by Zachary Doss
You sense a but belongs in that sentence somewhere. Instead, it seems like the two things are connected. Your boyfriend finally responds to your text, with a brief email asking for more money and referring to you as his campaign’s largest donor.
On election night, you stand on the stage with your boyfriend and his campaign manager and dozens of people you don’t recognize, people you assume worked on your boyfriend’s campaign. You’re pretty sure one of the men is a high-ranking official in the Trash Church. Your boyfriend has a strong lead in the exit polls and everyone is smiling at each other. There is an outrageous amount of smiling. The campaign manager suggests you and your boyfriend engage in some celebratory affection, a hug or a kiss or a head-butt. You ignore him and he head-butts your boyfriend instead.
The assassination seems to come from nowhere. The sniper rifle makes a loud crack, still barely audible above the noise of the crowd. Your boyfriend is one state away from winning the electoral college. It’s Florida, you think, maybe it’s Florida. You catch your boyfriend as he falls back. It’s a high-caliber bullet, the kind that leaves both an entrance hole and an exit hole.
As you sit, cradling your boyfriend’s mostly exploded head, you think of the first lady who, under similar circumstances, tried to keep her husband’s brains contained within his head long enough for help to arrive. You think of the First Lady who, shortly after her husband was killed, went mad. You desperately wish you were that kind of lover, but you don’t feel ready to do either of those things. While you are kneeling in front of maybe twenty thousand people with your dead boyfriend’s brains all over your charcoal-colored suit, your face is carefully blank.
Your boyfriend wins Florida and the election, and the campaign manager is sobbing, and you think, yeah, you could definitely fucking sell that.
Spatial Awareness
YOU AND YOUR boyfriend move into one of those houses that are so small everything has to be more than one thing. The only piece of furniture is modular. Your couch folds out into a bed, and then folds a different way into a bookcase, and then folds a different way into an exercise machine. The house is only one room, except for the closet, which has all your clothes hanging in it, and below that, a toilet. If you take all the clothes out of the closet and remove the bar that they hang on, there is a showerhead, so you can shower awkwardly half-kneeling on the toilet seat.
To move into the small house, you and your boyfriend had to get rid of many of your possessions. You bagged everything up, planning to donate to Goodwill, but your boyfriend said you were thinking about your possessions in the wrong way. He unbagged everything you had carefully decided to donate and put it back where it belonged. He gave you one medium-sized box. Put everything you want to take with you in this box. After you filled the box, which held less than half of what you really wanted to take with you, your boyfriend helped you load it into your car. Then, he locked the door to your large house, splashed a little gasoline on the outside, and lit it on fire.
Being minimal requires commitment, your boyfriend said.
You made a list of the things in the house you would have liked to sneak off with, things that didn’t make it into the small box. The heat of your burning house bathed the front lawn in a kind of desert heat. You remembered to get the dog out, right? you asked.
In the small house, even the dog is pulling double duty. You can’t keep more than one pet in the small house, so the dog has to be more than one pet. You decide that, from the right angle, the dog looks a lot like a cat, a bigger, hairier breed of cat, like maybe a Maine Coon. You name the dog Julia, and the cat Suzanne. When the dog chases its own tail, you imagine that the dog is chasing the cat.
It is immediately apparent that your boyfriend is not prepared for your cramped life in the small house. He is used to reading on the couch while you nap in your bed, but because the bed is also the couch, you can’t do both at the same time. When he wants to get a book, he has to wait for you to finish your set of bench presses. The few possessions you kept fit awkwardly into the house. Everything is visible all the time. To your boyfriend, it looks like clutter. One day, when you come home, you find your small box of possessions sitting on the curb with your trashcan. The trashcan is almost as big as the house, you think. From outside, you can see your boyfriend through the windows. He is trying to make dinner and trips because he left the wrong drawer open.
Later, all the drawers are empty and taped shut. Together you and your boyfriend share one pan, one bowl, and one spoon. One person eats first, and then washes the dishes, and then the next person eats. Your boyfriend always eats first, which you think is unfair, so you make a color-coded calendar with an eating schedule and a dishwashing schedule and even a weightlifting and reading and napping schedule. After one day, the calendar disappears, and you never see it again. Your boyfriend tells you that the dog ate it, but you haven’t seen the dog in a few days either. Your boyfriend tells you that the dog ran away.
I wish I could run away, you say.
Don’t be shitty, your boyfriend says.
Without the dog or any possessions, there seems to be more room in the tiny house. But you and your boyfriend still get in each other’s way, bonk heads or crack shins. You decide that this is just a natural part of adjusting to life in the tiny house, but your boyfriend is temperamental, furious. He is determined to make this work. He keeps saying that, I am determined to make this work. He stops sleeping as much, sitting awake next to you, and when the sun rises, he has dark hollows around his eyes.
Soon, you get sick. You can’t seem to keep food down, instead throwing up all day. You throw up at your job while people look nervous. Eventually your boss sends you home because you are throwing up every hour and your coworkers are uncomfortable. When you get home, you head straight to the tiny bathroom. You have diarrhea all afternoon. You sit on the toilet with your head smothered between two of your suit coats. One of them is slightly damp, you discover, because the showerhead leaks.
This illness lasts for some time. You get sicker and sicker. You get very thin. You take up very little space in the tiny house. Most of the time you sit on the toilet, in the closet. Occasionally you go out and drink water and eat some of the food your boyfriend has prepared for you, soup and crackers and big bottles of red Gatorade. The red Gatorade makes it look like you are vomiting blood. The toilet closet starts to smell bad, and then the entire small house starts to smell bad. You lose your job, but that’s okay, because you’ll probably die very soon.
You’re glad you moved to the small house; it is very economical and your boyfriend can afford to live there by himself.
Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison
IT IS THE end of the world for both of you. In the spare room you don’t talk about with each other anymore, your boyfriend sits with a pile of flashcards, flipping them over, one after another. He doesn’t say anything by way of identifying what is on the card. It’s a motion, a pattern. Flip, recognize, flip again. Each card features a cheerful caricature of a former President of the United States set on a yellow background. Earlier he took the living presidents out, set them on the window ledge to bleach in the sun. Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, the George Bushes, Senior and Junior. Barack Obama.
You try to be with him for several hours every day. At first, you sing the Presidents Song in your head. Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Adams, Jackson, while he silently flips cards. The song is a device you remember from your elementary school class. Somehow, they thought it was important, knowing the names of all the presidents. That was a long time ago; now, you never get any further than Jackson, humming the rest of the song without remembering the words. You watch your boyfriend carefully, waiting for his lips to move, but they don’t. He doesn’t even look at the cards, although he pauses on each one for long enough to see, if he were looking.
Otherwise you maintain your normal routine. You go to work early in the morning so you can come home a little earlier in the afternoon. Your job h
as been very accommodating. The Monday after, your boss tells you to take all the time you need, and you tell him that it will feel good just to have something else to focus on. This, too, felt rehearsed. You don’t know if it feels better to be at work or not. You don’t want to leave your boyfriend alone, but you know he is alone whether you are there or not. At work you feel alone, but also like a robot, or something automatic. You go through the motions. You laugh at jokes. Nobody notices that you have taken down all of the pictures that sat on your desk.
The night you came home from the hospital the house seemed impossibly warm. You checked the thermostat, and, sure enough, it was over eighty degrees. The air conditioner was broken. You fussed with the thermostat and then went out to the back yard to look at the AC unit. Your boyfriend was almost crying, shook his head and said, leave it, just leave it and his voice trembled. You stood outside on the dry grass in your bare feet and examined the AC unit with your flashlight. It wasn’t running, you couldn’t hear any noise, the fan wasn’t spinning. Nothing. You didn’t know what it was supposed to look like, but not like this. Something’s wrong with it, you said out loud.
You thought your boyfriend was on the porch, but he had already gone inside. You went room to room, opened all the windows, but really you were looking for him. You found him in the spare room, and you almost didn’t open the door, but then you did. Your boyfriend was sitting on the tiny bed, his weight wrinkling the comforter, which was covered in cheerful trains. There had been an argument about the cheerful trains; your boyfriend thought they were too gendered, but you held out for them. He was holding, in one hand, the kind of brightly-colored, soft, noisy toy that a baby could play with and chew on and throw at the cat. Around the lump forming in your throat, right at the bottom of your skull, you remembered joking that it looked like some kind of sex toy. In his other hand, he had the Presidents of the United States flashcards. The package is branded SmartBaby™ and has a cartoon baby wearing a mortarboard and holding a diploma.
He would have been such a smart baby, you think, and the weight of the night sits on you. When your sister agreed to carry the baby for you and your boyfriend, nobody thought much of it at all. It seemed like the easiest thing in the world. She was one of those women who loved being pregnant. She had three already and her husband didn’t want a fourth, and then you asked her if she would mind. Sure, she said. One more for the road.
Your sister made it, but just barely. The baby didn’t. That night, neither you nor your boyfriend slept. You did the things that made the most sense to you, made a pot of tea, cleaned the kitchen, called your mother to let her know your sister was doing fine. You heard your boyfriend crying, although you knew realistically you couldn’t hear him from across the house, over the sound of running water. You forced yourself still, told yourself you needed to finish the dishes. It was a little before sunrise and your neighbors were starting to wake up.
When you finished the dishes, you went back to the spare room to find your boyfriend wrapped in the train blanket, turning over the flashcards. His eyes were dry, and he was staring absently at the mural you’d had custom-painted on the bedroom wall. Later, you will want to paint over the mural, but your boyfriend won’t. You asked him if he wanted to come to bed, but he just looked at you and kept turning over cards. Washington. Adams. Jefferson. Madison. James Madison, the fourth President of the United States, smiled a happy cartoon smile up from the flash card. Neither of you could stop looking at him. When you heard the sound of your neighbor’s car starting, the beginning of his morning commute, you started crying, and then you were both crying. It was supposed to be his room, and then it wasn’t.
The Purses
YOUR BOYFRIEND HAS a room full of handbags, which you are not allowed to enter. You have always been particularly annoyed about the room full of handbags because after all there’s a whole room in your apartment you’re apparently not allowed to use because it’s full of handbags. This is how you phrase it when you argue with him about it, there’s a whole room in my apartment I’m apparently not allowed to use because it’s full of handbags.
You try to explain to your boyfriend the other uses you might put that room to, and really, you can imagine all sorts of things. We could have a private exercise room, you say over dinner. We could have an office, you say as you walk your dog around the park. We could fill it with fish tanks and have a fish tank room, you whisper into his ear at a friend’s cocktail party. It goes on like this, with you proposing alternate uses for the room: library, greenhouse, spare bedroom, yoga studio, second kitchen, second living room, racquetball court, art gallery, movie theater, indoor swimming pool, sauna.
Your boyfriend is always carrying a handbag hooked in his elbow, a clutch held at his side, or a tiny backpack over his shoulder. Your boyfriend has the most fashionable handbags. He has the expensive kind and the really expensive kind, a gleaming crocodile leather Birkin, a pristine white Chanel that you are pretty sure has actual diamonds in the clasp, an ugly limited edition Louis Vuitton designed by some woman you have never heard of. He has the less expensive kinds, too, the kind your mom used to buy at Macy’s, the Michael Kors and the Dooney & Burke and the Coach. The regular bags he carries every day to work and parties and the gym. The expensive bags you rarely see, although he often spends hours alone with them in his handbag room.
You have always wondered what the inside of the handbag room looks like. You are not interested in the handbags but you burn to walk inside that secret room and witness the alchemy of them all arrayed together like hieroglyphs. You dream that it is beautiful, each purse a jewel, carefully placed on labeled glass shelves. The light from the window floods the room and refracts through the glass shelves, each handbag reclining in its warm little sunspot like a cat. In your dream you weep because the handbag room is actually heaven. In your dream you open the diamond-encrusted clasp of the white Chanel and you crawl inside, curl up, and rub your cheek against the pink silk lining. The clasp closes behind you but the lining seems to glow with light from the outside. Inside the white Chanel purse is a smaller purse covered in black feathers, its provenance unknown to you. In the pink darkness, you wait for your boyfriend to find you, clutching the smaller black purse to your chest and gently stroking its silky feathers.
Despite your persistence, your boyfriend seems uninterested in the non-handbag potential of his handbag room. When you say, finally, that it might be nice to have an extra room for a nursery, just in case, he rolls his eyes at you before taking another gulp from his glass of wine. He doesn’t say anything more, but you understand the discussion regarding the room full of handbags is officially closed.
Transubstantiation
YOU AND YOUR boyfriend sit on the porch and watch the sun set. To call it a porch is really a kind of elevation or even glorification. Really, you set two chairs and a table and a pot of flowers on the sidewalk outside your apartment door and called it your porch. You are always worried someone passing by will smash your flower pot. That’s just the kind of person you are. You are sharing a cigarette with your boyfriend, passing it back and forth. Whenever you hand the cigarette off to him, your fingers touch briefly. You have no language for the kind of intimacy you feel, like you are the same person smoking one cigarette, only not.
The view from your porch, which is not really a porch, is devastatingly bad. Spread out in front of you is a parking lot and across the parking lot is an apartment building that looks just like your apartment building, and both buildings are unremarkable but ugly. They are squat and painted brown, brown everywhere, 3 or 4 different shades of muddy brown. To see the sun set you have to look up and over the top of the other building. Behind that building there are some trees, and a much prettier apartment complex, and you watch the sun turn orange and then so red and heavy it bruises the sky purple. You pretend that you don’t feel the heat coming off the asphalt and you don’t see all the cars parked in rows or the mud-colored apartment building across the parking lot. You pretend
that the prettier building, the one with the trees, is where you and your boyfriend live.
Really, you are thinking about killing yourself. It is a passive and familiar feeling. You often feel this way. You thought having a boyfriend would make you want to live, but you still hate yourself, and you do not hate yourself less because he loves you; instead this has simply increased the sensation you have that you are a disappointment, to him and to everyone. You are the kind of person who imagines running his car into the freeway median at seventy miles an hour, but you aren’t sure yet whether you’d actually do it. Everything you feel is so sleepy and passive, a painfully bearable kind of numbness. You feel guilty for thinking about killing yourself when your boyfriend loves you, like you are too selfish to love him more than you hate yourself. You’re that kind of person.
Your boyfriend is thinking about how his parents were once very rich but now they are very poor. That’s the kind of life he’s had, like when your foot slips off a rung on a ladder and you’re on your back on the ground before you know it. A head-cracked-in kind of life. A thirty-stitches kind of life. At least, that’s the way he thinks about it, until your fingers brush his again, and then he thinks about your beautiful long fingers that are going yellowish-brown at the first knuckle, where the cigarette rests, even though it seems like you are both too young for that kind of discoloration. Your boyfriend hasn’t had that hard of a life, really, but just possesses the kind of naiveté that leads young people to think that their difficult experiences are the most difficult possible experiences. He’s that kind of person.