The flu has me. I felt it arrive, fast and mean like a jet landing in a snowstorm with its iron thumbs digging into my forehead and hot poison fusing my neck to my shoulder blades. It wants a piece of the action. January's revenge.
I want to end it, I say.
He keeps reminding me: you need me if you want to keep your green card.
On both counts, I don't.
Department of Homeland Security form I-407: Abandonment of Lawful Permanent Residency. Fill it out, send it back, let him make a big deal about getting his copy. He says, They'll come after me if you try to stay in the country, even though the last fight he picked was from the threads of my dilapidated bank account, marvelling with callous glee at the cost of my plane ticket home. January is an expensive prospect where I come from.
Scorn sits rotting in my molars, threatening to creep onto my tongue and spit itself into the gritty, damp air of the apartment. No one is going to come for you.
I follow instructions from the future, from someone older, healthier, someone in control, whose crackling signal can somehow reach me across years and hemispheres before my batteries run dry. I follow the instructions under the superficial hypnosis of someone whose soul left the country six months ago.
You're not lying to me, are you?
I'm lying about everything. Lying is the only way to placate the last lap, the last thirty days, to wind down the clock and make it to the referee's whistle and kick the ball into the stands and run.
I'm not lying.
We live underneath the I-5 freeway as it roars through central Seattle. It's both a liberator and a trap. On account of its filth, its bulk, its intimidating gritty stench, it makes passage from the apartment impossible without a car. But it promises escape. It promises the Canadian border one-hundred miles north, or any other border sixteen miles south at the airport. It coats our meagre, warping balcony with thick black dirt. We made tentative pokes at living like adults who enjoyed our lives, drinking margaritas on the balcony in the evening once or twice. But the first thick, black, gritty rainstorm further warped the spongy decking and we gave it up to the freeway, to the dirt.
I work in an open plan office above a brewery on Capitol Hill. I come to work at midday after following him sadly around civic buildings in the city all morning, notarisations applied to clumsily photocopied documents, bang bang! with the inky stamps at the courthouse. I am an unsympathetic character. I am full of ibuprofen and paracetamol, and I try not to cough. I stay at work until nine at night, adding performative touches to audits as the cleaners stare at my hunched back under an industrial strength company hoodie. The other girls in the office glare and whisper and their tweets are filled with sighing, self-satisfied innuendo and derision about people whose tarnish is too visible, whose lives are failures, tweets they will regret in time and I want to tell them, be careful what you wish on me because the future is coming for you too.
The instructions from the future are remembered in stinging, infected present tense. Allow him to file as the petitioner for divorce, even though it was your idea. Divorce. Live with that albatross for ten years until you're forty and everyone else is divorced too. Exit interview. The girls, irritated and sniping: leaving them to pick up my slack in the middle of a project, as if I should have timed the collapse of my marriage and shamefaced trek to the other side of the world to fit around the shared calendar. Sleep on the sofa for a month. Call a cab. In the second bedroom, he's been taking apart his guns and putting them back together all night.
The driver goes north to get onto the freeway, passing over the apartment at seventy-five miles an hour. He asks if I'm going anywhere nice and a decade later, I wish I could tell him that yes, I did.