FICTION BY ASH HUANG

SOME PRETENTIOUS EXPERIENCE

You might vibrate off the Earth, you’ve already had so much caffeine, but greeting Elodie without a mug in hand means a barrage of questions: if you are currently keto (no, never) or vegan (not since last year) or fasting (not by choice, only on the fourth week of the month, when money gets tight).

Elodie is 22 minutes late, but she has 19.4m followers on Instagram, and social-clout-math allows her to be persistently 19.4 minutes late. So you suppose she is only three minutes late, and besides, there are two inches of tepid black coffee left in your mug. 

Elodie eventually flops down across from you, shooting out a gust of perfumed air that is half patchouli, half talcum baby-powder. She curls a pink bang around a slim finger and asks you how you are, her eyes on the line to the counter. 

Do you mind if I get something? She asks.

You don’t, and stare at a jagged gouge in the table’s surface while she’s gone.

She returns with her baby-hippie scent and a translucent iced drink in a to-go cup. She stirs it with her straw, the light refracting into a crash of citrine shards, painting the jagged gouge into some kind of lovely. 

She asks you how your thesis is going, how your job is going? At the art store, was it? You must get great discounts. 

They’re both going poorly. Your thesis advisor thinks your evidence is thin and your arguments are circular. There’s nothing noble about the job, it’s mostly keeping teenagers from pilfering Sharpies from the locked cabinet.

Elodie did Art History undergrad too, so you prattle on about some new brand of watercolor, inspired by the palette John Singer Sargent preferred. Has she heard? Someone’s discovered a new pigment in one of his—

Elodie picks up her phone and sips her drink noisily.

How dare she? 

But she nods, says she’s obsessed with that article, but did you see that some other scholar has confirmed the pigment in one of Monet’s later paintings as well?

Your frown is the pin in your pivot: and what is she up to?

She describes a new exhibit, one of those heavily guarded silences, hidden away in a residential Flatiron building, behind an unassuming door and unlabeled doorbell. 

Some pretentious experience for those in the know, a badly guarded secret of the influencer playground, superimposed on the plebeian grid you trudge through.

Focus: Elodie describes a long hallway, pitch black, that opens into a towering cave mouth, as tall as The Gateway Arch. It opens straight onto the banks of the Styx. Yes, that Styx, the one and only. Some YouTuber saw Voltaire just the other day, another girl saw Maya Angelou. 

No, not quite ghosts, Elodie tells you, more like echoes of someone as they travel to the underworld. It’s not so different from rewinding and watching a VHS tape, running a worn strip of cellophane.

How is this possible? 

Well, time is a construct, and everything is happening all at once (expand your mind, damn).

Would you like to go? She asks.

You’ve wheedled your way out of her last three invitations:

1. A fair-trade coffee tasting, eleven courses, where a live band played corresponding classical covers to match the flavor profile of each variety. 

2. A gallery exhibit of fresh paintings, where guests were blindfolded and encouraged to smear their hands (and whatever other appendages) through the still wet paint. Each painting sold for tens of thousands.

3. A polar bear swim in the Long Island Sound during the dead of winter on electric pink pool noodles at dusk, complete with rave lights.

Her photos were beautiful, and you admit you felt a longing that caused you to stop scrolling, a youthful desperation crystallized like sugared ginger candy, held up to the light.

Would you like to go? To the Styx? 

You are surprised that you would.

Will you see someone you actually knew? Should you prepare to make peace with your aunt, whose lazy susan you shattered with a baseball, trying to steal third base from your cousin? She never forgave you, and even iced out your mother for it.

Elodie laughs. Will you see someone you actually knew. You suppose that was a stupid question, but you don’t really know why.

✺ 

You stand under the awning and eye the unlabeled doorbell, an s inked in beside the worn bronze button. You would never have a reason to be in this small alleyway, lined with shining boutiques that house nine or so purses, each the price of a car, with glass doors that shiver when the doorman opens them. 

The Styx attendants must know you don’t belong, observing you through the security camera, in an outfit you picked to remain inoffensive and forgettable. This is how you have survived so long in these social situations far above your standing, why Elodie has kept you tucked under her arm like a dateless old newspaper. She is chatty, a gossip, so it serves you both if you remain a blank void for her musings. If you had a vicious streak, you hold enough secrets to bring down an entire sect of tastemakers.

There is no like the Styx, based on the Styx, inspired by the Styx on any of The Styx Experience’s marketing or website. Only, The Styx, The Styx, The Styx. What are you fundamentally lacking, that you can’t enjoy the playful make-believe pretension of it? You won’t enjoy this, you can’t. You are fine here on Earth. There is plenty left to see on the outer crust, you aren’t bored enough to need to tour the underworld, too.

The tastemakers, the staff who will undoubtedly sport cool blunt haircuts and wear all black, they will smell it on you, that you don’t belong. But perhaps not. Elodie could have brought a retinue of three small and unruly ponies as her entourage instead. Kaya Smith-Barnabas did just last week, to an eco-lodge in Costa Rica, and she was roasted and cancelled like a charred chicken wing before her metadata could tick to posted 3m ago. 

You at least won’t leave dung strewn about ‘the experience’, or nibble on the curtains. 

You are buzzed into a lobby with looming ornate mirrors flecked with age. Everything else is painted matte black: the intricate tin tiled ceiling, the baroque frames. 

You leave dusty footprints on the tile, so stark and gray you stop to examine the soles of your shoes, for evidence that you have stood in something significant enough, staining enough, to track in such a mess. 

You could still go home. You are five minutes late, so you could be gone before Elodie ever knew, and text her with a manufactured fever, maybe food poisoning.

Elodie breezes into the lobby in a large fluorescent sweater before you can make up your mind. She pulls down her heart-shaped sunglasses. 

Come on, she says, nudging your shoulder. We’re late.

✺ 

After signing a stack of waivers, you and Elodie are herded into different changing rooms. It’s for the best, you really don’t want to see her naked, you two were in the same dorm freshman year, but managed to avoid seeing each others’ bodies.

Only, you wonder what she’s doing now that you’re alone. They must have soundproofed this changing room, it is a rushing silence that seems acoustically impossible in Manhattan. You grab your elbows and your duffel bag slides off your shoulder, hooking into the crook of your arm and swinging like a fall of hair.

You think of that watered down saying, that we are only truly alone at birth and death. But birth seems less lonesome, someone was always just outside the membrane of the mother you grew in, and your mother was, of course, a someone herself.

You put your duffel bag on a bench. It’s the same one you’ve had since high school, and its neon patterns are not faded enough to render it anything less than garish against the birch colored wood. 

The walls are flat white, and besides the benches, there is no furniture in the room. The only items of decor are an empty ceramic vase, glazed in a bone beige, a stack of clean white towels, and a diffuser gusting lavender essence in the corner. All of it seems designed to cower beside a golden door lit red by the light above it, like an underworld recording studio.

A guidebook hangs to its side on a heavy brass chain.

Welcome to The Styx Experience, an authentic and rare opportunity to tour the gates of Hades. The phenomenon is still being studied, so visitors should have caution and a healthy respect for potential dangers. Please follow these rules to assure a safe and enjoyable visit for all:

1. ENTER STYX COMPLETELY NAKED. The frequency of the underworld is not well understood, and some alloys have vibrated unpredictably due to riverside adjacency. The Styx Experience is not liable for burns or any other bodily injury resulting from clothing or jewelry. If you wear corrective lenses, including contact lenses, please remove them. You will find you won’t need them once you enter the main hall. Please check for wedding bands, nose rings and other jewelry, hair ties, and glasses. These are the items most often forgotten.

2. DO NOT ATTEMPT TO INTERFERE WITH EVENTS AS THEY OCCUR. While this portal into Styx is by all accounts harmless and impossible to influence with our mortal bodies, it is still the entrance to Hades.

3. PHOTOGRAPHY AND VIDEO RECORDINGS ARE EXPRESSLY FORBIDDEN. Again, this is for your own safety, as the phenomenon is still being studied. You will have an opportunity to take photographs from the designated porthole after your visit, which has been appropriately shielded from Styx’s vibrations.

4. REFRAIN FROM SPEAKING OR MAKING NOISE. The phenomenon is best enjoyed in quiet contemplation, as loud noises will disrupt image clarity, sometimes for hours. 

You undress and put a washcloth on the bench so you can sit down. Terrycloth bites your skin and you stare at the golden door.

A calming voice recites an abridged version of what you’ve just read over some hidden speaker, and it just heightens the absurdity. You will arrive in complete darkness and you will be completely naked. Please do not take photos of the phenomenon. Please do not post photos on social.

You think of those museum guards with their CIA style microphones, the kind that keep you from fondling the Mona Lisa. Are influencers smuggling smartphones in their underboobs, recording grainy videos of an underground river? Who is stopping them? Who guards the Styx, a naked and resigned 60-year-old white man with neat facial hair, who eats a thin homemade sandwich on his lunch break? A floating scrap of black tulle made of spectral mist, who will suck the breath out of any selfie-posting body?

The door opens and the light over the doorway turns white. You don’t know if Elodie has already gone, or if you’re going first. No one would know if you didn’t go in, but you don’t want to be a chickenshit, so you head into the dark.

Besides, you would actually love to see Maya Angelou.

You close the door behind you, and the tunnel is pitch black save for a dim row of bluish LEDs that blink away from you, a ghastly runway. You descend through the tunnel, the smooth incline cold against your feet until you hit a patch of sand soft as dark flour. A few more steps and the view opens up as promised, a yawning cave mouth as large as The Gateway Arch.

After the warnings and rules, you were nervous it would be too dark to see much of anything, but you can. It’s a bruising and brooding kind of dark, the kind of wild dark that scares you—you, who are so used to a tamer dark easily bisected by headlights or pinholed by the brightest stars. The knowable dark inside a skyscraper, a camper van, a bedroom.

The temperature is somehow perfect, which says a lot, because you are not above battling your family and roommates in passive aggressive thermostat wars, 60° in the winter, just put on a sweater if it’s too cold.

When Elodie dragged you to Burning Man, you were so physically overwhelmed by a flashing light exhibit that you squeezed your eyes shut and fled blindly, bowling over a group of women tripping on shrooms. When Elodie read at a slam poetry battle in Brooklyn Heights, where all the participants dressed in French Revolution Era gowns and jackets, complete with powdered wigs, you excused yourself as soon as she left the stage and sat outside on the stoop, sharing a joint with one of the caterers, shouting small talk over the blaring classical music, still deafening from the street. 

At each of these events, you brace and clench and bear it, because you know if you rebuff every invitation, Elodie will stop asking you. It’s easier to lurk in the group chats, to keep a tallied calendar, to appear in a few of her posts. You don’t really know if you want to hang out with Elodie, but between the thesis and the art store and the odd contract job, you don’t have the time or the funds to want.

So when you look out on that murky river water, at the glowing blurs that whistle, chime and moan, you try to smirk. You try to pick apart the trick, of animatronic fins and waterproof casings, about a specific curve of wall and trompe l’oeil that makes the horizon look like it goes on forever. 

But the horizon does goon forever. Your eye muscles strain when you search for the end of it. The water chimes and whistles with no discernable repetition. A small boat inches along in the distance, where a hunched figure plunges its depths with a long stick. 

Marsh grass waves in a pleasing and rhythmic pattern, but there is no wind to speak of. Your hands are shaking, and you steady them against your bare thighs.

You feel the silky touch of your old ginger cat, Carmine, dead last winter, curving a figure eight against your calves. You look down, but she isn’t there. Suddenly it smells like a cemetery, like bone dust and hanging moss, wet stone and lichen.

You turn to your left and are standing on the porch of your childhood home. You touch the dent in the doorframe, digging your fingernail into the spongy wood, like you used to when you hid from your bullying cousins.

You smell the sugary artificial scent of your mother’s favorite vanilla creamer coming from inside the house, which was as good as any alarm clock. She microwaved it every morning at 6:45, because her coffee cooled too quickly and she likes it near boiling.

When you skitter away from the vision, you have shoes on, they pinch your toes. All your clothes are black and too tight, an effort by your mother to domesticate you for the solemn occasion, via constraining polyester. You see your grandfather’s waxy face, preserved in the satin folds of an open casket, your grandmother wailing in the background. You smell garlic and sharp vinegar, the sweet-mellow of coconut milk, the acid-bitter of peppers and other lost spices your grandfather used for his secret chicken recipe, which he never handed down to your father.

It all mists away like a nightmare. You want to run back through the tunnel, back towards your life, towards the sidewalks and gossip and your phone. You want to worry about unfinished business and inconsequential arrangements, pore over takeout menus and scoff at reality TV.

You’re breathing fast. How long have you been out here? Isn’t someone going to come and drag you back into the land of the living? A dark ferryboat arrives at some rickety dock that you swear wasn’t there before. The tide seems to be rising, and the river is suddenly inches from your toes.

You turn and you run. 

You run with your hands outstretched before you. Your feet slip against the tunnel floor and you bang your knees. They throb to the beat of the LEDs, which now lead you back to your changing room. Your palms hit cold metal, and the door to your changing room creaks open. You jump through it and shut it, drawing a shuddering breath as the white light above you fades to red.

The room buzzes with some badly balanced electrical current you didn’t notice before, and the diffuser is still happily gusting lavender essence in the corner. Your duffel bag and discarded clothes are where you left them, piled on a bench, your butt print still on the towel you sat on.

You put on your clothes and fumble the buttons, and wish they offered a shower. Clammy and tense, you tuck your head between your knees for a moment before you stand up and leave the room.

You meet Elodie in the lobby, and the lights hurt your eyes. She is scrolling on her phone, stopping to smile at something as she taps out some reply. 

She wordlessly loops her arm through yours and the solid mass of her is as comforting as a full belly. 

Your mouth is dry.

Bananas, right? She says. Who knew an entire universe was just under our feet? I’m so glad they’re not just letting everyone in at once, it really allows for the proper contemplation, can you imagine? They did such a classy job with it. Hector was so mad he didn’t get an invite, and then he almost blew his top when I said my guest ticket was already spoken for. 

She hugs my side and yawns. 

Don’t feel bad for him, he’s going to Paris next month, and they think they found another portal there. His mom is French, so he’ll be able to have as authentic an experience as any of us in New York. Oh! The porthole is just over there.

She pulls you over to a gap in the wall and leans into the darkness. The river is less threatening from a distance, but as you get close, it smells like a cemetery again and you have to hold your breath. 

Without asking, Elodie lays her cheek against yours and lifts her camera, turning her face a few times to find her perfect angle. You are too stunned to make the sparrow lips, too, to squint in a flattering manner, or even to smile.

The flash goes off.

She groans, stupid flash. Let’s try that again.

She raises her arm and adjusts the phone so you’re both in frame, the Styx a dim ribbon behind you. 

Ash Huang is a writer based in San Francisco. She is an alum of the Tin House Workshop and the Periplus Fellowship, and her essays have appeared in Catapult Magazine, Fast Company and elsewhere. Find her on Twitter and Instagram @ashsmash, or at https://ashsmash.com/.