The Year Cricket Died

By Kiran Sampath

A highly contagious virus has changed the landscape of Nadia's world. Now, humans live within closed communities, each isolated from the next. They understand the fragility of these communities, that on any day, at any given moment, theirs could be ruined. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: New Degree Press
• Release date: May 31, 2021
• ISBN: 9781636763422

Book preview

The Year Cricket Died

Kiran Sampath

new degree press

copyright © 2021 Kiran Sampath

All rights reserved.

The Year Cricket Died

ISBN

978-1-63676-873-1 Paperback

978-1-63676-900-4 Kindle Ebook

978-1-63676-342-2 Digital Ebook

For Todd

It was my life—like all lives, mysterious and irrevocable and sacred. So very close, so very present, so very belonging to me.

—Cheryl Strayed

Prologue

Somedays, like today, I wake up wanting to punch T. S. Eliot in the face. I am sweating, and my shirt feels liquid. I feel my ear lobes for the little gold hoops that climb up them. Good, I think. The hoops are still there. Then I feel for my body and think, relieved again, I am still here.

Cricket died yesterday. Though I didn’t really know her—I only had a threesome with her once—so grieving feels pretend, like stealing from her family and those who did know her. Anyway, I blame T. S. Eliot for her death. He said, there will be time, there will be time, there will be time. And there isn’t time. The virus is in Maryland, and that’s how she died.

He’s the worst, I say to my mom downstairs, where she is pouring buckwheat pancake batter onto a buttered pan.

Who? she asks.

T. S. Eliot.

Is that your new boyfriend? she laughs. The buckwheat smells like a farm wedding I went to three and a half years ago.

No, T. S. Eliot, I say the name distinctly, but it doesn’t register.

Blueberry or plain? she asks.

Blueberries. I eat two pancakes, first cutting with only my fork, the sound of synthetic alloy scraping the plate, and finish the second with my hands.

Who did you say was the worst, Nadia? my mom asks, looking at me licking the syrup off my fingers from across a vase of orchids.

No one, I shrug casually. It’s my own thing. I’m not even sure it makes sense.

What I hate about T. S. Eliot is that he promised this beautiful, banal life, and I want it. I want it so badly I can’t think about it for more than five minutes, or my skin will break out in a rash, and I might forget how to inhale air. I want to do the same stupid thing every day. I want to get unreasonably excited for my morning iced coffee order and on the Thursday before a long weekend. I want to live on the fringes of a city, what looks like a void of identity, but has babies, and chain restaurants, and homes with turquoise carpets, and pantries with sweet vanilla frosting. Once a month, I’d leave the fringes for the city to do something crazy, and by crazy, I mean dance in public to some mediocre song I know only the chorus to. Once a year, I’d leave the fringes for Florida. Really, I hate T. S. Eliot because I used to love him. At a time when the fringes were always upstaged by my romanticization of faraway places, I remember reading Prufrock in AP English and, as a seventeen-year-old, thinking, yes, disillusionment, the workweek, midlife crisis, I can relate. I was a seminihilist who projected on every piece of artwork and writing my own feelings of insignificance. There is one painting I loved: Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergére. In it, a woman is standing, her hands pressed against the bar. Her clothing is dark, corset-like, pinching in at the waist. She is maybe beautiful by Manet’s standards but too pale and round and plain for today. There are oily faces painted in the mirror, though her eyes are averted from them, and she is alone, expressionless, and disenchanted with the trapeze act. Now I want to punch that woman in the face, the same as T. S. Eliot. I can double fist and punch them together, I think. I want to tell her to be present, to smile, and not like a catcall, but as if I were her and she was a past-self, and I could time travel somehow and ask, Nadia, what’s so insufferable about the cabaret?

There is another painting, but this one is my own. It is called Pink Black Hole.

When I was six, the lower-school art teacher, a thick-haired woman named Zara who wore tangerine eyeshadow, told our class to paint our fears. It was meant to be therapeutic. Everyone painted turtles and witches and second graders. Zara stood above us, saying, Wow! Lovely! As if we’d painted panels in the Sistine Chapel.

Nadia, what did you paint?

I’d painted a large pink circle with my fists.

The end of the world.

It looks like a rose. Do the thorns of a rose scare you?

No. It’s a black hole.

Every night I would get these dreams, nightmares, which started with our local television weatherman saying, On Wednesday, it will be sixty degrees and partly cloudy. Oh, and on Thursday, there is a black hole. Then I would just live out the day before the black hole. I was always somewhere new in the dream: a park bench, the ocean, the grocery store. There would be this Asian man sitting on his front lawn and staring up at the sky. Once, I was at a Costco, and a lady was filling her shopping cart with mandarin oranges and soda packs, and I couldn’t understand when she planned on finishing everything in her cart. Now I think of it as a black hole pregame.

Zara told my mom, who took me to a therapist who gave me potential diagnoses for at least seven disorders in the DSM. So my mom took me to another therapist, this one who I liked much better because she kept a jar of sour worm candies and said my fears were normal, especially in gifted children.

What makes you happy? Are there moments you forget about the black hole?

I would nod, my eyes big and bug-like.

When? What are they?

Recess, I would say, and I would imagine swinging on the monkey bars, hanging upside down so that my shirt would fall past my face and I would be naked.

Recess is your spaceship, she would add, your spaceship is any thought that helps you escape the black hole.

Now in the moments, I feel existential angst which, despite the virus and the closed community, are far fewer than before, I have my spaceships. Escapes. The main one is a video on YouTube: Iris performed by the Goo Goo Dolls in Buffalo in 2004.

The taste of blueberry and maple lingers. Then I am upstairs in my room, clicking on the tab that is always open to YouTube.

Within minutes, my brother, Lev, is standing at the door. "Nadia, why are you listening to that concert again?" His eyes are honey-colored, and his face in real life is scruffier than how I see him.

Why are you the way that you are? I stick my tongue out at him, the same way I did the day he was born. He flips me off.

Twenty-two million. That’s the number of views under the video. I like to see the number increase, and I wonder who else is watching and where the VPNs come from. And I wonder if they watch it for the same reason I do, for the rain, and the electric guitar, and the crowd, and that feeling of wholeness after, that being alive can get that good. I imagine being Johnny Rzeznik, writing a song, and seeing all these people, like an army of dandelions, swaying and singing and screaming along. It must be surreal to know you wrote that. To know you have an effect—to cure existential pain. He is literally an opioid. Maybe that’s what we are, I think. We are opioids for other people. We reduce their pain. Some of us, like Johnny Rzeznik, are just better at it.

I am no longer thinking about T. S. Eliot. Now I am thinking about Iris and music and music theory.

There is a bass guitar in the corner of my room, near a pile of books I plan to read if I have time. A bass because in 2018, Stephen Caputo, a guy I met on Spring Break in Mexico, told me that the bass is the sexiest instrument. He told me that given a choice between a nine who plays the bass and a ten who plays any other instrument, it would be difficult, but he would choose the nine. I applauded his bravery in the decision, and the next day, of course, ordered a bass guitar. I can play all the beginner songs—Nirvana’s Come As You Are, Fleetwood Mac’s The Chain—but what I really want is to write a song. To be like Johnny Rzeznik in the YouTube video. Though, when I write down lyrics, I always end up singing them to the tune of some already-existing song. Song writing demands a dimension of thought I simply can’t access. How does someone make a melody? I wish I understood.

Anyway, since I can’t write a song, I’m writing in words only. The reason is more selfish than the opioid thing. If the virus comes to my closed community and I die, or if I survive and die later, it will be nice to leave something behind—and no one’s having children right now. Even if I die in seven seconds from the ceiling light falling on the soft, marzipan part of my brain, there can be a piece of my consciousness that lasts. And maybe, if humans survive this, what I write will become a boring primary source assigned in a seminar. Maybe they will highlight my punctuation and analyze the verbs I use and debate if I am a feminist or believe in any religion.

Actually, the reason I’m writing is less to immortalize myself and more to understand. I want to die understanding; that would be enough. So I’m writing for myself and reliving the months before the virus came and forced us into closed communities where we now live without contact with other closed communities to save our species or something like that. I am remembering the details of those last months: how I wasn’t happy, and how I thought I had nothing going for me when really I had so much.

I am remembering how I was waiting to be important. For someone to hand me a silver invitation to change the world, I didn’t have an idea of what that would look like, but I knew what it wouldn’t look like. And everything I did seemed to place itself into the latter category: too small and trivial, too inconsequential. It’s stupid to think about it now. With the virus, each person affects another, even if they don’t want to. The world is rock, and we can’t help but to carve it every