Agoraphobics in Love: An eShort Story

Agoraphobics in Love

Outside World Crisis

Emily’s brother’s wedding was the occasion for her OWC, but Jules was the reason for it. Jules, whom she liked more than any guy she’d ever met, even though she’d never met him.

It all started when she joined the group. From the beginning, she wondered if she really belonged there. She didn’t have the panic attacks other people described; she never felt even a little nervous when she went to get groceries or rent a movie. But there had to be something wrong with her, or why was she spending hour after hour, day after day, a virtual prisoner in the house she’d grown up in? Why was she unwilling to consider looking for another job, no matter how tired she’d grown of waiting for the words to come, hoping she could find yet another way to express some feeling she didn’t feel?

Emily was a freelancer at Your-Perfect-Words.com, a greeting card company. The website announced: For all of life’s occasions, from your heart to theirs. As if there was no middleman at all, no Emily-level person slaving away to find some new way to Welcome The New Baby or offer Congratulations to The Happy Couple on The Occasion of Their Engagement.

Her brother, Andrew, had been one of the first to receive her newest, Happy Couple #197H. Unfortunately, a card wasn’t what he was looking for. Andrew expected her to come to the wedding, and he pulled out all the stops to get her to agree. Don’t you think Mom and Dad would want you to be there? And what about Clara? She’s hoping you’ll be a bridesmaid. She’s been trying to call you about it for months.

Clara was Andrew’s fiancée, and Emily had been avoiding her calls. She would have avoided this one, too, but the caller ID had come up unavailable. Even if it had shown Andrew’s number, she probably wouldn’t have recognized it. She hadn’t called her brother once since he’d moved to Santa Fe after their parents died.

Thank God for the agoraphobia group. Since they rarely left their homes, there was always someone online, even at midnight, when Andrew had decided to call. Rude as always, Emily thought, knowing it was only ten o’clock where he was. You’re a night owl, he explained. I knew you’d be up. It was true, but it still infuriated her. You don’t know me at all anymore, she snapped. This was also true, and Emily felt a little better when her brother’s voice became sad.

The group had a special message thread for this kind of thing: The OWC. Emily posted the usual Help! on top of the news about the wedding, and then proceeded to bask in the warm outrage of her fellow group members, who COULD NOT BELIEVE (most of them used caps, unashamed to be shouting) how insensitive Emily’s brother was about Emily’s problem.

Andrew was insensitive, no doubt about that. He’d left all the funeral arrangements to Emily because he was on a fellowship at a biological research center in the middle of the ocean, studying something absurd like the sex life of salmon. I can’t make it back right now, he’d said. Actually, he didn’t say it, because he didn’t call. He sent a telegram, which Emily didn’t even know still existed.

I’m so sorry. Stop. Please do whatever you need to do with their house and things. Stop. I love you, little sis. Stop. Be good to yourself. Stop.

The stops weren’t really there, but Emily had seen them in movies so many times, she heard them anyway. Later, when she told Jules about the telegram, she inserted them before remembering she’d only imagined that part.

Jules wasn’t online the night of Emily’s OWC, but then he rarely was anymore. He’d told Emily he didn’t need the agoraphobia board, now that he had her. Every day for the last few months, they’d spent hours instant messaging each other and on the phone. They talked about everything from art to music, to what they were eating, to what they were watching on television. In fact, they spent more time together than most couples—ignoring the little detail that they’d never really been together at all.

How many times had Emily written a card with the word friend? Counting drafts that weren’t produced, it had to be in the thousands. And yet, until she met him she wasn’t sure she’d ever had a true friend. He was her Jules Verne, a name he used as a joke, given that he never went anywhere, but Emily thought it fit him perfectly. He was always discovering something to share with her. Thanks to Jules, she’d seen the sunset at Maui and the first bloom of flowers on the mountains of Peru. She’d listened to the London Philharmonic and gone to the top of the Eiffel Tower and even been to see the Pope. Of course the Pope couldn’t see her, because it was a virtual experience, not real. But Emily didn’t mind. We cherish the memories, she told Jules, quoting from one of her Perfect-Words bereavement cards. Then she tried to explain. If we never did something, but clearly remembered doing it, would there really be any difference?

Jules had laughed as he always did when Emily made excuses for them. Whenever she praised him for one of his Internet discoveries, he reminded her that reality was a thousand times richer than anything you could find on the web.

Maybe someday we’ll see for ourselves, Emily would say, about Maui or France or Peru.

Maybe, Jules repeated, but Emily could hear the doubt in his voice. She remembered something she’d read about agoraphobia being rarer in men and possibly much more intractable, much more serious.

Emily had been in the group for about five months when Jules joined. She’d noticed him immediately because he lived in Ardmore, Pennsylvania, only about thirty miles from where she was, in New Hope. His first question to the board was a practical one about finding dentists who make house calls and grocery stores that deliver. The response of the group was sympathetic but worried that he seemed more interested in adjusting to his situation than getting the help he needed. They expressed their hope that he had some family to assist him and especially a good therapist.

Since Emily herself had neither therapist nor family (except her brother, Andrew, whom she felt didn’t count), she emailed Jules privately to tell him she understood and she’d be glad to help with anything she could in their area. Not that she knew much, other than that the clerks at her local grocery would have howled with laughter if she’d asked them to deliver. But when he emailed back, he only asked her how she ended up in New Hope. Was this a choice or circumstances? Was it as peaceful as he’d always heard?

For obvious reasons, questions about the towns where the members lived were rare on the board. If anything, the group tended to ignore the world completely except when that world threatened to push them into an action they weren’t ready for. No one had ever used the word peaceful to describe the Outside World. Emily figured it would be like telling a bunch of infertile people about an adorable baby.

But, to continue with the analogy, Jules himself was infertile. So shouldn’t saying this make him feel worse, too? Shouldn’t his second email to her, with photos of fall in Pennsylvania—photos he’d spent hours searching for and downloading, choosing the best from among the hundreds available online—have been a painful reminder to him of what he couldn’t have?

Emily’s greeting card job had turned her into someone who was just dying to be blunt in some part of her life. She wrote back to him, Aren’t you worried you’re making me feel like shit with these? His reply was simple, not defensive at all. He said he would be more worried if she didn’t see them, adding, Don’t you hear your mind crying out for beautiful things?

The truth was no. In fact, Emily had barely bothered to look at the photos Jules had sent her. She’d grown up in Pennsylvania; she’d seen plenty of falls before. For the first month or so, everything Jules emailed to her was of so little interest that Emily found herself wondering if her agoraphobia was caused by some kind of premature aging of her soul. I can’t understand why everything seems so pointless to me, she admitted to Jules. It’s like I’m too tired to care anymore. Then, because she was embarrassed, she added, Poor me, tiny violins. Tired, yeah, right. I sleep twelve hours a day and pretty much never leave my chair.

She couldn’t resist putting her phone number at the end of that email. By this point, she knew he was a real person; she’d found his Ardmore address on the web. She’d also found him listed as an alumnus of some college in New York in the same year he’d said he’d graduated, only two years before she herself had graduated from Penn State.

He wrote her back a sympathetic reply, complete with a list of links on the meaning of existence, but no mention of calling. Maybe he was afraid of the phone. A lot of the people on the board were. She forced herself to wait a few days before she broke down and asked if she could call him. When he said yes, she paced the room and sang scales for almost an hour, to get the frog out of her throat, and then picked up the phone.

His voice was exactly like she knew it would be: low, musical, unmistakably caring. Everything he said was so thoughtful; even his pauses seemed thoughtful to her. He talked like they’d known each other for years, and when she finally asked him why, he said because knowing someone was a lot simpler than most people think. The trick to knowing someone, Jules said, was asking them just two questions: What do you believe is beautiful? And how do you feel about witnessing its destruction?

Emily was confused. But I already told you nothing is beautiful to me.

You told me everything is pointless to you. That isn’t the same at all. He inhaled and took a drink of something. She wondered what it was, what his cup looked like, and most of all what he looked like.

Maybe you’ve just seen too much destruction, he said.

Maybe, she said, but she didn’t believe it. Her life was hardly a tragedy. True, her parents had died in a car accident, but she was already a grown-up. The word orphan was reserved for children who still needed their parents, not for adults who hadn’t even bothered to visit them except on holidays.

Her friends thought she’d moved into her parents’ house to punish herself for not being there more when they were alive, but it wasn’t true. She’d moved into their house because she thought it was a good time to quit her crappy job as a bank-management trainee and figure out what she wanted to do with the rest of her life. And it wasn’t like New Hope was the end of the earth. Most of her friends lived in Center City Philly; she could drive into town and party with them whenever she wanted. This was back when she was assuming she would want to party with them, once the grief wasn’t so fresh, maybe in a month or two. She also thought she would want to continue seeing Peter, her boyfriend, who stayed by her side at the funeral and squeezed her shoulder and was really nice about what had happened, except for the time he spent outside the church on his cell phone, talking about some skiing trip.

Why she cut herself off from everyone, she still didn’t totally understand. It wasn’t a decision; it was just a process of saying next time and later until the offers stopped coming. Peter let her go first, less than a month after the funeral. Her friends tried harder, but even they gave up surprisingly quickly, proving what Emily had begun to believe in college: that people had become as interchangeable as clothes or CDs. Although everyone had to have some people in their lives, they no longer needed any particular person. Maybe there wasn’t even such a thing as a particular person anymore.

In the kitchen of her parents’ house was a framed needlework her mom had bought in the Pennsylvania Dutch country. Human beings are like snowflakes: each unique, one of a kind, miraculous. When she was a little kid, she’d liked the pretty blue thread. When she was about ten, the saying bugged her: "Unique is one of a kind, Mom. After that, she forgot about it. But during the long winter alone after her parents died, sitting at the kitchen table, eating soup straight from the pot, she decided it should say: Human beings are like greeting cards, each one passing itself off as unique when really we’re all mass-produced imitations."

Emily joined the group because she was afraid the hollowness inside her was getting worse, threatening to become permanent. And it helped, even if she found herself unable to agree with the basic principle of the agoraphobia website: that their condition was holding them back from a much better life.

It wasn’t until she became friends with Jules that Emily began to think maybe it was true, maybe there was something better beyond this house, beyond her neighborhood, beyond her own mind. He almost never talked about himself, and yet he seemed like the most individual person she’d ever met. Here was the real thing, she thought: a particular person. A genuine snowflake.

What he saw in her she honestly didn’t know. Sometimes she tried to find things to show him, but she never came up with anything even half as good as the things he routinely gave to her. He really was an explorer, able to uncover the strangest places on the Internet, the most wonderful pictures of mountains and lakes and stars and especially the way people lived. After a while, Emily couldn’t remember what she’d meant when she’d said everything was pointless. Nothing was pointless through Jules’s eyes. There was so much beauty, looking through Jules’s eyes, that Emily woke up every morning with a sense of anticipation even the stupidest Perfect-Words assignment couldn’t change.

Plus, there