There never liv’d a mortal man, who bent
His appetite beyond his natural sphere,
But starv’d and died.
— John Keats, Endymion

We were washing the family knives at the time, both already on edge. The whole drive up my sister had cavilled at me and I at her, aimlessly, indulgently, sparing each other only long enough to recollect additional, tangentially related sore spots to wrest open anew. It was standard practice for us to spend our limited time together this way. It was, I felt we would agree, an expression of our intimacy. The items cited in my comprehensive and interdisciplinary analyses of her shortcomings most would find innocuous, if noticeable at all, whereas I could catch them instantly, anywhere. Likewise she enumerated each betrayal I’d enacted against her, a year or a minute ago, yesterday and tomorrow. Tonight, however, our combative rapport wore us down, and we scarcely exchanged a word while preparing dinner. I ate quickly and without pleasure. Seeing she hadn’t touched her plate, and instead seemed busy with one of her periodic, prosaic panic attacks—jaw gone slack, dark behind the eyes—I wasted no time in clearing our dishes and moving on to the cleaning. By the time I got around to the knives, she’d come to join me, silent, incompletely apologetic, sighing and spinning the nakiri handle in her palm.

The knives were exceedingly sharp. They were the sharpest you could use, practically. By use and practically, I mean, they must have been as perilous as a kitchen knife could be without first warranting the designation weapon. I was sure they posed more danger than some lesser makes of swords and daggers. I was sure I would sooner die by a slip-up here at the sink than in a mass shooting at Lululemon in the mall or a midwinter’s car crash, so common in our hometown, sliding into the intersection on black ice and getting T-boned. The knives’ closeness to life and death alike actually inspired a certain fear of God in me, called me to take seriously my mortal duties of chopping, scraping, rinsing off… she watches over the affairs of her household / and does not eat the bread of idleness. But it was under the sign of this quotidian profundity that I felt, should my mind roam too far from my hands—idle as both could be—I might schizophrenically slash my wrists one day, bleed out into the garbage disposal before realizing what I had done.

It would really only take a graze of the blade.

Needless to say, the knives required careful attention to clean. We washed them all by hand, of course, not with a sponge or cloth but actually with our fingertips, using small, demi-moon motions and the absolute slightest quantity of an extra-mild soap from the hyperethical cleaning brand ZuperEco, developed by a private chemist in Singapore and distributed to the West exclusively via a small chain of Swiss apothecaries. Our cousin, who was a financial consultant in Geneva, purchased the supplies in-person and mailed them to us overseas, a favor he was happy to carry out in accordance with the economical credo of his profession.

Aside from the minuscule cost of shipping cut by our cousin, when it came to the knives, there was little to be salvaged in the way of either money or time. It was not uncommon that we spent longer sanitizing, sharpening, and polishing the utensils than we did preparing and consuming our relatively basic meals. The knives had to be wiped down if we were to leave them on the cutting board for thirty seconds with a good conscience. We smeared tsubaki oil delicately over the cryo-crystallized carbon-steel blades to prevent corrosion, and intermittently on the handles of natural Karelian birch, the only organic material ever to be used in a Fabergé egg. In any case, we didn’t have a dishwasher here at the country house, as our parents had spent the last five years remotely contracting thorough renovations to produce a perfect, or perfected, reiteration of the home originally erected on the property, now almost a century and a half ago.

They were deeply concerned with heritage and authenticity.

It’d likely been the greatest entrepreneurial success our adolescent neighborhood had seen in this millennium when nine-year-old Beau Rey started selling the cult set of Japanese knives. Keen enough to slice off the ring finger, straight through the wedding band longwise, he said they say. Uh huh. Without you even noticing till it lands on the floor. That’s how clean the cut. He said it, we saw it; out we held our unwed hands, bent those left third-fingers into hiding. Beau Rey’s doubters conspired that the wedding band detail had something to do with Mr. and Mrs. Rey’s marriage. But either way, Beau Rey was knocking on doors and offloading these things for something like three grand a pop, and suddenly every second household—including our parents’, who’ll buy anything as a favor—had these knives, a twelve-piece dynasty of gyuto and santoku, boning and petty. No one could say no to Beau. And no one blinked at the fact that a kid too light to set off an airbag had become our local luxury knife salesman. The same cynics were convinced it wasn’t legal, swore his parents were putting him up to the whole thing, splitting the money between them to even things out in a separation forthcoming. Most of Beau’s customers, however, only laughed fondly (you too?! when they realized yet another neighbor had made the same purchase), actually praised little Beau Rey for his precocious industry, raking in tens of thousands as he had in a matter of weeks, stockpiling enough to one day fund his college education or take three consecutive gap years in New Zealand or produce an independent film with his future girlfriend the star. Meanwhile, his fourth-grade classmates were failing to dissolve powdered lemonade in water with wooden spoons longer than their forearms, at best divvying up a jar of pocket change at the end of a hot day.

We could’ve left the knives up on their magnetic strip for exhibition. But after putting them to work once—almost as a lark—no lesser instrument could compare. Naturally the superlative experience of julienning with these knives vulgarized the experience of julienning with any other. But it also happened that the frustration and difficulties the knives posed—cleaning the blades during and subsequent to use, how it took multiple actors and up to an hour per knife, fine motor skills and 20/20 vision—increased our attachment to them: the atypical demands they made did not deter us from them but, perversely, drove us to employ them all the more. We were condemned to a begrudging repetition as long as there was anything to paysanne, bayonnet, chiffonade. As long, that is, as we cooked and ate.

So I was just scrubbing away at a knife, wearing my grandma’s old moccasins trimmed with mystery fur, slippers which perpetually felt as though they were on the wrong foot, yet when you kicked them off and switched them they were just as bad, and then you’d change them again and realize it’s all the same, just wrong and bad one way or another. My grandma had long narrow rounded feet like a rabbit’s and sometimes I remembered them as slapping against the tile with sounds like a wet rag when really she mostly just shuffled along. In my lifetime, at least.

I had inherited that habit of hers—dragging my feet. I had absorbed various other non-hereditary things, as well, like her adoration of crème brûlée and an ouroboric cycle of getting strawberry blonde highlights for time eternal while missing, somehow, actually genetically transmittable traits like slender nail beds and a gummy furl of the mouth and her high caffeine tolerance, all of which my sister had received. I was sliding along, about to lay the knife at hand to the right of the sink, when I sloshed through something and noticed the suede on my feet get damp. I lifted up one foot and saw a water line marring the moccasins, dangerously close to the serrated seam running round the side of the shoe and—my favorite feature—the stelliform bronze beading on the toe.

At the same moment my sister smacked her hand against the faucet.

What’s wrong with this thing?

I looked over. She was shaking the extendable hose. Miniature droplets piddled off of it like thaw off an icicle winking at the polar sun. She flicked the tap on-off-on-off.

There’s no water, she said.

I looked back at my wet slippers.

Oh… I think it’s on the ground.

Much like our mother, my sister was a gasper. To her the smallest of surprises—a quarter cup of milk in the carton when she thought it’d been finished yesterday, someone bringing her home a souvenir indubitably purchased in an airport terminal—were more than sufficient to induce one of her wide-eyed, hand-to-mouth reactions. She whistled the air up her throat and tottered backwards.

Please don’t tell me this is flooding.

We continued to stare at the water. Nothing seemed to change about it. Outside, the light was getting lower, a touchy, pinkish cast seeping through the windows and imparting a kind of romance to our new pond. I glanced back at the sink.

I think… I think it just ran out.

My sister let out a sigh equal in measure to her theatrical inhalation. Ran out of water? We’re not walking through the desert.

Well. No.

She shook her head, muttering, scampering off, returning moments later with a tasseled towel. Whipping it out forcefully in front of her, she spread it smooth over the stale pool like a shroud over a corpse.

I ducked down and opened the cupboard under the sink. I searched for some mark of anything, in vain. Flipping through a bilingual manual crumpled behind rows of cleaning products, I learned only that our pipes were manufactured in the Netherlands, where the name for the U-shaped portion at which I stared was a zwanenhals—swan’s neck.

In our part of the world, it was just known as a trap.

***

The man from Quickie’s Appliance Repair was called Sergei and he spoke the minimal necessary English for his trade, terms like “ice machine,” “filter housing,” “sorry,” and “deposit.” When we put our father on speakerphone thinking the two of them might have more success communicating, our dad addressed him as Serge, in French, and I resumed my intermediary role. Little discussion took place before we all tacitly agreed to take Sergei at his word or lack thereof, deciding his nebulous diagnosis must be correct and he would be more than capable of solving our problems. I knew from our years in Latin class that Sergei’s name derived etymologically from servant or guardian, so I, if no one else, was reassured that he must be able to help and protect us. And an email I received from a robot, albeit with little more elaboration than Sergei himself had offered, provided a price and a timeline: $1234 including installation and up to one week for the company to receive the new part. Then Sergei would come back to save us.

My sister grimaced. One week is a long time without water.

Dad said we can get water from the well. Or drive into town. That’ll take longer, though.

I think I might have to leave.

You can’t leave—then I’ll be stuck here all alone. Waiting for Sergei.

Pia Denning did this once, you know. A water fast.

A water fast is when you only drink water, idiot.

Well… she picked at a mole. The name is inaccurate, then. Water fast would indicate you’re abstaining from water.

You can’t survive without water.

Yeah, that’s what I just said.

Look. We have water. It’s the same source, we just have to go get it, instead of it spontaneously appearing. And whatever, I mean, I guess you can live without anything for a while. Maybe it’ll be good for you. Or something.

She wailed like a heifer, first time in labor. I rolled my eyes.

So what happened to Pia, I asked.

My sister shut her eyelids slow, massaged them with her knuckles. Watching her made me sleepy. She exhaled, removing one hand from her eye and waving it carelessly, still rubbing with the other.

I don’t know. She ended up in the hospital for an electrolyte imbalance or something gay like that. Then she gained it all back, plus more, in, like, a week.

I didn’t say anything. My sister stood up and padded out of the room.

It was embarrassing, I felt we both agreed.

***

The next day, the first of our standby period, I trudged out to the well before the sun had fully risen, in my grip a stoneware pitcher our mother had bought on vacation in Puglia. The well, well, it wasn’t a traditional well any longer, but now had a ridged wheel controlling a curved chrome spit from which the water gushed at high pressure. I pulsed up and down in a low squat as the pitcher became heavier in my hand.

Walking back to the house I cradled the full vessel in front of my torso, arms in something like first position. The water made little claps against the side, applauding me, pacing my even stride, imbuing me with the belief that I was doing something meaningful, primordial, something more than carrying a jug of water to pour in the hind compartment of the toilet. The light was coming through the trees. Dew lifted from the grass at my ankles.

The morning was unusually calm.

***

By the second day at noon, we had ingested every form of potable water in the house. My sister had washed her feet with sparkling. Patrolling the living room, I shook an open can of Perrier with two loose fingers to see how much was left. Another empty. My sister hung backwards off the sofa, dangling a book upside-down in front of her. She flapped the book shut and eyed me collecting stragglers, Saratogas and Mountain Valley stills, a two-liter Canada Dry club soda and miniature plastic bottles bearing the name of a golf course I’d never heard of.

We need to go into town tomorrow, she stated, cheeks red with bloodrush. One delicate vein stood out on her forehead like a topographical feature on a raised-relief globe.

I made a face. I don’t feel like driving an hour and a half just to buy a few flats of water. And there’s plenty of food here for a week. 

Yeah, like, if it were a nuclear war. I need, I don’t know, endives, or fresh herbs.

There’s basil and dill in the garden. And vegetables.

She puffed the air out her lips and let her book smack on the floor.

Well, then we have to deal with washing them.

I squinted at her.

Fine, I don’t know. I guess I’m just bored. Don’t you want to do something?

I mean… not in town. There’s more to do here. And it’s not like we were planning to spend time there before all this happened.

She rolled on to her stomach. It was unclear whether her simultaneous eye-roll was independent or a function of the overall movement.

Yeah, but I’m tired of having to think about, like, the hydro-consequences of everything I do here. It gives me OCD or something. I can’t relax.

I stared at her lying there.

Come on, she continued, you have two arms full of recycling and it’s been, what, a day? We need more water bottles, at the very least. If it’s such a drag then I can drive, and we’ll load up, so we don’t have to go back.

I don’t know. I just… I just don’t want to. It’s a waste of time. We can get water to drink and wash produce or whatever else from the well.

She crossed and uncrossed her eyes in aggravation.

I don’t trust that nasty tap. It’s probably full of lead, and there’re probably animals like, licking the spout and pissing on it. I want normal, mechanically filtered, pH 9 water.

Alkaline water isn’t normal. But fine. Go alone, then.

The roads here scare me, I added.

I watched as she pressed herself off the couch and swept her palms on her jeans. She started to walk out of the room.

You’re really going to abandon me? Where are you going? I asked.

She didn’t look back as she spoke.

I’m going to drink a beer.

***

On the third day my sister slept until three o’clock. In lieu of dinner the night before we moved from beer to wine to bastardized classic cocktails, to my sister slumped like Marat in the bathtub, winsome and sick, while I ran back and forth retrieving well-water to douse her clammy body, flush the bubbly, insubstantial vomit down the drain.

It wasn’t so awful. Anyhow, the longer she slept today, the longer we could skirt matters of shower and sink, toilet, toothbrush, tea-steep and coffee-brew, glass of water, pill-swallow, splash on the face and under the arms, ice-chew, ice on the pulse-points. We’d be dry as possible.

But I myself couldn’t bear lying in bed past eleven. I got up and paced back and forth in the hallway. When I passed through the living room I saw the maidenhair fern was dying. In a daze, I stumbled to the kitchen, grabbed the water I’d boiled and cooled at my sister’s insistence and glossed the fern’s soil anew.

I could’ve boiled and cooled the next round of well-water. Instead I only chilled it in the fridge.

As long as one of us was sleeping we couldn’t argue.

***

By the fourth day the dishes were piling up. Used teacups sat in a shallow pool of stale, translucent water at the bottom of a mixing bowl caked with hardened cookie dough. Draped over one side was a raspberry-pink thong, half-submerged, the string up the ass made of lacy stars. I scrunched my face and snatched it out of the bowl. The cotton was dappled with menstrual blood.

Can you please put your clothes in the laundry room sink?

My sister was walking into the kitchen. I threw the panties at her face and she swatted them to the ground.

You have to soak blood stains in cold water immediately, she said.

So? Can you not put them with the dishes that we eat from? You’re going to give me hepatitis. Or whatever else is wrong with you.

You put your shirt in this sink when you spilled vermouth.

Yeah, vermouth, which goes in a glass, which we already drink from anyway.

Well, I’m talking about the shirt.

A clean shirt hung over the rim of the sink touching nothing is different from free-bleeding on china. And you’re one to bring up alcohol.

She shrugged, pulling at a cuticle.

I was closest to this sink.

Whatever. Please, just like, throw those away. This is disgusting.

No. These have memories, she retorted, picking up the thong and whirling it around absently. I got them from a street vendor in Pigalle.

You’re a whore.

And you’re fat. Just throw away the dishes instead.

***

On the fifth day: chicken breasts from the freezer. Not a clue where they came from before that.

Don’t oversalt it, or I’m gonna get thirsty, my sister called from the sofa.

It was getting to me, I guess, though no doubt in the past I’d gone far longer neglecting everything causing my agitation at present. Beau Rey’s dormant blades gleamed from their post and I was near overcome by the desire to wrench the honesuki off the metallic strip and slice up the breasts, or hurl it at my sister’s, or plunge it into my heart, close enough. Instead I arranged the slabs of chicken in a casserole tray, poured white rice around them and dumped two cans of cream of mushroom soup overtop of it all. No water. One dish.

Let’s just both eat straight out of here, I told my sister an hour later, carrying the steaming platter over to the coffee table with two mismatched oven mitts.

You’re kidding, she said, sitting up and wrinkling her brow. Should I use my bare hands, too?

I gazed dispassionately at the casserole tray. All through our childhood our mother had deftly evaded the maternal obligation to cook for the family, favoring overpriced takeout, private chef services and meal delivery, cannelloni you’d get from the Italian deli and stick in the oven for twenty minutes. She had a few meals in her repertoire to which she made recourse if absolutely necessary, or else, perhaps, to prove a point to us—which her handful of recurring, mildly carcinogenic recipes missed by a long shot. She could handle appetizers, and, of course, liquor. She even enjoyed grocery shopping, having never been bogged down by the preparation that typically follows. By all counts she was an immaculate host. This dish, however, was one of her old soldiers, which is to say, the only kind that survives. I guess I was nostalgic or something. The rice had soaked up the canned soup to leave small, suctioned pockets of air amidst the otherwise gluey terrain of congealed cream and grain. The rubbery breasts looked like they were covered in semen. The whole thing, I thought, had turned greige, the color our mother routinely used as a pejorative, her means to describe anything which sought to be sophisticated, but seemed to her dull, overdone, neither-nor. It’s all just a bit… well, greige, if you ask me, she would say, unprompted, of course, disparaging everything from small-plate restaurants to centrist newscasters, commercially successful figurative paintings by conventionally attractive women and unsalable abstractions by charismatic, reptilian men. Greige, she would mutter, shaking her head. Her own tastes were divisive. They were so inconsistent as to seem arbitrary, like she made all her choices with her eyes shut. Almost always, somehow or other, they were expensive. About half the time they were unpalatable to me.

The casserole was just like hers.

We had a couple bites each then put it away to dump in the trash later.

***

On the sixth day Sergei called. I was desperate to see him.

Thank you, I said, you’re really just in time.

Sergei nodded amiably from the floor, where he reclined on a small, padded rectangle, fitting something under the fridge.

We’re both losing our minds, I told him. You know. We fight a lot anyway, but, I don’t know, maybe it’s not that different. It’d be easier alone, I think, like most things. Anyway, whatever. This’ll be a relief.

Sergei didn’t reply. He folded up from supine and pivoted to address something under the sink. Trailing my eyes around the room for a second, I decided to leave him be. I went into the living room and curled by one of the bay windows, resting. As far as I knew, my sister was still asleep.

Some time later Sergei appeared in the doorway, his arms tensed awkwardly at his sides.

All finished, he said to me, eyes jumping around.

Oh. Already? Okay.

I paid Quickie’s by typing our father’s credit card number, long committed to memory, into Sergei’s cracked phone. I couldn’t tell if the small “service charge” was an automatic gratuity or if Sergei’s labor really made up for such a minuscule portion of the total cost. I gave him a cash tip and bid him farewell.

Water’s back, I told my sister when she wandered out, bedheaded, that afternoon.

She gasped and gawked. No way.

I flicked the tap on. We both stood in silence as a cylinder of clear water churned against the steel of the sink.

God bless that guy, my sister said, running a hand through her hair. I was ready to kill myself.

Me too, I guess.

Well, I’m going to go take the longest shower known to man, first of all, and then do some laundry. Are you hungry? We should make something really clean and fresh, like, a huge pot of broth, and… a big salad. Maybe something poached. You know. Maximum water use.

Yeah. Sure.

She left the room. I watched the sink a while longer, stuck a jar of water under it to fill then turned off the faucet. My sister hadn’t been completely off the mark. The subtle exertion of the days prior, the background assessments of whether each action would require some hidden, additional effort, lent my current motions a kind of vacancy, automation. I lay down a cutting board and pulled some wilting greens from the fridge. I gave them a rinse, at first perfunctory and then for needlessly long, doubly after spotting a dead fly fall from the leaves into the sink. Grabbing the wide, flat nakiri knife from the strip, I slowly chopped the stems, stopping to wipe down the blade, sip from the jar. The water tasted different than I remembered. Almost sour. I filled a pot and turned on the stove, cracked some salt from the mill, and dropped in a cube of bouillon before the water had boiled. Placing a lid on the pot, I went to the door and slipped on a pair of espadrilles, walked out to the garden and pulled a few radishes, came back inside and observed, lulled by the strong white noise of the fount, as the water polished away each speck of dirt from the roots. I shaved them into rounds, paper-thin as only a Beau Rey knife could manage, drizzled them with vinegar and set them aside. I minced dill until it was particulate. The herbs stuck to my hands as I scooped them into the bowl of greens, and I noticed, beneath a stray frond, a bulb of blood beading at the tip of my pointer finger. I frowned and held it under the sink. The line of the cut was near imperceptible, but when I thumbed at it, a small sheath of skin rolled back, barely attached. I felt nothing. The red orb reemerged. I rinsed it again. The blood rose. I put my finger in my mouth and sucked, tugged a tissue from the box on the island and veiled it tightly, curling my finger into my palm.

I inspected the blade. Towards one end was a tiny wash of crimson. I opened a drawer and took out the small bottle of ZuperEco, careful to squeeze just a single drop; we were almost out. With my wounded hand I gripped the handle and used my right to softly rub in the soap, back, forth, back, forth, in alternating curves, gently working away the blood and flakes of green and a milky white residue from the radish. By the time I was done, a new blot was seeping through the tissue on my finger. I turned to face the light, peering at it with nakiri still in hand, when a shadow crept up on the border of my sight. The knife clattered to the floor.

Jesus. I looked up my sister, her hair coiled in a precarious towel turban, lips pursed in amusement.

Everything okay?

Um… I’m fine.

I expected one of my feet to be amputated. My sister bent down and picked the knife off the ground.

You chipped the corner. She flipped it around. These things are brittle.

I didn’t respond. Her smirk tapered off as I stood there, unmoving.

Look… you seem… keyed up. How about I finish off whatever it is you’re doing, here, and you just go run a bath or something.

Um. Yeah. Okay.

I hesitated in the kitchen for a moment more. My sister unfurled her damp hair, washed her hands and took a swig from my jar.

I think I’m in water debt, she said. Every time something like this happens, I tell myself, I will never take anything for granted ever again. Then, obviously, I do.

She gulped down more from the jar, and I nodded, disengaged.

Right.

I watched from behind as my sister fluffed up the salad, added the radishes, wafted the broth towards her nose. I’m just going to throw in a few things to like, zhuzh this up, she told me. But it shouldn’t be very long.

It’s fine, I said, take your time. My appetite is weird today.

She nodded. You’re probably dehydrated.

Probably.

My sister toyed with a spoon. I walked away. I could hear her humming to herself, by all appearances, totally at ease. I slid my feet back into the espadrilles and stepped outside, leaving the door slightly ajar. The ground was wet as the evening cooled, and clumps of mud clung to my shoes as I scuffed along. I walked and walked, walked to the well, past the well, pulled out tufts of sticky grass from the soil and let them fall again, retrieved a single blade and looped it round my injured finger like a tourniquet, a show ribbon. I walked through denser wood; I had to lift my feet, plodding after the last rusted leak of sun, blinking through a break in the trees where the low light spread. There, beneath the vast, indecisive stretch of sky, my head spun. I tripped across the clearing and groped down the bank of a brook on the other side, stole the slow-moving water. Dabbed it on my temples, the backs of my knees.

If I stayed here a while longer, I thought, my sister would eat without me. Would prefer it, I was sure. She had no faith, I thought—she could only appreciate lack, in wanting. I touched my forehead. The skin was aflame. I felt sick, meek, ugly. She would not come out to find me—that’s how we trusted each other. I cupped my hands together and bowed my neck towards the stream.