An Unweeded Garden: An anthology of contemporary voices.
Posted in Uncategorized on November 30, 2009 by daveousityEdited by J. Rutherford Kensington, Emeritus Professor, Yale University
Introduction by Davis Phillips, Visiting Writer of Distinction, Yale University
Copyright of Greenfield Literary Publications, 2009.
16123 7th Avenue Suite 742, New York, NY 10013
Table of Contents
Page 3. Introduction by Davis Phillips
Page 4. Rebecca’s Death by Byron Westfield
Page 7 Jenny by Melissa Carragher
Page 10 Big Sleeping by Jacob Greenweiss
Page 11 Flipping Your Hair by Mason Franks
Page 13 A Metafictive Perfumed Garden by Thomas McGrath
INTRODUCTION
When J. Rutherford Kensington asked me to write the introduction for this collection, I was more honored than any other time in my life, except possibly when Marissa Sergeant took off her shirt for me in the eleventh grade, but then, my early sexual life has little to do with what you are about to read.
These stories will make you laugh, cry, scream in anger, and possibly commit suicide. They are that affecting. I’m being paid one thousand dollars for this introduction, no matter how long it is, or what I write. Therefore, I could, with a clear conscience and no fear of being fired, write I STILL LOVE YOU MARISSA SERGEANT in all caps and still get every cent of my money. I wonder if Marissa still thinks of me. I’m drunk right now and my waitress is bringing me a triple bourbon and coke, light on the coke. I may be writing this on a napkin. So please, enjoy the stories, and if you know Marissa Sergeant’s current location or phone number, don’t hesitate to contact me at dphils@yale.edu. Cheers and happy reading.
May 24, 2009
Rebecca’s Death
Byron Westfield
Rebecca doesn’t know why she died. She tends to think about death a lot, mostly because I make her. I don’t try to make her, but she says my existence is enough to turn all her thoughts toward death. She also says I’m like an author writing her into a story of misery and pain, the kind where she ends up jumping in front of a train and allowing a mass of phallic metal traveling at three-hundred miles-per-hour to dismember her in the ultimate act of female subservience. She says all men are like penis-obsessed trains and women are tied down to the tracks. I disagree with her, though. I am not all that obsessed with my penis, I travel closer to five miles-per-hour and I have no interest in dismembering her. Not that it matters anymore. She didn’t die jumping in front of a train. She knows that, at least. I don’t know how she died either. I never knew her until after she died, but now she follows me everywhere. I’ve tried to be as polite as possible, but no matter how nice and sweet and accommodating I am, I’m still a train intent on destroying her. I ask her why she stays with me.
“Sometimes I enjoy the destruction,” she says. “Dreams of dismemberment can be kind of fun now and then. And, dreams are all I have left.”
“You killed me,” she says one day during lunch. We’re at our usual lunch spot, a café with cheap coffees and bagels that Rebecca says would bring her back to life, if only she could eat them. I smile, like I think she’s being funny, but her expression is of the utmost seriousness.
“Maybe you didn’t kill me intentionally,” she says, “but through your actions, or the lack thereof, I died and my blood is on your hands. You’ll never be able to wash it off.”
“Not even with really expensive soap?” I ask. She doesn’t smile. Those who have died do not engage in mirth-related activities, I suppose, especially with the person who supposedly killed them. I almost ask her if she’s having her period or has missed a period, but then I remember she can’t have those anymore. I’m with her so much, she almost feels like my girlfriend.
“I’m talking about psychological blood,” she says. “I’m pretty sure I died a bloodless death.” She seems a little disappointed in me, like she expects me to understand her point of view. I’d love to understand what she’s talking about, but, alas, I’m don’t possess a piercing knowledge of being dead, and so instead I sip my coffee and try to look sympathetic. She tells me I’m pretty useless, and she’s right. She says she has to find more details. In her position, I think I’d rather stay ignorant about such things, but she’s adamant, so I graciously offer to help her. She glares at me, the image of superiority. She thanks me for my offer, says she doesn’t need my help at all, but that I’m welcome to accompany her on her quest. Ah, questing. I feel like I’m in elementary school again. I tell her this, and she hits me in the ribcage. Dead people can still punch relatively hard.
“Ouch,” I say. “You know, Becky, for an impenetrable steel train intent on destruction, my ribs feel pretty tender.” Once again, she fails to find any humor in my comment. Usually she doesn’t mind when I call her Becky, but I guess her current state of mind calls for extreme measures of unfamiliarity.
“My name is Rebecca,” she says. “You of all people should know. Now shut up.”
She punches me again, then says having sex would help—if it were possible. I’m ashamed to admit that this makes me a little aroused. She’s still very pretty with a great tan, considering she’s dead. Her brown hair kills me, it looks so soft.
“I always feel the most clairvoyant after an orgasm,” she says. “Or a bagel.” She suggests I masturbate while eating a bagel but my burgeoning erection has mysterious disappeared. I blame the mention of bagels. Once again she calls me useless. I ask her is she’s able to take her clothes off—a tight black sweater and skinny jeans. I’m not sure if that’s what she died in or not. She changes clothes now and then, but never in my view.
“I think I’ll just watch TV,” she says. “Impotence is one of my biggest pet peeves.”
I’ve never felt more alone than right now.
“You know,” I say, “sometimes I wish you were still alive.”
She glares at me.
She says, “You know, sometimes I wish someone else had killed me.”
Jenny
Melanie Carragher
Jenny and Rick have been together three years, though for Jenny it seems more like sixty. Everyday, she wakes up at 6:15 in order to make it to work by seven, while Rick stays in bed until he feels like getting up. At first his unemployment was kind of cute, but not anymore. Jenny has tried to break up with him three times already, but each time she lost her nerve. Rick has no idea about any of this. Jenny is beginning to hate herself.
“No, I’m not,” Jenny says. “I feel perfectly fine about myself.”
Jenny has considered suicide more than once, but, like with breaking up with Rick, she is also afraid of that.
“This is complete bullshit! I’ve never even thought about killing myself.”
Jenny lies to herself. Jenny lies to everyone.
Rick wonders who Jenny is talking to.
“Jenny, what the fuck, man? I’m trying to sleep.”
Rick calls Jenny “man” ad naseum, something which has caused Jenny to question her sexuality. She wonders if maybe in another life she was a man and Rick was a woman. Sometimes she fantasizes about dressing Rick up in women’s clothing.
“Honey,” she says. “Would you put on one of my dresses? Just to see how it feels?”
“Sure,” Rick says. “I was hoping you’d ask that. I try on your clothes all the time when you’re gone.”
“Jesus Christ,” Jenny says. “I did not just say that.” She looks around the room, but sees nothing. “Who are you?”
You’re not supposed to know I’m here, Jenny. You’re not supposed to hear me.
“Dude, man, come on,” Rick says.
“Oh, shut up,” Jenny says.
Jenny has a violent temper. Many of her friends consider her quite the bitch.
“They do?”
Yes, they do. If Jenny weren’t so caught up in her own affairs, if she stopped being so selfish, maybe she would realize the pain others feel.
“This is such bullshit,” Jenny says.
Poor deluded Jenny.
“I’m not deluded.”
Then why do you stay this way, stuck in a life you find boring? If that’s not delusion, I’m not sure what is.
“You’re just a stupid narrator. You’re not supposed to be intelligent. You just tell the story. Shut up.”
But you are the character. I create you. You are mine to love or hate, kill or let live.
“If you’re trying to scare me, you’re not doing a good job.”
“We’ll you doing a great job of scaring me,” Rick says.
“Shut up, Rick,” Jenny says.
Rick suddenly has a heart attack. Jenny looks at him, wondering if she should cry. What frail creatures we are, she thinks.
“That’s not what I’m thinking. I’m thinking you’re psychotic. Rick is dead!”
He was annoying. And like I said, I have the power of life and death over my characters.
“What are you going to do, kill me next?”
No, no, Jenny. You have nothing to fear.
“As long as I don’t annoy you.”
Yes, I suppose. One thing that really annoys me are questions, especially when asked in a disrespectful tone.
“What are you, my father? Stay the fuck out of my life.”
Jenny looks wistfully at Rick. Suddenly she feels her own heart surge.
“Hey,” she screams. “I’m healthy! I’m vegan! I eat 850 calories a day, I can’t die of a heart attack.”
Sorry, Jenny.
Goodbye.
Big Sleeping
Jacob Greenweiss
The look of a bookstore girl in a 40s movie, watching the hero walking out into the rain, most likely never to return. The bookstore girl wears glasses and has her hair put up in a severe bun, but after a few snappy verbal interchanges, the glasses are gone, her hair is down, and they’re kissing, pressing their faces against each other so hard it must hurt. No pleasure in closed mouth lip-smashing.
Brandy on the bookcase, two glasses, ice melting. They still smash. “I liked that, but you’re not trying too hard, are you?” the bookstore girl says. Pulled in again. Smashing. “It’s better when you help.” That’s Lauren Bacall, To Have and Have Not. Wrong Film. Everything swirls in beautiful indecision. There are no titles. No one knows who the book store girl is. Was.
“Do you have a first edition?”
“Of what?”
“Of you. You’re a dream, angel.”
“Thanks, Charlie.”
“That isn’t my name.”
“Well, Angel isn’t mine.”
None of these lines exist.
It always rains outside.
Flipping Your Hair
Mason Franks
Well, ya know, I get well leery when a geezer gets hard with me. It’s an invasion of my fuckin privacy, see. I’s just trying to get a peek at the football, and he was up in my face tellin me he shagged my lamb the night before. Geezer couldn’t shag his own mum. Had zits all up and down his neck, he did. But he was all like, “she was sqealin for it mate” and nobody shags my bird but me, so I had to stare the geezer down in his cunt face, watching to make sure the fit girl at the bar was watching me as I laid him a good one in his fuckin nose. Then the cunt decided to bleed on me so I may have kicked him in the face and stomach a few times just to make sure he remembered not to pull my girlfriend again. Saw the fit girl flipping her hair and chatting with her friend, looking shaggable as fuckin hell. Then the barman was like, “Oi, take this shit outside my pub,” so I fucked off outta there, leavin the cunt to bleed and maybe die on the floor. I hoped the fit girl might follow me, so I waited outside for a bit, but nothin. Shit, right? I woulda read her some of my poetry. Don’t get acting like I’m a prancy fag cause I write poems. Mine’s street shit, ya know? None of your love and roses and shit. Bloke told me rhythm isn’t poetry anymore and rhymes is nothing but I fucked him up for that. Right, so no fit girl, no shot at pulling her. So I just walked myself back to my gaff and told my wife to get outta the place, and go whore herself out in Birmingham or some shit place. She yelled a bit but I was reciting my poetry in my mind so I didn’t hear nothing. Finally she threw on her coat and said she was goin out, probably to find the bastard I fucked up. I wondered how the sex’d be with him bleedin everywhere. I decided maybe I’d write a poem bout that. Dreams was good that night.
A Metafictive Perfumed Garden
Thomas McGrath
When writing a sex scene, you can’t be too modest. No lovers kissing behind closed doors shit. You don’t want to sound like you’re a blushing Victorian or something. You’re in the twenty-first century for chrissake. Every day of your life you hear and see so much shit you’re jaded beyond belief. Instead of a heart, you’ve got a callous. You’re beyond feelings. You glare at puppies, even. And you sure as hell better not ever end a scene with an embrace and then start the next paragraph with “afterwards,” leaving what happened to the readers imaginations. Readers don’t have imaginations. You have to get grimy and gritty and as realistic as possible, without sounding pornographic. Your readers aren’t supposed to be titillated by the sex scenes—we’re not harlequin romance novelists here, are we?—so you have to sound as detached as possible. Your characters are fucking. You don’t care. You don’t really know who they are anyway. And please, no characters-talking-while-copulating, okay? ”Fuck me, fuck me,” just sounds so stupid. No one says that. Also, no “making love” or “giving pleasure”. You’re not writing a sexy sex scene. It’s realistic. It’s high brow. Well, not too high brow.
He reamed her. That’s a good sentence. No one can accuse you of romanticizing anything there. Let’s continue:
He reamed her.
She cried out.
“God,” she said.
“Christ,” he said.
The reaming continued. The screaming continued.
That’s not a bad scene. You have the basic elements at least. Maybe using “he” and “she” makes things too personal though. Let’s try something else:
Character A fucks Character B.
Character A enjoys it.
Character B wants it to end.
Character C walks into the room, drinking a beer.
Character C says, “Mind if I join?”
Character A and Character B scream, “No!” at Character C, who leaves the room in tears.
(When character C arrives, and suggests a threesome, things start getting a little pornographic. You want to avoid that. Try something that seems less like a fantasy.)
Character A straddles Character B in the bright, sickeningly white glare of the fluorescent lights, the grime and sweat of their bodies mixing as they crush together animalistically. They grunt and moan and roll on the shit-brown carpet, gravelly dirt sticking to them as they move. Outside the sun goes behind the skyscrapers, but still they screw in the harsh whiteness, like laboratory rats moving down a maze toward swinging turbines and certain death. More grunting, more moaning. Gruntingmoaningsexpainallisemptiness. Character A’s back arches and then loosens as they collapse into a worthless heap. The lights go out above them. Darkness, the color of death.
Yes, that’s a good scene. No titillation there, unless you have some seriously screwed up fetish-mongering readers. Make everything as realistic and ugly as possible, and you’ll succeed every time.
I hope you’ve taken this advice to heart. If not, perhaps you should go back to Victorian England and cry in your tea. That’s what Character C is doing right now.
About The Authors
Byron Westfield has been dead for eleven years. A tragic train accident took his life. He lives in Brooklyn, in Salinger-esque conditions, producing only six pages each year for public consumption. Rumors abound that he has written a three thousand page manifesto, purported to be the seminal work on life after death. Alas, such claims are unsubstantiated as of yet. We can only hope they are true.
Melanie Carragher is a writer of short fiction. This is her first published work. She does not live in Brooklyn, but keeps an apartment there for the sake of appearances. However, she dislikes people.
Jacob Greenweiss has written seven books of poetry, the last of which, Visions, has been met with international acclaim for his frank portrayals of the metrosexual identity. His first short story collection, Mothballs and Perfume, will be published this fall. He lives in Brooklyn.
Mason Franks the ill-chosen pseudonym of one of America’s finest young writers. His reportage has appeared in The Paris Review, among other journals. He lives in London and Brooklyn.
Thomas McGrath is a staff writer for three news publications. He does not ream, but has no metaphysical qualms with hard anal sex. When not in Brooklyn Heights, he spends much of his time molesting succulent cabbages and his students at a small New England liberal arts college. He prefers brunettes, under nineteen, but has found ecstasy with a twenty-three year old blonde before. He believes extracurricular sex should not have any affect on a student’s grade. He neither flunks his conquests (a common film plot device) nor gives them As. He considers himself an enlightened, fair-minded professor and an excellent man. He enjoys cabbage soup and cole slaw.
Hannah’s Wedding (A Story)
Posted in Uncategorized on June 8, 2009 by daveousity(This story is dedicated to my friend Hannah–and that guy she’s marrying. May they forever be happy and enjoy chicken salad all the days of their lives).
As Davis Larsen pulls into a country club parking lot in a Dewey, Oklahoma—a town he’d never heard of until a few weeks before—he feels a strange sense of foreboding. Normally, Davis would never go anywhere like Dewey. He prefers cities, excitement, and late night Chinese food, not the pastoral pleasures of watching cows and rolling hay, or whatever it is you do with hay. He’s in Dewey for a wedding. He’s never approved of marriage—it seems so old-fashioned and somehow wrong—mostly because of his misguided pseudo-hippy ideals but also because no one has ever been dying to marry him. The only proposal he’s had was at age five, Katie something, and he refused her because of her unfortunate clothing taste. Her Sesame Street shirt was acceptable but the Little Mermaid sneakers were just too much.
His old friend Hannah is marrying her longtime boyfriend. What is the boyfriend’s name? Davis can’t remember. He has the invitation somewhere, but looking for it would require him to move, and the car seat feels much too comfortable at the moment. Alex? Alfred, maybe? Alessandro? Something along those lines. At one point, two years before, Hannah had almost seemed like Davis’s little sister, but now, he hasn’t seen her in a year and a half and here she is getting married to this Alphonso fellow, most likely a dodgy Italian lover-boy of some sort. They’ve already married, he remembers. The wedding has already happened. He’s just here for the reception.
After one last snuggle against his reassuring car seat, he exits the car and walks toward the country club’s main entrance. The car isn’t even his. His older brother drove him to Dewey. At 24, Davis still doesn’t have enough money to afford food, let alone a car.
At the door, two white-clad waiters await him.
“Sir?” one of them asks. They both seem to disapprove of Davis’s jeans and black t-shirt, but Davis hasn’t been to too many wedding receptions, and dressing up seems like too much trouble. Anyway, he’s a writer, just back from New York, so Hannah and Alexi and all of their shocked guests will just have to deal with it.
“I’m here for the Bolinger wedding,” Davis says.
The waiter who said “sir” so snobbishly leads Davis into a reception room, where thirty or so people in fancy clothing stand, talking and laughing. Davis feels alone, excluded, a stranger.
Then he sees Hannah. In her flowing white wedding dress, she looks beautiful. She stands by the door, arm in arm with Armand, smiling. Just beautiful. She sees him.
“Davis!” she says. She walks over as quickly as her wedding gown will allow and hugs him. Davis smells perfume and—strangely—chicken salad. A goddess in white, smelling like a sandwich. That’s the modern age for you, Davis laments. When white clad princesses have to work at sandwich shops in order to earn a livelihood, there’s no wonder the world is going to hell.
“You need to come say hi to the groom,” Hannah says. The groom. Why can’t she just say his name? It’d be so much easier for everyone if Davis just knew his stupid name. Not that the groom is stupid, he just has a damnably obscure name.
The groom swoops over, also smelling of chicken salad, though he also exudes Old Spice. Davis and the groom exchange hellos, but since, obviously, they’ve met multiple times before—and the groom’s name is on the wedding invitation—the groom doesn’t introduce himself, and Davis doesn’t want to make a fool of himself by saying, “How ya doin’ Arnie?” and then having the groom say, “It’s not Arnie, it’s Archibald.” That would be more mortifying than anything.
After Hannah and the groom leave to go greet other guests, Davis wanders the party. He still recognizes no one. What happened to all of their mutual friends?
“She’s so beautiful,” he hears a woman’s voice say. Apparently he has unknowingly walked into the women’s zone of the reception room, where the only topic allowed in the bride’s apparel.
“Oh my god, like, you said it, she’s beautiful!” a girl says. The maid of honor?
Another: “I hope I’m that beautiful at my wedding.”
“I’d rather go blind than stop looking at her. She’s so…beautiful.”
The women notice Davis. One of them smiles.
“What do you think? Isn’t the bride beautiful?”
Davis doesn’t want to be involved in the conversation. He wants to sink into nothingness.
“Yes,” he says. “Beautiful.”
After this, he makes a quick escape to the male side of the room. The first words he hears are, “Man, she’s totally hot.”
Back to the female side.
“And I don’t just mean beautiful, I mean beautiful beautiful.”
Male side.
“Way hot!” High fives all around.
Davis wonders if he can stand in the middle of the room in a way where no one will notice him being all alone.
He decides to leave instead.
As he walks out of the reception room door, he hears a swish behind him. He turns to see Hannah.
“You’re leaving?” she asks.
“Yeah, I have to, um, go see my friends.”
“In Dewey.”
“Yeah, I know, uh, a lot of people here. Anyway, I wish you and Andrei the best.” As soon as he says Andrei, he knows he’s made a mistake. Hannah’s smile turns into a quizzical frown.
“Andrei?”
“Your husband.”
“Alan,” she says.
“Oh, right. Well, at least I got the first letter right.”
“I can’t believe you forgot his name.”
“I prefer my Allens to spelled A-L-L-E-N.”
“Oh, and do you have many Allens?”
“Only a few, here and there.”
Hannah laughs, and Davis knows any animosity he may have caused by forgetting Alan’s name is gone now.
“How do I look?” Hannah asks, spinning around supermodel-style.
“Very elegant,” Davis says. “Stunning, really.”
Hannah hugs him once again, and Davis savors one last smell of chicken salad before letting her go. He feels hungry, suddenly.
They say their goodbyes and Davis walks out of the country club and back to his brother’s car. His brother is reading a book about slums and listening to a thrash metal song about eviscerating people.
“How was it?” his brother asks, turning down the music.
“Fine,” Davis says. “I saw everyone I needed to see.”
“Did you ever remember the groom dude’s name?”
“Uh, yeah, Armando.”
“Awesome, man! That’s almost like being named Armadillo!”
They pull out of the parking lot and begin the drive back to Tulsa.
“Yeah,” Davis says, ignoring his brother’s comment, “the bride was beautiful.”
Greenpeace
Posted in Uncategorized on June 2, 2009 by daveousity(My best short story from the New School)
I’ve never seen Mara from closer than three-hundred feet, but last summer we were in love. We did everything, went everywhere, I even asked her to marry me. Somehow it all disintegrated. If I had ever seen her face, I would say I still remember the way she looked. If I saw her on the streets now, I’d never recognize her. Perhaps she left New York to escape the bad memories. I’m sure she’s somewhere lonely right now, discontented.
* * *
There are three reasons why I was in Washington Square the day I saw Mara.
1) I needed a bottle of wine for a dinner party that night. I never go to exciting dinner parties, only to the parties of old college friends, where, at twenty-seven, I’m the only non-married person. Some of them have kids, and the ones who don’t, want them. I don’t have very much success conversationally. The topics are always the same. What brand of baby formula do you use? Oh, it was so difficult cleaning my suit after the baby spit up his carrot mush on the sleeve. The booties we bought were too small for the baby’s feet, and can you believe, the store wouldn’t take them back! Et cetera. Whenever I actually do say something at these parties, everyone waxes nostalgic on how care-free and easy life was in those youthful days of bliss. I don’t usually feel too much bliss, though.
2) I had to pick up a sweater from the cleaners, so I could wear it to the party. I’ve never been a sweater person, but for these married-person dinner parties, I either wear a sweater or a dress shirt and slacks. When I finally made it the cleaners though, they’d lost the sweater.
3) Hereditary high cholesterol. I was on medication, and I needed to refill my prescription. I’ve never been the most organized person, and I’d been out of medicine for two weeks almost, but still hadn’t made it the pharmacy. If I had gone to the pharmacy a few days before, maybe everything would have worked out differently.
* * *
Mara works for Greenpeace. She hasn’t been paid yet, but she’s supposed to make some kind of salary, she thinks. The recruiters were a little hazy about the details. She thought maybe she’d be riding around in speed boats, yelling through bullhorns at world-destroying, death-causing oil tankers, or maybe leading protests outside of meat production plants, condemning the slaughterers to lives of misery and remorse. Instead she’s walking around Washington Square with a clipboard, asking strangers whether or not they know about the environment. She feels her talents are being wasted. The recruiter told her that her BA from Smith would help her on the fast track to promotions. Within a few months of service, she envisioned herself leading troops of fellow eco-saviors into battle. She was Class President her junior year at Smith, so she has relevant leadership experience. Why wouldn’t Greenpeace want her on the front lines?
“You’re wasting your time,” her mother said when Mara first told her about her job. “All this education I paid for and now you go waste it trying to save the cows. A few years ago you would beg and plead for me to make you hamburgers.”
When Mara talks to her mother, she can’t help feeling like a hypocrite. She was quite the hamburger-eater in high school. Her mother always bought the best meat and toasted the buns with butter. As Mara stands in the park, she has a fleeting urge to eat a burger, but then she would be just like the murderers. Meat eaters are murderers. Her mother is a murderer. She told her mother as much the weekend before she left for New York to take the job. Her mother wasn’t very happy about it.
“I didn’t raise you for twenty-two years for you to stand here today calling me a killer,” she said. Mara hadn’t known how to respond to that statement then, and she still doesn’t. Her mother started crying
“You’ve made me a failure as a mother,” she said.
Mara was too angry to contradict her. She hasn’t spoken to her mother since. Her mother refused to say goodbye when Mara left, and Mara assumes her mother probably still doesn’t want to talk to her.
No one else wants to talk to her, either. She tries to act pleasant when approaching prospective recruits, but everyone either glares at her or completely ignores her. She starts to think her mother may have been right, after all.
She sees a young guy wearing a purple NYU t-shirt walking in her general direction. She smiles what she hopes is a friendly and encouraging smile and takes out her propaganda pamphlets.
“Hi, how do you feel about the environment?” she asks.
“I don’t,” the guys says.
“Well, I’m a member of Greenpeace, and we’re trying to spread the word about how we can help the environment. Would you like a pamphlet?” By the time she finishes her recruitment speech, the guy has already walked past her, angry like everyone else she meets. She puts the pamphlets back in her backpack and sits down on a bench, feeling sorry for herself.
From across the park she hears one of her fellow Greenpeace recruiters—a girl wearing a green bandana to match her green shirt—screaming at some guy in a black t-shirt. She can’t really hear what the girl is saying, but it sounds like No thank you. Or maybe Oh, thank you, but no thank you seems more reasonable. The stress must be getting to some of the other recruiters too. The black-shirt guy walks away from the girl, who’s still screaming. Mara promises herself she’ll never act that hysterical about anything, from Greenpeace to an impending apocalypse, assuming an apocalypse will ever happen. She’s hazy about that sort of thing. After a minute or two, the girl stops screaming, thankfully, and Mara once again focuses her attention on recruitment.
More people walk by, more people ignore her. She looks for the nearest trash can.
* * *
Washington Square. Afternoon. A normal-ish hipster girl comes up to me as I’m walking and asks me how I am. I assume she’s just being friendly, so I say I’m fine. She starts walking with me, which seems a little strange but I don’t say anything. It’s a nice day for a stroll. Maybe she has the same idea. Then she takes out her Greenpeace sign up forms and asks me how I feel about the environment. I don’t want to get caught up filling out forms—who really does?—so I say, “No thank you.” She stops and stares at me.
“No thank you?” She asks. “You say ‘no thank you’ to the environment? Do you have feelings? I bet you don’t even have a heart!”
I want to tell her that, yes, I don’t have much of a heart left, but I doubt she’d understand, so instead I begin walking away. She continues to scream, “No thank you?” for the twenty seconds, until I manage to turn a corner and bask in the relative safety of an office building. After a few minutes of hiding from the hipster girl’s wrath, I venture back into the park, trying not to look at anyone wearing green. That’s when I see Mara.
* * *
The hospital room is blue, not white. I’ve never been to a hospital until now, and I just assumed they were white. At first I’m not sure why I’m here, but the nurse tells me I’ve had a heart attack. Not a bad one, she says, not life threatening, but I still need to rest. The nurse is pretty. She reminds me of Mara. Maybe not the exact Mara that Mara is, but of some Mara.
Maybe my nurse is Mara. Maybe she’s doing an internship at the hospital, trying to pass the time in these weeks after our fated meeting. Maybe she tells me about herself in my dreams. I don’t ever remember my dreams, but maybe different elements of them are breaking free from my subconscious and invading my thoughts.
I can’t be sure of anything.
Friends call me to ask how I am. I say I’m in the hospital though they already know that. I don’t tell them anything more.
In the hospital. In the hospital for an old man’s disease. Is it a disease? An ailment? Both?
My nurse gives me a glass of water. She never stops smiling, even when she’s gone. I envision her walking to her car whenever her shift ends, still smiling. I don’t know what she’s smiling about. Mara smiles a lot too.
Morphine. In the hospital with an old man’s disease, but I have morphine. Thank you, nurse. She says it’s not morphine, just an IV, but I’m not sure if I believe her. How can I believe someone when they’re pretending to be Mara?
I ask the nurse what her name is.
“No thank you,” she says. No thank you? Strange name. I ask her what she means.
“I’m not thirsty,” she says. I begin to wonder if she’s the one on the IV. Then I notice I’m holding my glass of water up to her face, my hand shaking and the water spilling on her uniform. I apologize and move the water away from her, right into my lap. The nurse wipes some of it away with a towel, then says she’ll get me a new hospital gown. She leaves the room. I stay in bed.
My chest doesn’t hurt at all, but my feet do for some reason. Maybe they’re asleep? Maybe I actually had a foot attack, not a heart attack. Maybe maybe maybe.
Maybe I almost died.
Maybe that would have been better?
I don’t remember falling down. I don’t remember feeling pain. I don’t even remember my heart imploding. What was I doing when it happened?
Mara comes back into the room. Oh, Mara. So beautiful. Wait, no, no, sorry, not Mara. The nurse. Close enough. She’s almost Mara. Her uniform sparkles like pearls, rubies and sapphires interwoven together into a bleach-white mosaic. She hands me a new gown and puts another glass of water on my bedside table.
“Would you like the TV on?” she asks. I say, “No thank you.” She turns off the light and tells me to sleep well. I do.
* * *
Brown eyes, brown hair, white skin. You think only in colors when you think of her. Usually brown, with maybe just a tinge of red now and then, and of course the green shirt. You’ve never been the most observant person, and even with Mara you can’t remember much of how she looked. You remember her though. You saw her across the park. She threw her clipboard in a trash can and started walking toward Sixth Avenue. You started running, even though you’ve been having chest pains lately, and your doctor suggested laying off exercise for a few weeks, but here you are sprinting across the park like an idiot. She’s walking away from you, but not at too fast a pace, and you catch up to her before she makes it out of the park. You’re breathing a little hard but your heart feels fine.
You remember the specifics of your first conversation too, her taking the Greenpeace clipboard back out of the trash can and asking you to join Greenpeace, you taking a breath and preparing a witticism of the likes she’d never heard before. A witticism you never say. Instead of something rude, something acerbically funny that would have her cringing and questioning her meaning in life, all you say is, “sure.” Sure. You pride yourself on having a vocabulary on par with dictionary, and all you can think to say is “sure.” She smiles and gives you the paperwork and you fill it out, then ask her what she’s doing after work. She says she doesn’t know. You tell her you do. She smiles. If you smoked, this would be the perfect time to light two cigarettes, give her one, and together share a bonding experience, focused more on eye contact and rhythmic inhaling and exhaling than on conversation. But since you don’t smoke, you’re forced to continue talking.
“I saw you across the park,” you say. Another inane comment. You wonder what the hell is wrong with you.
“I saw you too,” she says.
You tell her you’re reminded of that old song from South Pacific. “One Enchanted Evening.” She doesn’t know it, so you half sing/ half talk the chorus. “One enchanted evening, you will see a stranger across a crowded room.”
She points out that Washington Square is hardly a room. You can’t do anything but agree with her. You decide to make more small talk.
“How do you like Greenpeace?” you ask.
“I’m quitting,” she says. “Right now. Do you want to go somewhere?”
So much for your smooth seductive repertoire. You’re a little disappointed with her. Asking “do you want to go somewhere” isn’t the most original line ever.
But you say, yes, you want to go somewhere.
* * *
Mara doesn’t come up to my apartment the first time I ask her. Or the second or third times either. She’s busy the first time, the second time her sister is coming to visit the next morning and she needs sleep, and the third time she makes some unmemorable excuse, probably about being tired again. All three of these interchanges happen our first night together. I’m very resilient.
The fourth time I ask her, she acquiesces. This is ten minutes after the third time.
We don’t kiss as soon as we enter my apartment. In fact, we don’t kiss for the first thirty minutes or so, until we’ve talked about who we are and how we feel about our purposes in life. The usual stuff. She asks me how I knew from across the park that I needed to talk to her.
“I think it was your shirt,” I tell her.
“There were twenty other people wearing the same shirt,” she says.
“Yes,” I say, “but you wore it so well.”
The look of a bookstore girl in a 40s movie, watching the hero walking out into the rain, most likely never to return. The bookstore girl wears glasses and has her hair put up in a severe bun, but after a few snappy verbal interchanges, the glasses are gone, her hair is down, and they’re kissing, pressing their faces against each other so hard it must hurt. No pleasure in closed mouth lip-smashing.
I’m not smashing my face into Mara’s but I can see that bookstore girl look in her eyes. Sad, yes, but more bittersweet, really. I wonder if she thinks we’re just having a one-night stand—or a one evening stand, since it’s not even dark outside yet. I hope we’ll have more than just one evening. She bites my lower lip roughly, and I can tell I’ll probably have some minor abrasions and a swollen lip the next morning.
I keep thinking about the bookstore girl. Mara is a bookstore girl, a nurse, a Greenpeace agent, everything. I know I should try to figure out what I am, but metaphysical introspection will have to wait. She kisses my neck and wraps her legs around mine.
“Hold me,” she says. I hold her.
“Love me,” she says. I love her.
* * *
My Mara nurse hasn’t returned yet. When I woke up this morning, some old ogre of a nurse glared at me and told me to go back to sleep. I wasn’t tired anymore, though. I told her that. She didn’t say anything, just messed around with the IV for a minute. I fell back asleep. I think the bitch drugged me. When I woke up again, I was alone. I spent the rest of the day staring at the walls and singing to myself. I don’t think I made any sound though. I sang to myself in my thoughts. Now I’m in the dark, wondering about Mara, my nurse, my health, and—strangely—the apocalypse. Death seems like an apocalypse. I was on the brink, I almost joined the dead, the apocalyzed. Sitting in dark creates an urge in me to make up words.
Supposedly my heart attack happened because of high cholesterol. Thanks, Dad. Thanks, Grandpa. My Grandpa died at fifty-eight from a heart attack, my dad at forty-nine. I should have known it would happen to me too. But why at twenty-seven? I should have had at least twenty more years before any problems.
My Mara nurse comes back in, but she’s no longer smiling. I wonder what happened.
“Hi,” she says, “How are we today?” Ah, yes. The medical we. Like the Royal we, except used by nurses attempting to sound pleasant instead of by purple-robed kings.
“We’re fine,” I say. “And how are we?”
“We’re quitting,” she says. Jesus. Why are Maras always quitting? Is there something about the genetic inner workings of Maras that makes them so unstable?
“And why are we doing that?” I ask.
“We’re disillusioned. Also, we’re sick of male doctors treating us like children. You’re my last patient.”
“I’m honored.” I try to reach out to touch her arm in sympathy, but as I lift my arm, my side erupts in pain. The nurse grimaces, and asks if I’d like something to eat or drink.
“Not right now,” I say, “but maybe we could meet up once I get out of here and have a burger?”
“I’m a vegetarian,” she says. “Sorry.” She pats my head. A sign of affection? “You’ll be discharged in a few days.”
She turns off the light.
“Sleep well,” she says.
This time I don’t.
* * *
All in all, Mara and I had four weeks together, maybe the best and worst time of my life, if you’ll forgive the Charles Dickens allusion. We spent our first morning at a coffee shop she liked, and even with a bunch of cell phone-wielding business people yelling about market rates and bond strength and other worthless topics. She told me over and over again how wonderful she felt. Sometimes I’d open my eyes while we were in bed together and she’d have her eyes closed, her face full of pleasure and yearning. These images are what I remember now, mostly vague and unformed, but also specific and lovely. “Our song” was “Saturday in the Park” by Chicago, which was a bit too 1970s for my tastes, but she knew all the words. I felt like “One Enchanted Evening” should be our song, but she said no show tunes were allowed.
Our time together didn’t end with an epic yelling fight. I can’t ever remember us fighting. She never threw any vases at me—neither of us were very fond of vases—and of course I never hit her. I think, fickle as it sounds, after a few months she began to fade from my mind, to the point where I couldn’t salvage anything. Our last moments together were full of tears, though neither of us cried. Psychological tears, the kind that wash over your emotions even while you try to stay calm and composed.
“Where will you go?” I asked her. She never responded. She didn’t want me to know where she was going, because then I would have searched until I found her, and in that searching, lost myself.
* * *
You see a girl across the park. Brown haired, wearing khaki shorts and a bright green shirt, holding a clipboard. You’ve sworn off Greenpeace people, but this girl looks like the type you can’t swear off. You start walking over to her, but she’s leaving. She throws her clipboard in a trash can and walks toward Sixth Avenue. You know you shouldn’t be doing any strenuous exercising, but you start running across the park, hoping to catch up with her. She’s too far away and walking too fast and your chest is pounding. Pounding. With the same numb almost-pain you’ve felt before. You try to keep moving, but you feel something tensing in your chest, almost to the breaking point. You can’t go on. You stop running and try to breathe, waiting to be swept into unconsciousness, but nothing happens. The pain is still there, tearing at your chest, like your heart is ripping apart. You’re on your knees, wheezing, clutching the area below your throat, wishing to fall into unconsciousness. Why is it taking so long? You close your eyes, thinking that might ease the pain, but then you remember the girl. Where is she? From your prostrate position you fight off the haze that covers your vision and you try to find her, scanning every direction possible for any hint of brown and green, but she’s gone.
Rebecca’s Death
Posted in Uncategorized on June 2, 2009 by daveousity(This is from my second semester at The New School)
Rebecca doesn’t know when she will die. She tends to think about death a lot, mostly because I make her. I don’t try to make her, but she says my existence in her life is enough to turn all her thoughts toward death. She also says I’m like an author writing her into a story of misery and pain, the kind where she ends up jumping in front of a train and allowing a mass of phallic metal traveling at three-hundred miles-per-hour to dismember her in the ultimate act of female subservience. She says all men are like penis-obsessed trains and women are tied down to the tracks. I disagree with her, though. I am not all that obsessed with my penis, I travel closer to five miles-per-hour and I have no interest in dismembering her. She tells me this makes no difference. No matter how nice and sweet and accommodating I am, I’m still a train intent on destroying her. I ask her why she stays with me.
“Sometimes I enjoy the destruction,” she says. “Dreams of dismemberment can be kind of fun now and then.”
Usually we are not like this. We don’t have too many of these dismemberment conversations, but today she believes God—or the gods, or nature, or whatever spiritual force exists—has sent her a sign. Last night she had the train dream again. She usually has it once a week, but this week is different. She had the dream three days ago too, so she should have had four more days before the next dream. Two train dreams in the same week hasn’t ever happened before now. Also, she saw on the news this morning that two trains in Japan crashed into each other and all aboard were killed in an explosion the size of our twelve-story apartment building.
Because of this, she knows that she will die. She doesn’t know when, but that doesn’t matter. She has conclusive evidence that death will occur and her tragedy will be complete.
“You will kill me,” she says during lunch. We’re at our usual lunch spot, a café with cheap coffees and bagels that Rebecca calls her life force. I smile, like I think she’s being funny, but her expression is of the utmost seriousness.
“Maybe you won’t kill me intentionally,” she says, “but through your actions, or the lack thereof, I will die and my blood will be on your hands. You’ll never be able to wash it off.”
“Not even with really expensive soap?” I ask. She doesn’t smile. Those marked for death do not engage in mirth-related activities, I suppose. I want to write her behavior off as normal depression, stress or maybe dissatisfaction with me. I also wonder if she’s having her period or has missed a period, but we never discuss those things. She says her body is her possession and that I don’t understand. She’s right. I don’t understand at all. I’ve decided over time to give her privacy about these matters. We usually get along very well, and as far as I know she enjoys living with me.
“I’m talking about psychological blood,” she says. She seems a little disappointed in me, like she expects me to understand her point of view. I’d love to understand what she’s talking about, but, alas, I’m don’t possess a piercing knowledge of interpreting morbid violent-death dreams, and so instead I sip my coffee and try to look sympathetic. She tells me I’m pretty useless, and she’s right. She says she has to find more details. She can’t continue living without knowing when she will die. I’d rather stay ignorant about such things, but she’s adamant, and so I graciously offer to help her. She glares at me, the image of superiority. She thanks me for my offer, says she doesn’t need my help at all, but that I’m welcome to accompany her on her quest. Ah, questing. I feel like I’m in elementary school again. I tell her this, and she hits me in the ribcage.
“Ouch,” I say. “You know, Becky, for an impenetrable steel train intent on destruction, my ribs feel pretty tender.” Once again, she fails to find any humor in my comment. Usually she doesn’t mind when I call her Becky, but I guess her current state of mind calls for extreme measures of unfamiliarity.
“My name is Rebecca,” she says. “You of all people should know that by now. Now shut up.”
I’ve suggested she go to an analyst a few times, but she says analysts are for people who need somebody to cry to, and that she’s perfectly fine. She never fails to remind me how I go to an analyst and I haven’t improved at all. I do go to an analyst, for an old social-anxiety problem that I think has vanished completely, even though Rebecca always says I’m becoming worse and worse. I know any mention of an analyst will start a fight, and I’d rather have conversations about her impending death than yelling arguments about how useless I am. And Rebecca is probably right about me, at least to some extent, so I can’t really try to take on a superior attitude without leaving myself open for ridicule.
After lunch, we go back to our apartment to take a nap. We never take afternoon naps, but Rebecca says a nap is necessary today.
“My dream isn’t finished,” she says. She wants to know more about her death, the details: when, where, how, et cetera, and she thinks she’ll find out through sleep, since her original inspiration came through dreams. We lay in bed, but she can’t sleep. She starts to get a little angry with me, because supposedly I keep dosing off, though I don’t notice anything. She punches me in the arm.
“Stop snoring.” She jabs me in the side, which is painful as well. I tell her I wasn’t snoring, and she hits me again.
“I can’t sleep,” she says, “and it pisses me off that you’re sleeping. My dreams are the important ones.” I suggest sleeping pills but she says artificially-induced sleep won’t work for her visions. Everything has to be natural. She suggests we have sex. “That always makes me want to sleep,” she says. I don’t exactly feel incredibly sex-crazed at the moment, but I try to get into the mood. Usually I do all right with afternoon sex, but the whole time we’ll going at it, all I can think about is trains smashing into women and dismembering them, and so I can’t ever get fully erect. Rebecca tells me again that I’m completely useless. I apologize but it doesn’t do any good. I’ve failed her. We lay there, and I stroke her arm, something that usually calms her, but now she just says it tickles and is keeping her awake.
I think I need to sleep alone,” she says.
I get dressed again and go for a walk. When I arrive back, she is asleep, a bottle of sleeping pills on the bedside table. She doesn’t look very peaceful, and I notice her hands are clenched together.
We’ve been together for three and a half years now, with two of those years spent living together. We know each other pretty well, to the point where a lot of times we communicate without words or expressions. Sometimes I feel like I can predict her every move and then she has one of her obsessive moments—like now with this whole death thing—and I almost have trouble recognizing her at all.
When she wakes up six hours later, she doesn’t want to talk. She just wants to be alone, so once again I go for a walk, this time for over an hour. At least my exercise plan isn’t suffering. When I return, she’s asleep again.
She wakes up at four o’clock the next morning, and the first thing she does is reach for the sleeping pills. I’ve been keeping myself awake all night, waiting for her to wake up. She opens the pill bottle, and I ask her what she’s doing.
“I’m getting closer,” she says.
“Closer to what?” I ask.
“My dream. I’m getting closer to my death. I just have to sleep a little more.” I tell her to try to sleep naturally and leave the pills alone, but she tells me to shut up and then she swallows two of the pills. “I’m almost there,” she says. She closes her eyes and doesn’t say anything more. After ten minutes or so, she’s snoring and whimpering softly. I wonder what she’s dreaming, and I imagine a few different death scenes. She could be dreaming about being crushed by trains, or maybe falling from a building or something. Unlike Rebecca, I don’t find thinking about death as enjoyable, so instead I eat some cereal and try to get my mind off things by watching TV. The news is still on, and the reporters are talking about death. I decide I might as well go for another walk.
Rebecca spends the next three days sleeping, only waking up to ingest more sleeping pills. I try to talk to her, to tell her to stop taking the pills, but she only looks at me, saying nothing except that she is communing with herself and that I should leave her alone. I don’t sleep very much. I’m relegated to the love seat in the living room, my legs hanging off the edge and my back aching, all the while worrying about Rebecca. I don’t know if the pain I feel is psychological or love-seat related, but I can’t take painkillers because of my anxiety medicine, so I just have to bear with the throbbing.
I spend most of my time worrying about Rebecca. She isn’t showering, she hasn’t eaten since she started her sleeping quest, and she hasn’t even gone to the bathroom, at least as far as I know. She may have pissed in her sleep, but her clothes don’t look wet at all. I’ve told her she’s hurting her health, but she just told me she knows what she’s doing. She hasn’t changed her clothing either. She’s still in the blue t-shirt and yellow underwear she put on for our nap three days ago. Her hair is a complete mess, her eyes completely bloodshot from too much sleep, and she continuously retches, but nothing except drops of clear stomach acid comes up.
“Becky,” I say. “Becky.”
She usually doesn’t acknowledge my presence, and whenever she regains consciousness, she looks at me with no expression on her face. I begin to wonder if she remembers who I am.
I spend a lot of my time walking, and thinking of ways to make her wake up. I hid the sleeping pills yesterday, but when she woke up and couldn’t find them on her bedside table, she screamed continuously until I gave the pills back to her. She was pretty threatening. I’ve seen her angry before, but this time, while searching for her pills, she looked like she wouldn’t feel any remorse if I were devoured by lions or something else really painful like that. She just kept screaming, “give me the pills, you bastard” until I didn’t know what else to do. I realize I shouldn’t have given in, but maybe I’m not thinking too clearly right now either. I could probably get away with hiding the pills now, but it wouldn’t do any good.
I think she’s reached the point where she’s passing out because of exhaustion and malnourishment, not the pills. She used to worry about losing weight to the point of not eating for a day or two, but never anything this bad. I know she hates hospitals more than anything–she had a botched blood transfusion a few years before I met her–but I don’t know what else to do except call for medical help. She may hate me forever, but at least she’ll be alive.
I call the hospital, telling an uninterested nurse how Rebecca hasn’t eaten in days, won’t stop taking sleeping pills and is puking up stomach acid. The nurse says the case isn’t serious enough for them to send an ambulance.
“You can bring her into ER if you want to,” The nurse says. She sounds like she taking a delivery order instead of supposedly offering me medical assistance. “It’ll be busy though. If you’d like to wait, we have some appointments next week.”
I thank the nurse, even though I’d rather yell at her. I notice Rebecca is moving a little bit in her sleep, and I try to wake her up by shaking her side and saying her name, but with no success. I’m a little paranoid she’s dead or dying, but she seems to be breathing normally—or at least what I assume is normal breathing for someone who’s been sleeping for three days. I decide to pour a saucepan full of cold water—a mere glass of water doesn’t seem like enough—on her face. Water always brings people back to consciousness in movies, but unfortunately not for me. Rebecca is still asleep, she’s wet, and the bed is soaked too so I can’t even lie down next to her or anything. I try to convince myself I’m doing some good, though. The glass of water I poured on her is her first shower since she started sleeping.
I really need to wake her up, but what can I do. Prick her with needles? Shake her while yelling, “Becky” into her ear? (I assume she’ll wake up faster if I call her by her hated nickname, even if I haven’t had any success as of yet). I suppose I could light matches, blow out the flame and then press the heated match heads against Rebecca’s skin, but that just seems kind of mean. I’m not that desperate yet. Really, none of the options seem feasible, so I decide I’ll have to take her to the hospital, no matter how much she’ll hate me afterward. This could be the end of our relationship, I know—the end of three and half years of my life—but I have to do it.
I get some pajamas and a sweatshirt out of Rebecca’s dresser. I’ve never put clothing on a sleeping person before, and I’m kind of worried it’s going to be difficult, but the pajamas go on without much trouble, and after propping Rebecca against the headstand of the bed, I work the sweatshirt over her head. Her arms don’t want to go into the sleeves, but after some maneuvering, she’s dressed and ready for our hospital trip. She told me I could join her on her quest, but I guess she didn’t know our quest would be in search of the closest emergency room instead philosophic knowledge.
I lift her from the bed and I carry her across the bedroom, into the living room and to the front door. Well, my attempt at carrying her actually turns into more of me pulling her along, her legs dragging on the floor. I thought I’d be able to lift her, but maybe she’s not the only one who’s been wasting away these past three days. I prop her up against the wall near the door. I get her slippers from the hall closet, and while I’m attempting to put them on her feet, she wakes up. She looks around for a second, like she’s not quite where she is, but once she realizes she’s not in bed, I can tell from her clenched teeth that she’s about to start screaming at me.
But she doesn’t. She doesn’t even raise her voice. She just looks at me like I’m nothing, and asks me what the hell I think I’m doing. I try to say something about how I was worried about her, but she doesn’t exactly fall down in a fit of gratitude. She falls down in a fit of malnourishment. I help her back up, holding her against me so she doesn’t fall again. Her breath on my neck reassures me that she’s still alive.
“I’m taking you to the hospital,” I say. “You’re sick.” She doesn’t say anything, but instead bites my neck, hard enough that I let go of her and she collapses to the floor again. She glares at me, with nothing but hate in her expression.
“I was right at the end of my dream,” she says. “Another minute or two, and I would have been there.”
“If you were right at the end,” I ask, “can’t you just extrapolate the rest?” She doesn’t answer me, just says I am an unthinking heathen who doesn’t understand her metaphysical state. She’s pretty eloquent for someone too weak to stand.
“I am not going to the hospital,” she says, “and I will never forgive you if you force me to go.”
Usually in circumstances like this, I do what she tells me, but for once I don’t care. I tell her I’m taking her to the hospital no matter what.
“I’m breaking up with you,” she says.
“Wonderful,” I say. Now put your slippers on.” She refuses to do so, so I open the door, and force her out into the cold. Two seconds of her bare feet on the frost-covered ground compels her to change her mind.
“Okay, I’ll take the slippers,” she says.
After her feet are protected from the cold, I walk her to the curb, where we wait for a taxi. She continues to harangue me on all the ways she will make my life miserable once she’s out of the hospital, and I mostly ignore her monologue. A taxi arrives after a few minutes, and we’re on our way to the hospital. Once seated, Rebecca falls asleep again, her head on my shoulder, and even though she looks way too pale and an inch or two thinner than usual, I think she seems a little better than she was a few hours ago, but maybe I’m just deluding myself. I’m worried she’ll actually follow through with her threats to break up with me, and I don’t know how I’ll deal with that situation, but right now I’m trying to focus solely on Rebecca’s health. It’s hard for me to not feel selfish, and in a way I think I may be taking her to the hospital more so that I don’t lose her than because I’m incredibly worried about her health. I’d like to think if she and I weren’t in a relationship, and were just acquaintances, I’d still be taking her to the hospital right now, but I doubt I would be. I’d probably hide from her and pretend I didn’t know about her medical problems. If Rebecca refuses to see me after her stint in the hospital, I’ll probably pretend I don’t really mind, and if she dies or something, I’ll be the image of stoicism around the doctors.
As we pull up to the hospital, Rebecca wakes up again. She opens her eyes and lifts her head off of my shoulder, acting less lethargic than I would think someone in her condition would be.
“How are you feeling?” I ask her.
“I’m going to die in Paris,” she says. “In a car accident. Or maybe a train accident. I’m not really sure. That part was a little blurry, but at least now I know. I don’t know when, but still, can you believe it? Paris. I love it. Dying in Paris is so noble.”
I don’t really know how to respond. I feel like she wants me to congratulate her, but congratulating someone on their death is just a little too morbid for me. I smile—I’m sure my smile is more of a grimace than anything else—and I tell her I’m glad she got what she wanted.
As I help Rebecca out of the taxi, she smiles. She looks happier than she has in months.
In Bed With Faulkner (A Love Story)
Posted in Uncategorized on May 26, 2009 by daveousity(This story is dedicated to Kat).
Katt sits in her writing workshop classroom long after all the other students have left. Her professor, Wright Stephens, author of such meta-fictional masterworks as Following This Character Anywhere and No Problems With This Prose, sits across from her, a Yankees hat covering the top half of his swarthy face. He never takes off the hat. His hands and arms, even his face, every part of his visible body is covered in tattoos, mostly Vietnam era, if Katt knows her American history at all. He smiles, the few teeth left in his mouth mossy. Katt tries as hard as possible to keep eye contact.
She desperately needs a thesis adviser. Every other professor in the department has declined her. Bastards. None of them recognize the epic scope of her work, how scenes in strip club backrooms actually show the detriment of American society, the end of the world as we know it, to quote R.E.M. Except Katt doesn’t feel fine.
She has a mission, no matter what the consequences. She’s heard Wright Stephens is a strange sort, and she’s afraid what favors he’ll ask in return for being her adviser, but she’s quite the seductress, and as we’ve said, she’s really desperate. Stephens’s books are full of sex and violence, usually of the incest and rape variety, with a little bestiality thrown in for good measure. By critics, he’s often compared to Pynchon, Mailer, and Faulkner. She decides, if she’s forced to sleep with him, it’s as close as she’ll ever get to fucking Faulkner. She’s not even sure if she likes Faulkner, but, given the opportunity, who wouldn’t fuck a famous author, right?
“What can I do for you, Miss Cochs?” Wright Stephens asks. “I know you need an adviser, but I’m afraid I’m really quite busy at the moment. You’ll have to make it worth my while.”
“I think I can do that,” Katt says, standing and walking over to him, swaying back and forth as she moves, half out of intended sexiness, half because she feels woozy. She wonders if Stephens would find vomiting sexy. She sits down in a chair adjacent to Wright Stephens and rubs his collarbone with her right palm. He flinches at her touch, almost shyly.
“I’ve never been with a woman before,” he says.
Katt vaguely remembers prior occasions in class when Stephens spoke of his son.
“What about your son?” she asks.
Stephens smiles, opening his mouth and showing nine whole teeth, some of his incisors very well cared for. She feels sympathy toward him. He’s making the best he can with what he has.
“You have a son,” Katt says. “So you must have been with a woman before.”
“What I meant,” Stephens says, taking hold of her hand, “is that I’ve never been with a conscious woman before.”
Katt doesn’t know how to respond to that.
“I’ve had my eye on you for a long time,” Stephens says.
Which eye? Katt wonders. The lazy eye or the one with blue and red cat tattoos around it?
Stephens suddenly unzips his jacket and goes in for a kiss, his tongue exploring Katt’s unexpecting mouth. Experimentally, for the sake of her thesis, she sticks her tongue in his mouth as well, but upon touching his barren gums, she feels once again like vomiting. She pulls away.
“I can’t do this,” she says.
“Sure you can,” he says, pulling her back, thinking she’s just playing coy.
“No, I mean, you’re sweet and everything, but I’m only attracted to women. I’ve been a lesbian since birth. I really just need a thesis adviser.”
“No sex, no advising.”
“Okay,” Katt says.
Sighing, she leans back toward him. He closes his eyes, moaning in anticipation, but Kat, instead of snogging him, reaches up, and snatches away Stephens’s treasured Yankees hat.
“No!” he screams. “Give that back!”
“Only if you sign on as my thesis adviser.”
“But, but…Yankees,” he whimpers.
“Yes,” she says. “Yankees. Sign here, please.”
She hands him the thesis form. He signs. He looks up at her.
“Now, can I have my hat back?” he pleads. He looks like a seven year old who wants his favorite toy back.
“Yes,” she says. “You may.”
She strides toward the exit, stopping only to fling the hat out an open window onto 12th street.
“That is,” she says, “as long as another homeless guy doesn’t get to it first.”
Wright Stephens stands up, looking murderous. He trips over his school bag, a black plastic bag, which Katt assumes could have various weapons hidden amongst the marked-up manuscripts.
Katt moves through the door, slams it behind her and starts running.
Felines: A Love (And Hate) Story
Posted in Uncategorized on December 15, 2008 by daveousity(A Christmas story I wrote for my wonderful friend Amy B., who desperately needs a cat of her own, though hopefully she’d never resort to violence).
Felines
The cat on the windowsill doesn’t belong to Amy, though Amy thinks he should. He’s on the small side, black with white stripes, and seemingly too depressed to move. A perfect cat. Her friend Byron has just returned from New York for the holidays, bringing with him this cat, the cat of her dreams. Amy is not happy about this. I am the cat person here, she thinks. Byron always had silly dreams of buying a dog—and naming it Dave for some ludicrous reason—and now he has the nerve to own a cat. My cat. Amy smiles, though she’d rather scream. Byron sits on a sofa by the window, stroking the cat, which—of course—he has named Dave. To Amy, he looks so much more like a Casper or a Zach, maybe even a Frederick, if she felt especially German at the time of naming. But not Dave. Never Dave. Dave is the name of forty-five year old mustachioed men, who hang around hotel bars, hoping to pick up college girls. This cat would never even look at a college girl. Amy is in college, but she doesn’t consider herself a college girl. “I’m a college woman,” she always says.
“He’s such a pretty cat,” she says to Byron. “But I thought you wanted a dog.” Byron laughs. He scratches his leg while looking fondly—disgustingly—at the cat.
“Oh, I did want a dog,” he says, “but New York has brought out the feline in me.” He meows. “I think, at heart, I’ve always been a cat. El gato.” Amy tries as hard as she can not to glare. She should be the one meowing. The meow is her trademark. She is the cat at heart. And Byron can’t even speak a sentence in Spanish. Amy is fluent. Only she is allowed to say el gato.
“Really,” she says. “You don’t seem languid enough to be a cat. In fact, I could see you chasing after a bone or a stick, barking, maybe eating your own shit. You are definitely a dog.” Byron smiles, looking nervous, like he’s not sure whether she’s joking or angry. He can be nervous all he wants, Amy thinks. In fact he can fucking die from his nervousness. Asshole.
“I think my temperament is too delicate to be a dog,” Byron says. “And besides, I like boneless meats. I can’t stand gnawing.”
Then why are you gnawing away at my heart with this nauseating display of pseudo-cathood?
“I just don’t see you as a cat,” she says. Byron laughs, amused, charmingly disdaining.
“Well, you know what they say,” he says. “Only a cat can recognize another cat.” Amy has never heard this before. Only I can recognize another cat. You can’t even recognize that you’re a prick.
“Oh, they say that, do they?” Amy tries to sound jovial, hoping to lull Byron into a false sense of security.
“Yes, they do.”
Amy smiles sweetly, the image of goodness. “Who the fuck is they?”
“Excuse me?”
Still smiling. “Who the fucking fuck is they? I need to know, because once I know, I’m going to kill them. Stabbing. Thirty-three times. In the heart.” She almost sings the last word. If they were in public, passersby would assume she had just said something unbearably cute.
“I—” Byron stutters. “I don’t know.”
“You made it up, didn’t you?” Amy asks. That’s it, Amy. Snarl. “You’re they. You asshole. Don’t ever—ever—talk that way to me again. I am the cat here. You—if you’re even worthy of being an animal—are a fucking dog.”
“Amy, please.” Byron has removed his hand from the cat and now he’s holding on to the chair, as if he’s about to leap up and run for the door.
“Don’t Amy please me,” Amy says.
“Well, then what am I supposed to say? You’re right. I’m wrong. Please kill me. Here is my pen.” He hands her a pen, a cheap plastic one. Cheap schmuck. “Here is my heart. Stab me please. Shed my blood. End my life.”
“You’re not funny,” Amy says.
“Neither are you.”
You just don’t have a sense of humor. Amy decides to be the bigger person, to put Byron’s faults behind her, and to try to have as pleasant an afternoon as possible. After today she won’t see Byron again for at least six months, so she may as well try to be a good hostess.
“Would you like a cup of tea?” Amy asks. Byron relaxes, as if he senses the danger has passed.
“That would be wonderful,” he says. Amy rises out of her plush orange egg chair.
“Well, then, let’s go to the kitchen. Bring Frederick with you.”
“Frederick?” Byron asks.
“The cat,” Amy says. “Bring him along.”
“His name is Dave.” No, it’s not.
“That’s what I said.”
“No, you said Frederick.” Byron seems ready for another fight. His shoulders are tightened, his jaw clenched.
“Look, I know his name is Dave. He’s such a Dave. The perfect Dave. Oh, the Daveousness. Now, can we go into the kitchen and make the tea, please?”
“Sure,” Byron says. “Come on, Dave.” The cats continues to sit of the windowsill, as if oblivious to Byron’s command. “Dave. Come!”
“That’s not what you do with cats,” Amy says.
“I know what I’m doing,” Byron says. “Dave, Come.” Still nothing. “You know what, fuck it. I’ll carry you in.” He walks over to the window, picks up the cat, who seems happy to be carried, not having to waste any precious energy
Amy leads Byron and the cat into the kitchen, which is conspicuously cat-related in its theme. Siamese cats on the teacups. A tabby on the calendar—for December, complete with a Santa hat and a bowl of milk with decorations of reindeer on the sides. And a poster above the stove of three Persian kittens playing with a ball of yarn, completely happy, something which Amy wonders if she’ll ever be again. Amy decides to stop feeling sorry for herself. In a perfect world, this would be the time to poison Byron’s tea, bury him in the backyard, and live happily ever after with Frederick. Alas, this isn’t a perfect world. It is a world where any asshole with a litter box and a hundred bucks can buy a cat, but Amy, who deserves at least three cats of her own, cannot, because she lives with her aunt, who—while she pays all the rent—is allergic to cat hair. A cat means poverty. No cat, the ability to afford a normal life. A tough decision, but Amy chose money over a cat. She hates herself sometimes. Today, however, all her hatred is focused on Byron.
‘What kind of tea would you like?” she asks.
“Prince of Wales,” Byron says. “If you have it.”
Amy has two boxes of Prince of Wales in her cupboard. “I don’t have any,” she says. “Sorry.”
“Earl Grey?” he asks. Amy has Earl Grey as well.
“No, sorry. I just ran out of it this morning.”
“But Earl Grey isn’t a breakfast tea.”
Amy ignores him. She never drinks Earl Grey for breakfast, but to admit that now would show she is lying.
“I have some lovely Lipton.” Byron seems to shudder. Amy always knew he was a snobby bastard, but he never used to care so much about tea.
“Oh, fine,” Byron says. He sounds like he has just found out a close friend died. “With milk and sugar.”
“Milk and sugar in Lipton black tea?” Amy asks. “How gauche.”
“Lipton tea in general is gauche,” Byron says.
“The name Dave is gaucher.” Byron’s face loses its color. Amy realizes she has offended him beyond repair. Serves him right.
“I don’t think gaucher is a word.”
“I don’t think you’re welcome here any longer,” Amy says. “You should go.”
Byron says nothing.
“I said, I think you should leave.”
“I think you’re right,” Byron says. He bends down to pick up the cat. “I guess Dave and I will be going then.” Amy opens the knife drawer and takes out a long, extra sharp bread knife.
“Frederick stays here,” she says. Byron looks at her, shocked.
“You’d seriously kill me because of the name I chose for my cat?”
“No,” she says, “I’m going to cut a slice of banana bread for myself.” She takes a loaf of banana bread out of the refrigerator, cuts off a piece, then puts the knife back into the drawer. “But I still think you should go. We have nothing left to talk about.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Byron says. “But I’m taking my cat with me.”
“All right,” Amy says. “But let me at least say goodbye to him.” She picks the cat up and cradles him in her arms. She leads Byron to the door. “I’m sorry things are ending like this, but I just don’t think there is another way. I care about cats. More than people.” Amy, still holding the cat, opens the door. Byron stands in the doorway.
“We’ll talk,” Byron says. “I’m sure we can work things out.”
“Yes, we can,” Amy says. She puts the cat on the floor behind her, then pushes Byron out the door. He stumbles backward, trips on the front steps and falls to the ground. Amy shuts and locks the door. She turns around and picks up the cat. Byron, standing again, is banging on the door.”
“Dave,” he yells. “Amy. I need my cat.”
Amy walks into the kitchen, where she can’t hear Byron’s screaming anymore. She sits down at the table, kisses the cat and then begins to stroke his back.
“Hello Frederick,” Amy says. “It’s nice to meet you.”
