“It’s pretty smart,” I admitted to Xander, over drinks. They were just old-fashioned alcohol, nothing to make you feel much besides uninhibited, or maybe depressed like a good depressant does. I wasn’t trying to change anything.
“I’ve already got advertising behind it,” he said. “And I’ve already got clients. I need people to work for me. I need people to go in and install. I need someone like you.”
“Why me?” I said.
“Well, I can trust you, for one,” he said. “Imagine what would happen if I got someone I couldn’t trust? Someone who was out to hurt people or worse. God, it would be a mess. And I’d be out of business before I started. You, I know you’ll just go in and do your job. You don’t give a fuck about anything, least of all messing with people you don’t even know.”
“I knew my apathy would pay off one day,” I said dryly.
My friend Xander was starting a new business. Xander had been dreaming up new businesses for years, since long before the tragedy, because Xander was loaded. He went on vacation once and started an import business for Arabic floor couches, thinking people would replace all their sofas and chairs with them. It failed. It didn’t matter because Xander had been rich since his mom died when he was nineteen, the kind of rich that would never run out. I don’t remember what his mom’s father did, but it was something we take for granted as part of how the world runs, something that seems like it didn’t need to be invented because it was so intuitive and integral to human society—the perfect kind of invention. Xander had been striving to live up to his grandfather’s work his whole life. He started a woodworking business the summer he had a girlfriend who showed him how to use a wood branding tool; a magazine the year he wanted to be a writer; a cobbling business when he went to Italy and became enamored with the little shoe shop under his apartment there. They always failed because Xander didn’t know how to run a business, and the businesses he chose to run were always things that there were plenty of. He could never compete with the experts, with his dilettante knowledge. He longed to invent something new, but all he did was bounce around things that already existed and that he would never master. I think he wanted to make his dead mother proud—or at least that’s what he wanted before we all went numb. Some residual of that desire was still there, swirling around everything he did like snow in a little glass winter-scene globe.
It wasn’t until after the tragedy that he came up with an idea that was new and inventive. With all the failed businesses behind him, he’d learned a lot of lessons on what not to do in business, so even that end of it was more solid. But the idea behind the business—it really was something.
The lack of feeling in the world brought out the best in people like Xander—people looking for ways to cash in on it. He came up with this piece of technology that sensed what was going on around it, intuited what emotions were normally attached to whatever was happening, or would have been before everyone stopped feeling everything. The little sensor was attached to speakers, and the speakers picked just the right music to heighten that emotion—or, as the case was now, attempt to make people feel that emotion. That may sound abstract, but what it did in real terms was this: inside the house of a married couple, it heard them talk about the baby they were thinking of having now that the tragedy had ended and the world was as safe as it ever would be to bring children into. The sensors picked this up. And suddenly, there would be music playing into the house to go along with the conversation, at subliminal levels. Songs that made people feel maternal or paternal, made them feel longing, and made them feel loving and caring. And on these gentle waves of barely perceptible music, these people, ideally, would start to feel those feelings, too. And they’d go and they’d make love or fuck or whatever they liked to do in bed, and sooner or later, there would be a new baby, and the sensors would pick up the new baby’s babbles, and the music that would play would be proud and protective and parental, and before they knew it, people would be living their lives like they had long ago, before everything stopped and went to hell, before everyone went numb to survive. I could see why so many would want the service.
“I have a client out in Montauk,” he said. “Lots of money, they want the sensors and the speakers installed in every room of their house. There are a lot of rooms.”
“I have no idea how to install electronics,” I said.
“Red wire goes in red hole. Yellow wire goes in yellow hole. White wire goes in white hole. Simple. I swear, even you can do it.”
“How much do you pay?” I asked.
“Probably better than you’ve ever made,” he said. It wasn’t a real source of friction between us, that he was rich and I was poor, but it didn’t prevent these digs every now and then, either. “And I’ll put you up in Montauk until the installation is finished. Probably a week. Don’t you want to spend a week in Montauk?”
“I might find the Montauk Monster,” I said. “The what?”
“Jesus. You don’t know the Montauk Monster? You probably only know Montauk from that shitty old movie.”
“Your hair looks like the girl’s hair in that movie,” he said. My hair was bright orange that day, just like the female lead in the movie we were discussing. I guess it was a lucky coincidence. Maybe it had even made Xander think I’d be the right person for the job. He hadn’t mentioned it until we were several drinks in, and then it had been like a revelation to him that he’d offer it to me.
“Yeah, I’ll do it,” I said. “When do I leave?”
“Friday,” he replied, sipping from his drink. Xander always drank fruity drinks that packed a huge punch. Why would he pretend to be manly by drinking barley juice that tasted like shit, he said, when he could sip something that tasted like Kool-Aid and be drunk in an hour? Xander was practical.
He paused a minute, then looked at me with eyes like a puppy with its head cocked to the side, trying to understand.
“What’s the Montauk Monster?”
*
Xander rented me a nicer car than the one I drove, which I took to Montauk. The town was just long strips of road with little pops of houses and businesses between. I imagined walking down the east-west road they called the Montauk Highway. I imagined hitchhiking down it, not getting picked up by anyone. This wasn’t the sort of place where they picked up hitchhikers. The houses were huge. There were strips of road where all that was alongside me were woods, probably a nature reserve.
Xander put me up in an old lighthouse that had been renovated as a bed and breakfast. The bottom floor was the restaurant, and the rooms above were the bedrooms. There were thick comforters on the beds and huge, fluffy white pillows at the heads of them. The windows in the brick walls were tiny, and they looked out over the ocean. I ate alone at night in the restaurant, on Xander’s tab. It all must have cost him a fortune. He was probably getting paid a fortune, and I think he wanted to make me think it would always be this way when he sent me out on a business trip. I knew better. I’m not stupid. Xander was pulling out all the stops. Later, it would be roadside motels with empty swimming pools. I watched the ocean crash on the shore from my bedroom and decided to count myself lucky while I could still enjoy it.
I went to the beach that night after dinner. I looked out across the water toward where Plum Island Animal Disease Center used to be. They used to run animal tests there, even bioweapon programs, a long time ago. It had a reputation. It moved somewhere else a few years ago. Now there were just ghostly lights out there. When the Montauk Monster first washed up on the seashore, the people who found it thought it might have been an experiment from Plum Island.
There was nothing on the shore around me, not dead, weird animals that I couldn’t identify, not birds, not fish. Everything was still. So much of the world, from people to flora and fauna, had died in the tragedy. And before the big tragedy, the one that emptied out the world, there had been so many other tragedies, daily indignities we all endured until we couldn’t anymore. When I think about it now, it’s no surprise we all just had to shut down. People aren’t meant for constant trauma. I know that better than most.
It was a lot to think about, how empty the world was now, and how the people who were left were moving along as if nothing had happened—people like Xander, who just thought, Maybe I can make a buck out of this.
The next day I started work. That night, I was going to get drunk on the beach and try not to think about the world that was gone now. I lifted a bottle to my lips, tipping my head back to see the hanging stars.
*
There was a process to picking out the songs, I told the Shardens. They were a good-looking couple, probably in their late twenties, younger than me. They had probably gotten married at the beginning of the tragedy, when the number of days the news reported that it might stretch out had seemed incomprehensible. A lot of people got engaged and married, then. It was some way to hang on to something in this world, prove that what you loved mattered, even if you couldn’t guarantee it would be there a year, two years from then. But they, young, recently married, had survived. They lived alone in this huge house. They didn’t even have many neighbors, and the sands of the beach you could see from their front windows stretched out lonesomely.
“What you do,” I said, looking at this good-looking couple, reciting things that Xander had made me memorize, “is say a part of the song three times to each other while you’re thinking about what you want to feel from it. It works best if you’ve felt something from it before. Like your wedding song, for example. You might want to use that, if you want to feel closer to each other. Not that it’s my business what you want to feel.” The Shardens looked at each other as I spoke, a silent language that was not meant for me. Brad Sharden was tall and blond, with a way of cocking his sandy eyebrows that made him seem boyish and inquisitive. Beth Sharden was short, with a dark bob and high cheekbones that seemed chiseled out of the rest of her face. She could have been a model, if she was taller. If models were still a thing, which they weren’t, as the world tried to recalibrate itself. The things we still had left to sell sold themselves.
We sat down at the table in their kitchen and made a list of songs. The programming was the hard part. The walls of the kitchen were white and gleaming, and between them, at the shining wood of the table, I took out paper and made them make a list. Songs that meant something to them. Happiness. Sadness. Love for each other. Hope for the future. All sorts of feelings. It was a lot to put on a song, to carry all that, but music had always been something therapeutic, both in actual psychology and in day-to-day use. And now, subliminally, it might be able to save them.
After they made the list, I gave them two interfaces. As I played the song, they were to pick out the emotion it made them feel from a long list, kind of like those that therapists show children when they want them to understand their feelings better, the kind with expressive faces and words beneath them. Then they said some part of the song three times, softly, to each other. Or one of them said it, it didn’t really matter, as long as it was spoken three times. When they heard that part, it would trigger the emotion they were supposed to feel. Simple. We did it over and over.
As the process went on, I noticed that Brad seemed sort of annoyed. I didn’t really know about what, since everything was going according to plan. He had one of those faces that everything is written all over. No poker face. Beth, his wife, was the one who was hard to read.
The session ended for the day, and Brad disappeared. Beth stood at the table as I punched keys in the interface, the last few details. The hard part was over. The rest would be wiring—red goes in red, yellow goes in yellow, white goes in white. I wouldn’t have to talk to the Shardens much after this, and for that I was grateful.
But Beth Sharden lingered over me as I pushed buttons.
“It will work?” she said. Then she added, a little more brusquely, “There’s a money-back guarantee, it had better work.” “Ma’am, our technology is cutting edge,” I said. I didn’t really know what that meant, beyond being a vaguery I had heard in a cell phone store or in some movie before the tragedy.
It was just another line that Xander had made me memorize, if anyone asked any questions.
“Things have been so hard. There’s just so much nothing. Going through the motions,” she said, looking out the window toward the ocean. She didn’t seem to want to meet my eyes. I didn’t want her to, either. “Without feeling, how do you know someone still . . . ?”
This was getting far above my paygrade.
“The technology should bring all the feelings back,” I said.
She murmured something to herself. I didn’t even try to hear it. “The technology,” I repeated, not knowing what else to say.
“It works every time.”
*
I was at the Shardens’ house for days. Drilling holes, mounting speakers, attaching wires. Xander had been right. Outside that awkward day when I had set the sensors for the Shardens’ unique needs, the job really was a piece of cake.
Beth Sharden wasn’t around much, but Brad seemed to be at the house often. Sometimes, he would come watch me work. Though he said he wanted to supervise to make sure things were going well, I knew he didn’t know any more than I did. There was some other reason he was standing there in the corners of the room.
“What do you do?” I asked him, one day, making conversation. I’ve never been great at small talk, and I didn’t much care about the answer, either.
“I don’t work,” he said. “I . . . before the tragedy . . . things went bad for me.”
“Uh, bad, how?” I said. He looked like the picture of health. “Mental health,” he said. “Bad-bad. It’s okay now. Beth—she arranges my doctors’ appointments. She makes sure I take my pills every day. I’m not sure how I’d get by without her, to be honest.” A clouded look came across his eyes, as if his mind was somewhere else. “But her being like a caregiver—it’s been so long since we’ve . . .” he started to say. “Excuse me?”
“I’m sorry. It’s inappropriate to tell you. I just, I guess . . . with you knowing all our feelings, all our songs, everything, you just seemed like someone I could tell.”
“Tell what?”
“There hasn’t been much intimacy between us since the tragedy,” he said. “Neither of us feel anything. We used to—never mind. You don’t want to know.”
I shrugged. I didn’t really want to know, but I could sense he was going to tell me anyway.
“She wants to have a baby, now,” he said. “And it’s impossible.”
“The technology—”
“I’m not attracted to her anymore. I don’t know that I ever was, really. I married her when things were bad. With my health and with the world. It seemed like a way I might survive it all.”
I didn’t say anything, just kept attaching wires to the right spots.
“The sex was good then, but I knew it wouldn’t last, wouldn’t make up for all that wasn’t good. But I was sick, and the world was ending. And now, the world is moving on, like it always does. And I don’t know what I’m doing here.”
“Where do you wish you were?” I said quietly, focusing on my job.
He looked out the window. We were on the side of the house that faced the ocean, in one of the guest bedrooms. Maybe the one that Beth wanted their child to grow up in, once they had one.
“Out there,” he said. “Anywhere. Beyond the ocean. On the ocean. It doesn’t matter, though. I’m here. I’m here for the rest of my life. I’m going to be tied to her, my feelings to hers, no escape, no way out.”
Brad looked at me. I looked back, for a second. There was something disturbing in his eyes. He leaned in, then, and pressed his mouth against mine, and the blue of his eyes disappeared as I closed my own. Then his tongue was in my mouth, and his hands were in my bright orange hair. And mine were in his. And we were pressed against the wall.
After his hands traveled over my clothes, feeling the swell of my breasts and the curve of my hips and the soft flesh of my ass, he stopped and stood back.
“That felt like something,” he said. “I think. Somewhere, I think I felt something.”
I shook my head. “We shouldn’t have done that. I’m not here to . . . I’m just here to put the speakers in.”
“Of course,” he said. He left the room.
*
“What if one of them doesn’t want to feel?” I asked Xander that night when he called to check in. I was out on the beach again, on the bay side, looking out over to where the animal disease center used to be. I thought about pictures of the Montauk Monster while I waited for Xander to speak. Hard beak, long spindly legs, body swollen from being in the water, from decay. “What the hell do you care? Wires in the holes, for God’s sake. What does it matter?”
“Imagine what hell it would be,” I said, “to be stuck in that house, listening to subliminal messages all day, if you didn’t really want to be there. Is what we’re doing wrong?”
“So that person leaves the house. Simple. Easy. We’re not doing anything wrong, Gemma. It’s not like we’re installing Guantanamo Bay torture devices in there.”
“No, just subliminal messaging,” I said quietly.
“They asked for it! They paid for it. What the hell has gotten into you? Just stick the wires in the holes and come home.”
“Sure thing, Xander,” I said. “I’m almost done.”
His voice lowered from the high register it reached when things weren’t going his way. He was a spoiled fuck, my friend. Now I’d agreed to what he wanted, and he was back to his affable self. “You find that creature you were talking about? The Montauk Monster?”
I looked across the bay, at the lights near where the old facility was. “No. I didn’t even look.”
*
Brad stayed away from the rooms I was working in. When Beth was home, she walked around the house, humming little snatches of the songs that were pumping, at subliminal levels, into some rooms. She smiled a lot more. I guess it was working. I guess she was coming back.
When I put the last wire in the last hole, I grabbed an interface and went looking for Brad. I found him out on the front swing. He was just sitting there, maybe trying to get away from the feelings he had never had for Beth. Beth wasn’t home. She worked, he didn’t.
I sat next to him on the swing. “I have a gift for you,” I said.
“What?” he sounded startled, like he couldn’t imagine what I might give him. I laughed. There wasn’t any happiness to it—it was just a dry bark, a reflex.
“Remember that day?” I said.
“I’ve tried my best to forget it,” he replied. “I’m sorry. I really am. I don’t . . . I don’t feel sorry. But I know I should be.”
“You don’t have to be sorry,” I said.
I picked up the interface and pressed some buttons.
“You looked out at the ocean, just before. Beyond the sea. Beyond the sea. Beyond the sea.” I repeated the words as I programmed the song of the same name into the interface.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“They’re at subliminal levels,” I said. “Your wife—when she hears it, it won’t make her feel anything because she’s not here for the programming. She won’t even notice. But you—you’ll have that moment when you get to escape.”
“Thank you,” he said.
“I’ve got to go,” I said. “I probably shouldn’t have done this.” “Thank you,” he said again.
I thought about how, for three minutes at a time, maybe a couple of times a day if he was lucky, he would be free.
*
“I’ve got another gig for you,” Xander said as we sat in our favorite bar, drinking our drinks.
“I’d rather not,” I said.
“You did such a good job last time,” he said. “And didn’t you like it, set up in that fancy hotel?”
“You know me,” I said. “Can’t hold a job. Never have been able to.”
Xander knew it was the truth, and he didn’t pressure me to change my mind. He’d paid me enough that I could cruise by, doing nothing much, for a few months. Which is exactly what I’d always done.
We kept drinking, the ice in our drinks melting and making them watery, the sun going from bright white and high in the sky to slanted from the horizon, orange. Xander started talking about his mother, his dead mother.
“I think this whole thing would make her proud,” he said, nakedly. It was the alcohol talking. Xander never talked about anything besides his get-richer schemes.
“What does it matter, now?” I asked. “If she were here, which she isn’t, she wouldn’t feel anything, anyway.”
He looked at me with his lips pursed. “Don’t you have any feelings, Gemma? I mean, you never did, you never talk about the people you lost, you never talk about wishing they were here, you never talk about wanting to make them proud or anything like that.”
I shrugged, swirling around my watery drink. “The world used to be built for people like you,” I said. “Now it’s for people like me. You might as well let me enjoy it.”
“Did you ever find your stupid monster?” he asked.
“Yes,” I replied, drunk. I lifted my glass. “To things not meant for this world.”
He toasted with me.
__________________________________
From The Grief Shop: And Other Stories from a Broken World by Alex DiFrancesco. Used with permission of the publisher, Seven Stories Press. Copyright © 2026 by Alex DiFrancesco.
