[2014] The Time Traveler's Wife

by C. Sean McGee

  “How many slices?” John asked, reaching through Tracy to get to the box behind her.

  “Two,” John’s Nipple said. “Before that fat bastard finishes it off.”

  John took the pieces and while Tracy continued to silently talk away, he lifted his shirt and fed the two slices of Stroganoff Pizza to his nipple which had a ravishing hunger.

  “Wow,” Stefan’s wife said, holding the back of Tracy’s arched hand to her face. “That smells scrumptious.” She then turned to John smiling, as if she were impressed by his extravagant taste.

  Tracy was looking at him and speaking. She ignored Stefan’s wife, who was still holding her hand, and though there was no sound coming out of her mouth, John knew exactly what she was saying. He smiled, as he always did and when he felt like she was about to finish her story, he pretended to blush, because that was one thing that she liked. But then right at the end, when her fable was done, when Stefan and his wife were poking and jeering like rowdy pirates, he pretended to get mad, riled a deranged; only settling down when she smiled playfully and reached for his tempering hand because that was how she liked her men. That was what most turned her on.

  “Hot, hot, hot, hot, hot” John’s Nipple shouted.

  John looked down and he could see his nipple flaming red.

  “Bloody drink” it shouted.

  His reaction was instant. John took a glass of ice cold coke and poured it down the inside of his shirt, sighing with relief as his nipple gulped every last drop.

  “I have something to show you,” Stefan said.

  He sounded secretive as if he’d been planning this day his whole life but if he had, if this were his crescendo, then tomorrow, this would all start over again.

  “You’re gonna love this,” he said.

  “If I had hands I’d make a fist and punch him,” John’s Nipple said.

  John wondered for a moment if something unforeseen might actually occur, if he might feel as unexpected as many, many repetitions ago. He tried not to imagine what it could be, but it was so hard; he had spent a lifetime shaking parcels and flipping to the last pages to quell his feline curiosity. But still, there was hope tickling a the back of his mind, and on any other day he might have thought it was a tumor, but this evening, as he sat on his sofa, feeding his nipple pizza and coke, and pretending to hold his wife’s ghostlike intangible hand so as not to cause her or his guests much unneeded alarm.

  “Girls” Stefan shouted.

  He clapped his hands like the drunken ringmaster that he was, forcing his children to line side by side and wait for his merry command.

  “The eldest,” he said, slurring his speech. “She’s been… She’s doing that…. They do this dance thing and she’s…. She’s gonna be a professional like Madonna or that other one you know, that thinks she’s British as well. Fuck it. Girls, do that… Do that thing you know?” he said, his head listing like a breached hull, his right arm waving around a limp wrist as if it were a broken limb on a squat, decrepit shrub.

  The girls all looked awkward and embarrassed, as did Stefan’s wife and Tracy, who wore the same wretched ‘shit-eating-grins’, unable to stop the madness and unwilling to turn away.

  “What happens next?” John’s Nipple asked.

  “One of the girls trips,” John said. “The middle one, nobody notices except her; and she’s devastated. Stefan continues to egg on the eldest, throwing his clenched fists about in small commanding circles, as if he were racing a small pony down the home straight. The wives ogle the youngest and they use such expected terms as, ‘How cute’ and ‘Would you ever?” All the while, the middle child continues to muddle the timing and mix up her feet. Eventually, the performance finishes without much event. Stefan tells me it’s because of the angle or slant on the floor. Then he says I should really come over during the week to see it on an even floor. Then Tracy gets offended because she thinks a flat floor is a metaphor for being properly grounded and she assumes Stefan has made a crack at her, pushing forty; and still no children. It gets awkward so the kids go back out onto the porch. The eldest lights a cigarette and attempts to fan away the evidence whilst the youngest points an accusing finger. The middle girl sits on an empty straw basket and she draws her nail across the creases lines on her wrist.”

  “You know it all so well.”

  “I’ve seen it so many times. I know when I’m supposed to laugh and sigh and the place for every oooh and aaah. I just…. I can’t remember when I stopped laughing when I stopped being affected, and when it all just became so… Comfortable. ”

  All of these things occurred. They acted out before John and his nipple in a foggy blur. Both watched on, neither entertained nor bored. Every now and then, to the delight of his nipple, John mouthed out some of the dialogue.

  “My life,” John said, “is three hundred words.”

  “What’s your favorite one?” John’s Nipple asked.

  “Huh?” replied John.

  “Nice. Can’t really think of any that I love per se. I guess I’d have to go with phallic. Makes me think of ancient Egyptians, like Xerxes or Ra or something. Come to think of it, you know with their bald heads and sturdy physique, they actually looked like giant penises so I guess it’s fitting. I hate the word pretentious though” John’s Nipple said, angrily.

  “Why?”

  “It’s not the word per se, as much as how it’s used and the type of person who uses it, you know? The word itself is beautiful on the ear and just as much to say. It feels like kissing a person’s moist and supple attention. It’s just, the word is like a gun backfiring. You know, it just seems like the type of person who would use it, wouldn’t normally use a word like that every day. Maybe that kind of person would be more likely to defame with a word like ‘assclown’ or ‘dickhead’, but for the sake of fighting monsters or whatever, they have to be just as swanky and hyperbolic to get their message across. I just feel that the use of the word pretentious is, in fact, pretentious. Hearing the average twit use this word, it shits me. It’s like seeing some pretty girl under the arm of some tattooed jerk.”

  “You say per se a lot.”

  “Does that bother you?”

  “It just seems unnecessary is all, but it’s fine. I hate the word sorry. I hate the way it makes every problem go away and makes no-one responsible. I hate the way you can say words without actually feeling them and that people trade this currency as if its legal tender. I hate the way words like ‘I’m sorry’ and ‘I love you’ and ‘it won’t happen again’ are passed around like bonds or promissory notes, you know. The idea of communication is to say what you feel, not to leave it up to the other person to spark their own feeling. It’s like giving some kid a bag of balloons on his birthday and telling him or her to blow them up. The word is a vessel. It’s coding, that’s all. But there has to be something to code. There has to be some content; some substance. You can’t just say ‘I love’, ‘I’m sorry’, ‘it doesn’t matter’ or ‘there’s nothing wrong’. You can’t. I don’t hate words” John said. “I hate the lazy, conspicuous and ambiguous use of words.”

  “I hate the word hip,” John’s Nipple said, spitting as it did. “It’s a god damned body part, not a way of life.”

  “I hate hipsters,” John said.

  “And hippies” replied John’s Nipple.

  As they debated, Stefan was busy bruising his thumb, flicking through channels on the television, unsure which of the movies he had already seen a hundred times over, he wanted most to watch again.

  “Oh, I love this one” Stefan shouted.

  There was that word again; love. John looked over at Tracy. She was smiling, or so it seemed. It was hard to tell on account of her having no solid form. And though he probably knew exactly what she was saying, staring at her and hearing only her breath escaping from her mouth, he couldn’t tell if she was being cynical or enthusiastic, her two usual ways in how she felt about most things.

  “The ending is fantastic. You never see it co
ming. It’s always a surprise, no matter how many times you see it. Let’s watch it.”

  “Great idea,” his wife said.

  Tracy agreed, saying exactly that, but her voice was mute so she looked almost as if she were mocking her friend. John laughed hysterically and everyone turned to him oddly.

  “You ok buddy?” Stefan asked. “You’re acting a little weird.”

  “Yeah,” John said, composing himself. “It was just something my nipple said.”

  They watched the movie and when it was done, they watched one more. The whole time, Tracy leaned on John’s leg and talked about her touchy boss and the fact that she had killed every single plant she had tried to look after since she was a girl. She was convinced they were connected somehow. John always thought it was her way, though, of distracting herself through the seamless repetition of ordinary events in her life.

  Stefan, on the other hand, was flexing his muscle, trying to impress the girls, John and himself, by showing how versed he was in the past, saying each line of dialogue a second before the actors on the screen did; annoying the hell out of John who at this point, was daydreaming about black holes and circular saws.

  “Fuck it” John shouted, jumping from the seat and almost bowling over the children who looked thankful for any kind of distraction. “I can‘t watch this shit. Not again. You know what I wanna see?”

  The others shook their heads.

  “Where is it?” he said to himself, scouring through old video cassettes, hundreds of inane videos he had collected over the decades, looking for one in particular that he seen in even longer. “Here it is,” he said, pulling out an old cassette with a tattered black and white cover depicting an awful looking man with strange concerning hair.

  “Is this what I think it is?” Stefan asked, slightly nervous.

  John didn’t reply. He just sank into his chair, pulling his legs up against his chest and curling up into a ball like he always did when he was alone. He could see Tracy mouthing the words, ‘I hate this movie’, but it didn’t matter, not like she had supposed it would.

  “Maybe we could do something else; Scrabble or something,” Stefan said.

  “Shut the fuck up” John’s Nipple replied.

  As the room flickered - a delusional-like black and white - John thought about how this movie had made him feel as a young man. It had since he was a boy, defined him. The mere mention of its title would cause looks of concern and idyllic wonder in others and a sense of purpose, direction and belonging in him. And it was a movie that he had spoken about more times that he had actually seen. Most people had; in the company that he kept of course.

  He remembered it having an allure of the strange and the surreal; being both siren and obnoxious; patently obscure. And like Tracy, it was so uncommon and difficult to find and more so, to understand, amidst the barrage of popular films with their common protagonists and linear plots. It was how he had felt about Tracy, and like her, there was nothing on Earth he wanted more than to sit in a quiet, dark room and be dumbed and bewildered by its flickering glare.

  But as one scene rolled into the next, John started to distance himself from the definition he had had in his mind this whole time. His first thought was, “This is shit.”

  It was nothing like he had first imagined. The acting was terrible, the cinematography was lazy and the editing was neither surreal nor obscure, it was merely poorly executed. And then his second thought was, “What the hell was I thinking.”

  He then reverted back to his first thought, “This is shit.”

  He fast forwarded frantically through the film, trying to find the scenes that he remembered as being poignant, like the first time that he kissed Tracy; when he was too scared to open his eyes, letting his arms flail lifeless beside his body, fearful that should he touch her demure waist, she might crumble, as if she were made of sand or his fickle imagination. Or the first time that he saw her naked body and he found himself in muted disbelief at how lucky he was, hoping that he could spend the rest of life as had been at that moment, bastille in venerate wonder of her beauty; brushing the faint shadows that crept across her breasts and into the curve of her naval with the cusp of his sight as she undressed neath the heady glow of the evening sun.

  He found that scene though and his wonder and animation, as he had always attributed to this memory, turned into stale bewilderment. And in his thoughts, he remembered himself young in his feet, his teeth, and his thoughts; and he remembered, not the first time he had seen the movie, but the first time he had seen Tracy; the first time they had seen each other; as companions, lovers, and friends.

  And it was as if he had discovered a wild weed in his garden, having for the life of him thought that it was some exotic flower. And as he stared into that memory, he was without wonder and without awe. He stared at her bare breasts as he if were staring at his own worn expression. In his memory, he stared at his wife’s naked body as he did now whenever she rose from her slumber, bitter and scorned, cursing the morning and his attempts to lighten her mood. He stared at her naked body with the same normal disregard as he did every day following, as she soaped her body under the steaming douche, complaining about traffic, her asshole colleagues, the idiot in the apartment above who insisted on wearing high heels at 6am, her mother, his snoring, the budget, whether or not they’d be able to make the car payment, and her chronic constipation. In his memory, he stared at her naked body, thinking of it how he thought of it now. And like any strong and effective corporate branding, after years of impressions, now and in his memory, when he saw her naked body, he didn’t feel lustful, considerate and lucky; he felt, as he followed the shadows across the curves in her soft, pert skin - oppressed, inutile, financially despondent and ridden with nagging guilt; mainly because he could shit on cue.

  He took the memory in his strangling grasp and he heaved into his sub-conscious, tearing the thought of her from the fertile garden of his imagination and with it, every memory he had of her body and her face, and with that, every trial and error, every struggle and conquest and every sobering failure that had come from knowing her, from being with her every day, and from loving her.

  He screamed wildly.

  “What’s wrong?” Stefan shouted, already off his seat, shaking his friend, as if that would loosen him of the grip of insanity.

  John screamed once more, lifting his shirt and shouting at his nipple. His sight blurred as the room spun out of control.

  “What’s happening?” he shouted to his nipple.

  He shouted again, louder and louder, but his nipple wouldn’t respond.

  Tracy was shouting something. She was angry and upset, but John couldn’t tell. He couldn’t hear a word she was saying on account of her being so mute. And an hour ago, that wouldn’t have mattered, for whenever she got like this, in a fit of absolute rage, her face would look as it did now, with her lips trembling like they were, as if some enormous quake at her center were shaking her rigid, ire core to a liquefied, sniveling mess.

  Normally it wouldn’t matter except that, although she was shouting so desperate and furious, so dire, doleful and sore, there was no way that John could tell, no way at all; for she had no form, no shape, no color and no image. She wasn’t there at all.

  And as Stefan’s wife fought to comfort her, it looked only to John as if she were comforting herself for there was nothing and nobody in her arms at all. She had vanished, she had gone, and the room would not stop spinning.

  “It’s gonna be ok” Stefan shouted.

  John could hear a voice, faintly, but he couldn’t see anyone whatsoever. He was alone in the room; in the room that wouldn’t stop spinning.

  “What do we do?” Stefan’s wife asked.

  Stefan looked at Tracy. She stood in the corner of the room catatonic, watching her husband and her lover, he partner and her best friend, in the fit of some psychotic breakdown.

  “Call an ambulance,” she said, breaking from her trance and running to her lover’s aide
.

  She knocked Stefan away and took John’s convulsing hands, squeezing them tightly as she had, every other time they passed through trouble and struggle in their lives; through his constant illness which caused them so much financial strain, and through the tyranny of his depressions and his anxieties, as she fought time and time again to make him feel for himself, how she felt about him and to cast off whatever idyllic wonder and delusion he had spelt upon her body and her face; whatever inane belief he had that he wasn’t good enough or smart enough or creative enough to be with her; to rid him of the thought that one day, she would rid herself of him.

  The siren was loud and waling as the ambulance rushed up the street. The banging on the door felt like it could have been pounding on her own failing heart as Tracy clung to her husband and her lover, feeling him slipping away from her warm touch. She felt as if she were nursing a stranger through a fit or seizure.

  The door burst open and the paramedics rushed in.

  “Is this him?” they asked. “Has he had any drugs? Has he been drinking? How long has he been like this?”

  “His whole life” replied Tracy, shaking like a leaf as the paramedics lifted him onto a gurney and strapped down his violent and convulsing body.

  “Is he lucid?” asked one of the paramedics.

  “Sort of. He just started screaming just now and this convulsing. He’s also been talking to his right nipple for the past week or so” Stefan said.

  The paramedics lifted John’s shirt. His right nipple was pasted in tomato sauce, mustard and chunks of pepperoni, chicken and pastry crust.

  “He has pizza on his nipple,” said one paramedic to the other. “Some pretty bad burns here.”

  “Are you the wife?” one the paramedics asked Tracy.

  “I am,” she said. “He hasn’t been taking his medication.”

  “Does he have a history of illness?”

  “He was doing so well,” Tracy said, bursting into tears. “I really thought this time would be different. I thought he’d…”

  Stefan’s wife embraced her and the two women wept as Stefan helped the paramedics load up the gurney and take John away. As the ambulance, with its flashing red lights and screaming siren, disappeared into the night, Tracy wiped away her tears and took a long, deep breath.