The Laws of Average

by Trevor Dodge

  a) Quick-hits for how to handle the sometimes painfully obvious truth that it is a competition:

  —Humor is your ally, as is clever/timely character assassination. Use both.

  —Update your resume and/or curriculum vitae.

  —Don’t update your resume and/or curriculum vitae.

  —Chrome up. Obviously for worst-case scenarios, but nonetheless effective. As of writing, handguns are still legal to own in the U.S. If you aren’t a convicted felon or mentally incapacitated. In the case that you live in another country, are in The Cut already, or are under the direct daily supervision of a clinical psychologist, you have no business reading this anyway.

  b) If you have been convinced beyond any doubt that it really, truly and could never be a competition, you simply need to wait. Before too long a situation will present itself to corrode your confidence on the matter, usually involving a cellular phone transmission of some kind. It’s important not to go looking for this and create/force a situation that will almost certainly result in a conversation/confrontation that will operatively have absolutely nothing to do with the larger, underlying issue(s) which provoked/created it, and this is always a conversation/confrontation that you will certainly lose.

  Careless Whisper

  It really was just as simple as the woman needed redeemed in her own mind, her well of willful ignorance run dry and the neighborhood crammed full with the wreckage of her turning a blind eye for far too long. She realized this as she mowed her own lawn freshly staked with a realtor’s FOR SALE sign, as she checked her own dipstick and saw the oil line caked over in a rusty flaky crust of something almost animalistic, as she streaked the glass in the screendoor over and over again in the July heat, her papertowel just dirty enough and the surface just hot enough to ensure it could never come clean. And heaven knows she wasn’t about to break off a clean new piece from the Brawny roll her mother had given her just this morning, because god forbid she use something actually designed to be used.

  The teenage boy across the street had his bedroom window cracked open just enough for her to hear him practicing on the dinged-up saxophone her father had given the boy a couple of years ago as a sort of thank you for assisting with the block’s garage sale. That one Memorial Day weekend, when the boy was just a toddler, the boy’s father played Wham’s “Careless Whisper” so much the steamy notes grafted themselves onto the soft flesh of his inner ear, so deep the boy honestly felt the song was being channeled to him by God.

  And by God this was the one neighborhood of all neighborhoods where neighbors still believed in God, the stake center and grade school and high school all within easy walking distance, not to mention a Kiwanis-funded public park only a 100 yards away from her front step (105 away from her parents’) named after a lead-crystal bowl of Christmas-colored ribbon candy.

  As the notes squeezed through the little squares of the screen meshing of his bedroom window, she began humming the melody without even thinking or having to think about thinking. The boy’s father used to play the song on his boombox over the sound of him and her taking deep breaths together, back before there even was a boy or a garage sale, and but also after there was a boy and a boy’s mother and a garage sale, but that’s a story for another time.

  The story for this time begins with a fight. The real kind, at a real bar. Not with fists but with words. How he doesn’t deserve her how she doesn’t deserve this how she is beautiful how he is abusive how she is caring how he is selfish. Same she, different he. How she is. How he is. The chorus and refrain lines identical, and these are them: I’m Not Afraid Of You. The car ride home was only a matter of blocks but it took years, their perpendicular stares crossing each other again and again, scissoring the silence into little scraps that heaped onto the floorboards and spilled out onto the driveway when she cracked the passenger door open and its rusted hinges screamed out into the dim neighborhood. The boy’s dog barked a two-noted response before the boy’s father barked his own, and the night’s thick shush instantly rehealed. They carried their stares inside and the boy’s father remained. Longer than he should have.

  That brings us to the middle of the story, and there isn’t much here that can’t be derived from all that precedes this very sentence. What happened in the middle was special but not unique. This was especially true for the woman, and much less so for the boy’s father. That’s why the middle wasn’t the end, and why middles are never ends. Why they are big, fat middles.

  The end of the story also begins with a fight, another real fight, but not a bar fight and not a driveway fight and not an inside fight and not an outside fight. An under fight in the early morning hours, after the texts and phone calls trickled to a stop and didn’t restart again, her windows shut and locked against the curve-ball breeze swirling outside in small circles, every knife, fork and spoon accounted for in a rental truck now hundreds of miles away. Guilty feet. Got no rhythm. A fight under the surfaces of their skin, beyond and beneath the places they were able to reach each other.

  Ransom

  Here is my list of demands.

  Pay careful attention because I will not repeat myself.

  I’ve been trained to want things, and not only things like physical things but things like abstract things.

  I am supposed to covet these things.

  Have you ever noticed how close the words “cover” and “covet” are?

  Luckily, I’ve owned a fat, leather-tooled dictionary since I was six years old, so I know the difference between the two.

  Where’s your dictionary?

  Get it out now.

  I’m not joking around here.

  We’re going to do this like they do in that Mel Gibson film, by the way.

  You’re going to come to a point where you refuse to pay me.

  You’re going to come to a point where you yell at the top of your voice.

  Notice I didn’t say “lungs,” I said “voice.”

  You were expecting me to say “voice,” weren’t you?

  If you don’t know the difference between your lungs and your voice, you are truly fucked here.

  But I’m getting ahead of myself, so let me articulate what I want first.

  I want you to pretend that you’re holding a letter from someone you love.

  I want you to think something nice about that someone.

  Like a kiss.

  Like a pinky ring.

  Like a mole on a big toe without any hair growing out of it.

  I want you to want to finish reading the letter you’re holding, so please try to concentrate.

  This is important.

  I want you to tell that someone something for me.

  I want you to tell that someone you won’t be taking their phone calls.

  I want you to tell that someone you will only communicate with them through notes on a napkin the next time the two of you have lunch.

  I want you to tell that someone you can no longer be a hostage.

  So that’s the first thing.

  I know you’re disappointed that this is continuing, but if there was only the one thing, this wouldn’t be called a “list of demands,” would it?

  Stop it.

  Right now.

  I want you to know that this won’t last forever.

  Everything else, on the other hand, will.

  I want you to consider what drove Verlaine to publish Rimbaud’s poems.

  The ones his mother and sister begged him not to publish.

  Think long and hard about that.

  I want you to consider what drove Poe to trash his own novel, calling it his “silly little book,” refusing to pay it any attention or tuck it in at night.

  Spend as much time as you like on that one.

  I want you to consider why Alisha Klass tattooed Seymore Butts’ name above her ass before she ever met him.

  Now consider how that name later transformed into a dolphin.

  If you’re not already googling Klass, don’t both
er. The moment has passed.

  I want you to tell that someone something else for me.

  I want you to tell that someone there is no such thing as freedom of conscience.

  Make sure you put as much stress on the first syllable in “conscience” as you possibly can.

  Come on, don’t be like that now.

  We’re just about to get to the good part.

  I want you to tell that someone there is neither a thing called “freedom” nor “conscience” that is worth fighting for.

  Scratch that.

  I want you to tell that someone there is neither a thing called “freedom” nor “conscience” that is worth dying for.

  Because having a conscience is predicated on having a choice.

  Because having a choice is predicated on being free.

  And I don’t mean “free” the way Amy Goodman and Rush Limbaugh mean it.

  And I certainly don’t mean “free” the way that someone you thought about earlier means it.

  I mean “free” the way Gil Sorrentino means it when he says that plots are absurd.

  I mean “free” the way Bill Burroughs means it when he implores us to raid the prisonhouse of language.

  I mean “free” the way Ted Adorno means it when he argues art is a social antithesis to the very society which produced it.

  It just kills me having to spell this out for you, by the way.

  Let me back up a second.

  What did you think I meant by “free” in the first place?

  Perhaps we’re getting ahead of ourselves here.

  Perhaps we’re trying way too hard to get to the end of this.

  I can hear you sighing.

  Fine.

  Just fine.

  Go on now.

  Go ahead.

  Before I change my mind.

  Again.

  Choose the Right

  With her gourd-shaped body, wire-wrapped mouth, and equally sensually-problematic attitude to match, she was a classic middle child with the curse of an older, prettier, sexually active sister a full four years ahead of her, and the blessing of a younger, awkward and wholly unintelligent brother plodding five years behind. She was officially reticent but in reality curious, with a good helping of subtle deviousness that comes standard being raised in a Mormon family, bred in mind and soul not to give audience to the body’s cravings until someone winks the formal wink in her sealing ceremony.

  Her panties were always cut high on the hip, tucked inside elastic-waisted dancing sweats, black and crinkled. On purpose. Her mother liked these particular sweatpants because she thought they obfuscated her daughter’s figure with their zigzags and bunchings of spandex, that somehow all that designed noise would disrupt the big lines and slow curves of her.

  But the mother was wrong about that, just like she was wrong about a great deal of other things when it came to dressing and undressing the human body. Things like when it’s appropriate to wear a T-shirt to bed instead of a nightgown, and things like when/if said T-shirt should be removed even for the few minutes it always ended up strangling her around the neck and chafing her chest when her husband came calling for her monthly tithing. Like her daughter after her, there was a moment in the mother’s youth when she was pretty and energetic and even a bit sexy; unfortunately, also just like her daughter after her, the mother had already eclipsed that moment by the time she’d turned 17, and the rest of her life she’d spend servicing whomever was just asexual enough to have her help him achieve the Celestial Kingdom. To steel her daughter for this, the mother took her to a Shopko when she was 8 and bought her a thin steel ring topped with a simple emerald shield cradling three uppercase letters: “CTR.”

  The girl was instructed to have a visceral antagonism towards not just her body, but all bodies, no matter their sex or how they gender-performed. And saying she was simply embarrassed or modest or a bit shameful about her own body would almost certainly be to overstate what was largely was true: that she was apathetic towards her own sensuality, and this was a real, real shame.

  The most vivid memory I have of her testing herself is the one I formed while driving her back home on a late school-year Tuesday afternoon, me in the driver’s seat of my 1973 VW SuperBeetle, her parked beside me in the place girlfriends are expected to sit as their boyfriends grind through a manual transmission, showboating their menial skills in throttling the vehicle with the clutch and shifter that is always sprouting up from the floorboards like a little beanstalk. The left-hand turn lane onto the boulevard from the avenue, three cars ahead of us queued to make the gentle sweep to the left, her acid-washed jeans just baggy enough in front for me to flip the brass button fly out and work it past its double-stitched crevice, flaying the fabric open almost like one does when dissecting a frog dead on its back in a biology tray.

  She was wearing hip-huggers again, green and white striped ones, the bright lines of color long ago faded from all the hot water and bleach her mother cycled through the household’s underwear literally every single day. I pressed my palm against the bottom berm of her stomach and slid the tip of my middle finger underneath the elastic lip which always drew itself so tight that it left red and purple railroad tracks in her skin for what seemed like hours to her after she changed them out for new ones or showered or what have you. She certainly never slept completely naked, and especially not on the bottom. Her mother had terrorized her at a young age about the potential infective invasion down there when girls are fast asleep in their beds and surely dreaming of how to make the perfect jello or macaroni salad at a moment’s notice, or simply impress a gaggle of cousins visiting from across the state line. As my finger trundled along, I felt the crazy wires of her hair, long and grainy and big shades of orange-red, the color of a campfire well-fed with oxygen and fuel and heat.

  By this time the cars ahead had pulled away and so I had to jerk the car into motion using its first gear. There was no way I intended to move my shifting hand, but it wasn’t clear to me if she was into this at all, so I asked her to help me shift into second. She obliged and I wanted to think she attempted a smirk, queuing for the engine to hit that sweet spot with its RPM before I buried the clutch pedal into the floor, allowing her to effortlessly slide the beanstalk into the next gear. I underhanded the top of the steering wheel and spun the tires so the car could make the curve, simultaneously plunging that middle finger of my shifting hand through the firey-wiry hair and arriving at the tip of her clit, soft and unsure like waking from an inadvertent nap on a cold and rainy afternoon. I whined the engine up for her to shift into third, and again she did it seamlessly.

  I would love to narrate something fantastically meta-phoric for you here, but the simple, brutal truth is that when the car hit fourth gear she was staring straight ahead without a single emotion on her face. Me telling her to please leave her pants that way only led to me changing my mind as she resigned herself to my request, flatly and without word or motion. Grade schoolers extract their math books with more desire than what surfaced in her at that moment, and I instinctively knew that although she had never had a shred of anything to feel shame for in her 15 years on the planet up to that moment, I had just given her something to change that for her. And I joined her in that feeling.

  I parked across the street from the brick house she lived in, the one that always had ample parking in its expansive driveway and attached carport. The engine spun down and she relooped the denim over the fat brass fasteners below her stomach. She smiled the vacant smile she had seen in practice inside the house on the other side of the road. I must have grimaced. But if I didn’t, I am now. Whatever that’s worth. Choice is such a beautiful thing.

  Space

  It probably should have ended with an argument like the one that was their favorite and most frequent, the one about which size fork she preferred with her apple pie, which of course differed from which size fork she preferred with her swedish meatballs, which of course differed from which size fork she preferred
with her spinach salad, but was exactly the same size fork she preferred with her ice cream, which of course baffled him because he always forgot this part about the ice cream and served it to her with a spoon enough times that their second favorite argument was about which size spoon she preferred with her tomato soup, which of course differed from which size spoon she preferred with her oatmeal, which of course she occasionally ate with a fork to make sure she didn’t get a huge mouthful of the mush because he never microwaved it to achieve the right temperature, and that was an entirely different argument altogether, one which most certainly wasn’t frequent or ferocious enough to rank in the favorites list, because there was potential for real hurt and pain in that one, and they never argued a single second about anything that lasted.

  But it didn’t. It ended like this.

  After she’d finished her fourth crossword thingy and tenth sudoku whatchamadoo and sixth anagram-a-bob, he figured it was safe to drape his arm along her side as she faced away from him, the mechanical pencil still dangling between her index and middle fingers, the little crumbs of its eraser clinging to the sheets and her skin like a stubborn snow. She was sleeping and he knew it; the television buzzed in front of their bed, quick shadows strobing against the textured walls, constantly flickering into new shapes just at the moments the old ones became identifiable.