Fakes: An Anthology of Pseudo-Interviews, Faux-Lectures, Quasi-Letters, Found Texts, and Other Fraudulent Artifacts

by David Shields

  Yes?

  Right, right, by all means, mustn’t run over. It’s only . . .

  I thought, I thought there was . . .

  I thought I saw her hand.

  This AGREEMENT is between ____ Potential Future Husband ____ (hereinafter referred to as “You”), and ______ Me ______ (hereinafter referred to as “Me”).

  WHEREAS, you let me use your colored markers,

  WHEREAS, you let me ride your bike,

  WHEREAS, you are shy and have knobby knees and take me into the brush beyond the school fence that we call Outer Mongolia and ask if I will “go” with you on a piece of notebook paper with three boxes that say “yes,” “no,” and “maybe,”

  . . . you agree to love me.

  SIGNED this ____ day of ______________________ , 1980.

  BE IT KNOWN, that for good consideration the following additions or changes will comprise a part of said contract as if contained therein. All future addenda shall likewise be considered as contiguous to said contract, and all other terms and provisions of said contract shall remain in full force and effect.

  1. Insert “WHEREAS, you are dark haired and dark eyed, over six feet tall, with dimples,”

  2. Insert “WHEREAS, you are a bad boy on the outside, but a sweet, sensitive, and loyal boy on the inside who is not afraid to cuddle and cry,”

  . . . you agree to love me.

  SIGNED this ____ day of ______________________ , 1989.

  ADDENDA:

  * * *

  1. Strike “over six feet tall.”

  2. Insert “WHEREAS, you do not make out with me after your show and then drive me home in your van with your buddies in the back snickering, ‘Someone’s gonna face the hairy axe wound tonight.’”

  SIGNED this ____ day of ______________________ , 1990.

  ADDENDA:

  * * *

  1. Insert “WHEREAS, we do not meet on my European backpacking trip right out of high school. You do not have an enticing South African accent and invite me back to spend the summer working at a youth hostel with you in Athens, Greece after exchanging letters and phone calls for months. You do not drink retsina wine with me on a rooftop looking out at the white buildings dotting the city like cranes and I don’t lose my virginity to you. You don’t tell me a month later that if I was a good girlfriend I wouldn’t chat with the Australian boys in the bar as I wait for you to finish bartending. You don’t call me a slut under your breath another month later when I casually wave to a guy I know. You don’t throw away letters from my friends and tell my family I am not there when they call and then say, when I wonder why nobody is answering me, that you are obviously the only one who cares. No. You don’t lock me out at 2 a.m. so that I end up sleeping on benches in the Athens subway. You don’t get me drunk one night with round after round of Ouzo for the boss’s birthday, hold me down, and have your way until I get sick, or tell me it’s all water under the bridge the next day and to stop crying. You don’t berate me with lectures about sucking it up and discipline and what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. And I do not one night push open the door to find you on your back on a mattress with a woman straddling you on all fours and her vagina pointed straight at me. I do not feel my stomach drop each floor to the lobby and out to the street, where I do follow to find my breath, do discover my voice, do go through the movements to pack my backpack and walk out of there the next morning straight past your raised hand, you fucking asshole, I dare you, just dare you to do it and show everyone watching what I already know about you.”

  2. Strike “WHEREAS, you are a bad boy on the outside.”

  SIGNED this ____ day of ______________________ , 1991.

  ADDENDA:

  * * *

  1. Insert “WHEREAS, you buy me a bumblebee finger puppet and a spaceship that shoots foam disks so I can protect myself from your onslaught on the circus backlot, shrieking and laughing like a kid. After everyone has gone home, late at night, we lie on the dark round stage in the big top and talk about building a cabin in the woods. One day. The first time you kiss me it’s really soft and sweet and you say, ‘How was that?’ And we hold our breath when Tommy comes through with a flashlight to check the tent.”

  2. Insert “WHEREAS, you do not have to go back to Montreal.”

  3. Strike “You are dark haired.”

  4. Insert “You might be bald.”

  SIGNED this ____ day of ______________________ , 1995.

  CODICIL:

  * * *

  Mitigating substantiation of fuck-ups. Evidence attached, exhibits 1 and 2

  1. My friends told me that attraction fades anyway, so I soldiered on. But I made you get off me to brush your teeth because it was always there, the chemical evidence of our incompatibility. When you asked me to come home with you at Christmas, I said no, and you said, “When I get back, this is going to be over, isn’t it?” and I said yes. And after Christmas you came up to me in a university hallway after I avoided you for days, and you gave me a Simon and Garfunkel CD box set. “I got this for you before we broke up,” you said, “and I don’t have anyone else to give it to.”

  2. One night a boy I liked more than you invited me out to dinner and I forgot my date with you. When I returned, hours late, you were sitting on the front steps, still waiting. I hung on the arm of the other boy and your face fell. “So sorry,” I said. “We ate already. I’ll call you tomorrow.” I climbed the stairs around your seated body. And I didn’t call.

  I, the undersigned, do hereby submit a motion of mea culpa. I understand that these fuck-ups may render all potential future husbands null and void, according to Article 1, paragraph 6 of the Municipal Code of Karma.

  Sign here X ______________________

  and here X ______________________

  ADDENDUM:

  * * *

  1. Insert “WHEREAS, we have chemistry and you smell good to me.”

  SIGNED this ____ day of ______________________ , 1999.

  ADDENDUM:

  * * *

  1. Insert “You are not my professor in the Netherlands. We do not stand in the hallway talking about books for an hour before moving to the pub next door. It does not take you two weeks to mention you are married, with an eight-year-old daughter. We do not continue meeting for coffee ‘as friends’ and marvel at the way the time leaps. I do not get the inevitable phone call that you love me one night as I cross the bridge in the damp Dutch autumn, do not force you to stop talking to me and get yourself into therapy to make sure, do not finally give myself over when you say you know there is no other way for you. You don’t beg me to trust you. You don’t tell me you want us to get married and how we will build a family. You don’t quote Yeats poems. You don’t move to an apartment overlooking the canal in Utrecht, where we spend our days. We do not go to faculty dinner parties together and Luxembourg on weekend trips. You don’t accept your ex-wife’s terms that you can only visit your daughter at her house and I can’t be in the same room with her. We do not fight about it when things are still the same a year later. When we decide to resolve the issue by buying a home in the neighborhood so your daughter can come over after school, you do not find problems with every house. You do not backpedal about our future babies. I do not go home to see my family, and you do not promise to get serious about finding a house when I get back. Two weeks after I am back in California, I do not get your call to say that you are moving back in with your ex-wife for the sake of your child. You do not actually tell me to wait ten years for you because when your daughter is eighteen you plan to come back to me. You do not talk about how this is your great sacrifice. You do not move back in that weekend and your wife does not immediately change your phone number so I cannot contact you anymore. Your secretary, who was my friend when we were together, does not refuse to put me through when I try to reach you. There is not the hideous impenetrable wall of silence when I pace my studio apartment all night in a frothy delirium, until you begin to send me e-mails. You do not call me your Bea
trice, your muse, as though I existed solely as a prop in your life, as if I had not lost the ground from under my feet.”

  ADDENDA:

  * * *

  Strike it all.

  Strike the e-mails that say:

  “I want a tape of your laugh.”

  terminate the contract. terminate

  WHEREAS, you vis-à-vis me, heretofore exist solely and exclusively in past tense and time travel is a posteriori null and void.

  WHEREAS, terra nullius therefore null and void by conditions of terms and mutually agreed upon in perpetuity ad infinitum default by undersigned henceforth shall cosigner per outlined therein without recourse.

  Ibid.

  Ibid.

  Sign here X __________________________

  and here X __________________________

  and here X __________________________

  and here X __________________________

  and here X __________________________

  and here X __________________________

  this ____ day of ______________________ , 2005.

  Renegotiate.

  WHEREAS, . . .

  You are not a ranger I meet hiking in a Berkshires nature reserve. I do not let you hold my hand and let someone call me baby again. I do not start to think about it all again, about my waning fertility and the ghost babies that fill my bedroom at night, about how nice it can be to have someone make coffee and fresh fruit and place it before my sleepy face in the morning, all just as I find out that I will be moving to Iowa. I do not hear, in our telephone conversation a few weeks after I move there, that moment when I hear you slide out of reach. I do not hear the mundane questions about my family and my apartment and my work. And I want to say no, please-wait-stop, let’s talk about when we hiked to the waterfall and watched the teenagers leap from the top to hurtle inches from the rock wall into the pool below, remember when we discussed the temerity of youth while we held hands on the walk down? Let’s talk about picking stinging nettles as we shrieked each time one got us, exacting our revenge over the steaming nettle soup in your little house, those easy kisses punctuating our kitchen dance as we prepared the table. Let’s coo over baby saw-whet owls and look for the skunk cabbage bloom . . . But I hear the futility, and as I say goodbye through the phone I know only definitively that you are gone after the click. I stand there with the phone in my hand, looking at the crap lump of plastic in my hand as the only miserable conduit I have left.

  WHEREAS, I remember one night as we walked in a parking lot, you took me by the hand and led me to a tree. This is the Black Locust Tree, you said. It is completely poisonous, except for the blossoms. You can eat the blossoms, they are delicious and filled with nectar. You picked the blossoms and brought one to my mouth. Trust me, you said. It’s delicious, you said. But the leaves and the rest of the tree will kill you.

  Strike “You agree to love me.”

  Insert “I, the undersigned, agree to love you.”

  Sign here X __________________________

  and here X __________________________

  and here X __________________________

  Signed this ____ day of ______________________ , 2011.

  18

  PRACTICE PROBLEM

  Joseph Salvatore

  CIRCLES, OVERLAPPING CIRCLES, circles intersecting with other circles, like the slow closing interstice of moon crossing over soon-to-be-eclipsed sun, circles overlapping with small shaded areas of geometry, not the geometry of Lobachevsky or Gauss or Euclid, but the geometry of Jennifer, the geometry of Jennifer Hampton, small-boned, green-eyed, pale-faced, goth-girl, theatre major at the state college in Salem, Massachusetts, a women’s studies minor currently on academic probation for failing Introduction to Geometry last spring, a writer of poetry and nude dancer at Shelby’s Slink Factory on Route One, a rough-trade emporium where Jennifer sticks out her pierced tongue and makes contact with her pierced nipple raised by hand up to her black-lipsticked mouth, Jennifer, Jennifer Hampton, the geometry thereof, and those circles, overlapping circles, circles like her silver sunglasses, the ones she wears day and night, indoors and out; circles like her many pills, the ones that deter pregnancy and manic depression, social anxiety disorder and panic attacks, O.C.D. and A.D.H.D.; circles like the Sunbeam clock above the dish-filled sink, the clock that hasn’t worked since 4:48 on a day when it seemed time finally slowed to a stop, circles like the antique opal ring that Terry gave her, and then there’s Terry: big-boned Boston bouncer at Club Zero Hour located behind the Fenway, the hearty, Irish, shaved-redheaded overseer of the cage-dance bar crowd that he’s paid to control with their wiry, bangled arms and pythonic, nylon-skinned legs sprouting from combat boots and silver platforms, and, look, there’s Terry now: tight black T-shirt, hard body, jeans and silver-tipped boots, shaking down the clientele, running hands up thighs, over asses and groins, searching for nines and boxcutters and other shit the grungy, flannel-shirted boys (and lately the girls) try to get past, the geometry of Terry, the geometry of Jennifer, Jennifer Hampton, intersecting planes and lines and overlapping circles and then we turn to our assignment: Graph the total area, spatial solidity, and utter leather morosis of Jennifer Hampton on a solid three-dimensional plane (note: be sure to make use of the fifth axiom and point P), and to begin the assignment we use a blank sheet of paper, blank slate, start clean, pen and pencil, and we wager softly on the depending outcomes of logistical circumstance, positive relativism, apathia, we allow to coincide the Sunday morning that big-boned Terry Hogan woke up in Laura Huron’s four-post canopy bed, the brittle condom still biting around his flaccid manhood, his head a crescendo of constricting blood vessels, and at the same moment Jennifer Hampton pouring her morning urine into a clear chemical solution and then over the colored cardboard dipstick embossed with two tiny indicator circles, one pink, the other white, almost simultaneously swallowing three pregnancy-deterring circles, trying to make up for the three she missed last month after spending a Friday/Saturday/Sunday biking from Roxbury to Cape Cod with Miguel, but her Sunbeam clock above the dish-filled sink doesn’t tell time anymore and Jennifer sends a letter to Roxbury, to Miguel in Roxbury, Miguel from Roxbury, now the slim-hipped hairdresser on Newbury Street, bi and beautiful, sideburns cut like coke, and the letter starts politely, calmly, Hey there stranger, then a few lines later, Can you believe this is happening to me? I’m getting it done next week, hope I don’t get shot by someone wearing a Save a Fetus for Jesus pin, guess I’m going to have to slow down, haven’t used my breaks in so long, hope they still catch, wld love to hear from you, where you been? love Jennifer, and if the Sunbeam clock above the dish-filled sink had still worked she’d have known that it was two-hundred-and-twenty-nine hours since she walked downtown to the corner of Derby and Congress and pulled the lip and fed the mouth of the mailbox a pink envelope addressed to Miguel de la Cruz of Humboldt Avenue in Roxbury, Massachusetts, who, at the exact moment when the mouth of the mailbox was pulled by Jennifer’s small, many-ringed, black-fingernailed hand, was asking another woman, this one even smaller-boned than Jennifer but almost the same age (actually fourteen months younger, but he, Miguel, never asks, only hopes) to accompany him on a trip from Roxbury to Cape Cod, he says it’ll be the best exercise she’ll ever enjoy getting, and touches her arm on the very same spot where he touched Jennifer’s for that crucial second longer than is necessary, and his pouty tight lips will finally spread east to west, and this girl, Veronica, fourteen months younger than Jennifer, Veronica Sheldon, a transplanted District of Columbian, will remember how her ex, Brian, Brian of South Boston, with his leprechaun-tattooed shoulder, promised her romantic trips like the one she’ll take with Miguel, down to the Cape or to Walden Pond or Revere Beach or somewhere, anywhere, just as long as she wouldn’t leave him or cheat on him or look at other guys, and how his promises for romantic getaways became inter-textured with his promises to stop drinking until that Friday night last December when he opened up the side of her face, his diamon
d Claddagh-ringed fist catching her below the cheekbone, and now that pinkish-purple worm crawls across her cheek forever, but Miguel said she was beautiful, and that’s more than anyone else ever said to Veronica Sheldon, and Jennifer’s clock has hands that don’t move and Jennifer’s addressee, Miguel, will pedal next to Veronica Sheldon and the two of them will cross the Bourne Bridge together and not see passing them, intersecting their radii, the smoky green Saab of the doctor who first looked at Veronica’s cheek the night Brian’s fist left its mark, and Dr. Powers will speed his Saab from Harwichport back to Boston, a smoky green line segment darting from the center point of his world toward the circumference of another, speeding back to Boston, back to Beacon Hill, to give his daughter’s college dorm-mate, Emma, twenty-seven years his junior, a gold tennis bracelet and dinner in the North End, and up on the fourth floor in an apartment across the street from the restaurant, across the street from Giovanni’s where Dr. Powers and Emma are planning the duplicities of their delicate new union, up on the fourth floor Leslie and Karen are stoned and sixty-nining, and Leslie moves her tongue in empty circles between Karen’s labia majora, wishing Jennifer Hampton would just return her phone calls, but Leslie knows that Jennifer only sees the night they slept together after Club Zero Hour, the night Leslie had to spend an hour and a half to get her Astroglided fist wrist-deep inside Jennifer, Leslie knows that Jennifer Hampton only sees their night together as her obligatory college-feminist foray into the trendy lesbianism that’s been written about so much lately in The Phoenix and The Voice, Leslie knows that small-boned, green-eyed Jennifer Hampton with her witchy pentagram tattoo on her slim Salem ankle only wanted to piss-off her ugly, shaven-headed, control freak, total breeder, bouncer boyfriend because he puts his hands way too far up women’s skirts when he’s working the door, Leslie knows that Jennifer is one of those total breeder girls who desperately want to be bi, really bi, like beautiful Miguel whom Leslie introduced to Jennifer in Boston, the day they were having double espressos and rolling Drum cigarettes, sitting on Newbury Street at the Armani sidewalk café, and Leslie knows that Miguel took one look at Jennifer’s sad green eyes and her all-too-ripe, twenty-year-old body and thought, Mmmm, definite bike trip to the Cape, and, to be honest, Leslie doesn’t even believe Miguel is really bi, since for as long as she’s known him he’s never gone biking down the Cape with anyone but beautiful young girls, and, as for beautiful young girls, Leslie also knows that Jennifer blew her off that next night at Club Zero Hour so she could make her bouncer boyfriend jealous again, but this time with Miguel, not some dyke from the North End—just return my fucking calls, bitch—and although a non-subscriber to phallocentrism, Leslie will use a Jell-O-red dildo on Karen whose legs will be tied too far apart so that later when she is untied and gets up to use the bathroom she, Karen, will walk stiff and grimace like an old woman with arthritis, while in Salem, Massachusetts, the city where broom-straddling witches decorate refrigerator door magnets and the sides of police cars, in Salem, Massachusetts, Jennifer Hampton places a Nine Inch Nails CD into her Sony Discman, the silver circle refracting in her tobacco-stained fingers, and she won’t remember that she was supposed to return one of bull-dyke Leslie’s two dozen manic messages—she’s such a drama queen—she’ll be rehearsing some new dance steps for the beer-glazed, tear-glazed eyes at Shelby’s Slink Factory in front of her oak-framed mirror that she found in Marblehead in someone’s trash, she will be thinking about Miguel and the baby that never was, and she will roll a tight Drum and decide to take a walk and think and write Miguel another letter, and she will see the October moon fat and round in the grape Zarex sky, and this will invigorate her and make her feel consumed with a belief in fate, a belief that everything happens for a reason under that great glowing green-cheesed celestial sphere, and who says it’s not the eye of the goddess? our earth mother of the night, able to pull the oceans away from the sands and up into the stars? who says it’s not all going to work out in the end? who, other than Jennifer, after all, can control her own fate? and that’s when Jennifer will see Anthony, Anthony the painter, Anthony the artist, who uses hollow-core bathroom doors in place of canvasses, and who stacks them down the cellar of his apartment building where his landlord, Raymond Callabrazio, will throw them out next week since he’s been vowing to do so for months now to his wife, Sophia, who had her breasts enlarged and her nose jobbed last year and who, while during her stay in Salem Hospital, saw the smoky-green-Saabed Dr. Powers walk past her room every so often and although she never met him she considered him a very attractive gentleman, but right now here’s Anthony the painter, Anthony the artist, whose daytime job is bike courier and who delivered a white package last week to a man named Jules in Jamaica Plain for three hundred dollars, but Anthony didn’t ask any questions, just delivered a package is all, a portion of which got cut up and split in half and distributed to a young dealer, Jason Barnard, who sold a portion of his portion to a queer named Miguel who works in some hair salon where Jason’s other customer Karen Delmaro works, Karen who lives with her girlfriend, Leslie, in the North End across the street and four floors up from Giovanni’s Restaurant, the present locus of love and linguini for Dr. Powers, but right now to the north of that spatiotemporal amorous cabal, right now, here comes Anthony the painter, Anthony the artist, coming right now toward Jennifer, walking slowly, left hand in pocket, in the right a cigarette glowing like a lit fuse, coming toward Jennifer Hampton from the direction of the college, scraps of fallen leaves skittering between the closing chasm of their collective steps and mutual paths, and Jennifer will look down, avert her gaze, as Anthony passes, she will see the dim splatters of paint on his black Doc Martens, and she will turn back as he passes but not say a word after seeing that he cut his ponytail off, and Jennifer will keep walking, as will Anthony, two integers, units of measure, unknown values and variables, maybe positive, maybe negative, void now to extrapolation, moving in opposite directions on a given line, distance compounding with every step, no backward glances now, and Jennifer will walk on until she ends up at the college, the buildings black this time of night, and across the street she will step into the college pizza shop, which is actually called College Pizza and Sub, still open, thank goddess, and Jennifer will order a slice of pepperoni and a small coffee, and sit at a brown Formica table and pull out her pouch and roll another cigarette, looking at her reflection to the left in the darkened front window of the shop, and begin to conceive another letter to Miguel, and that’s when she will see Anthony, sans ponytail, avec paint-speckled Docs glowing extra-terrestrially in the neon light, and Anthony will enter and stare up at the posted food prices and run his hand through his hair and feel around for the amputated limb of ponytail and then realize and reach farther down, as if to scratch the back of his neck, and he will pretend not to notice Jennifer Hampton, who at the same time is pretending not to notice Anthony, acting all preoccupied in getting her cigarette to roll just right, head bent down, fingers working the white paper into a fat, soon-to-be-delicious smoke, and Anthony will make his order, a small onion and mushroom, please, oh and hey, throw in a can of Diet Coke with that too, ah-ight? and the man behind the counter wearing a stained apron will bark back in broken English, small pizza-pie? and Anthony will say, no, no pie, thanks, just the pizza, to which the man behind the counter, head down now like Jennifer’s, already spreading the toppings over the tomato-pasted dough, tossing the onions and mushrooms out like a dealer at a blackjack table, will say, oh ya, oh ya, okay, small pizza-pie for you, and Anthony will smile nervously and turn back to get a reality-check response from Jennifer whose head is still down like the man behind the counter, the man behind the counter, whose wife, Marta, is kneeling in front of a candle-lit religious shrine across town, her head down at that very moment, just like her husband’s, just like Jennifer Hampton’s, three heads all bent down at that very moment, three points of a triangle spreading out across the city, and Marta’s head at one vertex bent down in prayer now, praying f
or her husband’s fingers to get cut off in the salami slicer, and Marta, emotionally exhausted from working the late shift at the pizza shop after her husband, the man behind the counter, begins his affair with a chubby college freshman named Nicole, Marta will imagine one great day shooting and killing her husband, shooting him in the face, his head broken open and spilling over like a fabulous piñata, syrupy colors running all over the floor of the pizza shop, College Pizza and Sub, colors everywhere, on the tops of police cars and ambulances, on the walls and the cash register, and if Marta’s lucky that night: on the blouse of that puta Nicole, colors running out of her husband’s open head like the vibrant paints Anthony had used on those hollow-core bathroom doors, those doors which by that time, thanks to Raymond Callabrazio, will be forgotten in some dump, buried under a card table once belonging to the poet Lucie Brock-Broido, but Marta won’t know any of this, won’t know poets or paints, won’t know guns or gun dealers, won’t even know Jason Barnard who could hook her up with any firearm she desired just by making a phone call to the pager of a West Indian called Toby, but Marta won’t know the right equation for tracking Jason Barnard down, and soon Jennifer will be back with big-boned Terry after spending two and a half artistic months with Anthony the painter, Anthony the artist, but right now here’s Anthony sitting across from small-boned, white-faced Jennifer Hampton who is chipping bits of black polish off her fingernails, her head still down, a black pen lying across an open notebook, and Anthony will follow her disinterested lead and look down at his own hand, at the gray sprinkles of paint on his knuckles, and then over at Jennifer,