Boy Oh Boy

by Zachary Doss

  Eventually you are both so weak from poison and cobra venom and frostbite and burns and acid and axe wounds and explosions that you have to stop trying to kill each other. You have both been badly wounded but neither of you have died. You are under investigation by the police because you have made so many emergency calls but have both refused to press charges. Your neighbors hate you because of that time you cut the power lines and tried to drop the live wires on your boyfriend as he jogged by, the resulting power outage, and also because they are uncomfortable living next to the place where the bomb went off. The insurance company has begun to dispute your claims, which are extensive (the cure for the poison alone was ruinously expensive). Your divorced friends have stopped calling you because you seem too serious, because you’re spending so much time with your boyfriend and it makes them feel bad, like you are not very fun anymore.

  One night, you and your boyfriend sit in your wheelchairs on the deck, watching the stars and holding hands. You are both in a moderate amount of pain, your face still sore from the reconstructive surgery after the acid, his nerves still tingling from the electricity (or the cold? Or the poison? He isn’t sure).

  I hope I don’t die from my wounds before I kill you, you say.

  I’ve never wanted to kill anyone as much as I want to kill you, he says.

  Fuck Marry Kill

  YOU AND YOUR boyfriend play a lot of games of fuck, marry, kill. You’re not sure where it started, whether it was you or him that proposed the first scenario—kill seems like you, fuck seems like him, marry seems like neither of you. In fact, when you play, you and your boyfriend play with adjustments to the traditional rules, and your rules almost never involve an option to marry. You play variants on the traditional scenarios, like kill kill fuck or fuck kill fuck or kill kill kill. Initially, you choose celebrities for the game. Tom Hiddleston, Christina Aguilera, Tilda Swinton. Who would you fuck and kill and fuck?

  As you get to know each other better you play a trickier version of the game, involving close friends and loved ones. The idea is to create an untenable situation, where you are fucking and killing people you are reluctant to kill or fuck. Your mom, your best friend, your childhood pet. Kill fuck kill. There are uncomfortable contortions involved. Your boyfriend is actually much better at it than you are, or maybe you wind up going easy on him, while he grants no mercy to you. Either way, it is usually you who is boxed into a corner, forced to make an unhappy face and say, fuck, I guess? and you both know that you don’t really want to fuck your childhood pet or kill your mom.

  The game begins to occupy a very central place in your life with your boyfriend. It is sometimes foreplay, sometimes amusement, and sometimes the stakes become very high. Your boyfriend uses it to ferret the truth out of you, who you’re attracted to, who you hate. The only rule you both play by, unspoken but long agreed to, is that neither of you are allowed to put yourself in the game. In a relationship there is knowing the truth, and then there is knowing too much of the truth. You and your boyfriend are in love, and as such, you are both afraid to know too much of the truth. You are both very fragile, prone to hurt feelings and miscommunication. You could not say kill, even as a joke, about one another. You could not say fuck because it implies something, a transience maybe, or a casualness neither of you feel, and either of you would be hurt if the other said fuck about your life together, about your stupid collection of vintage troll dolls that started as a joke but now has become something very earnest, about the agreement you made with each other when you got rid of your mismatched old furniture and replaced it with new furniture you bought together, a matched set. Of course neither of you can say marry, either.

  When the game gets too dull, you introduce new rules to keep it fresh. For example, you ban groups of people or limit yourselves to groups of people or forbid people entirely. Sometimes you are standing on the street waiting for a cab and you decide you’ll play a quick game, just on the street. The man in the white cap, the woman in the green dress, the old lady with the cloth grocery bag that looks too heavy for her. Kill, fuck, kill. You can’t kill the woman with the green dress because she’s holding her daughter’s hand. You can’t kill the old lady because she’s very old, has probably lived a long life, and she deserves to go out with some dignity, with some peace, like maybe she should fall asleep and just never wake up again. In other words, you aren’t willing to kill an old lady. On the other hand, the man in the white cap is incredibly handsome, tall but not too tall, bearded but not too bearded, muscular but not too muscular. He is exactly enough, and you could imagine fucking him just because, and now you could fuck him to save his life, but then you have elected to murder a young mother (single, you decide, something about her tells you she’s raising her little girl alone) or an old lady who has lived a long life (and difficult, you think, probably very difficult, she looks tired even for her age).

  Still. Fuck, you say, pointing to the man in the white cap, which is what your boyfriend was trying to get you to admit to in the first place. Kill, you say, pointing to the young mother, and kill, you say, pointing to the old woman with the grocery bag.

  Predictable, your boyfriend says, and he laughs at you. You are so predictable, he says again.

  You made the choices too easy, you say, and anyway it’s not like anyone really has to die. It’s just a game.

  Eventually your boyfriend has the idea: maybe more than just a game. He pulls up three profiles on your Facebook page, people who you know but who are not particularly important to you, but people who have occupied some space in your life. One is a casual acquaintance who you see fairly often, one you knew very well but a very long time ago, and one is a business contact you have never met in person, or only met once, in passing, but who has been helpful in your career.

  Fuck fuck kill, your boyfriend says. For real this time.

  Well, all three are passably fuckable. None of them present you with the desire to fuck that is so intense that it would save their lives by default. On the other hand, none of them are so deeply flawed that you think immediately that it would be fine to kill them, that you would be okay doing that so as to avoid fucking them, or because they seemed to deserve it. You do your math, like you are still playing the game in the usual way, because you always took it at least a little seriously.

  The business contact is single, but he is very fit and gives a lot of money to charity, you see from his Facebook page, where it lists the charity marathons he has run in and the charity benefits he has attended. This combination between fitness and philanthropy makes him stand out, briefly, as more fuckable.

  The casual acquaintance is married, but you don’t like his wife, so you could fuck him or kill him and not feel that badly on her behalf, but on the other hand, she’s pregnant, and if you kill him, his child will grow up without a father. But again on the third hand, he’s probably the least fuckable, if you’re being honest, he has let himself go recently, and there is nothing about him that’s particularly fuckworthy.

  The old friend is unmarried but has a lover who he has been with for many years, and they have no children or interest in having children. You aren’t close anymore because you and the old friend had a falling out, and while it was many years ago, you still harbor some resentment. You could kill the old friend as revenge, but then, you would stand out immediately as a suspect, and also, you’ve spent all these years being the bigger person, not seeking revenge when you could have, being generous whenever possible. After all this time invested in one-upping the old friend, being a better old friend, you don’t want to ruin that by murdering the old friend, because you feel certain that once you have murdered the old friend you are no longer the better friend.

  You decide that maybe it would help if you paid the three potential candidates a visit, to see if maybe you feel differently about them after seeing them and assessing their value as people on a face-to-face basis. After discussing this with your boyfriend, he agrees that this isn’t a violation of the rules
as long as someone gets fucked and killed and fucked. After all, he says, we are just making things up as we go along.

  You meet the business contact for coffee, which is something you had been talking about doing for ages anyway. You sit across a small round table from him and you both drink from oversized mugs of very elaborate flavored coffee. Yours has both caramel and vanilla; it is very rich. His has hickory and something else, you don’t remember what exactly. You think hickory in coffee is an abomination. The business contact talks a little bit about the business things you both do, and it is very business-y, and you half pay attention while you decide whether you want to have sex with him or kill him. You only have to kill one person, and you are still considering saving one of your fucks for the casual acquaintance, in order to spare his child the pain of being half-orphaned before it’s even born.

  The business contact is more handsome than you’d imagined he’d be. He is appetizingly athletic, he has a friendly, open face and prominent eyebrows, and when he smiles, his eyes light up in a very attractive fashion. It seems like it would be silly not to fuck this person, and then he compliments you on your handling of a business matter you were both involved in several months ago, and you decide that you’re going to go ahead and fuck him.

  You fuck the business contact, and afterward he is sitting in bed with his iPad, answering emails, and then he takes a Skype call, and you are on your phone the whole time playing a game about cats. You like the cat game. The business contact expects you to leave, and you expect you to leave, but then you start to feel a little twinge of regret, just a twinge, like maybe you had too much fun with the business contact, you liked him a little too much, and now that you have fucked him there is a lingering concern that you are now connected to the business contact, and maybe you always will be, a door open, because you have shared a physical intimacy and also because while you are playing your phone game about cats, you think of the business contact’s smile, his mastery at the business which you are both involved in, and his friendly enthusiasm as a lover.

  So when he hangs up his Skype call and looks at you expectantly, you kill him. You kill him extra hard, just to be sure, beat him with the big wooden lamp and then with the metal sculpture of an elephant he keeps on the night stand, and then just to be just super certain about it, you go in the kitchen and get a knife and you knife him a few times. Then you take a shower and get dressed and pour bleach generously over absolutely everything you think you might have touched, hoping that will be enough to take care of fingerprints and DNA.

  On your way out, you look at the business contact, a kind of wet, mushy dead on the bed, now reeking of bleach, and you feel hollow and needy and a particular kind of empty, and you feel fairly certain you did the right thing there.

  So you go to meet the casual acquaintance next, thinking this will be easy, you just fuck him and then fuck your old friend, which will be unpleasant, and then it’s over, but you wind up killing the casual acquaintance too. That winds up also being an impulse thing because when you see him he’s a little drunk and sloppy and falling over, and he’s really let himself go, you can’t stress enough how much he’s let himself go, like he’s lumpy-looking but also it seems like he’s given up on washing his face or brushing his teeth or applying moisturizer anywhere. You’re a bad person, you think as you’re killing him, because really being generally unhygienic is not a good reason to kill someone but your instincts assure you that this was the right thing to do. You back your car over the casual acquaintance a few times for good measure. It’s raining while you do it. Killing people is a very wet business, you’re discovering.

  You think about going to meet the old friend, but you’re overwhelmed by how uncomfortable that will wind up being, and you realize that you’d very much rather not do that. It will be hard to fuck the friend without meeting him. You consider a disguise, like maybe a wig and a big hat and a too-large coat to disguise yourself. So you’ve got your wig and your big hat and your too-large coat, and you add some sunglasses, and then you walk with a limp, because that seems distinctively not you, because you don’t have a limp. You’re on your way with your bulky disguise and your limp and then at the last minute you buy a greeting card that says SORRY with a picture of a puppy making a mess on the front, and you apply a pretty liberal dosage of anthrax to the envelope, and instead of going to go meet your old friend, you go to the post office and mail the anthrax and you think, having mustered several years of forgiveness and goodwill, you’re still the better person on the aggregate even if you did wind up taking revenge.

  You report all this to your boyfriend. I lost the game, you say mournfully. Neither of you have ever lost a game before, but ultimately you only fucked one person and killed three of them, and no matter how generously you read the rules, you are not victorious. Your boyfriend has been out too, fucking and killing people, but he followed the rules of the game and you declare him the winner. You take a shower together and you kiss and have a little sex, and then you both pack bags with some clothes and beloved possessions, because after all you’ve both killed a few people at this point, and when you started the game you didn’t think about how easy it is to get caught for this sort of thing, in this day and age.

  Later, you are both in the car that you bought off Craigslist for a few hundred dollars. It’s a manual transmission, but when your hand is free between gear shifts, you hold your boyfriend’s hand. You play other games, you play I spy, you play the license plate game, you play I’m Going on a Picnic. It’s only after about six hundred miles that your boyfriend says, Fuck, Marry, Kill.

  Yes, you say.

  VII

  Boyfriends All the Way Down

  Universal Boyfriend Theory

  AT THE CENTER of the universe, the boyfriend singularity pops out boyfriends at a rate of approximately one per hour, forever. The boyfriend singularity can create a variety of different boyfriends depending on the arrangement and intensity of the heavy elements and gasses spinning at its heart at any given moment. So the boyfriend singularity creates tall boyfriends, short boyfriends, thin boyfriends, fat boyfriends, very fat boyfriends, pale boyfriends and brown boyfriends and black boyfriends, rich boyfriends and poor boyfriends, kind, intimate boyfriends and distant, withholding boyfriends, polite boyfriends and rude boyfriends, deferential boyfriends and braggadocious boyfriends, the gentlest and cruelest boyfriends, boyfriends made of stone, boyfriends made of strong organic fibers, boyfriends made of millions of tiny flowers delicately laced together, boyfriends made of concrete, boyfriends made of steel, boyfriends made of glass, white-hot boyfriends burning like stars. Every kind of boyfriend is born at the heart of the boyfriend singularity, and each one is the best boyfriend, even the hurtful ones, the cruel-tongued ones, the ones who disappear before you even really know them. Every boyfriend that emerges from the boyfriend singu larity is the best boyfriend that has ever emerged from the boyfriend singularity, and it continues on in this way, boyfriends all the way down.

  From your spaceship, you watch the boyfriends emerge from the boyfriend singularity. You take measurements and readings. You have a long table of boyfriend instruments taking readings, constant boyfriend calculations. The process is so automated that you have to do almost nothing except watch through the wide, thick window as each boyfriend materializes from the singularity. All you can do is wait for enough data. You hope to one day be able to predict what kind of boyfriend will come out of the boyfriend singularity. But you are not close to that breakthrough, or you don’t think you are. It was a victory just to perfect the instrument that tells you whether the boyfriends are nice or mean.

  Often when the boyfriends are born, they immediately leave the vicinity of the boyfriend singularity, flying off to a particular corner of the universe at incredible speed. But some of them stay, living on the asteroids that circle the singularity, tiny satellites. These are the boyfriends that cannot go to live on any planet, boyfriends made of toxic gasses or heavy metals or dangerou
s elements, boyfriends whose bodies burn so brightly no planet could survive their proximity, or give off radiation so strong that the instruments in front of you pulse with red caution; don’t go near, they say. Eventually you would like to collect a sample, study a boyfriend more closely, but not these boyfriends. You have been in space a long time, long enough that you are not afraid of much, but you still fear death. That is the human center of you.

  When you went to Space School, they told you space was not black but grey, the colors so muted and subtle that the human eye cannot quite perceive them. Every picture you’ve seen of space is a lie, your Space Instructor explained, colored by artists to seem more beautiful and dynamic to the human eye. Real space will appear flat and grey to your eyes, he said. The example he used was that your eye is like a camera made of meat. A camera made of meat would not be a very good camera, he said by way of explanation, and in the years that followed, you often imagined going to the deli and picking up several pounds of thinly-sliced turkey and chicken and ham in order to make a meat-camera that was also an eye, the eye of some meat-being that was also you and everyone you know.

  You went into space prepared for unending monotony, and there is a lot of that, but the truth is that your Space Instructor knew almost nothing about space and warned you about all of the wrong things. You and your crewmates have been out here for almost two hundred years, and you’ve seen that real space is not one color but many. In this part of space, the part of space where the boyfriends are born, space is white, a muted beige-white like apartment walls. In many ways this color is even more disturbing than the strange dark grey that space was before, even more disturbing than the parts of space that were pitch-black, where you couldn’t see meteors until they struck you. It is so white you have to wear special modified sunglasses to protect your eyes, your meat-cameras; it is so white that you feel like you are always about to run into the white walls of your apartment, or worse, so white that you will never run into anything, ever.