by Julia Scott
—C.Y.
I’m a good person. Or at least not a bad person. Pretty good. Almost good. Ninetieth percentile. That sounds too high. Eightieth percentile. Top quintile, is that what it’s called? Good enough. I care about other people. I care about caring about other people. No I don’t. No, wait, I do. I care. Is caring enough? It’s a start. But I have to do more. I have to do something. What should I care about? I don’t know. I don’t know what to care about. I have to learn more to know what to care about. I have to do something now. Something real, something big, start today, this moment, change myself, change the world a little bit, just a little bit, engage with the world. I have to go:
To the Internet.
I’m opening a browser window. A window to the world. The news. What is happening? Wars. There are wars going on. There are people dying of curable diseases. Insert real stats here. That’s a note to myself, to learn stats later. This would be more impactful if I had real stats. God I hate that word. Impactful. That’s not even a word. Is it? I should look it up. Note to self: look that up later.
I don’t even want to know if it’s a real word. If it is, it still sucks. If someone says impactful, I automatically don’t like that person. That word gives me goose bumps, the bad kind. That word makes me flinch. It makes me wince. Wincing and flinching at the same time. Winching. That’s a word. Impactful, on the other hand: still not a word. It’s, I don’t know what it is. A non-word. A damaged fragment of language. An orphan. A mangled idea turned into a sound, a sound which sounds like a word, but it’s really just a noise. I’m off track here. Stats. Here we go, let’s see. A portal. My window is into a portal. A news portal. A hole. I’m looking through a hole at the world. I can point my hole and see what I want to see. Blank people die of blank horrible disease every year. Oh my God that’s depressing. Ugh, I need stats. It would be so much more powerful with stats. I’m a good person, or at least I want to be a good person, and a good person would know stats. A good person would do something about this. I should volunteer. How do I do that? Click on this link, oh man I love the Internet and
HELLO
—Hello?
HELLO
—Who are you?
I’M THE INTERNET. HERE IS WHAT IS TRENDING NOW
—I don’t want to know what is trending now. I want the news.
TRENDING NOW. NOW. WHAT’S MORE NEWSWORTHY THAN THAT?
—I need to know what to care about.
TRENDING NOW:
—I don’t care about that.
HERE ARE THE TOP FIVE KARDASHIANS
—I told you, I don’t care about that. And Kourtney is obviously the best Kardashian.
HERE ARE THE TOP FIVE TELEVISON SHOWS: YOGA WITH THE STARS. YODELING WITH THE STARS. EATING YOGURT WITH THE STARS
—That’s not interesting to me. What is interesting to me is, well, I’m not exactly sure what’s interesting to me but whatever it turns out to be, one thing I am sure of, really sure of is, oh my God is that a baby panda hugging a baby koala? No, no, stop it. I’m a good person. Eightieth percentile. Certainly no lower than seventy-fifth. Top quartile. I am going to volunteer. If my schedule permits. If not, then I’ll donate. That’s perfect. I work, to make the money, and then I send it to people that need the money, in a faraway place that I know about from commercials. It’s how much? Oh I’m good for that. Put me down for, wait that’s every month? Okay maybe, huh, hmmm, hrrrmmm, okay donate is on my list, I will donate, maybe a little later, I don’t even have my credit card with me, where is my wallet? Oh crap, it’s all the way on the other side of the room. Okay donate later, but what can I do now? Right now? Anything that doesn’t require a credit card. I can sign a petition. Click yes on that box. But, ugh, that takes me to a link and that seems like a lot of text to read. I have to scroll down, all the way to the bottom? And then, give my address. Hmm, why do they need that? Okay, well, maybe I don’t sign that petition yet, but at least I know about it. I don’t know the positions of the left and the right on the issue and what the science says but I do know the issue exists. That’s something. That’s more than most people can say. That makes me, at least, I don’t know, sixtieth percentile? Maybe that’s a little aggressive. The median. Smack dab in the middle. That’s not bad. By definition, it’s not bad. It’s not good, but well, I can work on it. Starting now. Or now. What’s going on now?
HERE IS WHAT IS TRENDING NOW:
KENNY G DIVORCE
CHUCK NORRIS
AUSTRALIAN SHARK ATTACK
IS AFRICA A COUNTRY?
BANKRUPTCY PROTECTION
TRAMPOLINING WITH THE STARS
YO-YOING WITH THE STARS, STARRING YO-YO MA
—Why am I so unhappy?
—Why do I keep doing this again and again?
—Why am I with him?
—Why is she with me?
—Why aren’t things turning out the way I thought they would?
—What do I look at now? What is trending now? No, shut up. How do I clear my head? How can I think straight? How can I even think about what I want to think about? What can I do, what do I do?
What am I supposed to do now? And now? And now? And now? What do I do now?
SIMON RICH
SIMON’S NEWS PAGE
SIMON RICH has written for the New Yorker, the Believer, and McSweeney’s. His books have been published in a dozen languages. His latest collection is called Spoiled Brats.
These days, I write joke books and gags for the movies. There was a time, though, when I wanted to be taken seriously as a writer. That’s why, when I was five, I founded a hard-hitting, muckraking newspaper. The year was 1989 and the world was changing fast. The Berlin Wall was coming down, Nelson Mandela was making waves, and Mr. Brockman was introducing shapes and colors at my kindergarten. I was reporting from the front lines of history.
Simon’s News Page was critically acclaimed by everyone (Mom, Dad). Somehow, though, we folded after just five issues. A few factors contributed to our demise. As an investigative journalist, my scope was limited by the fact that I wasn’t allowed to leave the apartment. Low circulation was another problem. I was so desperate to increase our readership, I resorted to printing sensationalist headlines (“Bubble Gum,” “Rock and Roll”). In hindsight, this was the beginning of the end.
The biggest blow to Simon’s News Page occurred when my mother, whom I dictated the newspaper to, informed me that she no longer had time to type up my articles whenever I wanted her to. When you lose your publisher, it’s hard to recover. Still, I’m proud of the work we did. I feel like we told it straight, changed some minds, and made a real difference in apartment 6A.
Below are some excerpts from Simon’s News Page.
—S.R.
NEWS
[NOTE: I have a brother Nathaniel, he’s four years older than me. I was very much on the Nathaniel “beat.”]
BUBBLE GUM
Nathaniel Rich blew a bubble that was almost as big as my face. I thought it was pretty good. It was the biggest bubble I ever saw. It was almost as big as the S on Superman’s chest—I mean bigger. So that’s all for the top story today.
ROCK AND ROLL
Nathaniel likes rock and roll. He even watches MTV. He loves rock and roll so much that he even talks about it. In fact he doesn’t like it, he LOVES it. He likes it even more than baseball cards. That’s it.
ADVERTISEMENTS
Here is a list of what you could get your child for Christmas.
1. G.I. Joe Figures.
2. Police Academy.
3. Double Dare.
4. Ring Raiders.
5. Some Clothes.
REVIEWS
[NOTE: This is a review of the classic Tim Burton Batman movie. My review was hindered by the fact that my mother did not let me see the film, due to scariness, even though my older brother had been allo
wed to see it.]
I am telling you that “Batman” isn’t good at all. There might be a movie about it but that doesn’t have anything to do with going Batman crazy! A month passed and everyone is still Batman crazy. Why not tell the actors and everything that Batman isn’t so great? . . . We are real and Batman isn’t.
EDITORIALS
MIKHAIL GORBACHEV
Mikhail Gorbachev is a pretty good leader of France. He makes peace in the entire world.
MR. BROCKMAN IS NICE
Mr. Brockman is so nice, he even has good projects like journals. We write in the journals every time it is time for journals. I love the journals the most. I always like doing the journals. I hope I get to do the journals forever.
JOSH MCHUGH
LETTER TO THE NOSE
JOSH MCHUGH is the CEO of Attention Span Media, a digital agency with clients in the entertainment and hospitality industries. Before joining Attention Span in 2008, he was a contributing editor at Wired magazine, an associate editor at Forbes, and a writer for Vanity Fair, Outside, and other publications. McHugh graduated from Yale in 1992 with a bachelor’s degree in English. His efforts to dunk a basketball are the subject of Dunkumentary, a short documentary that screened at the Cannes Film Festival in 2009.
The first piece of mine that was published in a non-school-sanctioned publication was never meant to be published at all. It was 1992, my first year out of college. While perusing one of Philadelphia’s more eclectic newsstands, I lucked into a copy of The Nose. This was during the heyday of Spy Magazine, which I read regularly. But I always came away from Spy feeling like I’d shared an elevator with James Spader’s character Steff from Pretty in Pink.
Nose, on the other hand, had all the gonzo funny of Spy without the jaded Upper East Side snottiness. This was the kind of magazine I could see myself working for.
This is my attempt to get a job at the magazine. I sat down at the IBM Selectric that I had bought for $1 at a yard sale. Its motor was ill-calibrated, which made the machine jumpy, causing the lines of text to look as though they’d been hiccupped onto the page. It also had a hyperactive Z key that deployed at random. Propping my Nose issue on the basement worktable next to the Selectric, I launched into a job application letter that, in retrospect, was a blend of thinly veiled arrogance, desperation, and atrocious spelling.
I sent the letter off to The Nose’s San Francisco headquarters and, not that surprisingly, didn’t hear back. The letter did get their attention, however. A few months later, back at school for a tailgate party, a friend told me that my piece in The Nose was the funniest thing he’d read in a long time.
“What piece in The Nose?”
“You know, that thing where you were pretending to be looking for a job?”
I hunted the magazine down and finally saw the response, which was:
“We have no job for you, Joshua. But, when you pitch yourself to a magazine for employment, here’s a tip: proof for typos. Yale, eh?”
—J.M.
ETHEL ROHAN
OUT OF THE MOUTHS OF VIRGINS
ETHEL ROHAN was born and raised in Dublin and now lives in San Francisco. She is the author of two story collections, Goodnight Nobody and Cut Through the Bone. She would hate you to think she has ever vomited in a car. Visit her at EthelRohan.com.
Fierce is how I imagined myself as I wrote “Out of the Mouths of Virgins”—attempting a kind of subversive erotic writing that would speak to the largely silenced sexcapades of my fellow Irishwomen. At nineteen, sexually active, and in love for the first time (or so I imagined), my body hummed with needs my church, culture, and parents insisted were sins. When I couldn’t find enough horny girls like me in stories—getting it on, and often getting it wrong—I was determined to become the Irish author to write the raw and real sexual tales of my contemporaries into the canon. Where were our voices among the sad and stale tales of wives lying under heaving husbands, eyes squeezed shut?
My own complex and troubled relationship with sex affected this story, which is hardly a harlequin romance. Vomit rarely figures in erotic literature, for instance. The results were a little too real.
—E.R.
Inside the dim, smoky pub, Molly’s vagina throbbed. Tirlee, her mother had called the body part. Girls had tirlees and boys had willies. Jaysus. Why was she thinking tirlees and willies? She wasn’t a girl anymore. She was seventeen and about to be deflowered. A flash of herself ripping white petals from a daisy crossed her mind and she threw up her imagined pale arm and tossed the soft, severed pieces into the air like confetti.
She looked at Barry standing at the bar, so tall and broad and his eyes as black as his hair, and her vagina started up again like a thumping heartbeat. She loved Barry and she was going to give herself to him tonight. Fully. She recalled the shower of daisy petals she’d imagined raining down on her just minutes earlier and believed she and Barry would marry some day, a warm feeling spreading over her like hot water on a teabag.
Barry parked his Da’s blue Renault at their usual spot in the Phoenix Park, right next to the polo fields. They’d been going out together since New Year’s Eve (three months, two days, and twenty-two-and-a-half hours to be exact) and had probably made out in this very spot some fifty times. Always, she stopped Barry and wouldn’t let him go all the way, just let him hump her with most of their clothes still on. But not tonight. Tonight they would get gloriously, biblically naked and he would enter her, fill her, complete her. She looked at him, trying to appear a seductress. He looked back at her, blinking hard, like he was trying to keep her in focus. God, they were both drunk. So drunk.
“Tonight’s the night,” she said, trying to sound her sexiest.
His head snapped back, as if she’d slapped him. “It is?”
She nodded, her teeth biting into her lower lip like she’d seen in films. All their other dates, she’d worn her ugliest knickers to steadfast her resolve to wait, but tonight she wore black lacy thongs. Just seeing her inside those, Barry might well spill himself.
He lowered the driver’s seat and pulled her onto him. She tried not to look at his red, damp face or listen to his aroused sounds, more like bleating than moans. Tried not to think that he reminded her of that orangutan at the zoo last summer descending on an enormous mound of bananas, his teeth bared, lips curled inside out, and falling over his own limbs with excitement. She squeezed her eyes shut and let Barry remove her bra and then her best knickers. His head dipped to her hard nipple and his lips latched on. He made suckling baby sounds.
She slapped the side of his head. “You never even noticed me knickers?”
“What about your knickers?” he asked.
“They’re new, sexy.”
“Yeah, all right, nice.” His lips wrapped around her nipple again.
Again she slapped his head. “I paid big money for them knickers. They’re fancy.”
“Fine, your knickers are fancy, gorgeous. Now can we get on with it.”
He angled on the driver’s seat and maneuvered her body so that she was lying on her back and he was straddling her. He slipped one, two, three fingers inside her. She was wet, so wet, and alive, so alive—a slick, throbbing organ between her legs. Like she’d just given birth to her own heart. It wouldn’t hurt, she reassured herself. There would be no blood. Only her juices and his juices and their love, all spilling out, oozing.
He pulled her hand to his penis and they both stroked it.
“I’ve got it,” she said, proud, confident, and he let her take over, her solo of solos. His face puffed and turned purple and he made grunting, wounded noises. “Stop,” he said. “Let’s make this last.”
He repositioned them both on the seat so he was now lying on his back and she was lying on top. He pushed her head down his body and her insides grinned, knowing what he wanted, knowing what she was going to give him at last. She grabbed his penis, its p
urple-red top like a bruised eye, and took him into her mouth, hoped she was doing it right. He moaned and his hand pressed the back of her head. She thought her eyes were going to pop out of her face. Then, no, oh no, her stomach retched and she vomited all over him.
“I’m sorry,” she said, her hand at her mouth.
Barry cleaned himself off and wanted back to business. His mouth worked her neck and then he kissed her again, even after she’d puked up vodka and Diet Coke and burger and chips. Next, he was humping her for real. They were naked and he was inside her and pushing at her like he wanted to go right through her. This is love, she told herself. This is my first time. I’m never going to forget my first time. Never going to forget Barry. She tried to settle in, to quicken her breathing, to feel aroused again, to have her vagina throb like a heart again, but something wasn’t working. The horses! she thought. The horses that raced around the polo fields out there right next to the car after a little white ball. She tried to imagine the rhythm and race of the horses, the thud of their hooves in the dirt. She pictured the magnificent animals, their sleek coats and rippling muscles, their strong legs. Giddy up, she thought, giddy up. She moved her body and made her noises in time to the horses’ gallop. She was close to climax. Her toes were curling. Barry jerked away from her, his teeth clenched and his penis in both hands. He sprayed her with his juices and she thought of a sparkler going off. He collapsed on top of her, panting.
“That was fucking great,” he said.
She looked past him and into the blackness dazzled with stars. Molly and Barry, she thought. Tirlees and willies, she thought. She thought, all the things that rhyme.
ELLEN SUSSMAN
THE AFFAIR