I know this isn’t about movies, but I’ve been playing around with fiction for the first time in years and wanted to share something I’ve been working on without having to make another one of these Substack things. Thanks!
Hannah arrived five minutes early to Pilar, a Hemingway-themed bar on 14th. She was to meet Daniel, a 33-year-old archivist who was coming from Bethesda. Daniel had chosen the place, inferring from her scantily dressed dating profile, which featured a sole joke about getting fingered at a local Borders Bookstore, that she was bookish, someone who’d likely get a kick out of a cocktail named “The Old Man and the Long Island Iced Tea.” However, there were no such cocktails, and anyway Hannah couldn’t remember the last time she allowed herself to read for pleasure. But the gesture was sincere, so she said okay, and found herself sitting in a rickety wooden chair while a waitress with giant tits Hannah could only describe as “inhibiting” prepared her Sazerac.
She stared at a couple, likely in their 40s, holding hands across their table as Daniel explained how happy he was to have quit Deloitte four months earlier.
“I did some traveling for a bit, stayed in Croatia for a few weeks—you know, where they shot Game of Thrones—before I heard from the National Gallery. One of their junior archivists had to quit because of a family thing, and they said they really appreciated my enthusiasm and diverse background.”
Hannah snapped back into the conversation. “Diverse background? Like, Jewish?”
Daniel laughed, a bit too hard. “No, they never had anyone come from the finance world,” he replied proudly.
And it was at this moment, when Hannah had nothing to add, that the big-titted waitress appeared, asking if they wanted something else to drink.
“I’ll get another Sazerac,” Hannah replied coolly.
“Want it on the rocks?” The waitress asked.
“That question is a hate crime,” Hannah quickly responded, which prompted Daniel to let out another one of those laughs, which eventually morphed into a disagreeable snort.
The waitress nodded, embarrassed, and Daniel ordered a second Aperol Spritz.
Once she walked away, Daniel leaned in close, conspiratorially. “So, Sazerac. That’s interesting.”
Hannah didn’t meet his eyes, and instead ran her fingers over the ridges of the empty glass the waitress left behind before she cowered away to the bar.
“I grew up in New Orleans,” she answered flatly, still not making eye contact.
“I bet there aren’t a lot of Jews there,” he said.
“My mom teaches at Tulane. And when my parents first moved there my dad developed a taste for it. I don’t know. I used to take a few sips here and there, and I guess I developed my own taste for it,” she explained with an enthusiasm that was new to Daniel.
He saw this as some sort of thawing, and pressed on. “Sounds like you’re close with your parents. I find that so sexy.”
Hannah’s face changed; her brief fervor replaced with an emotion she was more comfortable with, anger. And while this ire was first internal and only visible on her face, it began to manifest into something full-bodied. She tapped her foot on the ground and then against one of the table’s legs. This wasn’t necessarily a conscious behavior, but it was an unsubtle hint to her date that he was nearing a landmine. And Daniel, more insightful than she would have given him credit for, understood that he needed to back away.
But he couldn’t. He was the type of guy who had a fraught relationship with silence, and was unable to rest in its discomforts for too long. He couldn’t wait for Hannah to chime in with something she did want to talk about. Hannah, for her own part, liked to make people sweat, and reveled in assuming that he was losing his mind, which was clear by the way his eyes zoomed around the room in the hopes that they would land on something or someone that actually wanted the attention. After a few moments he broke and apologized, and Hannah, never missing a beat, felt an urge to add to his humiliation. She felt inclined to jab at him, just as she did with the waitress.
“I bet you’re very close to your family,” she said with her signature brand of condescension, an impediment in most aspects of her life.
He nodded, and then added, “You know, you’re kind of mean.”
Hannah didn’t expect this, and laughed, amused for the first time. But there was something that stung her about the statement, and she instinctively—and perhaps defensively—went to take a sip from her empty glass. A droplet of watery rye hit her tongue, and by the time she had placed the glass back down on the table, she had softened.
“I know, I can be. Ask me something else. I’ll answer this time.”
Daniel smiled, and then said, “What do you do for work? Your profile was kind of vague.”
“I’m in intelligence,” Hannah responded, the way someone who does something cool for work always responds—casually, bored, knowing full well that more questions are on the way.
“Are you for real?”
Hannah nodded while looking out to the bar, hoping the waitress she had antagonized would bring over their drinks sooner than later.
“Like a spy?” He continued.
“It’s more boring than that. Right now, I collect data. Cybersecurity stuff.”
But he, as she expected, was enthralled.
“I’m sure you’re sworn to secrecy, but what does that mean? Like, what does your average day look like?”
She deferred to her pre-considered reply. “I spend most of it looking over Reddit.”
“Really?”
“No. Well, sometimes. It depends on what the assignment is. The real hard part is weeding out the trolls from the terrorists.”
She grinned, content that he was oblivious to her flair for drama. She then watched Daniel retreat inwards, knowing full well he was debating what to ask her next, what was appropriate, what wouldn’t elicit something thorny. And it was during that brief pause, that the waitress appeared with their drinks. She left them on the table without saying anything, and Hannah felt a pang of regret. She knew she had this ability to be incredibly harsh when she meant to be disarming and straightforward. It was all about tone, and she remembered this was what her dad would tell her anytime she got in one of her screaming matches with her mother.
She took a small breath, small enough for Daniel not to notice, and told herself she would be kinder, more patient. This was a date, and she was 29 and craved a romance that would break up the dull rigidity of her life. She often felt that her life was like a network procedural: repetitive, predictable, with supporting characters that were either on the nose or thinly drawn.
“It’s good to do something you like,” Daniel finally said, matter-of-factly and unaware of how nothing of a statement this was. “Every day I thank my lucky stars that I’m not a corporate sheep. I’m grateful that—”
Hannah stopped him, raising her hand to his face like one would to a fast approaching car. If Daniel was surprised, Hannah was even more so. She didn’t fully know what she was doing. Something instinctual and out of her control had taken ahold of her. But she couldn’t find any words, she just held her hand up to his face until Daniel—the ever-reliable Daniel—spoke up.
“Uh, is everything okay?”
And then Hannah stood up, again feeling possessed. But this time she found words.
“Yes, but I think I’m going to go.” He was so taken aback that he smiled for a millisecond, assumed that she was once again toying with him. But she looked firm, and Daniel realized she meant it.
“Of course, but is everything—”
“I just put it together pretty quickly that we’re not a match. I don’t feel sexually attracted to you, no offense, and I just have to be up early and figured we can cut it here.”
She knew she wasn’t possessed, that it was her buzz that encouraged such an abrasive truth telling. And for once, Daniel was left with nothing to say.
In her Uber home, Hannah opened a window and put her headphones in. She wasn’t in the mood to listen to music, but she knew there was no risk of her being bothered if she kept them in, pretended to be lost in some sort of sonic trance.
She then checked her phone and saw that she had a text message from an unsaved number. She opened it and read the message.
“They want you in early tomorrow.”
Hannah, nervous, sent back a quick response. “Am I fucked?”
“I assume so,” the other person responded. “I think you asked for a little too much this time. They placed you where you’re at for a reason.”
She read the message over a few times, and began to type something out. She felt defensive, and explained that she never wanted to seem ungrateful. She just knew that she was capable of more and was tired of being an office lackey. She fit the profile too. Single, available, no attachments, psychologically sound enough. “Fuck them,” she added at the end. Her finger lingered over the send button, and only after another breath, this one louder than the one at the bar, was she able to delete her reply.
She was about to put her phone away, to let her anxiety sit and morph into something less all-consuming, but an article in her web app summoned her back to attention. It was a report from a local New York publication dated three weeks before. Its headline read, “Third Hasidic Woman Found Slain in Williamsburg.” Under it was an image of several black-hatted mourners, stoic-looking men gathered outside of a decrepit brownstone.
Her eyes, however, were on the second paragraph, the paragraph that caught her attention when she first stumbled upon the story weeks ago. It explained a friction between the notorious community, closed off to the outside secular world, and the NYPD and their lackluster attempts to execute an investigation in such an insular and unwelcoming neighborhood. They had no leads and would find no leads because not one of those fundamentalist Jews would ever think about talking.
Hannah told herself—and her superiors in an impassioned email—she was moved by the injustice of it all. They’d understand it more this way. Righteousness, after all, was a simpler explanation than the pathological truth. Her life was empty, and not empty in the way the lives of D.C. residents often are. She had estranged herself from anybody that could matter, and with that came a desperate craving to be anyone but the late twenty-something who walked in on her dead father, his face still a pale blue from the asphyxiation, over a decade ago.
Hannah put her phone away and closed her eyes. She wouldn’t think of him. She would do her best not to make anything about him. Instead she imagined herself, just then, walking down a crooked street, her hair hidden beneath a straw-like sheitel. The day would be a humid one, and she’d sweat through it. The back of her neck would be covered in salty little beads. Her heels would bleed from those modest stiff black shoes. She would suffer, perhaps a lot, and would have to be quiet about it all. But it would be worth it. She’d get closer. She’d dive right in. She’d lose herself in all the right ways.
Hannah then opened her eyes. Her car had pulled in front of her apartment complex, a depressed building that felt straight out of the Soviet Bloc. It was menacing, and as she thanked the driver, slammed the door behind her, and made her way to the barred door, she thought once more about the mission, about her transformation. She asked herself: Is it easier to become someone else when you already don’t feel like someone?
She didn’t answer the question and removed a set of keys out from her bag and opened the door to the building. She let herself into the small, empty lobby the led up to a tall stairway with wooden stairs, stained by time and the weight of its disgruntled residents — for no one could be happy in such a building. She smiled and remembered none of it mattered. There would be no operation. She was stuck in this life. She was stuck and more women would die.