by Zachary Doss
You know one thing for sure: all that talking animal poop is wonderful fertilizer for your garden. The rhododendrons are positively enchanting this year.
What Keeps Society Going
YOUR BOYFRIEND GIVES up and goes into The Business. He had been talking about it a lot lately, like one day you can’t pay the power bill and your boyfriend mutters something about going into The Business, how much easier it would be if he just went into The Business. He won’t leave it alone, The Business, bringing it up whenever he has an opening. My father was in The Business, he says, and our bills were always paid on time.
So fine, you say, Call your father. Go into The Business. Either do it or don’t.
You expected your challenge to go un-answered but sure enough the next morning you wake up and your boyfriend is dressed like you would expect someone in The Business to dress. He looks alone and awkward in the clothes, like a little boy, and you love him through the feeling mounting in your chest that this is the beginning of some disaster you have already completely lost control of. You do your usual morning things, brew a cup of tea, rub lotion into your hands, let the cat out. In the backyard, you chop some wood, run a mile, check on the goats. You go about your morning and you assume that your boyfriend has already gone off to work, gone off to The Business, but when you get back to the house after all that, he is still standing there, eyes vague.
I start tomorrow, he says.
He stands in much this same fashion all through the afternoon and evening and into the night. You do the things you usually do. Before he went into The Business, your boyfriend was out of the house during the day. You don’t know what he did, exactly, you assumed that maybe he did a lot of drinking and a lot of gambling to pay for the drinking, or maybe he stole cars or purses, but you’ve always liked terrible men and so you imagine that your boyfriend is of course up to no good, and the fantasy of him being up to no good is largely what has sustained you throughout your relationship, and with all that being said, you are unprepared for the fact that he has become furniture.
You get ready for bed. You brush and floss your teeth, and wash your hair, and file your fingernails until their edges are soft, and rub lotion into your elbows and knees, and put out fresh food and water for the cat. The whole time your boyfriend stands there, in his clothes for The Business, and you don’t even know where he got those clothes for The Business, certainly not in this house, certainly not from you. In fact, you haven’t paid a second of attention to The Business in your entire life, you know about it, of course, everyone knows The Business is what keeps society going, but you’ve never had anything to do with any of that. You are not invested in whatever it is that keeps society going, and, come to think of it, neither is your boyfriend, or at least you feel fairly certain your boyfriend is not invested in keeping society going, turning gears or the wheels of progress or sprocket factories or anything of that nature.
Are you coming to bed? you ask him.
I am waiting for a call, he says, this is how The Business works.
The call never comes, or if it does it comes while you are asleep and therefore don’t notice it or care very much about it. In the morning you hear him make a cup of coffee and start the car and leave. You don’t hear him shower or change his clothes or make a phone call or brush his teeth. You don’t hear him let the cat out. That makes sense, as those things are your job, and so since you’re awake anyway, you shower and change your clothes and make a phone call and brush your teeth and let the cat out. You feel very supportive, doing these important things so your boyfriend can focus on The Business.
You try to imagine him in The Business but your imagination can’t fill in the gaps, can’t quite make anything out of how little you know about The Business, and instead you imagine him doing other things. For example, you imagine him robbing a bank, or stealing a car, or sticking a knife in another man wearing the costume of The Business. Perhaps stealing the knifed man’s watch and wallet and keys. Or, you imagine your boyfriend is performing some kind of espionage, that he has entered The Business in order to steal all of its secrets and sell them to the highest bidder. Or maybe he plans to release all of the secrets of The Business on a free website that everyone will access so they will know everything about The Business and the mysterious ways in which it keeps society going. You imagine that your boyfriend has gone too deeply into The Business and has trouble remembering who is friend and who is foe, and then he is discovered in his espionage by a boyishly handsome man who is also in The Business but is sympathetic to your boyfriend’s intentions, whether he is working for personal financial gain or socially-responsible altruism. Your boyfriend has trouble trusting the idealistic young man from The Business, but eventually they become lovers and vow to take down The Business together.
In your fantasies, you are the person paying your boyfriend fifty million dollars for all of the secrets of The Business, or you are the open-minded tech entrepreneur who supports your boyfriend’s free website of secrets. Sometimes you are the person sitting at home scrolling through the secrets of The Business on the free website your boyfriend and the open-minded tech entrepreneur built and you can feel through the layers of the fantasy that the secrets of The Business are important but fundamentally boring. You are reminded why you don’t care very much what keeps society going.
Sometimes in your fantasies you are an ambitious young security guard who catches your boyfriend and his lover in their espionage. Sometimes you let them go, confident that The Business will no longer have any power over you after they destroy it, but in most of the fantasies you shoot them both to death. You point your gun at them and scream that they should kiss, they should kiss each other, like they mean it, and then while they are kissing you shoot them, you shoot them a lot, until they are very dead and also full of bullets.
Does the human body get heavier after it is shot up, you wonder? You like to imagine the bullets weigh a lot.
Because you believe your boyfriend is on an important mission to bring The Business down, you begin to help him in any way that you can. When he comes home at night and stands perfectly still and doesn’t move, you remove the clothes he put on for The Business and you replace them with other clothes that he can also wear to The Business. You dry-clean the other clothes from The Business so that your boyfriend always has something fresh to wear. You scrub him, too, just scrub him everywhere, make sure that he is clean and pink and ready for The Business. You rub lotion into his hands and elbows and knees so that his skin is soft and appropriate-looking. You give him protein shakes, for nourishment, and you find if you tilt his head just right, you can pour the protein shakes right down his throat even if he refuses to swallow. You discover that if you make the protein shakes coffee-flavored, he’ll drink them willingly, so you do that.
Helping your boyfriend commit espionage begins to take its toll on you. Because you have dedicated so much energy to helping your boyfriend succeed in his mission, you are not doing very basic tasks around your home, like rubbing lotion into your skin or letting the cat in or checking on the goats. The cat has been loose outside for god knows how long. Maybe the cat finally got hungry enough that he ate the goats. You regret that you let something bad happen to the goats, although it seems better than something happening to the cat. Your teeth remain unbrushed and you remain unshowered while your boyfriend goes to The Business every morning and comes home every night to stand very still in a single spot in the home that you share. When he is at The Business, you take your turn standing very still in the exact spot that your boyfriend stands when it’s his turn to stand very still.
Your skin gets so dirty and dry that it turns red, and then it begins to itch and peel and you break out in strange scaly patches that cover your entire body. You look like a terrifying lizard-person and you smell horrible, although your boyfriend doesn’t notice either of those things when he comes home to stand very still on the floor. Many weeks pass and you don’t notice any espionage happening. You get
bored standing very still in one place in your house. Eventually you stop standing very still in one place and check the internet for secrets about The Business and find that there aren’t any. Your boyfriend has not succeeded in his mission, or perhaps he is not trying and you only imagined that part. According to the internet, The Business is doing well, or terribly, and there are not enough people in The Business but there are too many people trying to get into The Business.
After much digging, you find a site that says the thing that really keeps society going is a secret cabal of lizard people who only want you to believe The Business is working, but it’s all a sham because what the lizard people really like is control. You look in the mirror and realize you do look like a terrible lizard-person who might be part of some kind of secret cabal. There is something around the eyes and the corners of your mouth that suggests the tendency toward secrecy and even a little hint of the capacity for manipulation. You have the lizard-face of a lizard-person who really likes secretly controlling world events.
You decide to leave your home to find the other lizard people, who will sympathize with your situation and include you in their plan to control the world. Outside, you are joined by the cat, who looks sleek and well-fed on goat, and you sentimentally declare him an honorary lizard-person. The cat joins you on your journey to find the other lizard-people, who you hope will not eat him.
When your boyfriend comes home that night, to stand very still in a single spot and stare at a fixed point on the wall, you are not there to dress him and feed him and clean him, and while he doesn’t seem to notice or alter his routine in any way, the next day he is a part of The Business that is functioning a little more poorly than the other parts, and every day after that, a little more poorly than before. Your house is slowly reclaimed by the landscape, your boyfriend coming home to floors covered in dirt, the power bill goes unpaid. The roof disappears one day, boom, no roof, just like that. Your boyfriend stands in the sun all weekend and afterward works in The Business with leathery skin, his Business costume faded to a dusty no-color. In the room where he stands, there is now a cactus, so he stands next to the cactus. The goats come inside, track their small hoof prints through the dirt, eat bits of the cactus and hallucinate because of the cactus juice. Your boyfriend stands next to the cactus and the hallucinating goats every night. He leaves for The Business every day. The goats see bizarre shapes and colors, the walls melting, an unfamiliar sky, they hear alien music. They stand still, all day, not moving a hoof, not even to get water, only occasionally stretching out their necks to bite off another bit of cactus. They don’t move, though whether it’s from fear or wonder is impossible to tell.
Spy vs. Spy
YOU BEGIN TO suspect your boyfriend might be cheating on you. There isn’t any one thing, you don’t catch him red-handed, don’t find any sexual text messages or smell any strange cologne, it’s just a nagging feeling you get that you can’t ignore. He has, for example, started going to the gym more often. He is always at the gym. You recently read an article that said that 25% of people are having sex at the gym. Statistically, there’s a 25% chance your boyfriend has been having sex at the gym, and if he has, it wasn’t with you. You are never at the gym. You conclude that, at least, there is a 25% chance that your boyfriend is cheating on you.
You spend a lot of time convincing yourself that your boyfriend isn’t cheating on you or that he is. You write in to Dear Prudie. You go on the Wendy Williams show. You read women’s magazines and men’s magazines. You ask some of your friends, all of whom are recently divorced. You sit with one of the recently divorced friends, the one with the perfect manicure, and you paint your nails together and drink strawberry daiquiris. She is recently divorced and mean about it. Not angry or bitter, mean. She keeps calling you girlfriend and laughing too loud. She is paint ing her nails acid green. She is making lewd comments about the young man who cleans her pool.
I am having sex at the gym, she tells you. Your boyfriend is probably having sex at the gym. I wouldn’t be surprised. I mean, would you be surprised?
Talking to your mean divorced friend convinces you that your boyfriend is cheating on you and you decide the only thing to do about it is murder him. You talked a lot about that, when you first started seeing each other and everything was new and romantic. One night you lay back in the bed of your boyfriend’s truck looking at the stars with your arm around his shoulder.
I hope we are always like this, you said. Romantic and in love with each other.
If I ever do anything to hurt you or our relationship, he said, you should absolutely murder me.
You remember it very clearly, him saying that.
Now you’ve decided to take him at his word. It’s important, you think, to be consistent. Which is to say, when someone in a relationship makes a promise, they should keep it. You’ve always felt this way. You’ve always been a little strict, a little serious, a little self-righteous. When you were young you were not the one anyone wanted to hang out with. Your younger brother was always loose and charming, fun to be around and quick with a joke. You were responsible, dedicated, somber. Nobody wanted to be around you. Later your brother got addicted to drugs and you got your boyfriend. You tried to be fun and loose and charming. You made some friends, and later those friends got married and you didn’t see them for a while. Now, they are all getting divorced, and you once again feel like you have friends.
You think about ways to kill your boyfriend. You want it to look like a crime of passion. Not only because you know you will serve less jail time if you’re caught, but because you want everyone to think you are capable of passion. Wow, they will say. After all this time, turns out he was really pretty passionate. Wow, we sure had him all wrong.
You start leaving deadly objects sitting around the house, at an arm’s reach. Letter openers, heavy paperweights, odd decorative statues with sharp edges, kitchen knives, cuticle scissors, wooden lamps, iron candlesticks, toolboxes full of dangerous tools. You want to get in an argument with your boyfriend and then you want to murder him. This would be the ideal way for things to go. But time passes and you don’t ever have quite the right argument. He fusses at you for keeping the house too warm, and you want to fight about that, but then you imagine stabbing your boyfriend because he has unreasonable expectations about temperature and honestly that just seems silly. Later you yell at him because he got 1% milk, which you hate, instead of 2% milk, which you love. You look at his face very closely and decide you don’t want to murder this man you love because of milk.
You want to murder this man you love because he is cheating on you. Eyes on the prize, you tell yourself. Don’t forget why we’re doing this.
You practice wanting to murder him, just to see how it will feel once you finally get to it. One morning you hit your boyfriend with your car, experimentally, just to see how he looks sprawled out on the ground. You dent the car and break his leg, but he lives.
After the incident with the car and the broken leg, things around your house become tense and suspicious. Your boyfriend starts to notice how there are deadly objects always within reach, and you notice him watching you. You have more fights, and during those fights your boyfriend stays carefully out of striking range. One night, not long after the incident with the car and the broken leg, your boyfriend knocks a bookcase over on you. He says it was a mistake, that he tripped and fell on one of his crutches. But you know the truth. You saw him wait for you to pass.
When the bookcase falls on you, you break a few ribs and dislocate your shoulder. You have to wear a sling. This is going to make it harder to murder your boyfriend, but not impossible. You feel very dedicated now. You are reverting to your old self, serious and responsible. If you are going to kill your boyfriend, you’re going to do it right.
What follows is several weeks in which you and your boyfriend are very seriously trying to kill each other. Your boyfriend stops going to the gym. You stop going to work. You are both concentrating very hard on th
e murders. Around each other, you are very careful to focus on your routines. You do the things you usually do, eat dinner and watch movies and take long walks. You become aggressively romantic with each other in order to stay always in arm’s reach, to remove the element of surprise. You have the most sex you’ve ever had in your life, incredibly violent sex, with some punching and stabbing and clubbing each other with lead pipes, which both of you loudly assure the other is the best sex you’ve ever had, this rough play is exactly what you’ve always wanted, don’t stop. Afterward neither of you wants to fall asleep first. Instead you have long talks, learning things about each other, each of you trying to search out a fatal weakness.
Your boyfriend leaves a loose cobra in your closet. A gift, he knows you like animals.
You pour lube all over the bottom of his shower. An accident, you just used too much.
He shoots you in the back. He thought you a home invader.
You poison his dinner. You’re incredibly clumsy in the kitchen.
He chokes you in your sleep. He was having a nightmare. You electrocute him. You heard that was fun in the bedroom.
He throws acid at your face. He heard that was fun in the bedroom.
You hit him with an axe. You love him.
He pushes you into the oven. He loves you.
You lock him in a freezer. You love him more.
He sets a bomb under the cushion of your favorite chair. He loves you the most.