Bankruptcy, lust, self-delusion and city heat combine in a sharp story of financial and emotional ruin.

For my hearing, I wore peep toe stilettos, an ocher button down, and a restrictive pencil skirt that forced me to take tight, deliberate steps. If I had to choose one word to describe the courthouse I’d be torn between ‘sad’ and ‘mean.’ Aside from a young woman who looked like she was balding, all the defendants were senior citizens, each of their mouths straightened with concern. The judge was boring, he looked like nothing special. The prosecutor wore a top that she looked like she might fall out of. I sat there, staring at her chest, when a man approached me. We were both around forty, around the same height (five feet five or so), and about the same weight (a hundred and forty pounds).

“I’m Hector,” the man said.

“Monica,” I smiled at him.

Hector was a volunteer attorney. I watched his eyes as I explained myself. He seemed rabidly sympathetic to my situation. There were slow blinks and nods, a pursing of the lips. I studied his face and body: brown, faithful eyes. A sensual mouth. Good arms, even through his suit. He had pierced ears but no earrings. Our eye contact was just right.

The other cases were all predictably sad, almost boringly so: a cab driver paying off a second mortgage after being rendered obsolete by rideshare apps, a bereft widow saddled with her dead husband’s debt, an old man with a broken arm subsisting on disability, and so on and so forth. I tried to pay attention, I figured I was there and that’s all there was to it, but I was distracted by Hector and also by the prosecutor’s cleavage. Where did she get off, wearing a blouse like that to court? I wondered. When my name was finally called, Hector accompanied me to the front of the courtroom. I watched from the defendant’s table as the prosecutor enumerated my debts to the judge. She looked like a miserable, big-breasted doll. I couldn’t help but hate her and feel sorry for her at the same time. I wanted to grab her by the shoulders and shake her, then smack some sense into her. When she finished, Hector told the judge that I planned to file for bankruptcy.

The judge turned to address me.

“When are you planning on filing?” he asked.

“Today,” I held up an envelope which contained all the necessary documents. “I have everything I need with me,” I added reassuringly.

“Okay. You’ll need to come back to prove that you filed. In three months. On October fourth.”

The prosecutor raised her hand.

“Your honor, the fourth is Yom Kippur.”

“The sixth then,” the Judge said curtly.

My God, I thought. My birthday. Do I say something? I decided not to mention it. Afterwards, outside the courthouse, I spotted Hector across a walkway. He was fumbling with a stack of papers. I lit a cigarette before approaching him.

“Hi,” I exhaled.

He looked up from his papers, then smiled.

“I didn’t want any trouble,” I winked, “but October sixth is actually my birthday.”

“Sorry. What?”

“Forget it. Nevermind. Thank you for all your help,” I said.

“You’re welcome.”

We stood briefly in silence, side by side, as I finished my cigarette and Hector returned to his papers. I hadn’t been with a man since leaving my ex-husband. It was hard for me to be social. I was alone all day, working on my jewelry and updating my Etsy account. Soon, Hector will want to touch me, I told myself. He will wrap his arms around my waist, his lips will run across mine. I cleared my throat. To hell with it, I thought.

“Would you like to get a drink with me sometime?” I asked.

Briefly, he looked at me with astonishment before lowering his eyes to his hands and proceeding to say some nonsense about how getting a drink with me would be some kind of workplace violation. I only nodded. I swatted at a mosquito as Hector came up with an appropriate excuse for his exit. “I’ve got to go,” he tugged on his tie. “I’m all sweaty. This heat is destroying me.”

The night I found out I was being sued, my roommate, Darius, was making roasted leg of lamb with rosemary mint au jus. Darius was loosely employed as a music composer for video games so he was almost always home. He was pretentious and liked to cook elaborate project meals: poached tête de veau, bouillabaisse from scratch, cassoulet that took days to prepare. The apartment always stunk and the kitchen was commandeered. As a result, I exclusively ate pre-packaged meals from a Japanese grocery store down the street from our apartment. If I wanted dessert, chocolate bars and pickled umeboshi plums. The pits from the plums laid around my bedroom in upsetting clumps. There were ants.

That night, I came home to the apartment reeking. “Smells good,” I lied as I hung up my coat. Wordlessly, Darius moved out of the kitchen and handed me a stack of envelopes. A self-described music aficionado, he constantly bought records online and checked the mail with the frequency of an insane person. At the time, I also got a lot of mail. My finances were in bad shape; they were in ruin. Everybody wanted money and I didn’t have any. I’m not looking for anybody’s pity. I’m just explaining my situation.

I flipped through the mound of mail he’d handed me: it was all debt collectors, offers for predatory business loans, and coupons for food delivery apps. At the bottom of the pile was a twenty-five page long subpoena littered with typos and grammatical errors.

THIS IS A SUMMONS!!!! DON’T THROW IT AWAY!! TALK TO A LAWYER!! RIGHT AWAY! PART OF YOU’RE PAY CAN BE TAKEN FROM YOU (GARNISHED). YOUR PROPERTY WILL BE TAKEN AWAY AND YOU CREDIT WILL BE HURT!! BRING THESE PAPERS TO THE COURT RIGHT AWAY!!!!!

“That was duct taped to our front door. It greatly embarrassed me,” Darius said. His mouth was especially rigid when he said that. I think Darius saw me as some kind of really unacceptable presence. He blamed me for anything that ever went wrong with our apartment. He didn’t approve of how I lived, how I kept a home. Or really, how I kept a room. He cast me so many disapproving looks I sequestered myself to my bedroom most of the time. Darius had a terrible personality––petty, malignant, often cheerless ––but he wasn’t wrong. I did have a lot of bad habits. I walked around in my underwear. Whenever I ate some of his leftovers, I denied it. I lied to him constantly, actually. I took long, steaming showers. This was a problem because our bathroom didn’t have any ventilation. You never really get used to living in someone else’s home.

This was only the second time I had ever lived with a man. I split up with my husband, Andrew, two years before. I had left him, it’s true, but only because he forced me to. For a while, we had a nice life together. Andrew enjoyed moderate success as a painter. His work was weird and ugly, his technical skills very limited, but he was a gifted schmoozer. We were never rich exactly, but he managed to build himself a life we could both enjoy. We had enough money for a spare bedroom, European vacations, and his cocaine habit. But after contracting Alpha-gal syndrome from a tick bite while attending an artist’s residency on Martha’s Vineyard, he came apart. Suddenly, the undesirable elements of his personality which I only occasionally glimpsed were startlingly potent. He wore shirts that showed his chest hair. My sister said he developed a “staring problem.” In public, he’d fondle himself through the pockets of his pants. Despite becoming obsessive about his diet, he had chronic diarrhea and his eyelids were always swollen. When he got sober, he adopted a little arthritic therapy dog at the behest of his sponsor. I found him and the dog’s dynamic disturbing, grossly close. On more than one occasion, I watched them drink water from the same glass.

It was clear Andrew and I were no longer happy. We were both waiting for me to leave, but for a long time I didn’t know how. When we first moved in together, he convinced me to quit my day job to focus on my jewelry making and I didn’t want to go back to waitressing. It wasn’t until I received a thirty-thousand dollar settlement from a class action lawsuit against a perverted gynecologist (he didn’t use gloves) that I decided to leave. Stupidly, I sunk most of the money into my business. I rented a spacious studio, used more expensive materials. I paid a twenty-three year old three thousand dollars to design my website.

After reading the subpoena, I decided to call my brother-in-law because he is sensible about these sorts of things but also because he is rich. He didn’t offer to loan me any money, though. He advised me to call the collection agency and reach an agreement. “You don’t want to go to court over something like this,” he told me. I didn’t take his advice. I didn’t make a ton of money and I had assimilated to my finances.

I surveyed my wardrobe which was really just a garment rack I’d bought on Amazon. I have impeccable taste, the right clothes for every occasion. I didn’t want to sell my stuff. I loved my stuff. I already do so little in the city, I reasoned, I pursue a small life with a few loud exceptions. In a panic, I cut the tags off of some of my designer clothes and stitched them onto the hems of ordinary, non-luxury items. The next morning, I carried it all around to different consignment shops in the Lower East Side. A few of the girls fell for it, but I figured it could take months before anybody bought the stuff, anyways.

Fatigued, I walked to a legal document preparer’s office on my block. The sign was big and red and in Spanish—when I first moved in with Darius, it would get stuck in my head whenever I passed by it. I’d catch myself muttering se preparan documentos divorciado, bankruptia, testamentos y patrimonio under my breath. The person working was named Ken. Man or woman, I couldn’t say. They were angular, close to death, and had a large purple birthmark on their face that was mostly covered by a swoop of gray hair. Ken’s general appearance, as well as the ambiguity of their gender, lent them a spiritualist tenor. I had a childlike faith in Ken. I think I was delirious from subsisting on saran-wrapped sushi and pickled plums. A diet like that eventually becomes psychoactive.

Ken explained it all to me, what needed to be done. There was a stinking black labrador in the office who kept sniffing between my legs as I filled out the necessary forms. As part of the process, I was required to complete financial counseling courses. However, in the paperwork, there was a box you could check to waive this responsibility: I am not required to complete credit counseling courses because I have a mental deficiency that makes me incapable of making rational decisions about finances. My pen hovered about the checkbox. This wouldn’t have been a lie. After the divorce, I went a little crazy. On top of spending thousands on ill-fated business investments, I bought five-hundred dollars worth of yoga equipment. At auction, I successfully bid on a sable fur capelette that once belonged to Janet Jackson. I got my nipples pierced.

“Ken,” I pointed to the line item which would have absolved me of the credit counseling courses, “what happens if I check this box?” Ken shook their head, then sighed. “You don’t want to check that box,” they said gravely. I nodded, understanding Ken perfectly. In that state, whatever Ken said was gospel. I finished writing down the facts of my life and signed my name, swearing it was all true.

Spring turned to summer and I still hadn’t managed to take the paperwork to the necessary people. I can’t explain my delay, other than that going to the county clerk’s office seemed insurmountable. I imagined the errand as some kind of hero’s quest. The thought of hauling myself downtown, facing public servants in the afternoon heat was too much to bear. With some regularity, I’d begin my days with the intention of going. The paperwork sat in a drawer in my nightstand, filed away in a folder. I’d open the nightstand drawer, glance at my documents, and become so tired.

The day before my court hearing, a consignment shop I’d ripped off left me a voicemail saying some of my clothes had sold. I interpreted the timing as a good omen, an auspice that everything would work itself out. But on my way to the store, I saw Andrew on Orchard street. Since our separation, we’d run into each other a handful of times. We lived in the same city and ran in the same circles, after all. But that afternoon, he was standing with another woman outside of the Tenement Museum. When I saw him there, I burst out laughing. I just couldn’t believe it. This was a betrayal, a breach in our separation. The Tenement Museum belonged to me. For years, I’d tried to get him to go with me, but had never managed. I was through with mourning my marriage, but the sight of him, beginning a guided tour with his hand draped over another woman’s waist, still stung. My mood blackened.

At home, Darius had on a record and was decanting a bottle of wine. “Want a glass?” he asked me. Every once in a while, on the rare occasion that Darius was in a good mood, he and I would fraternize. He was still difficult to be around, often we’d gently bicker, but it was a way to pass the evening. As he handed me a glass, I watched a baby roach crawl across the kitchen countertop. Discreetly, I smooshed it beneath my palm and smeared the residue against my shorts. I was afraid the roach might sour his good mood.

We finished the whole bottle, then opened another. When he lit a joint, I decided to take a few puffs. Once stoned, I talked about the war, the mayoral race, and residential skyscrapers. In turn, Darius complained about a homeless woman who regularly defecated outside of our building. “Homeless people have a culture too, which should be respected!” I shouted back at him. Weed makes me maudlin and self-righteous. Daruius ignored me and perused a dating app on his phone.

“Do you ever think about having kids?” I eyed his phonescreen.

He shook his head.

“No way.”

“I think I’d be a good mother,” I said wistfully.

“Listen,” Darius started, “I would never go to bed with you, if that’s what you’re getting at. We share a wall, okay? That’s all.”

“Thank God,” was all I said before pouring myself another glass and walking to my bedroom. This remark upset me. I was getting older, nearing forty, but still not half bad. Andrew always said I was beautiful in a sad, medieval way. He claimed it was part of what drew him to me, that I looked like Jean Seberg playing Joan of Arc. And who was Darius, after all? He had small rodent eyes and a rodent’s physique. Whenever Darius did manage to rope a girl back to our apartment, I’d listen to them through the wall. I was all too familiar with men like Darius: the sex sounded puerile and overlong. Despite being a horny and vengeful person, I can count one one hand the few satisfactory sexual experiences I’ve had. In bed, I sent a text to Andrew: I am not jealous. I am in pain.

The bankruptcy office’s building was beautiful but the people inside of it were anything but. The security guard was a scowling, paunchy man. The clerk looked like she was capable of murder. I had absolutely zero curiosity about why she was being mean to me. Why shouldn’t she be? I paid the filing fee and sashayed up Broadway in my pencil skirt. I felt free. I would get no mail. I could begin again. I let this peaceful notion waft over me as I turned down Centre street, feeling triumphant and deserving of some kind of reward. When I got to Chinatown, I was confronted with throngs of tourists blocking the sidewalks. The crowds and the summer heat made me groggy. I realized I hadn’t eaten all day. The restaurant I settled on was very crowded, someone slammed into me with their elbow. I felt a violent rage towards all the other diners. As I waited for the check, my phone buzzed. A text from Darius. He sent a photograph of green fungus growing from our bathroom wall. Beneath it he wrote: Before you, there was no mold. Less roaches. No issues of any kind.

My feeling of triumph had passed. Bloated with Tsingtao and pork dumplings, I studied myself in the reflection of a Chinese pharmacy’s window. And for what? There was never all that much to look at, I thought. I was only ever medium-sexy. In that pharmacy’s window, my peeptoe stilettos were a failed experiment. And my feet ached. I noticed a stepdown massage parlor beneath the pharmacy. A painted sign said Spa of Dr. Lin.

Inside, Dr. Lin was very officious with me. Gruffly, he took my pulse, pressed on my stomach, and examined my tongue. His breath was pleasant. After some deliberation, he spoke Fuzhounese into his Samsung. A translation app itemized my ailments: heat in my liver, pleurisy, a severe electrolyte imbalance, resentment in my groin. I nodded. “It’s true,” I said. In response, he spoke into his phone again. The app explained to me that most of my problems were incurable.

He prescribed me several herbal tinctures before leading me into a dark, peaceful room. He played relaxing music off of his phone, handed me a towel, and told me to get undressed. When he came back, he suctioned star-shaped tools to my naked back. I shut my eyes, imagining that Dr. Lin’s tools would draw out all the indignities of the day, of my life. I rolled over. He massaged my feet, then my calves. His hands ran further and further up my leg. When he reached my hips, we looked at each other in a wondering sort of way. I could see sweat droplets along his neck. The thing is, I was mortified, but my nerves were firing off all over. What got to me was he seemed to care so much about what he was doing. He was a man at work and at play. It moved me. I enjoy the company of men and want to see them satisfied.

By Jazz Boothby

Litro Magazine

Litro is an international literary magazine publishing short fiction, essays, interviews, culture writing, and new voices from around the world.

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