With a Voice that is Often Still Confused But is Becoming Ever Louder and Clearer
Page 18
He kept an intimate journal that spoke of nightmarish things. He vacillated between mild self-deprecation and intense seriousness. He firmly believed he was destined for better things. He was bilious toward people who rejected his writings or dismissed it as juvenilia, and dropped friends who questioned him or gave him unsolicited writing advice.
At some point in his journals, he resolved to kill, in a wild, elaborate and hysterical way. He died wearing a mask made out of diaper. He took selfies with the corpses of her mother and Rose. She saw one of the latter, just for a second, on a terrible website called Best Gore, where he stared ironically dead-faced into the camera, as if he didn’t know the tendons and viscera of her beautiful friend’s open neck was fully on display just above his shoulder. And her face, God her face, cadaverous, still beautiful, always beautiful, but those dead sunken eyes, the radiance of them, gone.
She’d looked at the picture for a moment — the picture had been labeled as The Crazed Kat Killer’s Last Selfie, but the website hadn’t mentioned that there’d be a corpse in the background (but perhaps a website calling itself Best Gore didn’t hold itself to the highest journalistic standards, phantom-Rose would have said) — and oh God no, never again.
He had typed a long-winded suicide note where he looked forward to better things. The letter became irreverent and manic whenever it risked seeming treacly.
>< >< ><
As promised, he’d uploaded his story collection to various marketplaces and offered it for free.
One night, over a year later, she looked up the collection online and found hundreds of ratings, reviews and discussions. On Kindle, it was one of the top 50 most downloaded items in the free anthology category. There were links to Reddit and 4Chan that she left unopened. There was even fan art.
She ignored it, she pretended otherwise, but it was there.
There was a whole universe that’d been created, that clicked and churned ceaselessly.
I’m A Good Person, I Mean Well and I Deserve Better
Robin looked nice tonight. She was dressed in an effervescent dress that, while not tight-fitting, at least acknowledged the appeal of her petite form and hearty bust. She had applied a little bit of make-up and eyeshadow, too. Bryce preferred the au naturale look, but the eyeshadow gave her a hint of an edge, a little sass. She had pretty eyes, and the eyeshadow feminized her, tilted the appeal of her androgynous vulpine beauty back firmly to the feminine side of things. Her hair was done the usual way, pinned-up in the back, which he liked. He liked the crook in her nose, the nose that most girls (her included) probably grew up feeling ashamed and insecure about. An asshole could say it looked a bit like there was an extra bone in place of where the cartilage should be. But everything about her was decisively cute, and her nose was that kind of charming imperfection that, in their brief foray into dating, he’d firmly identified her with and maybe even fetishized a little bit.
She wore rouge lipstick, noticeable but modest. Red was the color of lust, he’d read in an article, and that bode well of her interest, he thought. That, and that she agreed to a fourth date with him, this time an unabashed date, a full meal and everything. But he tried not to get too ahead of himself. That was emotionally dangerous. His mind was always analyzing the odds. Rouge and a dinner date. Good signs. But this was an unusually early dinner, 6:15 pm, more befitting of the senior citizen early birds than a couple in their mid-thirties. And they were the earliest of the early birds — there were literally no other guests, and they’d arrived at the weird liminal phase where the wait staff were still setting up a bit and were resentful that you cut down on their time to prepare. But maybe he shouldn’t read too much into the time, maybe she just liked eating early — hell, he liked eating early — but his mind refused to turn off, always the dating thresher, churning in input and spitting out conclusions.
He met her there, which was always a smart bet. Don’t want to waste needed conversation talking points on the pre-dinner repartee. That’s time you can’t control — imagine having to wait for a table for an hour and spending all that awkward, uncomfortable, impatient time together.
So he was already there when she arrived, sitting at the table. When she arrived, he bounded up and pulled her chair back for her. It was simultaneously genuine yet ironic, which was a fairly good description of how they both had separately represented themselves on their Kettle of Fish pages.
“Ahhh, what a gentleman,” she smiled, ironic in her use of gentleman and what a hoary cliché pulling out a lady’s chair was, but genuine in appreciating his interest and his effort, at least, to impress. “Pulling out all the stops, are we? Watch out!”
“Hah, you know it.”
They made small talk for a bit and he pointed out the drinks menu. She perused it and he didn’t say much. Let her read it, he thought, but that was displacement. He just didn’t know what to say. That was one of his bigger fears: not saying enough. He felt he was an interesting person, but too often all that interesting stuff was buzzing around in his mind and he didn’t let it out. Dating and sharing and intimacy didn’t come naturally to him; he didn’t feel comfortable with it until he knew he wasn’t being judged, that he was loved and appreciated. In a sense, he put the cart before the horse: he needed the adulation, and then he felt comfortable with the sharing intimacy; that women expected sharing, intimacy and the connection before the adulation was a fatal lapse in his emotional sequencing.
“Did you know” — oh boy, goddamn the man who begins a conversation with “did you know?” or “know what’s interesting?” — “that the word ‘Jeep’ comes from the abbreviation used in the Army for the General Purpose vehicle, G.P.” She worked as an analyst for a car company. “Yup, you can take that fact into the boardroom.”
“Promotion, here I come!”
“Hah, yep. Thank the Internet and a slow day of work.”
He had to be careful. Dead air tended to turn him into an Interesting Fact Generator. Could be good for a cocktail party, but no girl wanted to fuck the human embodiment of Wikipedia.
“Well,” she drawled. “Let me one-up you.”
“Okay, okay, I’m game, let’s hear it.”
“So, you know what the ‘Q’ in Q-tip stands for?”
“Nope,” he said with metaphorical open arms.
“Quality,” she said, throwing up her hands like a rap baller.
“Well look at that.”
The drinks came and, this was pivotal, after she went in for her first sip after they cheers-ed, she smiled upwardly from her drink at him in a way that froze his insides and made his heart stop. Inadvertently — it apparently not being enough that she agreed to a fourth date — he’d subconsciously been dedicating mental processing power to monitor all the signs she was into him. Hair teasing, forthcoming laughter, steady eye contact: running the metrics behind his eyes like an undercover economist. But he needn’t worry. That look sealed the deal. It was a look of joy, of the pure sensual pleasure of enjoying another’s company and being open to the electricity of good companionship. It relieved him and unnerved him. He wished he could change his reductive thinking — she was a human being, a great human being, for God’s sake, he should stop with these objectifying comparisons — but all he could think was that he was a dog who finally catches the car and doesn’t know what to do with it.
He wanted to tell her that he really liked her, and that he wanted to save this moment in time in case something went wrong later in the date, so he could backtrack to this moment and start again. Like the beginning of a stage in a videogame and he’d stocked up infinite lives. Of course, if he said that, he’d fuck everything up, and, accepting the logic of his own premise, would have to jump back in time to right before he said those words.
He sipped his cocktail — gin and bitters and lime and sugar and a fancy name that added $5 to the price — and he liked it but that didn’t even register because he wa
s acting like drinking was something that just got into the way of talking.
“Know what else is interesting?” He said, kicking himself mentally for it — he hadn’t even swallowed fully before he started.
“No, tell me,” and he detected a less enthusiastic reception than before.
“Well, I don’t want to just spout out interesting facts, but bear with me, this one is interesting.”
“Raising the stakes. You better deliver,” and she leaned in in such a way that the menu pressed against her dress to make a steeple of cleavage. He never averted his gaze from her eyes. It was just a lovely detail he noticed in his periphery.
“Well, do you know that they never toast in Hungary?”
“No.”
“Well, and I don’t know if this is true, but it’s what I’ve been told—“
“Duly noted. Told, you mean on the streets?”
“Yes, of course, the streets, the streets are always talking about Hungary.” He was performing that weird obligation to generate witty repartee, and he found it a little bit annoying and disruptive when she joined in. This was a solo act. He was doing his best to even remember the factoid, which was hazy and half-remembered. Was it that they only didn’t toast over beer? Eh.
“Well, after the Hungarian revolution against the Hapsburg Empire in like, the 1850’s, the Austrian army leaders executed the Hungarian generals, and they celebrated it with a toast. So, from then on, Hungarians never toast when they drink beer.”
“Interesting, interesting.” She made a face that registered her appreciation, like she was storing the information. “What was the Hapsburg Revolution?”
He sipped and shrugged. “I don’t know. If they want me to know, they need to tie it in with some beer or food-related fact or something.”
“Obviously,” she smiled.
The performance ritual of repartee was draining his mental battery. It’s interesting, how things are considered mildly unpleasant, and then something comes along to drop the end out from under you and make things so much worse. Here he was, juggling being charming with a mild headache; his mild self-hatred of his dating game-playing and his wavering about whether dating as an activity was even worth the effort; his desire just to declare his affections for her and move onto the next steps; and all the other tests to his endurance, when … the bottom fell out.
The mysteries of the human body. There’s a nesting fullness you feel when you need to move your bowels, but that’s usually the key — fullness. A fullness, like a shifting tractor trailer. There’s weight there. Not this. This was a water hammer in a sewer pipe. This was a 7th grade Earth Science lecture on potential to kinetic energy. This was his asshole puckering up with flop sweat in the midst of turning into a swamp. This was the type of shit you fooled yourself into thinking you could control with the proper positions you assumed and the seasoned contortions of your asshole, but in reality you knew it was going to come out hot and burning and for a second you’d think, Jesus, what have I been doing with my life?
His stomach gurgled. He kicked himself for his early-, mid-, and late-morning coffees, for those unneeded shots of vanilla-hazelnut-flavored chemicals he’d added to them. The sour sludge inside him turned his hunger off like a light switch. There’s that pyramid of needs. Hunger, water, those are on there at the bottom, the base of the pyramid. Young guys will act like sex is there as well. Look lower down, in the footnotes section. There’s a caveat: “The need to shit rules out all other needs.”
He yearned to return to the gentle patter of conversation he’d established. Like an old man on his death bed, how foolish he was for not realizing how good he’d had it not so long ago.
He was a strategic man by nature. Especially where something important was concerned — a job, school, a significant other — he had the tendency to break down every action into a play-by-play like a coked-out John Madden, until it was usually just him alone and a trusted friend hashing out and debating what exactly happened, long after the opportunity came, went or passed and everyone else had moved on.
One of his long-standing life hacks: never go to the restroom before you order food. This didn’t just apply to dates. It’s inefficient, and the other party will be impatiently waiting for you to return and be doubly attentive to the passage of time.
He resumed saying something, under the quixotic delusion that he could flag down a waiter and put in a food order before he had to take the bathroom out of commission.
Nope, there’d be none of that.
“I’ll be right back,” a line which, if their relationship survived some length of time, was destined to become an inside-joke euphemism.
He retired to the restroom before they even had gotten dinner menus. Before they had even gotten dinner menus! He thought of that word, retired, and it seemed apt, because after this he’d have to take a nap and perhaps retire from ever showing his face in public again.
He navigated his way to the restroom, a couple members of the staff intuiting the urgency just beneath the placid mask of his face and pointing him in the right direction
Le Latrines, the sign on the door read, complying with that unwritten rule that every restaurant above a sufficient level of hipness was required to have some whimsical name for the place where people pissed, shat, farted, ralphed, applied and re-applied make-up and maybe did coke.
He twisted the knob on the door and it didn’t turn. Oh god. Oh god. Occupied. And it’s only one stall.
One stall, for every man, woman, and child. Providing one unisex stall should be a crime against restaurant design. Under almost all circumstances, he wouldn’t have the guts to shit in a unisex stall, only allowing himself to pee and maybe later squeak out silent farts at the dinner table if the pressure got too bad. He could just never bring himself to defecate where there’s only one unisex stall; the pressure was just too much for him. He’d immediately imagine a line of innocent, angelic American Apparel models lining up right outside.
He remembers his own traumatic experience, at a Barnes & Noble many years ago. Barnes & Noble must have known that every customer secretly resented it for some reason or another, and tried to appease them by providing a separate bathroom for men and women. But not the Barnes & Noble he’d ventured into. No, not that Barnes & Noble. This must have been a closing Barnes & Noble, where management said “fuck it, we’ll show these ingrates, make it a unisex bathroom.”
He’d never forget the look on that beautiful woman’s face after he came out of that Barnes & Noble bathroom — her pixie-ish dirty blonde hair, her button nose, her button-up shirt that looks so cute on girls of her type, her angular cheeks, flush with rouge, the nose ring stud, that little indication that in other circumstances she’d be cool and understanding and open-minded — and that, that unconscious twitching of her nose, that look of dread and embarrassment and shame that registered knowing that this filthy creature in front of her had just befouled the space she was entering, a creature of honeyed charms and fairy dust entering a labyrinth of emanations bespeaking pestilence and contamination.
He twisted the knob before him, again, and … it opened, albeit slowly, with another person opening the door on the other side. She was trying to twist the door open from the other side at the same time and they’d been working at cross purposes.
“Sorry about that,” he nodded and slid past her.
“My bad.” She wore flannel and had night black hair. Other than that, he couldn’t see much of her, but she seemed nice and big-hearted.
He made his way in, and, lo and behold, he was wrong in his estimation. There were actually two bathroom stalls! One with a ... what the fuck is this? There was this trend in restaurants to convey the crucial information of MAN or WOMAN through quirky signage. That may have made sense at certain themed bars; if you see a male pirate or a mermaid on the bathrooms at a seafood restaurant, well, that’s pretty intuitive.
God, he had to be a fucking astrologist here in order to take a shit. Which was which? What other purpose is there of signage than to be clear and direct? Literally, the point is to convey a message clearly. That’s why a STOP sign reads “STOP,” instead of representing a cleverly illustrated parable of a before, present, and after situation.
Venus rhymes with penis? Could that be it? No, he felt that the jutting arrow was a proxy for the penis, and even if that was wrong, society still felt comfortable gendering colors, and light blue usually denoted the feminine.
He tried Mars, and it opened.
His asshole almost gasped in release upon entry. There was an undeniable rush, a dampening of the back of his underwear. Why? Did his body just think that when the button comes undone and the pants come out, it can just spray shit everywhere like a fire hydrant? Mind over matter, mind over matter. His bowels protested with each second, and in the anticipation of impending release was an unspoken euphoria and satisfaction that society dare not name.
>< >< ><
Alexander, he decided. He would call himself Alexander. It made him feel smart and cultured, and tales of conquest and adventure were the only things he ever enjoyed about high school. Alexander the Great had conquered, like, the entire known world at the time. Just went on in and rolled all over people. That would be his inspiration.
He took long, reflective pauses as he walked the several miles in the fading natural light toward the Deer & Fox, as befitting a conqueror debating his options. He put his fingers to his chin, softly stroking a beard that was not there, just staring off into the distance. One second, five seconds, or thirty seconds: it made no difference, he wasn’t actually thinking anything. Just assuming the position.