by Jeff Parker
It’s actually dangerous. Women have ruptured cerebral blood vessels.
I was stupid and insecure. I didn’t want to tell you I was getting headaches. I thought you’d hate me. On top of that the old sex-headache cliché. So I told you I was pregnant. I invented the abortion saga, carried it out for months. Those times I wept, it was because I was imbalanced. I began to hate me and to hate you. The doctor told me it was impossible to tell what caused Sexual Headache, but that he was sure if I didn’t have sex, it would solve the problem. The abortion story bought me time. When you dropped me off that day, why do you think I ordered you not to come in? I had scheduled a routine exam, a consultation on birth control. That took about twenty minutes, and I sat in the waiting room while you sat in the parking lot until I figured I’d sat roughly long enough to have an abortion and walk away from it.
Remember that one fight, when I screamed, “I can’t live with what we’ve done”? That’s the part I regret. That lie. In truth I couldn’t live with the headache I got while we were doing it. And the thing is, I’m grateful for all of it. I didn’t have the strength to break up with you otherwise. I didn’t have sex with anyone for more than a year, but when I did, it was fine, great even—and no headache. It never occurred again. The cause of my Sexual Headache was you.
I don’t want to seem heartless, Dealer. I do have nice memories of you. But honestly, the capillaries in my brain feel constricted just emailing you. I’m sorry to hear about your motility and I wish you and what’s-her-name the best of luck, but don’t write again.
Jana
From: [email protected]
Date: Wednesday, November 22, 2006 12:16 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Re: a little catch-up
You always were a neurotic bitch. Thanks for fucking out my world.
From: [email protected]
Date: Wednesday, November 22, 2006 12:20 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: quick question
Dear KkrazychickK,
Hey. Nice email handle. It’s got great symmetry. So yeah, this is Dealer. It’s been a while huh? I tracked you down online. Looks like you’re working for some yoga place—sounds hot!
To be honest I’m in a bit of a panic here. I’ll give you the condensed version: my new wife—yeppers, married—wants to have kids. We haven’t used protection in years because I guess you could say we were never really not trying. I assumed the reason nothing ever happened in the kid way was that she couldn’t have children. This made sense to me in terms of karma, that I would fall in love with a woman who couldn’t conceive. I figured I’d aborted my chances at children and now by the natural laws of the universe, I would not have them. I remember the abortion you had when we were together. That really broke me up. The funny thing is, I’ve been diagnosed with low sperm motility. In other words, my boys lack oomph. But I’m trying to figure out if this is something that’s happened over time, or if it’s always been this way. Obviously, it can’t be the latter, because you got pregnant when we were together. We had that little scare afterward, with the blood in the toilet. And you called the doctor and it was just a normal clot. I know this must seem weird and probably unpleasant. I’m just trying to clarify. I’ve had some disturbing revelations of late.
Hope everything’s okay in your life and in your bidniss.
Solid Gold,
Dealer
From: [email protected]
Date: Wednesday, November 22, 2006 01:07 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: quick question
Hey you, that’s so strange. I was just thinking about you the other day. The owner of a studio I work at was interested in building a database of her clients and asked me if I knew anyone who did that stuff. I said that I did but I hadn’t talked to him in a few years.
I’m teaching Pilates and Bikram Yoga at a few places in Oakland. Do you know what Bikram is? It’s like hot yoga. So, yeah, it is hot, about 106 degrees to be exact. The poses are designed to tourniquet your body with long, low-impact stretches, which you hold, cutting off the blood flow, then release, and your blood surges through you again, rushing oxygen to every tissue. It’s the life. Nothing but good feeling from me. You’re probably right about the karma. I don’t want kids. You’ll think I’m crazy. I have four dogs: a great dane, a pug, some kind of dalmation mix and a shmorkie-poo.
Listen, about that abortion back then, I’ve got to be honest with you. I wish I’d known how to get in touch with you because I’ve needed to for a while about this very thing. I ended up in a twelve-step program not long after we split. I had it coming even then. One of the steps was to apologize to everyone you had hurt and/or lied to in one way or another. You were at the top of my Had Lied To list. I was cheating on you with four or five guys. You tended to use condoms whereas they didn’t. So I doubt it was yours. In fact I can say almost for sure, I doubt it was yours. I know whose it was. I remember exactly when it happened. You would have been at work, which is when I would meet with this particular one. It happened just like I always imagined it would, mystically, under a tree, in the rain. But it wasn’t you. You were the only one who stepped up to the plate though. I figured because you had experience from that other girl, the one you got pregnant before me. You knew how to deal with things. Good because I didn’t want to have anything to do with that guy. You were really sweet during all of that. I’d like to send you the money you paid for it. What was it, like 400 dollars? What’s your address?
Kisses,
Kim
From: [email protected]
Date: Wednesday, November 22, 2006 01:09 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Re: quick question
You’ve got to be kidding me. Four or five guys? Under a tree? In the rain? Are you sure that wasn’t a movie? Or maybe you’re misremembering. Time is like that sometimes. Especially with all the pills you were doing.
The database stuff isn’t hard to learn. Well, I take that back, the query languages take some time, but the actual design of the database is pretty simple. You have a number of entities with different sets of data, but each entity shares one thing in common. That’s your primary key, which forces entity integrity by uniquely identifying entity instances. Then there’s your foreign key, which enforces referential integrity by completing an association between two entities. These keys can be as meaningless as an ID number or meaningful, like a last name.
I am still trying to picture this: you under a tree in the rain, being mystically impregnated by one of four or five men you are sleeping with during the time I am at the office learning the principle of the primary key. You could say that I feel right now like the keys of my life have just been blipped. It’s primary key rule numero uno, that each instance of its entity must have a non-null value. When it’s pulled out from under you, it’s a crusher.
Pilates and Yoga? You must be in great shape. Could you send me a pic? Are you born again and everything now?
Solid Gold,
Dealer
From: [email protected]
Date: Wednesday, November 22, 2006 01:35 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Re: Re: quick question
Yes, it’s what happened. Time I’m very clear on. The mistakes add up quick.
I know in my heart that there’s something out there, Wheeler, something governing the universe. But I don’t believe in God. I didn’t fall for that part of it. I only fell for the part that could help me. It’s not selfishness though. I know in my heart by helping me it helps the rest of the world too. I was corrosive before. Now I am galvanic.
I don’t get any of what you said about keys.
Seriously, send me your address. I’m waiting. Atonement, at last…
Kim
ps: Here’s a shot they took for my instructor profile. It’s the Sasangasana, the rabbit pose. I can do that shit all day lon
g.
From: [email protected]
Date: Wednesday, November 22, 2006 01:38 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: getting over it already
Wow. You look totally collapsed in on yourself there. I mean, it’s a good look for you. I think I can safely say you are the hottest woman I ever went out with. You were probably my best chance at natural selection. Of course back then you were so fucked up it probably would have been the village idiot. But present wife included, you are definitely the hottest. That’s no dis to Lisa. Lisa is amazing. She’s totally ironic, and she just deflects things. And she’ll try anything but in moderation. I think she knew all along that it was me, that I was the problem. And she let me blather on about my abortions and how it had to be her. I’m still fucked over all of this. Did you ever have dreams about the kid, Kim? I have dreams about the kid all the time, and not only that one. I dream about the other one I supposedly (don’t get me started) aborted with that neurotic bitch. I’ve had such vivid dreams I woke up in the morning and thought I heard the both of them, two boys, chattering away downstairs in front of the TV. They’d be five and eight now if they ever really existed. It never bothered me. Never. Not until now. I carried them with me and that was enough, and now I find out I was carrying nothing all along. It’s like the opposite of that Jesus-and-footprints-in-the-sand story. You don’t think something like that will affect you, but it does. It affects you.
Solid Gold,
Dealer
From: [email protected]
Date: Wednesday, November 22, 2006 02:10 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: indecent proposal
What does a guy have to do to get an invite to the Bay Area and a complimentary body tourniquet?
From: [email protected]
Date: Wednesday, November 22, 2006 02:20 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: where we stand
Well, babe, I’ve been searching for answers. Things are confirmed: I was a dope, duped. My boys never swam, Lisa. I hereby drop my claims on the good people at Fertilocertainty. I hereby restore their good name. My abortions were fictions all these years. Those cunts. I could understand one, but two? Where do you find girls like that? It’s been a grand deception. I just thought of something funny, babe: False sense of sterility. But that’s not quite it, is it?
Solid Gold,
Your Deal
From: [email protected]
Date: Wednesday, November 22, 2006 2:35 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: where we stand
Dealer,
I’ll see you tonight. We’ll make it. There are drugs to teach your boys to swim or technologies to do the swimming for them. And in the end, it’s just another project of mine. If it doesn’t work out, I’ll find another project. This is how well I understand me. The ROOMBA robotic vacuum is already tempting. It’s like a puppy except instead of shitting and pissing all over the place, it cleans. It’s cute, adorable even, a little toaster-sized cross between Knight Rider and R2-D2. Don’t worry about your ex-cunts. I’m more than you could ever ask for.
xo,
Lisa
Notes
“False Cognate”–The quotation about Black Widow suicide bombers is adapted from The New York Times, “Female Suicide Bombers Unnerve Russians,” August 7, 2003.
“An Evening of Jenga®” owes acknowledgements to the Gordon Lish-edited version of Raymond Carver’s story “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” and to the Milton Bradley Company.
“The Taste of Penny”–The quotations used in Jeremy’s call out to the Two Men And A Truck crew are from, respectively, David Copperfield by Charles Dickens; Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship by J.W. von Goethe; and the poem “An Epilogue at Wallack’s” by John Elton Wayland.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to all the journal and anthology editors who first published these stories.
I stole material for many of them. Thanks to Tom Burke, Nathan Deuel, Elizabeth Ellen, Kevin Keck, and Tony Walsch for being agreeable victims.
These stories have been a long time coming and many have had my back along the way, sometimes without even knowing. Thanks to Aaron Burch, JJ Butts, Mary Caponegro, Igor Chesnokov, Tony Earley, Jon Fink, Arthur Flowers, the folks, John Goldbach, Mikhail Iossel, Josh Knelman, Phil LaMarche, Adam Levin, Mima, my wife, Natural Light, Jason Ockert, Robert Olmstead, Crystal Parker, Tiffany Parker, Padgett Powell, Russki Standart, George Saunders, the Sewanee Writer’s Conference, Briggs Seekins, Meg Storey, and Ashley Vaught.
Special thanks to the Croatian Sensation Josip Novakovich.
Another special thanks to Stephen Lyons and John Jenkins at DECODE for publishing the limited edition chapbook The Back of the Line with images by my man/genius William Powhida, which make the James stories much better. (More info on that can be found at http://www.decodebooks.com/bookstore.html.)
As always, thanks to Ellen Levine.
And finally thanks to everyone at Dzanc Books, designer Steven Seighman for taping flyers to a telephone pole, Mary Gillis for copyediting, and especially Steve Gillis and Dan Wickett. Most publishers are content that the work they publish is impact on the world enough. Dzanc ups the ante, giving to kids and the incarcerated and more. It’s an honor to be associated with them.
1334 Woodbourne Street
Westland, MI 48186
www.dzancbooks.org
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Copyright © 2010, Text by Jeff Parker
All rights reserved, except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher:
Dzanc Books - 1334 Woodbourne Street, Westland, MI 48186
These stories have appeared in the following journals and anthologies:
“An Evening of Jenga®” as “The Tower” in Pindeldyboz; “The Back of the Line” in Hobart; “Bingo” in The Mississippi Review; “The Boy and the Colgante” in The Best of the Web 2009 (Dzanc Books), Waccamaw, and For Crying Out Loud (Ferno House Press); “The Briefcase of the Pregnant Spylady” in Columbia and Unsquared: Ann Arbor’s Edgiest Writers (826Michigan); “False Cognate” in Best American Nonrequired Reading 2006 (Houghton Mifflin), Stumbling & Raging: More Politically Inspired Fiction (MacAdam Cage), and Hobart; “James’s Fear of Birds” in CutBank; “James’s Love of Laundromats” in Panhandler; “James’s Low Moment” in The Journal; “The Taste of Penny” in Ploughshares and The Robert Olen Butler Prize Stories 2005 (Del Sol Press); “Our Cause” in Indiana Review; “Two Hours and Fifty-three Minutes” in Four Letter Word: New Love Letters (Simon & Schuster); “Owned” in Phoebe. All the James stories also appeared in the chapbook The Back of the Line published by DECODE with art by William Powhida.
eISBN : 978-0-982-63186-7