice, she kept visiting the doctor, week after week. 

The next time, she brought him a candy bar. She asked, “Have bad things happened to you in your life?”

He nodded vigorously. “My wife had three miscarriages.” That sounded like bad things had happened to his wife, but okay.

“We’d always thought we’d have a big family…” and then he trailed off. She understood that he wanted her to feel bad for him. She did, sort of. It was confusing. He was pathetic, with his half-dyed hair and his sweatiness and his obvious bids for her pity. On the other hand, she knew that she wouldn’t feel bad for him at all if she didn’t now have more money in her bank account than ever before in her life.

“Did you ever think about trying to find a kink community?” she asked him. “You could hire people to role-play with you, a doctor-patient scene. If all you wanted to do was finger-fuck them—” 

He rocked back in his chair. She rolled her eyes, then wondered where she’d found the gall. Normally, she was so polite. He was someone she could say anything to. No one would care what she said to him. She herself didn’t care. 

“Surely it would have been within your budget? You had to know that all this wouldn’t end well.”

In a very small voice he said, “I was two years away from retirement.” 

She was now feeling less bad for him. For the first time, he registered it, and rushed to take it back.

“I only mean,” he stuttered, trying to come up with an acceptable answer, “I thought I was too old for all that. I was sure my wife would find out and then—”

“And then you’d be busted.”

He was certainly busted now.

“Can we talk about something else?” he asked.

“Sure! What would you like to talk about?”

He thought for a long moment, looking down at his lap.

“You have a girlfriend, right?”

She cocked her head. “I have a partner, yeah.”

“Could you tell me about her?”

“Like what?”

“Everything.”

That night she took Reggie out for sushi. Every time a waiter came by to fill up their water glasses or bring more sake, Crystal stopped speaking, craned her neck to make direct eye contact, smiled warmly, and said, “Thank you!” To Reggie, she said, “I think the doctor wants to meet you! Want to come with me next week?”

Reggie shrugged and said sure. Then they talked about Reggie’s mother, Diane, who was coming to stay with them the following week. 

“Diane could come to the prison too!” Crystal said.

Crystal felt a little nervous about bringing two guests, so she brought two extra candy bars. It was a short visit, about ten minutes or so. Overall, it was pretty awkward. The conversation could not have been said to flow. 

“I think he was expecting a sexier encounter,” Reggie said on the way home, laughing.

“Yeah, you could tell he was hoping you’d be more femme and he just looked right through Diane… Well, it’s not like we don’t know he’s a misogynist.”

“He’s a big, fat old loser,” Diane pronounced. She was a tiny person with a soft, breathy voice. These factors often made people blank on the actual content of what she said. “Your mom’s so cute!” they’d say to Reggie. 

Diane continued, “I’m sick of looking at all these obese men who look like they’re nine months pregnant. No more pregnant men!”

“Hahahahahaha!” Crystal said. When she started dating Reggie, Crystal decided to find everything Diane said funny, whether she was joking or not. 

Reggie said, “You could make tee shirts with that slogan, Diane: ‘No more pregnant men.’ That way, you’d get the fat shamers and the transphobic. That’s where the real money is these days: trolling. You’d be a millionaire in no time!” 

“How had her child reached adulthood without any idea of how power worked in this world? Perhaps the ignorance was feigned, which was even more irritating. 

”

Diane appraised her reflection in the car window. She fluffed her hair. She sighed at yet another demonstration of Reggie’s total cluelessness. How had her child reached adulthood without any idea of how power worked in this world? Perhaps the ignorance was feigned, which was even more irritating. 

Diane decided to poke back. She said, “I might be old, but at least I’m not fat. I’d love to get a face-lift, but every time you go under anesthesia after the age of sixty-five you lose ten IQ points.”

When they got home, they started looking at real estate websites. Even though Crystal and Reggie were freelancers with no savings, they figured there was a chance they could get a mortgage if Diane was willing to be their non-contributing co-signer and Crystal used the entire fat check for the down payment. After a half hour of looking at listings, Diane’s blood sugar dropped and she screamed, “What’s in this for me?” 

After they’d cooked a meal to Diane’s specifications and Diane smoked a joint Crystal rolled for her, she finally agreed to be their guarantor, with the strict condition that they would pay Diane a hundred bucks for every document she had to put her signature on. Negotiations over, Reggie put on a dance hit from Diane’s heyday and they all did a little jig of celebration. Then they watched one of Diane’s favorite movies, a comedy from the 1960s about college life. Crystal fell asleep after the party scene, in which a young man juggled tennis rackets while young women sat around him and watched, and another young man played guitar while young women sat around him and watched.

Crystal came across a new article about the doctor. It included an interview with one of the patients he’d photographed. The woman used words like “violated” and “a survivor” and “traumatized.” Surely getting photographed couldn’t make all the difference? Or maybe it did. Crystal wondered if she was traumatized, after all, but disassociated from her feelings. Then she chastised herself for acting like all women should have identical responses. 

There was one last quote from the patient that made Crystal’s spidey sense tingle. The woman said, “Although nothing can make up for the trauma I survived, the compensation awarded to his victims is a clear signal to all abusers that our society will not stand for it, not anymore.”

Crystal’s reaction was: that’s bullshit. The woman was sort of saying that the money wasn’t important, but, on the other hand, the money was very important. Crystal decided that, if anyone asked, she’d say, “It’s just a very odd manifestation of the American legal system, in which if something bad happens to you, you get money. Like, what does money have to do with justice?” She often formed public statements in her head, although she rarely made one. In this case, she’d definitely avoid posting anything (although maybe she could say something like that to her friends). 

It certainly was an interesting philosophical arena. Worse things had happened to Crystal in her life. And in those situations society had no idea how justice could be defined, let alone hand out cash when it had been “served” (and that word didn’t help to clarify matters either). But in this case she didn’t think what had happened to her was really all that bad. And if she said that in public people would expect her to give the money away, possibly to a sexual abuse survivor’s group. If nothing else, on one thing she was clear: she wanted to keep the money. 

That’s why the logic of the woman’s statement had gotten her all tangled up, because you couldn’t say, “A hundred grand? Yeah, that’ll do it, thanks!” and waltz away. If you talked like that, people might think you weren’t so traumatized, after all. (And maybe those people were pissed because they hadn’t gotten paid for the bad things that had happened to them.) If you can’t say anything honest in public, then don’t say anything at all, she thought. That was a fairly workable motto.

Crystal liked mottoes. They were like songs, portable and storable inside you. When she was fourteen, she came across one—“It’s always darkest before the dawn”—and knew that she could hold on to it. She also knew that it wasn’t true. Nothing with the word always was. But there was no harm in carrying a lucky stone in your pocket.

Over the next few months, Reggie and Crystal continued to look at apartments, accompanied by their real estate agent, Suzanne, and her ever-present but noncorporeal daughter. Suzanne would merrily wave them into the next apartment, holding up her phone and saying, “Excuse me, I have to answer this, my daughter’s at Coachella and she forgot to bring her inhaler!” or “I’ll meet you inside, I just have to talk to my daughter, she’s on vacation with her boyfriend and there’s an issue with the Airbnb!” or “You go on in, it’s my daughter and she doesn’t know what to bring for brunch!”

“She’s like the polar opposite of your mother,” Crystal said to Reggie. Crystal had been an orphan so long that she was always trying to put together a taxonomy of parents, for her own reference purposes. They were looking out the window of a studio apartment. Beyond the window was a silver-tarred roof installed with a hulking ventilation system that almost entirely blocked out the daylight. Beyond that was another apartment building. 

“I know,” Reggie said. “Diane is more like a Neanderthal parent, when babies would hold on to their mother’s hair and if they fell off too bad.” Reggie contemplated the tiny patch of open roof and said, “Maybe we could exercise out there?”

The next time Crystal went to the prison, she asked the doctor, “What was your mother like?” 

“Oh, she was a wonderful mother,” he said. “Loved to bake and spend time with her children. Never saw her out of a twinset and pearls!” She could tell he’d enjoyed describing his mother that way his whole life. But now that society had recast him as a villain, how could he continue to describe her as the perfect mother? She watched him trying to work it out in real time, squirming: was there a way to blame his mother for all this?

But all the doctor came up with was: “Why don’t you tell me about your mother!” He’d never asked her anything about herself before, except to confirm what he figured he already knew: a lesbian with a girlfriend. It hadn’t occurred to him that she was a subject of interest.

“Nope!” Crystal said.

They saw more apartments. There were occupied apartments entirely taken up with cat-shredded leather easy chairs, and there were empty apartments dressed up by the brokers with solo props: a faux-ceramic vase containing a single large fake leaf. Such decorations were for the photos, and you weren’t supposed to react to them in any way in person. They found an apartment they liked (“I like living in little spaces!” Crystal kept repeating to anyone who would listen) and could possibly afford (thanks to the mildew-speckled ceiling, a sure sign of an unaddressed roof leak), but their tiny, moldy daydreams abruptly ended when they got rejected by the co-op board. 

“They don’t even have to tell you why!” Reggie said to Crystal. “Isn’t that fucked up?” 

“So we’ll never know whether it’s because they’re homophobes or because we’re ne’er-do-wells with extremely dubious financials.” 

“Or all of the above.”

The doctor had lived out in the suburbs. “It’s a nice little commuter community…” These days, the doctor spoke only in clichés that trailed off, now that his changed status in the world made even the most innocuous statement a minefield. 

“God,” Crystal said, “I’d never want to live there. Having to drive everywhere? Plus, it’s so white and conservative.” Then she felt bad. “Sorry,” she said. “So where’s the first place you’ll go when you get out of here? Only a year and a half left!” she said cheerily.

“I’ve been thinking about that a lot!” he said eagerly. “You know what I’d love to do? There’s been rumors that my favorite band is gonna hit the road again—” 

And that’s when she remembered it, everything.

“Aerosmith! Right?” 

“That’s right!” he said, grateful that she’d remembered some part of what he thought of as his real personality. “There’s talk of them doing a residency in Vegas, so I was thinking I’d take a road trip out West.” 

He’d been playing Aerosmith during her pelvic exam, out of a little Bluetooth speaker, one of the ballads. At a pretty high volume, but she liked eccentric people. “Wait, what’s this song? Oh, right, duh,” and she had started singing along, her feet in the stirrups, “It’s called ‘I Don’t Want to Miss a Thiiiiiing!’ This song is hilarious.”

“Yep, it’s a real doozy!” he said. And then he’d driven four fingers into her vagina. She yelped in pain. He chided her, saying, “Oh, shush. You’re fine. Well, you’re a lesbian, you’re probably just not used to penetration.”

Which just went to show how much the doctor knew about lesbians. 

And now the doctor was in prison, his heart on wings by the thought of seeing Aerosmith in concert again. “You know I saw them on the Nine Lives tour? I challenge any guitarist, in any era, to lay down licks like Perry does. The guy has been playing at the top of his game for four decades now!”

Crystal started laughing and she couldn’t stop. The doctor’s face curdled. His cheeks hollowed, his eyes yellowed, his nose mottled, his lips grayed, and his chest shrank as she watched and laughed in his face. “See you next week!” she sputtered. And then she got out of there. 

Later that month, she and Reggie decided it was finally time to take the next step in their relationship, to visit a website they’d never dared visit before: petfinder.com. The pictures flooded their hearts with joy, and they splashed around in the feeling of having more love than they knew what to do with. The dogs were all over America, but there were other dogs much closer. They went to the shelter the next day and found her. 

“Look at her soft little belly! It’s practically hairless, so sweet!”

She was named Darlene. She was a runty little pit bull with long teats and missing an eye. The other eye was extremely expressive. She looked back and forth between their faces. Reggie and Crystal beamed at her. They were all on the bed. Darlene shifted, put her cheek down on the blanket, and closed her eye, like she was sleeping. “She’s sleeping!” they whispered to each other. She opened her eye again. “She’s awake! Hello, Darlene! Hello!” 

 Now they were looking for an apartment that allowed dogs. They went to an open house, leaving Suzanne in the hall texting with her daughter. The seller’s agent looked back and forth between them, although not in the charming way Darlene had. Finally, he asked, “And which of you is the potential buyer?” 

“Both of us!” they said in unison. 

His eyebrows shot up. “Oh! Well, that’s… wonderful. I can understand giving up a little space for such a first-rate location!” 

“Look!” Reggie said. “If I stretch out my arms like this, I can touch both walls of the apartment at once!”

After putting it off for a long time, Crystal went to see her uncle. This visiting room was similar to the doctor’s, only here they could sit at tables together. As soon as she appeared at the entrance, he shot his arm straight up into the air and waved at her. His hair was wet and combed. His cheeks were freshly shaved. 

“No more beard!” she said. “I like it!”

“I figured it was time for a new look. New year, new me!” he said. It was October. His meds made his tongue feel too big in his mouth. He tried to manage it by doing a lot of vigorous swallowing and jutting out the lower part of his jaw to make space for it. “So how’s it hanging?” he asked. 

His slang was frozen in the 1990s, right when he had his schizophrenic break. She could remember how, as she and her mom were leaving his yuppie bachelor pad, he’d always say to her, “If you ever want to rap, you know where to find me!” No one had ever said anything like that to her before. She was twelve years old. She’d never call him “to rap,” not in a million years. But she liked it.

One day he stopped sleeping and began to hear voices. Her mom would drive him to all these mental-health specialists, experimenting with different meds, then shock treatments. Sometimes Crystal would go with them, riding in the back seat, staring out the window and feeling put-upon. One afternoon when it was just her mom and her uncle in the car, he grabbed the wheel and crashed the car and her mother died and he survived.

Now Crystal said to her uncle, “Oh, you know! Same old, same old.”

“Glad to hear it.” 

It was hard to know what to say to her uncle. Being schizophrenic hadn’t really changed his basic, at-rest personality, and she’d never really known what to say to him, before the accident or after. She didn’t want to talk about the good things that happened to her, but obviously she didn’t want to complain about anything either. Maybe he felt the same way. Or maybe the words good and bad were no longer expressive of anything that happened to him. This didn’t leave them with very much to talk about. She came to see him about once a year. 

“I like the decorations,” she said. “It looks spook-tacular in here!”

“Oh, yeah, some of the staff are really into Halloween. My nurse, Trisha, she keeps asking me what my costume is. I told her, ‘Well, I could be a scarecrow. That’s sort of what I look like, anyway!’”

His bony leg started to jiggle in his navy pull-on pants. He took out a hanky and wiped his forehead with a shaking hand.

“You need a hat to complete the look, maybe!” she suggested, “Maybe someone has a floppy hat you could borrow. That could really work!”

“A hat,” he repeated. “I can dig that.”

He always looked scared when she arrived and relieved when she left. So did she, probably. But she forced herself to go because she thought that’s what her mom would have wanted.

Back home, she started to cry. She said to Reggie, “I’m worried you’re going to die. I’m worried something terrible is going to happen to you.”

“No, no,” Reggie said, sighing. “Nothing’s going to happen to me. But I am worried Diane’s gonna die before we find an apartment.”

Now they were both crying. 

Crystal said, “But she’s so healthy! She’s going to be driving us crazy for the next twenty years at least!”

“I called her this morning and she said, ‘Can I call you back, honey? I have a little tummyache.’ She sounded so frail!”

Diane was seventy-eight. They often wished she were less combative, but Diane down for the count was a trade-off they could never accept. She was like the bad fairy they’d always invite to the party; her curses were a lot more interesting than other people’s gifts. 

“That was the whole point of being a lover in the first place, to make the beloved feel loved.”

Crystal got Reggie under the covers, and herself too. She knew what she wanted to achieve next, although she didn’t know how effective it would be. When Crystal met Reggie, she discovered her raison d’être: to make Reggie feel loved. Unlike justice, unlike rehabilitation, unlike guilt and blame and forgiveness, this, at least, was an easy philosophical idea to understand: that’s what a lover did. That was the whole point of being a lover in the first place, to make the beloved feel loved. Over the years, Crystal had experimented with a variety of conveyance techniques, and in this moment she decided on the surround-sensation approach, where you tried to turn your body into a kind of white-noise machine for ambient love. So she stroked the fuzz on the back of Reggie’s head and hummed softly. Then she heard a soft snort from the side of the bed.

“Darlene!”

There she was, on her rickety hind legs, looking up at them. Crystal helped Darlene scramble onto the bed and Darlene sent out her own vibrations toward them, sniffing and snuffling and nudging and licking their hands until she swooned down between them and they all drifted off to sleep. It was exactly what Crystal had been aiming for, but so much better.

Meanwhile, Crystal kept visiting the doctor. 

“What do you guys talk about?” Reggie asked. 

They were lying in bed, Darlene curled up at their feet. 

“Well…” Crystal thought about it. Recently, everything had become more scattershot. She had stopped asking him questions, and offered no information about herself. She was no longer sure what she was doing there. After his brief collapse during the Aerosmith conversation (she’d always hoped her derisive laughter had that power!), by the next visit the doctor had miraculously re-inflated himself. Why wouldn’t he? He lived in a universe in which he was basically a good guy. Maybe he’d been foolish, but he hardly deserved the severity of his punishment. It turned out that neither a spell confined in prison with other men nor a weekly probing look from a righteous queer did much to shake up this overarching cosmology. But did Crystal have to live inside it too? 

“He summarizes various articles in medical journals he’s reading. Some study about how after age forty people shouldn’t go on roller coasters because the inner ear is worn out—”

In truth, she’d hadn’t been listening. Reggie had texted her a picture of Darlene and Crystal had been distracted by the perfect way she crossed her paws.

 “—and I go, ‘Hmm’ or ‘Really?’ while, inside, I’m trying to scrutinize his soul.”

“And what have you discovered about his soul?” 

“Nothing much, I don’t think. Nothing interesting.” 

One week she arrived a little early and there was the doctor’s wife. She could tell it was his wife because of the guilty look on his face when he saw Crystal in the doorway. She could also tell it was his wife because she had the same dyed black hair. She and Reggie did that, too, sometimes, had “salon night” at their apartment, bleached their hair together. 

She didn’t want to tell his wife who she was, so she lied. She said, “I’m a journalist writing about the lawsuit. I was told you left your husband after the court case—” The wife’s mouth ripped open. 

“Stop harassing my husband!” 

Her torso shook with the force of her sobs. She wailed, “It’s not like he… raped anyone!”

The doctor looked embarrassed. He mouthed “I’m sorry” to Crystal. She flinched. His wife sobbed louder. 

“It’s not like he shoved his PENIS into anyone’s VAGINA!” she bellowed, and that’s when the guard stepped in. 

The next visit, Crystal had found something to say to the doctor at last:

“You’re an asshole.”

He quickly organized his face into what she’d come to recognize as his official apology look, in which he tried to seem grave. “I shouldn’t have taken those photographs, I know that, it was a research project that got out of hand—”

“I’m talking about your wife. She should leave you.”

For the first time, the doctor looked pissed off. “Excuse me, young lady, but you really can’t have any idea what happens over the course of a forty-year marriage—” 

 She could tell he hadn’t felt like he’d earned the right to display moral outrage in a long time and was going to milk it for all it was worth. She cut him off. 

“Nope!” she said, and pushed her chair back.

Then she straightened her neck from its insolent tilt; she wasn’t a teenager. She was a person who was free to come and go from this place. Voice limp with disinterest, she said, “Take care.” It was the most anonymous thing she could think of to say.

After that, Crystal and Reggie found a 250-square-foot studio apartment in a dog-friendly building with a more relaxed co-op board. “We like living in small spaces!” they chanted as they lit a candle for good luck. Their application was approved, their mortgage was approved, and Diane came and signed her name twenty-three times without a hitch. They paid the down payment with a cashier’s check, closed the deal, and moved in. Diane had an open invitation to come stay whenever she wanted (“You can have the bed and we’ll sleep on the floor! It’ll be so cozy!”), and they knew she would take them up on it. Crystal’s bank account was empty once again. 

She didn’t have to worry about the fat check anymore. She didn’t feel the need to visit the doctor anymore either; he’d be out in a couple of months, anyway. She and Reggie didn’t have to explain to anyone where they’d gotten the money because Reggie’s career was going pretty well, and after they got the apartment people assumed it was going even better. After a few years, she almost forgot where the down payment came from in the first place. The nightmares continued, but there was no way to control what she dreamed.