The Three Fates of Henrik Nordmark: A Novel

by Christopher Meades

  Henrik reflected on the doctor’s words. Eventually he came to the realization that there was nothing at all wrong with his penis or the rest of him. He stripped out of his hospital gown and was putting on his security guard uniform when a woman poked her head in. It was Bonnie, the woman Henrik bumped into in the marketplace, inadvertently making her the winner of four million dollars. Henrik didn’t recognize her at all but she immediately recognized him.

  Bonnie tried to play it cool. If this bald man found out about the switched tickets, he might alert the lottery officials and she could very well lose her still-unclaimed grand prize.

  “Have you seen a man with an arrow wound?” she said. “He’s probably wearing a Dunkin’ Donuts uniform.”

  “I’m right here,” Clyde said from the other side of the sheet.

  Henrik pointed to his right.

  Bonnie smiled and entered the next partition. Her husband Clyde was lying on the bed in obvious pain. Bonnie walked over and tried to kiss him. Clyde rebuked her affections and turned his head the other way.

  “What’s wrong?” she said.

  “What’s wrong? I got shot in the chest with an arrow four hours ago and you’ve finally just shown up at the hospital now. That’s what’s wrong.”

  “I was working,” Bonnie said.

  Her irritability did not sit well with Clyde. He himself was quite irate.

  “You still should have come as soon as you heard.”

  “I couldn’t leave my job,” she said. “There was no one to cover for me and the doctor told me on the phone that you weren’t going to die. I don’t know what you’re so angry about.”

  “Screw your job!”

  Bonnie stepped forward and slapped her husband across the face. It was the first time she’d ever hit him.

  “I don’t know why you can’t support my work,” she said. “My parents support me. They come to my work at least once a week. Even our priest joined them a few times. You’re the only one who has anything bad to say about my job.”

  Clyde could smell cigarettes on Bonnie’s skin and a hint of vodka on her breath. He grew even angrier.

  “Why did you have to tell the guy next to me that I work at Dunkin’ Donuts?”

  “Because you do work at Dunkin’ Donuts, you jackass! You shouldn’t be ashamed of your job.”

  “You only tell people I work at Dunkin’ Donuts because you want them to know I earn minimum wage and I can’t support us.”

  “That’s not it at all,” she said. “I asked that guy if he’d seen a man wearing a Dunkin’ Donuts uniform because you’re wearing a fucking Dunkin’ Donuts uniform. If you were wearing a suit, I would have asked him if he saw a man in a suit.”

  “But I’m not wearing a suit!”

  “No,” Bonnie rolled her tongue along the inside of her cheek. “You’re not wearing a suit, are you?”

  Henrik had fully pulled on his clothes and was listening through the curtain, hearing the argument escalate. These two had grown so incensed that their voices rose with every word.

  “I know you screwed that little skank from Orange Julius,” she said.

  “I told you — I didn’t screw her,” Clyde lied.

  “I could cheat on you too,” she said.

  Clyde laughed a little. “Listen, we both know that’s not going to happen. Look at you. Look at what you do for a living. You’re a stripper! You take off your clothes for money.”

  “How dare you?” Bonnie’s voice rose in volume and fury. “I’m a dancer! And I’ve worked damn hard to get to where I’m at in life. Three years ago, where was I? Working the Tuesday afternoon lunch crowd and subbing at Bart’s House of Class on C-Section Sundays. Now I’m one of the top girls. People love what I do. Men want me.”

  Clyde shook his head. “No one else wants you. I’m all you’ve got, babe. I’m all you’ll ever have.”

  Bonnie stomped her foot furiously on the ground. She looked around for something to hit Clyde with and made accidental eye contact with Henrik as he walked by Clyde’s curtain and glanced in. Bonnie stormed over and flung the curtain open. She grabbed Henrik’s surprised face in her hands and planted a big, sloppy wet kiss on his mouth. Four and a half long seconds passed before Bonnie released Henrik and tossed him back toward the other bed.

  She turned to Clyde and gave him a look of wretched loathing. Bonnie had hidden her hatred for too long. Her face morphed into a hideous scowl.

  Alarm bells sounded in Clyde’s head. He looked down at the arrow still stuck in his chest. “You did this to me, didn’t you?”

  “Don’t be preposterous!”

  “Preposterous, eh?” Clyde said. “That’s a pretty big word for someone who didn’t even finish ninth grade.”

  A wild glare formed in Bonnie’s eyes. She lunged at Clyde and grabbed hold of the arrow. Bonnie started twisting it in circles. Clyde let out a tormented scream and tried to stop her.

  “I’ve been trying to kill you for months!”

  “I’ll kill you!”

  “No, I’ll kill you!”

  Finally a set of orderlies, until now busy with the blown-up grandmother, came over to see what all the ruckus was about.

  Henrik had fallen to the ground when Bonnie pushed him away. He scrambled to his feet and watched Bonnie and Clyde battle it out. When the orderlies arrived, they pulled a kicking and screaming Bonnie off her husband while Henrik stumbled out of the emergency room and into the street.

  Henrik held his fingers up to his lips. No woman had ever kissed him before. It was the most joyous sensation he’d ever experienced. Past the taste of vodka and beyond the odor of old cigarettes, there was something euphoric about that strange woman’s tongue swirling around his mouth. Like licking a hundred miniature caramelized apples. Henrik felt amazing. A miracle was embedded in that kiss. He longed to feel it again. And he wasn’t the least bit discouraged by the ugly display of marital relations he saw back in the hospital. Henrik had finally decided how he would become special and unique.

  He would find someone to love him and to kiss him.

  He would find himself a girlfriend.

  seventeen

  Of course, Henrik had absolutely no idea of how to go about getting a girlfriend. He went home and got a good night’s sleep, confident that his subconscious would determine the best way to make a woman fall in love with him. When Henrik woke up the next morning, he scurried over to the table where he had a pen and piece of paper waiting to record whatever bright ideas his subconscious mind had come up with. Unfortunately there were none. He’d awoken to a strange dream about the season of The Dukes of Hazzard in which they’d inconceivably changed their lead actors over a merchandise profit-sharing dispute. He couldn’t get the picture of the General Lee jumping a row of cars out of his head and set the paper down, greatly agitated that his subconscious hadn’t been more supportive or accommodating.

  After a torturous hour spent — literally — staring at the wall, Henrik realized he would never find a girlfriend on his own. He decided it was best to seek out expert knowledge on the subject of human mating. Henrik forwent the Costco-sized bookstore with its nosy employees and magazines wrapped in cellophane and ambled over to the local bookshop, where he headed straight to the sexuality section and bought half a dozen books on relationships, erotica and the Kama Sutra. The attractive woman behind the counter gave him an apprehensive look when he approached the desk. Henrik found her quite striking and briefly considered starting his foray into the dating scene by asking her to share a cup of coffee with him. But then he remembered that he had yet to read all of these informative books and that it was better to come into such a situation armed with knowledge rather than ignorance.

  “Are these the best books on human relations?” he said.

  The woman hesitated before answering. “I think they are.”

  “Thank you.”

  Henrik made a mental note to one day return to this bookstore and perform the Kama Sutra on the attractive cashier.<
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  He headed straight home and flipped through the books. Henrik started with the picture-laden volumes that promised to teach him various sexual techniques. The more he looked at pictures of bondage, Nyotaimori (sexual food play) and Bukkakes (a really mean thing to do), the more he realized he was jumping too far ahead by learning what to do sexually to a woman without first learning how to trick her into his bed.

  He’d anticipated the relationship books would be more instructional in nature but they proved equally confusing. Some of them even contradicted what the others said. One of the books (written by a woman) told Henrik that men fundamentally don’t understand sexual intercourse and that there must be a long drawn-out ending and at minimum twenty minutes of cuddling in order for it to be enjoyable for both participants. A second book (written by a man) told him that this was all hogwash and that when men are done, they’re done. Henrik didn’t know what to believe. He picked up another book and learned that men are from Mars and women are from Venus but the book said nothing about the origin planet of homosexuals. The general inference was that they didn’t exist at all. This confused Henrik to no end. He was quite sure that there were at minimum thirty homosexuals on Earth because over the course of his lifetime, Henrik had witnessed fifteen incidents of same-sex kissing, and counting up the participants on both hands, he came to a total of thirty. Thirty-one if you count that cottaging bastard Senator Larry Craig.

  He threw the relationship books aside. They were obviously lying to him. Henrik grew suddenly angry with that attractive cashier in the bookstore. She had lied to him when she said these were the best books he could buy. Henrik now hated her beyond all reason. He most certainly would not return and perform the Kama Sutra on her.

  Henrik languished in his chair. He planned to spend the entire day cursing his misfortune — and perhaps if he had time, performing some extensive soul-searching — when suddenly a sensation akin to a lightning bolt struck the base of his skull. From there it spread outward; tortoise-like at first, it gained momentum as it sailed through his brain, bashing aside neurons and careening off the hypothalamus before the sensation formed a single thought so akin to a great idea, Henrik didn’t know what hit him. He ran over to the kitchen and opened the cupboard above the refrigerator. Henrik slammed a copy of the Yellow Pages on the counter and flipped sections back and forth like a madman until he found the page he was looking for. There in large black letters was the word MATCHMAKER. Henrik grabbed his phone and dialed the number at the top of the page.

  One hour later Henrik was sitting in the matchmaker’s office across town. He’d put on his best suit before he left the apartment and, hell-bent as he was on making a good impression, had cleaned behind his ears, brushed his teeth and even rinsed his mouth twice with blue mouthwash he’d found in an old dusty bottle under his bathroom sink.

  The receptionist walked him into an office and Henrik sat down across from the matchmaker. She introduced herself as Susan. Susan had wide eyes spaced far apart on her head, big breasts and a tight brown leather jacket. She looked to be about fifty-five years old, a good four years older than the arbitrary twenty-seven– through fifty-one–year age range Henrik had randomly decided upon for a prospective mate. Susan smiled warmly.

  Henrik immediately felt at ease in her presence. He crossed his legs and leaned back in his seat a little.

  “Some advice?” Susan said. “You should always sit up straight in front of a lady. Especially in a dating situation. Sitting up straight indicates you are a man of power. A man of action. Slouching gives your entire body an aura of being flaccid. Women don’t like men who are flaccid.”

  Henrik sat up straight and smiled bravely at the woman.

  “Also, never cross your legs so tightly. It gives others the impression you have a small penis. Women frown greatly upon men with small penises.”

  Henrik uncrossed his legs and made a mental note to never ever cross them again.

  “Now,” Susan said. “How may I help you today?”

  “I would like to find a girlfriend.”

  “Have you dated before?”

  “No. This would be my first time.”

  “Well then, let’s start by me asking a few questions. First, how old are you?”

  “Forty-two.”

  “How much money do you make?”

  Henrik hesitated.

  “Is it less than thirty thousand, less than sixty thousand or less than ninety thousand?”

  “The first one.”

  The matchmaker made a sour face.

  “Do you live alone with your mother?” she said.

  “No.”

  “How long did you live alone with your mother before you moved out?”

  “I’ve never lived alone with my mother,” Henrik said.

  “Never?”

  “Never,” Henrik said. “And I fail to see how whether or not I ever lived alone with my mother should affect my ability to find a girlfriend.”

  “Well, you’re forty-two years old and you say this is your first time dating?”

  “Yes.”

  The matchmaker gathered her eyebrows and turned her attention to the open folder on her desk. She proceeded to write down extensive notes on a piece of yellow paper, with intricate details and observations on their current conversation. Some of the notes were in full sentences, others in point form and together they took up the entire side of the page and a small portion at the top of the other side. The matchmaker wrote without looking up, intermittently exhaling long breaths out through her nose, before she finally turned her attention back to Henrik again.

  “Have you ever heard of Sigmund Freud?”

  “I’m familiar with his early work.” Henrik lied wholeheartedly and without conscience.

  “Really?” Susan said. “Which portions of his early work?”

  “The early, early portions.”

  “Are you familiar with his theory of the Oedipus complex?”

  “No,” Henrik said. “That must have been part of his later work.”

  “Freud believed that each son secretly desires to marry his mother and kill his father.”

  “What does this have to do with me?” he said.

  “You’re forty-two years old and you’ve never been on a date. Based on these facts alone, I suspect you’re a textbook case of Oedipal desire.”

  “But my mother is a thick-wristed German woman who weighs nearly three hundred pounds.”

  “All the same,” the matchmaker said.

  “And my father is dead.”

  “I rest my case.”

  Henrik was largely offended. He was paying one hundred dollars for this appointment and had spent the entirety of it being accused of acts he’d never considered — not even once — in his entire life. Henrik would have lashed out verbally had he not been so busy marveling at how unique a person must be to have constant thoughts of incest and patricide running through his head. Now, that was inimitable distinctiveness if Henrik ever heard of it.

  Susan pushed her leather jacket up to her elbows and cracked her knuckles. “What type of woman are you looking for?”

  “I’m not sure. I’m in no position to be picky.”

  “But you must have a type in mind. Someone athletic perhaps?”

  “I don’t want to be encouraged to do calisthenics,” Henrik said.

  “Perhaps you’re looking for someone feisty?”

  “What does that mean?”

  “You know, abrasive and bossy. The kind of woman who picks out your shirts for you and enjoys sending back soup at a restaurant.”

  Henrik shifted in his seat. “I don’t think I want someone that feisty.”

  “How about someone more traditional? The kind of woman who likes you to hold the door open for her?”

  “That sounds terrific,” Henrik said.

  “Not so fast. The traditional woman will also expect you to pay for her whenever you go to dinner. And she’s likely to make you wait until marriage before you have sex.�
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  “Oh.”

  This sounded absolutely terrible to Henrik. Conceivably, he wouldn’t mind waiting until marriage to have sexual intercourse. In fact, a traditional woman might even marry him without ever learning about his significant lack of skills in the bedroom. But he loathed the idea that he would have to pay double for dinner and movies every time they went out. And what would his well-paid, traditional girlfriend be doing this whole while? No doubt investing her money in 401Ks and real estate properties, stocks and bonds. Her mattress would be stuffed with dollar bills and her piggy bank overflowing with change while Henrik ate at soup kitchens and purchased his clothing from the Salvation Army.

  And when she inevitably left him for another man, the traditional woman would go on her way carrying a thick investment portfolio under her arm while Henrik was left poor, heartbroken and sexually frustrated to the point where he didn’t know whether to cry or scream. No, this didn’t sound like a good idea at all.

  “Perhaps a traditional woman isn’t right for me either,” Henrik said.

  “Okay,” Susan said. “Just for a minute, let’s forget about what type of woman you’re looking for. What I try to do is match people on the basis of several factors of compatibility. Age, religion, sexual preference, relative vigor of libido — everything down to which side of the bed you sleep on. But let’s face it. The most significant factor is looks. People have to be within the same range on a scale of attractiveness in order for a relationship to work.

  “For example, if I have a male client who is an eight out of ten — solid jaw, slim and with all his original teeth — it’s only wise for me to set him up with someone close to his level of attractiveness. So my client who’s an eight can date someone as low as a six-point-five, like the kind of woman you see on the escalator at the mall. Or, should he be so lucky, as high as a nine-point-five.”