Riley and the Vortex

Probably the most unexpected consequence of being cheated on was Riley no longer had anxiety. Before, anxiety had hung over her all the time — less like a cloud, more like a layer of the atmosphere. "But it's just generalized anxiety, and it's not debilitating or anything like that," she'd say to people who hadn't asked, usually after a second glass. The resulting avoidance with which she'd generally approached life was probably why her nephew had asked if Riley was an NPC (video game terminology meaning non-playable character — basically implying she had a limited personality and no soul). But now? After being cheated on? Well, here she was, wasn't she? Sitting on a stage in front of a hundred people, grinning, waving (at no one) like she was in the regal seat of a long presidential motorcade — wearing a bib, drooling a little. A hotdog-eating contest! Her! Riley! On the way to her chair, she'd gone down the line of contestants and whispered obscenities in their ears, hoping to get in their heads. "Hot dogs are only phallic when you look at them long-ways," she'd said to the thin, salt-and-pepper-haired man that had won last year's contest. What was his name again? He was someone famous. "Try holding it vertically and then tell me what you see, bud."

His sputtering dismay hadn't pleased her as much as she'd hoped it would. But that wasn't all that surprising. Those dainty little sprouts of anxiety and other conditioned modesties failed to bloom because of a raging black hole inside her. But this same black hole also consumed more positive things, like joy. She couldn't even really be all that proud of herself for not giving a shit; if whispering in a man's ear about the symbolic androgyny of hot dogs didn't get you off, nothing would.

She was scanning the crowd, looking for him. In past years, she and her once-husband had tended to try and get as close to the stage as possible without shoving anyone, which usually meant ending up in the middle.

Not this year. This year, he lingered in the back. Not alone, either — he'd brought the mistress, his new girlfriend.

Riley had told herself she was prepared for this — there was nothing to be scared of while you're temporarily incapable of feeling fear. This whole ordeal was part of the plan: She would show him, in front of the multitudes of other weirdos that made a yearly tradition out of attending this spectacle, that he was nothing more than a Blob — a heartless mass stuffed into a human casing that could be replaced by tubes of pork. Look! These things, they're like you, asshole! Look at me, devouring them, becoming whole again!

The Blob's mistress-girlfriend-person recognized Riley up there on stage and became immediately upset. The nerve! She tugged at the Blob's arm; Riley couldn't read her lips, but the meaning was obvious. (She's here? Did you know she would be here? Come on, we're going. Now!)

However, Riley and the Blob were currently, unexpectedly, engaged in a staring contest. The intensity of his gaze seemed determined to communicate something to Riley. Guilt? Regret? Whatever it was, it seemed to be weakening her. With every passing second, those dainty little sprouts of anxiety grew faster, wilder, succeeding, to some extent, in exerting some control over their environment, releasing spores, spreading a pestilence of nausea and panic...

Then a microphone blared as the announcer took the stage, yanking Riley's attention back to the contest:

Riley and the Vortex! How many hot dogs could they handle?

***

She'd snapped at a bartender the other night. Not because she was drunk. Actually, she'd just ordered a fourth Sprite. The man tried to relate by saying that he too had recently gone sober. "Not as young as I used to be," he'd said by way of explanation, smiling sheepishly.

"How old are you?" Riley asked.

"Thirty-one."

"You're a fucking moron."

One of the most important parts of coping is, of course, developing theories. Something bad and unexpected happens to you because your worldview wasn't tuned properly. On some level, you should've seen it coming. So you develop theories. A lot of them, ideally. You won't make the same mistake again. You can't! You're hypervigilant, now.

"He always talked about how old we were," Riley had been saying to her best friends on the way to the bar. "And he's starting to talk about Gen Z and Gen Alpha the way old people do. 'Kids just aren't as smart as they used to be,' as if the two of us are in our seventies watching a news segment about the dangers of Fortnite, not our early thirties. He can barely read! 'The iPad Kid epidemic is a major issue,' he'd say while watching a video on his phone of a kid on an iPad. Ugh!"

Her best friends all agreed. It was like a chorus of hums. Validation in perfect harmony.

"I think that's probably what started this," Riley continued. "He feels old. And we're the same age, so it doesn't matter how I feel about it."

"He probably wants to be with someone younger so that he feels younger," said a best friend.

"That's what happens when they start feeling old," said another.

"It's the classic story of men," said a third. "As soon as they realize they're going to die someday, they start off on a lifelong expedition in search of the Fountain of Youth."

That's how the first hot dog tasted — like that first theory. For a moment, it seemed filling. A whole hot dog! But then it settled in in an unsatisfying way, failing to be truly substantial on its own. Riley's stomach bubbled a little; she had the sense that the hot dog was in there trying to plead its case like some sort of Hot Dog Martyr: "It was all me, I take all the blame, my brothers had nothing to do with this!"

Though maybe it was just her body protecting her: "See? Look, you're already full. You didn't think you could actually win this contest, did you? You can stop now. Hey, did you hear me? I said you could stop!"

The second hot dog tasted like indignation.

***

By around the six-minute mark, about two-thirds of the contestants had dropped out. The Previous Year's Winner, however, hadn't slowed down at all. Was this something he practiced? Something he was born with? If he was born with it, did that mean it was in his DNA? And what did that say about evolution, if so? Was it perhaps the case that society had so warped the way people lived that genetic traits were being selected according to local overeating contests? If so, would Riley's kids' kids' kids (none of whom would have to worry about having a deadbeat Blob for an ancestor) also have voracious, insatiable appetites? Would this be how mankind was finally destroyed? By the pork industry? Big Pork?

But maybe it was a skill the Previous Year's Winner had discovered after going through something traumatic. Riley felt a momentary pang of empathy for the man; she wondered if he too had been betrayed by someone he'd loved.

He eventually noticed her watching him (both still eating — her staring at him while stuffing her face, him now staring back at her while also stuffing his face). Wet flakes of bun stuck to the rim of his mouth as he leered at her; he then turned his hot dog into a vertical position and proceeded to devour it.

Oh, okay — in that case, Big Pork, please: Destroy us! Strike us down! Start with him!

Riley leered back, taking it as a challenge, and bit into a chunk of the next hot dog like a snake sinking its teeth into the head of a mouse.

***

Riley had always thought of herself as not really having a strong imagination. That is, she didn't consider herself to be creative, or clever, or particularly quick, and she rarely "saw" things in her head. It was something she was ashamed of, actually. She felt it made her boring, like someone who had been dulled by life, reduced to only grey tones and vague shapes.

Ah, but then, then she was cheated on. And not only did life become more vibrant (in a horrible way), but so too did her mental faculties. But rather than an enhancing of already-existing beauty, this vibrancy constituted a deep contrast of oversaturated colors. What was it like? — it was like everything was rotting, and also on fire.

Riley had a childhood friend that had now become a successful comedian (she often though herself "lucky" to have met him when she did, since they would never run in the same circles now, but he so genuinely adored their friendship that this opinion upset him to the point of crying, so she never said it to him again). It had been just last week that he'd gotten her into the live studio audience of a popular late night talk show on which he was being interviewed. Late night talk shows! There were few things Riley loved more, and yet as she sat in the studio, watching, laughing when instructed, she was utterly unable to be an attentive audience member for anything other than the show playing out in her head: namely, every single moment that she and the Blob had ever shared. If she could step through each one, she would eventually find the answer that illuminated everything. She often had to restart though, because her mind wanted to jump to the Blob's excuses; "We haven't had sex in thirteen days!" he'd shouted. "Before that? Fifteen? Before that? Twenty-three!"

Before that? Even longer, probably. But where it all started, where it really started, had to have been before the thirteen days prior to that, or the fifteen, the twenty-three. And she had to know. And so, over and over and over, in perfect technicolor, she watched.

It was similar, in a way, to how Riley felt when she began to lose count of how many hot dogs she'd eaten. (Thankfully, someone else would be tallying how many she'd eaten — an official hot-dog-counter with six pairs of eyes trained to recognize when any of the contestants were trying to pull a fast one, maybe try to chuck a 'dog over their shoulder.) Her brain needed something to focus on while she ate, so she tried to count by replaying the past seven-and-a-half minutes in her head.

It was undoubtedly a mistake. Eating an abundance of hot dogs while trying to summon to mind the abundance of hot dogs you've already eaten has a sort of compounding effect on how full you feel. As her body complained and her imagination faltered, she could envision only a blur of hotdog colors, and was quickly coming to hate that color.

(What color was it, anyway? Riley was now an expert on the subject. They were the color of American Eagle belts, though she didn't currently have the wherewithal to explain any further.)

***

You think you know someone. That’s what they always said in the movies. You think you know someone. But you do know them! It’s just that knowing them isn’t the same as knowing who they might become. “It’s that exact capacity for sudden, radical, inexplicable change that makes us human,” her mother had said over the phone. (She was a college professor, and had never quite learned that Riley did not also find comfort in dissociating with philosophy.) Riley responded, “But I’ve never changed suddenly, radically, or inexplicably. All of my changing has been extra-explicable!” God, it made her feel so fucking dumb! Her mother didn’t know it, but with that comment — that pseudo-attempt at beckoning Riley to join her as she abstracted away the pain by zooming out to a vantage point that made all the details as indistinguishable and tiny as looking at ants from the third floor — she’d made Riley feel a hundred times worse. Ah, so it was normal to suddenly become a horrible piece of shit. Duh! Did Riley not know that prior to this? Because, and this, this was the worst part about the whole situation — she hadn’t found out. Riley hadn’t caught him! The Blob blurted it out during an argument that had started with a disagreement over seed oils. How fed up did you have to be that seed oils made you decide to throw it all away?

The last hot dog tasted like nothing. Which was how Riley felt. Like nothing. Because what was stupider than nothing? Think about it: In the end, when there’s finally nothing, won’t you think, “All that for this? Really?”

***

"Riley Ridley!" said the announcer over the loudspeakers. Now that they were down to the final two contestants, he introduced them to the crowd. They'd been asked beforehand to write profiles of themselves to be read in the event they made it this far.

"Some of you may be surprised to see a woman up here," he continued, reading from the profile she'd written. "But don't be fooled! Inside this particular woman is a vortex so powerful, it consumes everything — even relationships!" He paused, most likely reading ahead. "After being betrayed by the man she loved more than anything in the world, a no-good — nope, can't say that — she signed up for this year's annual county hotdog-eating contest, an event attended by that — nope — by that man every year, without fail, like some sort of voyeuristic moth to a slovenly flame." He cleared his throat, muttered, "I think we were all just insulted — someone look up the word 'slovenly.'" He kept reading, "A man who henceforth shall be referred to only as the Blob! Hello, Blob! Hi, Blob! Enjoying your funnel cake, Blob? Riley's victory today, which by the will of the universe is without a doubt assured, shall be achieved by nothing less than pure, unadulterated, borderline pornographic tenacity. Look at her eating those wieners! Look at her! Look at her! Look at her! Look — okay, I'm not reading any more of this. Riley Ridley, ladies and gentlemen!

"And our other finalist, the previous year's champion and local legend, is of course none other than Billy Crudup! He writes: For every hot dog eaten in today's contest, I will be donating a thousand dollars to the town library. Everyone give it up for Billy Crudup!"

***

Riley realized something in those final, dizzying moments.

Mind over matter. As a mantra, it sounded like something people said in the hopes that it would hold true — a desperate attempt to manifest one's strength beyond its historical limits.

If there’s a will, there’s a way! I mean, come on. No unbroken person says such things. Which, by the way, is suspicious! Generally speaking, Riley did not try to emulate broken people.

But now, as the announcer took her by the wrist and raised her hand in triumph, declaring victory, Riley realized that she had, in fact, accomplished the impossible. She'd eaten — well, who knew how many hot dogs? Thirty? Forty? Six hundred? What surprised her (and maybe this was the revelation) is that she’d always thought that doing something unprecedented required unprecedented drive. But this wasn’t drive. She hadn’t been motivated to eat six or nine hundred hot dogs because she was motivated to eat six or nine hundred hot dogs. She wasn’t running toward something. She was running away. "Chase the tiger," her old track coach had once suggested. Well, there was no tiger — not one ahead of her, anyway. "Escape the tiger," however. That worked!

Riley glanced toward the back of the crowd and made queasy eye contact with The Blob. He looked mortified. Riley garnished their eye contact with a burp and a smirk. Now he looked sick.

Was Riley hallucinating, or was he actually turning green?

The Blob keeled over and released the contents of his stomachs. The crowd gave him a wide, disgusted berth, allowing Riley a clearer view of the spillage. By the looks of it? By the volume of it, the texture? It had to be at least six or nine hundred hot dogs. Maybe more.

How many?

Thirteen hundred, fifteen hundred, twenty-three!