Still Alive: an excerpt from LJ Pemberton's forthcoming novel from Malarkey Books
"In this story, as in life, there’s no cure for living."
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Welcome to new subscribers. On occasional Thursdays you’ll receive a mini-interview, or in this case, a special feature: a brief excerpt from a forthcoming novel.
Today I’m thrilled to share with Mommy’s El Camino readers a dazzling excerpt from LJ Pemberton’s debut novel, Still Alive (February 2024 from Malarkey Books).
About Still Alive, from Malarkey Books, coming out in February 2024:
“A hero's journey through a dying empire. On the Road for a beaten generation. After V meets Lex, a butch painter, at an underground punk show, they enter a multi-year relationship that ranges from Portland, Oregon, to New York City, and finally Los Angeles, with V’s family of origin ever interjecting with dysfunction and neediness. Her brother has retreated into a hodgepodge of Eastern religiosity and their mother’s addictions are worsening. Meanwhile her father is busy building a new family, as sunny as V’s childhood was grim. Leroy, V’s gay best friend, has chosen rural peace, but V can’t find the same satisfaction – anywhere. Ever in search of love, meaning, and temp work, V hurtles across the US, resisting the store-bought narratives of mainstream life to create a freedom all her own.
With heady pacing, a recursive structure, and sharp prose, STILL ALIVE renders the much-maligned adult millennial experience with affection and profundity. In this story, as in life, there’s no cure for living.”
LJ Pemberton is a writer / artist whose essays, poetry, and award-winning stories have been featured in The Baffler, Los Angeles Review, Exacting Clam, PANK, Malarkey Books, Brooklyn Rail, Electric Encyclopedia of Experimental Literature, Northwest Review, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from Columbia University and a BA from Reed College. This is her first novel.
Find out more at ljpemberton.com.
I asked LJ to describe how we met in the latest Sunday post.
Preorder Still Alive after diving into the excerpt below.
It was early enough that I was in that sun flare of forgetfulness. I forgot that the Floridation blonde had been driving me nuts and I forgot that being tired can be a bad thing and I forgot how old I might have become because none of it mattered, really. I was in fucking love and full of wind and strong strides; I felt large and complete and like my life belonged to me. Everest was littered with dead bodies, but my mountain top was pristine and near and always with me.
We were irresponsible with money and we were serious about leisure. One night in the intoxication of her laugh I asked her to the roof of my building and we sat on a blanket and drank mismixed mojitos as the sun went down and the city faded into black-blue sparkle. The neighbors fought and I thought of the highs and lows of this cyclone, this us, and knew I would cry someday and knew that was okay because right now was still ours, and full of the possibility of her, right here, right near. In the morning I woke with reluctance, but there was a joy behind my eyes as I wand-stroked my lashes with mascara. She would see those eyes. I would see her with those eyes. It was ridiculous. I was ridiculous. I had never known how purely love could infuse the background of an unremarkable life with glory.
She was doing well, as though the spark of us was a lucky charm and she was safe to jump from bridges and cliffs without fear of falling. She took more chances with form, and her paintings melted into contour fury and strident neon. I was jealous of the paint, without reason, and wished that I could drop into her hand and make something as beautiful as the abstract fever dreams of her worst days. It is embarrassing to remember then. It seems so foolish to obsess over one person with such fervor. In other times I have eaten the same melted grilled cheese for dinner every night, and it never occurred to me that the pattern was the thing until the pattern broke. Our togetherness had the same eternal quality as it happened, as though we had always been and always would. She was what I knew and would know. Next week would come and we would talk and fuck like the week before. That is the mystery of feeling: it’s ability to erase the past and future as though they were merely suggestions, small whispers of someone else’s life in your ear.
When mom called from the side of the road in Portland, too drunk to tell me more than “I was drivin” and “cops now” Lex looked at me and gave me permission to hate. I hung up the phone. I didn’t speak to my mother for a year. In that silence I built a church. My breath was my liturgy. Lex and I talked about moving in together, and I started looking for something cheap in Astoria—as it was, Greek and Egyptian and full of eurotrashy dinner spots with bright lighting and too-good wine for the price. My temp daygrind turned into a full-time spot and I manned the desk and made small talk and texted Lex in-between expense reports.
On the weekend, we sipped hotel bottles of liquor along the East River, trespassing behind warehouses with sloppy kisses. We were like a goddamn American Apparel ad without the pedophilic gaze, just pure panysian youth, grotesque and beautiful and deeply in debt. My credit score held steady at 650 something anyway, which is good enough to seem good to some brokers, and we rented a one bedroom off 37th Street and Broadway in Queens, close to four train lines but quiet enough that we could leave the window open in the spring.
She hangs her two favorite paintings in the bedroom and I see her as she is, before she puts on her costume for the gallery assistant gig that keeps the lights on. She gets good at kissing the dollar-boosted asses of the blessed, who buy culture from a catalogue in a concrete room they would have scoffed at ten years before. I get suspicious of her smiles; I hate that I am so easily afraid of what they contain. We have drunken brunch each Saturday, then fuck, then nap, then venture into the midnight air to suss up different fun in booths and bar seats, secreted in the dark of warm corners and vodka-soaked floors. She knows the bouncers. She knows so-and-so who’s having a party in BedStuy. She knows how to get a spot on the roof of the Jimmy without paying for drinks. People meet me like I’m lucky. Men shake my hand like what moxie. It’s always the quiet ones, she says, and winks at me through whirling murmurs.
I see the texts when she leaves her phone behind on a hungover morning in October, sixteen months in. Vibrate, alert, and the screen lights up with heartache. She comes home all smiles and kisses my neck while I stir onions on the stove, staring at the swirling pieces as they brown. You know people are the only mammals that can eat onions, she says, nibbling my ear. Maybe because we are just as rotten inside, I say. What the fuck is up with you? she says, and I turn off the stove. I haven’t practiced this. I’m not good at practicing anything. It comes out or it doesn’t. It comes out. She doesn’t deny it. I ask who she is. She says a friend from the gallery. A friend? I ask. She’s older. She’s a patron. It’s fucked every way I look at it. I feel like a joke. She starts crying. Sits at the table. I know better, she says. I know better. Do you think we pick up? I said. Do you think this is something we can survive? I say. I hate myself. I don’t want to survive this. I’m dead and then I am screaming, GET THE FUCK OUT. She picks up the bag she had dropped by the door, grabs her phone off the kitchen counter and leaves.
Silence. I return to the stove and stir the onions. The absence of her is like the air after lightning. I wait for thunder, but there is only ordinary noise. Add ground beef. Stir to brown. Tomato sauce, salt, pepper, Italian seasoning, red pepper flakes. Boil the water. Drain the pasta. Mix and plate. Pour a glass of too-long-open sauvignon. Night happens, then waking, a commute, work, repeat. Cecilia calls me and leaves a message. Same-same for two weeks. One Friday I come home and Cecilia is waiting for me in front of my building and asking me if I’m okay.
No, I am not okay. My rent is twice as expensive. My heart is fucked. Her stuff is still here. Too much of it. I am living in a museum of my old happiness. We go upstairs. Cecilia listens, quietly throws away candy wrappers and empty microwave dinner boxes and napkins and used ziploc bags with leftover crumbs and cheese powder, from the kitchen. She wets a sponge. She nods as she wipes down the counter. Bro, you can’t live like this, she says. She is tender. I know better, I say. I know better. We finish the kitchen and move to the bedroom. In the corner she piles Lex’s folded tshirts, her jeans. I add Lex’s rusted nail sculpture from the dresser, a few of her art books I wish I could keep out of revenge (but know I’d just cry into), her underwear, everything I can find. It’s an ugly pile, falling over on itself and unsorted like trash. Why did we move in together again? Why?
I remember when Gere came to visit, Lex picked at her french fries, and he was wearing civilian clothes for easier blending amongst the plebs. He had plugs in his ears. I didn’t ask. Even though the things he did were always because of a new way he had found to assert his belonging in this or that subculture, he never failed to use some sadhana to explain them. I have read that the human brain is a master at rationalization, and I will admit that in this practice, my brother has always been a fucking yogi. What did I know, even, about her? I believed we were a unit, or at least had become one, and the presence of any of my family members seemed to affirm that.
The way I remember it, it was good to see him with her there, because I did not feel crazy that I thought him self-involved, that I found his stories pedantic, his compliments backhanded. She squeezed my leg under the table when he launched into an explanation of why I just needed to align my chakras, as though my frustration and anxiety had a simple solution I was too dense to acknowledge. I tried to keep it light. How is your visit going? Where are you headed next? And she would mention the new exhibit of East Indian antiquities at the MET. He hugged me and whispered something in my ear that must have been sanskrit—a blessing maybe—but felt like a curse, like a symbol of everything ineffable in the gap between us. She fucked me in the taxi home, her hand slipped into my pants as I looked out the window, pretending we were a family. There was no rationalization in me when it came to her, just action and lust and a hunger to have it continue, unending and near.
Cecilia tells me it would be good to have her things gone and I believe her because I could feel myself touching Lex’s shirts like precious artifacts, drifting into the spun romance of a past that never existed. Cecilia agrees I should text Lex to pick up everything or maybe just deliver it all to her, because maybe it’s better to have it gone. Maybe she shouldn’t come here? Cecilia is good at using maybe like a pillow, and I say yeah, and I text Lex after we eat dinner. The next morning, after Cecilia stays over, holding me as I cry myself to sleep, we get up and put all of Lex’s stuff in bags and spend an hour on the subway so we can meet Lex at some rando’s apartment on 14th Street in Manhattan.
She opens the door and her jaw is as sharp and beautiful as the first time I kissed it. She is wearing a loose tank dress; I haven’t seen her in a dress since my dad’s wedding. Here, I say. Yeah, she says. We hand over the bags one at a time and she sets them down past the threshold where I am not allowed. Thanks for bringing everything by, she says. And I say no problem, and nod, and we are gone.
I hope for disaster as we leave, something bigger than us that could dwarf what drama we have created for ourselves in our heartache. I want to focus on a different pain. Cecilia offers to buy me lunch, which turns into a drunk afternoon and a late-night purchase: plane tickets to Asheville for the next weekend, courtesy of my credit card. I spend the next week in the past, running through flashes of her laughing, her eyes watching me from across the room, and the emptiness of the bed, bereft of our bodies. And then I am gone.