Edith and Gomorrah by Heather Parry

It had been nineteen weeks since I’d seen Edith, and I was beset by a strange kind of guilt. We were in our early thirties; most of our friends had partners and kids and parents and all those things to keep their heads above water. Edith didn’t. Neither did I, but where I was resolutely independent, Edith was unwillingly so. She lived alone, in a flat of only a couple of rooms, and her neighbours were the hateful type who would never call in to see how she was or leave a spare marrow by her door. We had been close, and now felt less so. Via messages I had learned that she had a new job, a grunt role for a major tech company, which could be done from home, thus keeping her both safe and free from commuting. I knew this wouldn’t have helped the calcification that set in over that turgid, suffocating winter. And yet still I hadn’t called.  

One Saturday morning after two double espressos and a custard tart, I dialled her number and she answered, to my audible surprise. The conversation was slow starting, like a phone call with a child, and when I finally got her talking she kept pulling away from the phone to clear her throat. I tried to coax some information out of her by displaying my own vulnerability; I’ve been lonely, I said, without anyone to talk to. Her secret, uttered starkly, was YouTube; just something to play in the background while she pottered about the house. I knew Edith well enough to know what pottering consisted of: studying the written grammar, but never the speaking of French; making herself small and exact meals to eat eight times per day; and continuously switching the locations of all the plants in her flat. Inserted into this routine was this new job, which she said was to be “the intelligence behind the artificial intelligence” that powered most of the websites on which we all wasted our time. I prodded her for details, but she ignored my questions and instead said: Can you recommend a dehumidifier? The air in this flat is soggy.

By the time we were allowed to congregate and our friends could pull themselves away from the various responsibilities with which they’d busied themselves, we found that Edith had cultivated an entirely new neurosis: she wouldn’t go out when it was raining. It wasn’t just that she refused to walk to restaurants, or the pub, or that she made us get cabs everywhere on overcast days. It was more intense than that. If there was the merest hint of drizzle, she would not leave the house. Even humidity unsettled her, and the sound of running water, and by the time we saw her, she had already given up on either baths or showers, relying solely on dry cotton pads rubbed all over her body, leaving her chafed and permanently sour. 

With some effort over the next couple of weeks, we convinced her to meet us outside a bar for Simon’s birthday; outdoor table, small party, no physical contact at all. She sat at the head of the table, as if readying herself for a fast exit, and wouldn’t be enticed to share a bottle of red, not even when we sprang for her favourite; she asked the waitress to take away all empty glasses at her seat. I spoke about a series I’d started to watch online, a gentle show about two comedians fishing, again sharing in the spirit of coaxing; in little more than a whisper, Edith said she often left the algorithm to choose something for her, but she’d found her way to the black box recordings of crashing aeroplanes, and found them weirdly addictive. The response to this only closed her further inside her distant world. She was pale. She looked quietly haunted, consuming only dry crackers and salted almonds and licking her lips, which were red and sore. When asked directly, she told us her job was to look at everything that had been flagged up as disturbing content on a variety of platforms. Isn’t that all automated now? She smiled, then, with the bottom of her face only. Aye, that’s what they’ll tell you. Ignoring the rest of our questions, she stared across the road, where a rat feasted on the innards of a recently dead fox. She’d never been one to pull her eyes away from horror. 

Before the meals came, the blue sky gave way to a rolling cloud; when the first drop of rain hit the pavement she got up and ran to a taxi, leaving her coat and bag behind. While we ate our spaghetti alla puttanesca without her, I wrote AGORAPHOBIA on a napkin and underlined it three times, as if the rest of us had escaped the previous year without disorders of our own. 

I took the bag and coat to her place the next day. She didn’t buzz me in, despite answering the ringer, but a neighbour let me up. I banged on her flat door until she opened it a smidge then barged my way through, feeling there was some weight of responsibility on me. The sourness I’d smelled on Edith’s skin was resolute in every room. All the blinds were closed and she’d had air conditioners fitted; several, in fact, each running loudly and mechanically. There were huge blocks of rock salt on every available surface. Over the speaker system she was playing calls to the emergency services, an unsettling confluence of the blind panic of the callers and the strained reserve of those trying to help. I wordlessly offered her the bag and coat and she looked at them as if they were alien items. The air was so dry I could barely breathe, let alone speak. I stepped in and saw that the living room had become her office, the dining table loaded with screens, and each showed unwavering horror; an eight second clip of a man jumping from a building and landing on the concrete below; a photo of a mutilated corpse; symbols that I had seen in history books, daubed onto synagogue walls. It didn’t stop coming, this strange carousel, and at the end of each one was a small beep to indicate a failure. This is what she was paid to see. To miss a rating lost her pennies each time. She bit at the tips of her fingers while I stood there aghast, and as she chewed, one fingertip seemed to crumble, flesh to powder. She wouldn’t stop. I indicated to the screens, my disgust too clear. You can’t watch this, I stuttered, it’ll ruin your brain. It’s my job, she said, opening the front door for me to leave, a woman on the speakers begging for an ambulance. You’ve got to keep up. 

Three weeks later, she showed up at Simon’s door. She was ashen, so white she looked like marble, and wrapped up maniacally given the warmth of the day. She said little, and moved slowly, holding out her hand and removing the glove delicately. Her fingers were gone. Her palm had mostly come apart. There were chunks from her legs, her neck; she took off her woollen hat and the back part of her head was gone. I reached out to touch her and jolted at her texture; I looked down and saw that on my fingertips there was salt. 

We took her back to her flat, because it was the best prepared. We couldn’t bring moisture near her, so we went outside in shifts to rehydrate; we took to wearing Tyvek suits so as not to damage her with the oils of our skin. She demanded a screen set up near her face, a tablet on which she could watch the ghoulish videos she’d found on a subreddit. She had arranged these into a playlist, hosted on what seemed like a private server. If the battery died she wailed drily. We attended to her as best we could, keeping our eyes averted from things she consumed, but some days I couldn’t help but hear the noise leaking from her headphones. Our friends never mentioned their children, their parents. Within days Edith was chalky but still moving; soon she solidified but still breathed. Before the month turned, she was nothing but piles of white sodium chloride. Dust to dust. 

We didn’t know who to call, or what to do. The lives we’d built felt childish in the shadow of her death. Who do you tell, when there is no body to collect? What forms do you fill in when a person becomes mineral? We told ourselves there was no precedent, no clear path that we might follow. But the truth was we all felt culpable; that we might have saved her if we hadn’t left her so long. The white residue about the place was evidence, as well as our friend. 

We put her remains in a pan of pasta water, in the end, and she made it salty as the Mediterranean. She seasoned cavatelli from the inside out, and we spooned her over the crab and chilli butter sauce, and she fed eighteen of us, a wake of strange sorts. We toasted her with her favourite wine, and left the flat silently. I spent that night doubled over alone on my bathroom floor, with a black box recording to distract me from the cold sweats and stomach cramps. The next morning, I wiped a crust of salt from the corner of my mouth, and ordered an air conditioner on the internet.