by Zachary Doss
You attempt to sell the boyfriend, put an ad on the internet and in the newspaper, but nobody wants him. You are honest in the ad, say that the boyfriend has not stopped crying in weeks, no longer does or says anything to you. I think it might just be me, you write. You might have better luck. Nobody answers your ad, nor does anyone respond to your post on the message board asking for advice or possi bly technical information that might allow you to reprogram your boyfriend.
Finally, you come home one day and the new boyfriend has pulled the old boyfriend out of the hall closet. You wonder how the new boyfriend came to discover the old boyfriend. The old boyfriend is spread out on the floor, arms spread like a cross, and the new boyfriend is cutting the old boyfriend with a kitchen knife, your good chef’s knife. He is digging into the old boyfriend’s torso with the knife, reaching in and pulling out handfuls of wiring. Is this what I look like on the inside? he asks.
I guess so, you say, maybe newer or nicer. I don’t really know. You are buried in sadness, mourning, you realize, because your old boyfriend is now gone forever and never coming back. You can’t even be angry at the new boyfriend, you are just numb, in shock.
Is this what you’re going to do with me? Replace me with something else? he asks. You swear that his hand, still holding the knife, is trembling.
Probably not, you say, you were very expensive. And anyway, I’ve just realized that I loved that boyfriend. I’m sad that you killed him.
I hate you, the new boyfriend says.
The new boyfriend screams and hacks the old boyfriend’s head off with the kitchen knife. You keep your distance, wondering if you can reach for your phone without him noticing. The new boyfriend seems inconsolable, screaming and hacking and now crying again, crying more. I think you’re malfunctioning, you say, trying to be very calm.
YOU’RE malfunctioning, he screams, and lunges at you with the knife.
You see him moving at you too late, his arm swinging the knife toward your throat at slightly faster-than-human speed. Your hand is wrapped around your cell phone, but you’re already too slow, you realize it’s too late. Still, the thing you feel saddest about is the old boyfriend, spread out on the floor, his torso shredded, his head hanging from his neck by his spine, which you see is made of what looks like a high-density ceramic. The knife chipped it but didn’t break. He looks so broken, a dead thing, and that space between your heart and your stomach tightens and twists inside you.
Maybe I am malfunctioning, you think, and nothing more after that.
IV
You Love it All so Goddamn Much
Esquire
IT IS SOMETHING that you notice very suddenly. You are standing in the checkout line holding a sack of limes and you realize that the cashier is your boyfriend. He wears a wig that is long and chestnut-colored and has a slight wave to it. This hair is nothing like your boyfriend’s hair. It could be your imagination, but it seems your boyfriend, wearing a bald cap, is also bagging your groceries, making a face at your unripe bananas.
It’s possible that you are just having a bad afternoon, except all week you don’t run into anyone who isn’t your boyfriend. Your boyfriend in dreadlocks hands you your cup of coffee. Your boyfriend in an undershirt jogs through the park while your boyfriend in an extremely fancy car cuts you off in traffic. You go to the gym and your boyfriend sits at the front desk when you check in, your boyfriend hands you a towel, your boyfriend has already worked up a sweat by the time you make it to the weight room. You are at a club late one night and you have unprotected sex in the bathroom with your boyfriend, who is on his break from dancing on a glowing platform.
You go to your therapist, who is also your boyfriend, and you feel uncomfortable telling him about your feelings. Let’s say I am your boyfriend, your boyfriend says, being your therapist, with glasses and unflattering lipstick. What is it you feel like you couldn’t tell me?
In your hands, you hold a magazine that you carried with you from the waiting room. You couldn’t put it down. You twist it nervously, bending the pages into a semipermanent tube. Your boyfriend is on the cover, wearing a well-tailored suit and grinning and suddenly you can feel him looking at you from every direction. You look over at a lamp and it is your boyfriend, and the computer, your boyfriend, your therapist’s chair is your boyfriend and the chair you are sitting on is your boyfriend and the bookcase is your boyfriend and the desk and the diploma on the wall is your boyfriend the whole room is your boyfriend and the sky outside the trees the cars the roads the buildings the earth, everything is your boyfriend and you love it, you love it all so goddamn much.
Sex Stuff
YOUR BOYFRIEND WORKS in pornography. You thought this might bother you but it doesn’t bother you at all. Your boyfriend travels to Florida or California or Texas for work. You notice pornography is filmed where it is hot outside and the sun is always shining. Your boyfriend is never called to Maine or Minnesota or Wisconsin to film pornography. Which is fine, you are unconcerned that the weather other places might be better. Your boyfriend deposits his pornography paychecks in your joint bank account, and it doesn’t bother you to see his income listed on your bank statements. You make about the same amount of money, which is cool. That is totally cool with you, that your boyfriend is doing enough pornography to make a regular income. Your best friend calls you up to tell you he saw your boyfriend on the internet doing some sex stuff. It doesn’t bother you that he says it like that, sex stuff. You’re proud of what your boyfriend does for a living. You are proud of your boyfriend and, most importantly, you are not bothered that your best friend called you up. You and your boyfriend have sex sometimes. While you are having sex you imagine your boyfriend having sex with other people and it doesn’t bother you that imagining your boyfriend having sex with other people is more arousing than imagining your boyfriend having sex with you. After, you lay in bed next to your boyfriend and it doesn’t bother you that you don’t have muscle definition or visible abs. You are awake, your eyes open, long after your boyfriend has fallen asleep. It’s getting hotter outside, global warming, probably, and that doesn’t bother you, you are not bothered at all.
Fraternal
YOUR BOYFRIEND HAS a twin brother. They look nothing alike but your boyfriend is always trying to play tricks on you as if he and his brother are identical. Often your boyfriend’s twin brother shows up on dates you planned with your boyfriend, giggling because he has played a trick on you.
Going on a date with your boyfriend’s twin brother, who takes great pains to talk and act like your boyfriend, is almost the same as going on a date with your boyfriend, even though your boyfriend’s twin brother looks nothing like your boyfriend and has a terrible personality. He eats the things your boyfriend likes, gives a reasonable imitation of your boyfriend’s opinions. At the end of each night, your boyfriend jumps out of the bushes and shouts, I caught you! Out on a date with my twin brother. Sometimes this happens in public and people laugh and clap because they think you are doing a play.
Your boyfriend and his twin brother try to do other twin things. They talk in a secret language you don’t understand, only actually they’re speaking Spanish and you understand everything. They try to solve mysteries. They wear the same clothes or radically different clothes. We switched places once, to try to trick our parents into getting back together, your boyfriend tells you.
But it could be your boyfriend’s twin brother who tells you this. You are on a date, and you can’t tell if your boyfriend and his brother have switched places or not. You find that you can no longer tell them apart. This might be your boyfriend’s twin brother, or maybe your boyfriend is having a bad day. This might be your boyfriend, or maybe your boyfriend’s twin brother got an unflattering haircut. In your mind, their features have begun to blur together. You decide to be in a relationship with whichever one you are nearest at the time.
It didn’t work, your boyfriend says. It was very disappointing.
The Problem-Solver
/> WITH YOUR BOYFRIEND, something urgent is always happening. Maybe he’s in a fight with his best friend, or someone at his job got murdered and he’s got a lead on the killer, or he has a project due at 8 a.m. and he’s overslept, or he’s pretty sure someone is following him everywhere he goes, but he can’t talk about it. Some days you only see your boyfriend at meals, but he never gets to eat, much less have a conversation. He gets a call when the fork is halfway to his mouth. He gets a text just as he’s folding his slice of pizza in half. He cuts a neat triangle from his waffle and just then, someone bursts through the door with news.
When your boyfriend calls out for delivery, he asks for two cheeseburgers, extra fries, a side of the special chili, macaroni and cheese with extra cheese, fried pickles. At breakfast he asks for waffles, sausage, biscuits and gravy, a spinach and feta omelet, extra bacon, breakfast tacos, mini blueberry muffins. He always orders two pizzas instead of one, extra breadsticks with his lasagna, he always tells the waiter he wants an appetizer. He orders all this food and then he can’t eat it because he is called away. He is running toward something or he is running away from something. He is dropping his fork to rush out the door; he is drop ping a full cup of frozen yogurt to melt as he runs down the street.
Your boyfriend’s hunger is magnified, legendary. He can’t eat even when he tries. When he lifts a fork to his mouth, even an empty fork, an alarm goes off somewhere in the distance. He knows he’s the only one who can solve these problems, from the minor crisis to the major catastrophe. He has to be there to stop the nuclear plant from melting down. He has to be there to save his best friend’s marriage. In his wake he leaves a trail of solved problems, satisfied customers, citizens saved, and a trail of rot, a landfill’s worth of food waste, never eaten, the hollow inside him growing at an incredible rate even as he sometimes looks over his shoulder with longing.
Once, he ignored a crisis, tried to take a bite despite the alarm going off in the distance, and a second alarm went off, then more, a falling building in midtown, a tidal wave at the beach, a plane falling out of the sky, a civil war erupting across Europe, an entire landmass cracking off and falling into the sea, and as his tongue touched just the smallest bit of his ravioli, the sun went supernova, dooming the world billions of years from now, when the wave of fire finally reaches Earth.
He could never bring himself to do it again.
It is hard to say to him, you are always leaving me, but he is always leaving you, surrounded by piles of uneaten food, discarded, another thing he wants but dares not touch his mouth to. You are lonely among the worms and ants that emerge from hiding to pick at scraps of egg, the rare beetles hoping to steal a pepperoni, the birds flying away with dinner rolls and the rats nibbling at discarded cheeseburg ers. Here is what your boyfriend does not do: come back. Here is what you do not do: chase after him. Even though he leaves a trail you could easily follow, you are not a scavenger, and you don’t need anything from him.
Higher Learning
YOUR BOYFRIEND ENROLLS in community college without discussing it with you, which is the kind of thing he’s always doing. I thought some fresh air would do me good, your boyfriend says.
You aren’t pleased, but you want your boyfriend to have a good experience at community college, so you go with him to the store to get a nice tent, a sleeping bag that’s warm enough, a gas lamp. You and your boyfriend spend some time standing together silently looking at fishing poles. Do you know how to fish? you ask your boyfriend.
Community college is about learning, you know? he says. Maybe in community college I’ll learn things about fishing. You get him a fishing pole just in case.
When you drop your boyfriend off at community college, you are surprised to discover that you feel nervous for him. You want him to succeed and be liked. You want him to get good grades and improve his life. As he walks to the cabins, you notice that he seems much older than everyone else at community college. You feel one last stab of hope that he’ll fit in. You don’t know if he packed enough clean underwear.
It takes about a week of you sitting at home alone, drinking wine and feeling apprehensive, for the first letter from your boyfriend to arrive from community college. The letter sets you at ease. Your boyfriend is doing the usual community college things, making arts and crafts, singing around the campfire, learning to swim, participating in a late-night panty raid on the girls’ community college on the other side of the lake. He tells you, his excitement present in the letter, that he has learned to make his own lip balm. He doesn’t mention if he’s used the fishing pole.
You remember your time at community college. It was very different. The sky was always dark, incipient rain never falling, the clouds heavy. There was a problem with ghosts in the cabins and lake monsters in the lake, and the slashed bodies of the other students were always turning up in bushes and under picnic tables or washing up on the beach. Your boyfriend says nothing about lake monsters in his letter, although he does say that sometimes he hears other students crying in their bunks, homesick. Nobody was homesick when you went to community college, but then, you went to a better community college than your boyfriend.
When the last day of community college comes and you can finally go pick your boyfriend up, it is a beautiful day, the sun shining over the lake and the picnic tables and the long wood cabins. There is enough time for you to walk with your boyfriend around the lake, where he points out all the places that he had fun while he was at community college. He shows you the cabin he stayed in, and the bunk, his name written on a chalkboard hung at the foot of his bed with twine, the spot at the lake where he did finally use the fishing pole, the sandy rectangle where they played volleyball. He introduces you to his community college teachers, who say kind things, are generally pleased with his abilities, the way that he can macramé a lanyard, how well he does at making his own all-natural beeswax lip balm, how attractive the birdhouses he made were to the local birds.
They all hug him, one by one, and thank him for being such a good student at community college. They shake your hand. In the parking lot, the other students are filing out to where parents and loved ones are eager to take them home. It’s a chaotic scene, lots of shouting, a churning crowd. Your boyfriend runs off to say his goodbyes to his fellow students. You grin and pop the trunk of your car, where you have a ski mask, and an axe, and a real educational experience.
V
You Did the Things That Made Sense to You
You Could Fucking Sell That
YOUR BOYFRIEND RUNS for president as an outsider political candidate. You try not to let this disturb your life too much although your boyfriend is always on the television and the radio and satellite radio and the internet. He gives interviews in the home you share and you aren’t there for any of them, you don’t even try to be. His slogan is Turn it around, America! and your slogan is This is none of my business. You have a very important business that is actually your business and you make the money your boyfriend uses to run for president as an outsider political candidate and otherwise you want nothing to do with it.
Eventually you agree to one interview. Short, very short, I’m very busy, you say a little sharply to your boyfriend’s campaign manager, who called you at the office. You agree mostly to get him off the phone.
Never call me at the office, you text your boyfriend, even though he’s not even the one who called you.
You sit down for the interview with a woman who has a very broad, sensitive face. Before the cameras start rolling, you watch her do facial exercises to stretch out her face muscles. At first, she looks gently concerned and you’re about to ask her what her problem is, but then she laughs too loudly and then she frowns deeply and then, excruciatingly, begins to fake cry, which she is not good at. Then she makes a series of very loud noises, stretching her face to its extremes one way or the other, before finally setting into her default facial expression, a very placid affair you described initially as sensitive. She wears spring colors, pastel pi
nks and yellows, and you wonder whether it’s spring. You have no idea if it’s spring or not, but her eyeshadow matches her outfit and her eyes, closed while she practices her weep-moaning, remind you of Easter eggs.
She smiles and begins your interview.
Later, you are on all of the shows. People describe you as unlikeable. They talk about how you were too sharp or too mean or too smart or your suit was too grey. Almost charcoal, a very large potato-looking man snarls on his talk show. You wore a grey suit and a black shirt, you smiled but it seemed insincere, you run a very profitable business and are worth billions of dollars and you are not good for the environment or minorities or the economy. Your hair was expertly, beautifully styled. You looked sexy but unapproachable. The American people hate you.
The American people hate you, your boyfriend’s campaign manager says over the phone. He clears his throat several times as he talks. You wonder if he hates you too. You wonder if he and your boyfriend have become lovers on the campaign trail. You wonder if your company has a film and television division, because you could sell that story. You could fucking sell that.
You are about to respond that you hate the American people too, but your boyfriend’s campaign manager hangs up on you. Almost immediately your face on the TV screen is replaced by your boyfriend standing in a half embrace with the Trash Pope, both men waving with their free hands. The Trash Pope looks benevolent, which you suppose is basically his full-time job anyway. The pundits describe this as a coup for your boyfriend, leading to sharp polling increases among Americans who practice the Trash Religion. When the TV show cuts away from your boyfriend and the Trash Pope, all that remains is a ticker across the bottom of the screen that reads, Popular political candidate has awful boyfriend, has secured the endorsement of the Trash Pope.