Four Letter Word

by Joshua Knelman

  Concluding Remarks

  You may or may not have already noticed that all of your bank accounts are frozen and your credit cards are inactive. I also disabled your cellular phone. I regret having to take such extreme measures, but I feel that this is entirely in your best interests. I wanted to prevent any rash purchases on your part as you attempt to fill the emotional void you surely are experiencing right now. Further, I felt it necessary to encourage you not to leave the state or communicate with Jay and his cohorts.

  Speaking of Jay, by this point you are probably aware that he has been jailed on the charge of possession of marijuana with intent to distribute. The repercussions that this will have on his personal and professional lives are potentially devastating, and it is with his and your futures in mind that I reiterate the importance of keeping some distance between yourself and what is soon to be a convicted felon.

  The next few years will be quite difficult for Jay, and while he struggles to put his life back together I hope you will find the energy and wisdom to rededicate yourself to our relationship. I look forward to the progress we will undoubtedly make in the coming months.

  With love, and hope for your future,

  Jessica

  1 I will be referring in particular to the communications of the past six months, in addition to various communications from over the course of the past four years, including (but, again, not limited to) Thanksgiving with your family in November of 2002 and the events related to your 2003 trip to Atlantic City.

  2 Overheard in the kitchen of the McKellen residence, on the evening of November 25, 2002, at approximately 9.02 p.m. Central Time.

  3 I would also like to point out, with, of course, no disrespect intended, that your mother is a frigid bitch who has had it out for me since the moment we met. Additionally, do not assume that your family life has given you a good understanding of what a healthy relationship is, especially in light of the fact that your father has been screwing, for the past eight months, your brother’s fiancée.

  4 These dates are based on the first time you were given oral sex, on October 5, 2000, and the first time we had intercourse, on November 12, 2000. Additional sexual favours were granted over the course of the relationship that I believe have more than fully met your sexual needs and desires.

  5 These figures are based on analysis of weight gain/loss patterns, average annual incomes, and hygiene habits of the past seven years.

  6Excerpt from conversation on September 3, 2004, at approximately 7.09 p.m. Eastern Standard Time:

  Randolph: I can’t believe we’ve been together more than four years.

  Jessica: I can.

  Randolph: But, do you ever think about what things would be like if we’d never met?

  Jessica: How sad and lonely your life would be? I try not to dwell on it. I’m just glad we did find each other.

  Randolph: Do you think everyone has only one person who’s made for them?

  Jessica: Oh, Randolph, what a sweet thing to say!

  Randolph: Do you think maybe we aren’t each other’s?

  Jessica: Do you want to know what else is out there? Floozies. Gold diggers. Drug addicts. Think about what I’ve done for you. Don’t you see that your life would be worse without me?

  Randolph: I guess you could look at it that way, but –

  Jessica: Yes, you could.

  7 Yes, I’ve been faking it.

  8 I understand from firsthand experience that she unwantedly imposes herself on you. I therefore support any decision you make regarding moving or changing our telephone number without granting contact information to the abovementioned.

  9 Need I mention this noxious habit of yours?

  10 Jay in particular is an exceptionally destructive man. I refer specifically to a disturbing episode in which, while organizing your drawers, I came upon a photo of my Tootsie I in Atlantic City, pushed into the cleavage of some trashy hotel-bar waitress and being forced to take a shot of tequila, with Jay smiling maniacally in the background. I only pray that this alcohol was fatal, and that my beautiful guinea pig was not subjected to further abuses before she perished in that cesspool of sin. Had I reported Jay to PETA or a similar organization, he most likely would have been shot.

  11 These include, but are not limited to, the following:

  The ‘Still a Bachelor’ party they have thrown for you on the evenings preceding all four of our anniversaries;

  The ‘RANDY IS RANDY’ shirt they made you for your birthday last year;

  The whip I received in the mail three weeks ago;

  The prostitute who arrived at our apartment last Thursday.

  12 And no, Randolph, I do not believe that this was Jay’s cousin’s cellphone number.

  DOUGLAS COUPLAND

  People say that when you’re in love you enter a new parallel universe that runs alongside our everyday world – a small universe where nothing else can intrude – a republic of two, hypnotic, exclusive and bubbly, like you’re living inside a punch line that just won’t end. But I don’t think this is true. I think that being in love simply makes you feel even more connected to the rest of the species – it makes you belong to the world as fully as do birds and animals and flowers. I think that the real other universe is the one that erupts when the love goes away – what remains when the world crumbles and you’re left floating with nothing real to grab on to, and this is the world I’m living in right now. It’s a place where the rules are different. It’s a place where the only things that make sense are gestures that frighten or confuse people who live in the real world.

  For example, this afternoon I could see a squall coming in off Vancouver Island, black and inevitable like a cartoon warlord’s empire. And then an hour later the rains came. I got to thinking of the hot tarry smell of roads just after a shower that follows a drought. So I walked up to the highway, four lanes each way, just before rush hour, and began to walk backwards along its shoulder. If you were driving west and you approached me, you’d only see the back of my head, dripping wet, and my legs taking me the wrong way. Seeing this, you’d know that I was a soul in trouble, a soul obviously headed in the wrong direction, a soul who lives in this different loveless world.

  But then the sun came out and I looked to my right, off the highway’s edge, and there were all of these trees – birch and alder and vine maples – glistening, as though varnished. Because of the drought the colours hadn’t changed the way they normally do. The wet leaves looked brittle and transparent, like glassy candies, and they lured me off the highway and into the woods.

  And then I felt wonderful. I felt the way I feel after I’m halfway through my third drink, which is the way I wish all moments in life felt: heightened and charged with the sense that anything could happen at any moment – that the reason being alive is important is because just when you least expect it, you might receive just what you least expect.

  Then the woods felt as though they were made of glass shards. I had this feeling that all these coloured shards ought to be tinkling like wind chimes and my head got all tickly on the inside, and then the world went silent. I had to sit down on a rock. I had this feeling that surely the early pioneers must have felt about the beauty of the New World, that the only way to explain it was that there had to have been an eighth day of creation. What else could have generated such an astonishing world?

  And sitting down I also began to think about life, and about how our lives can seem so plotless and formless, and this makes us desperately need to feel as if we’re a part of a grander story. And I got thinking about writers – how all writers know when they’re about to finish a book – the last chapter, the last paragraph, the penultimate sentence, the final sentence and then the final words, THE END. And I got to thinking that there has to be some sort of psychic compression that happens in a writer’s brain when they know they’re about to hit that final wall. Surely all writers must compress something out of themselves that they hadn’t expected – that a diamond has to be lef
t behind, even a microscopic diamond.

  And so I walked back to the highway, got in my car and drove to the library. I went into the fiction section, got one of those little book carts, and then I selected a hundred novels at random. I took them to the photocopier and copied the final two pages of each. I stapled them together and then took them home and I read them all.

  Did I find any diamonds? I don’t know. I did find that the one thing many story endings have in common is that when they end, the narrator is moving either towards or away from light or darkness – literally – carrying candles into dark rooms or running a red light at an intersection.

  And so here in my parallel universe I think about you and I think about the light and the darkness that defined us back when we lived in the real world – the way you burned your fingers on the kerosene lamp at the lake two years ago; the way you made me go shoeless and walk through the sea foam full of phosphorescent organisms up the coast last year; the way you always had to duct-tape over the one chink of light that drilled into your eyeballs every morning from up near the curtain rod; and the night we shone flashlights through our fingers to convince ourselves that we’re made of blood.

  And so now I live alone in my parallel loveless world, looking for light sources and patches of black, hoping for a signal or an omen, wondering whether it will be a spark or a flame or a shadow or a tunnel, all the while feeling utterly unsure of which direction I’ll be headed into once that signal arrives.

  BIOGRAPHIES

  Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was born in Nigeria in 1977. She is from Abba, in Anambra State, but grew up in the university town of Nsukka where she attended primary and secondary schools. Her short fiction has been published in literary journals including Granta, and won the International PEN/David Wong award in 2003. Purple Hibiscus, her first novel, was shortlisted for the Orange Prize and the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, longlisted for the Booker Prize and was winner of the Hurston/Wright legacy award for debut fiction. Her second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, won the Orange Broadband Prize for fiction in 2007. She was a Hodder fellow at Princeton University for the 2005–6 academic year. She lives in Nigeria.

  Anonymous is a well travelled man/woman of the world who has been known to swing, ménage, fall in love and – on occasion – to write.

  Margaret Atwood’s books have been published in over thirty-five countries. She is the author of more than forty works of fiction, poetry, critical essays, and books for children. Her novels include Bodily Harm, The Handmaid’s Tale, Cat’s Eye, The Robber Bride, Alias Grace, which won the Giller Prize in Canada and the Premio Mondello in Italy; The Blind Assassin, winner of the 2000 Booker Prize; and Oryx and Crake. Margaret Atwood lives in Toronto with writer Graeme Gibson. They are the joint Honourary Presidents of the Rare Bird Club of BirdLife International.

  Chris Bachelder was born in 1971. He is a frequent contributor to the publications McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern and the Believer. He is the author of three novels: Bear v. Shark, Lessons in Virtual Tour Photography, and U.S.! His work also appears in New Stories from the South 2006, the Oxford American, The Cincinnati Review, and Mother Jones.

  Peter Behrens is a Canadian novelist and screenwriter who lives in Maine and Los Angeles. Behrens was a Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. His short stories have appeared in Tin House and the Atlantic Monthly, and in numerous anthologies. His novel The Law of Dreams received rave reviews in The New Yorker, the New York Times and the Washington Post, and won the 2006 Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, Canada’s highest literary honour.

  David Bezmozgis was born in Riga, Latvia, in 1973. In 1980 he emigrated with his parents to Toronto, where he lives today. His first book, Natasha and Other Stories, won the Jewish Quarterly Wingate Literary Prize for Fiction, the Commonwealth First Book, Regional Prize, and was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award in the same year. His stories have appeared in many publications including The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Walrus. David’s stories have also been anthologized in Best American Short Stories 2005, 2006. David is a Guggenheim Fellow and a Sundance Institute Screenwriting Fellow.

  Joseph Boyden is a Canadian writer with Irish, Scottish and Métis roots. His first novel Three Day Road won the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and the McNally Robinson Aboriginal Book of the Year Award and was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction. He is the author of Born with a Tooth, a collection of stories that was shortlisted for the Upper Canada Writer’s Craft Award. He divides his time between northern Ontario and Louisiana, where he teaches writing at the University of New Orleans.

  Tessa Brown is a senior at Princeton University, where she is writing a joint thesis under the Religion and Creative Writing departments. Her fiction has appeared in Harper’s magazine and New Sudden Fiction, and she has written book reviews for the Forward. She grew up in Chicago, which she still calls home.

  Leonard Cohen is a writer and composer. His artistic career began in 1956 with the publication of his first book of poetry, Let Us Compare Mythologies. He has published two novels, The Favourite Game and Beautiful Losers, and ten books of poetry, most recently Book of Longing. He has recorded seventeen albums, including Songs From a Room, Songs of Love and Hate, I’m Your Man, The Future and Ten New Songs. He divides his time between Los Angeles and Montreal.

  Douglas Coupland has written ten novels, including Generation X, Life after God, Microserfs, Polaroids from the Dead, Girlfriend in a Coma, Miss Wyoming and jPod. His writing has been translated into twenty-two languages, and appeared in over thirty countries. He is a regular contributor to the New York Times, the New Republic and ArtForum. His most recent novel is jPod, which was longlisted for the 2006 Giller Prize.

  Geoff Dyer was born in Cheltenham, England, in 1958. He was educated at the local grammar school and Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He is the author of three novels: Paris Trance, The Search, The Colour of Memory; a critical study of John Berger, Ways of Telling; a collection of essays, Anglo-English Attitudes; and four genre-defying titles: But Beautiful (winner of a 1992 Somerset Maugham Prize, shortlisted for the Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize), The Missing of the Somme, Out of Sheer Rage (a finalist, in the US, for a National Book Critics Circle Award), Yoga for People Who Can’t be Bothered to Do it (winner of the 2004 W.H. Smith Best Travel Book Award), and, most recently, The Ongoing Moment (winner of the ICP Infinity Award for Writing on Photography). He is also the editor of John Berger: Selected Essays and co-editor, with Margaret Sartor, of What Was True: The Photographs and Notebooks of William Gedney. In 2003 he was a recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship; in 2005 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature; in 2006 he received the E.M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in London.

  Michel Faber is a novelist and short-story writer. Born in Holland, he moved with his family to Australia in 1967 and has lived in Scotland since 1992. His short story ‘Fish’ won the Macallan/Scotland on Sunday Short Story Competition in 1996 and is included in his first collection of short stories, Some Rain Must Fall and Other Stories (1998), winner of the Saltire Society Scottish First Book of the Year Award. His most recent short-story collection is The Fahrenheit Twins and Other Stories (2005). His first novel, Under the Skin (2000), was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award and he has also won the Neil Gunn Prize and an Ian St James Award. Other fiction includes The Hundred and Ninety-Nine Steps (1999), a novella, The Courage Consort (2002), the story of an a cappella singing group, and the highly acclaimed novel The Crimson Petal and the White (2002).

  Neil Gaiman has long been one of the top writers in modern comics, as well as writing books for readers of all ages. His New York Times bestselling 2001 novel for adults, American Gods, was awarded the Hugo, Nebula, Bram Stoker, SFX and Locus awards, was nominated for many other awards, including the World Fantasy Award and the Minnesota Book Award, and appeared on many best-of-year lists. A
nansi Boys débuted on the New York Times Bestseller list in September, 2005. He has written screenplays (Mirrormask); the script for Beowulf, with Roger Avary, and is co-author, with Terry Pratchett, of Good Omens which spent seventeen consecutive weeks on the Sunday Times (London) bestseller list in 1990. He is also the creator/writer of monthly cult DC Comics horror-weird series, Sandman, which won nine Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards. He has written children’s books, plays and television series. Born and raised in England, Neil Gaiman now lives near Minneapolis, Minnesota.

  Damon Galgut was born in Pretoria in 1963 and lives in Cape Town, South Africa. Galgut is the author of several novels and one short-story collection. His début novel, A Sinless Season, was published when he was just seventeen. His other novels include The Beautiful Screaming of Pigs, winner of the 1992 CNA Literary Award (South Africa’s highest literary honour), A Small Circle of Beings, and The Quarry, which was adapted as a feature film that won the award for Best Film at the 1998 Montreal Film Festival. Galgut’s last novel, The Good Doctor (2003), was a finalist for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and for the Man Booker Prize, and won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for best book from the region of Africa.

  Panos Karnezis was born in Greece in 1967 and came to England in 1992. He studied Engineering at Oxford and worked in industry before starting to write in English. He studied for an MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. His first book, the critically acclaimed Little Infamies (2002), is a collection of connected short stories set in a nameless Greek village, and his second book, The Maze (2004), a novel set in Anatolia in 1922, was shortlisted for the 2004 Whitbread First Novel Award. His second novel The Birthday Party was published in July 2007. Panos Karnezis lives in London.