The Deep Whatsis

by Peter Mattei

  “Go on,” he says.

  “She’s nineteen or twenty or something, maybe older, I don’t know, she’s an intern at the firm,” I tell him, laying out the basic facts of the story as simply as I can. “I’ve slept with her, sort of, and I enjoyed it and all, but the thing is, the thing that I can’t understand, is why it is I seem to have fallen in love with her.” He doesn’t say anything now and so I feel compelled to go on. “I don’t even know why I fooled around with her, apart from the fact that I was horny, and she’s funny, but I’m always horny and there are lots of funny girls and I masturbate eight or sometimes ten times a day in an attempt, one might call it vain, to rid myself of my erection, or at least partial erection, that I have had for quite some time now, nearly a year, ever since I started taking the medications I am taking in the current combination I am taking them.” I stop here, figuring this is enough shrink candy for one visit.

  “You celebrated yourself in various ways,” he says. “It’s normal.”

  “I’ve masturbated in my office at work, I’ve masturbated in an empty lot in the middle of the night, I’ve masturbated in the back of taxi cabs, in stairwells of department stores, in airport bathrooms, I’ve masturbated on airplanes, I’ve masturbated while driving on the New York State Thruway and looking at lewd photos on my iPhone.” I’m really laying it on thick.

  “Why do you think that is?” he inquires, testing me, but I don’t take the bait.

  “I guess you would say that I have a strong sex drive. Of course I can get sex pretty much whenever I want it, and I have paid for it on occasion, I work all the time so I don’t always have the bandwidth, as you call it, for dating. When I do date normally I date actresses and models. I meet them often in my job, and I make a good deal of money, so they’re attracted to me. I’ve never really had a relationship with anyone and I’m thirty-three. I guess that’s not so weird since the advent of video games and reality television, not to mention that new porno app everybody is talking about, thirty-three is the new nine.”

  Then I put an unexpected twist into the story, a Henry.

  “I guess it all goes back to my mom,” I say and then, without thinking what’s coming next, there it is, sliding out of my mouth. “She died in a car accident when I was ten years old. I saw the whole thing.”

  The rest of it just writes itself. “I was standing in our front yard and my mom was driving down the street. In my mental re-creation of that day I surmise that she was drunk because when she got to our house instead of slowing down to let a garbage truck pass she must have hit the gas instead of the brake. She lurched forward right into the front of the truck as it was zooming by.”

  I figure this would be an excellent place for a pause and so I put one there. I look at him and wait, wondering why I am making up all these tales when there are perfectly valid truths I could be telling him; my father’s emotional rectitude (my sister’s phrase) or my mother’s actual illness. Dr. Look doesn’t say anything for a while. Then: “It must be very difficult for you to speak of these things,” he says quietly.

  Nothing has changed in the room but for some reason now it seems dark, as if many hours have passed in the last minute and a half. He shifts in his chair and suddenly I’m worried that he is going to come over and try to touch me, perhaps put a hand on my shoulder, but he doesn’t.

  “So then what happened?”

  “With the intern? You mean after I punched her? I got her a towel and some ice. I’m totally lying,” I say. “I didn’t punch anyone.”

  “I know that,” he says, “but we’re talking about your mother now. So she was killed in an accident.”

  “I ran up to the car and pulled the door open and screamed loud enough to wake my dad, who was inside the house, asleep in the dark in front of the TV”—I’m not a narrative innovator in any way—“and then I grabbed her bloody hand and pulled her from the wreck, only it was too late. She died in my arms right there on our street, which was called Magic Elm Drive.”

  “Your mother died in your arms?” He repeats my statement in the form of a question. “On the street in front of your house?”

  I nod yes. We remain silent for a long time. Long enough for me to realize that the died-in-my-arms line was a bit too much. “Was she heavy?” he finally asks. “Your mom? What was her name?”

  “She was a bit chubby, yes, as I was growing up,” I say. “The body is only a vessel, an avatar of our actual selves.”

  “What I’m wondering about,” he now says, “is how at age ten you managed to pull a somewhat, as you say, chubby woman from a wrecked car, and hold her in your arms while she died.”

  “I was a pretty strong kid,” I say. “I lifted weights. I worked out.”

  “Alright,” he says, leaning forward. “I find it of interest that you would tell me this story.”

  “You’re a shrink, yes? Isn’t this what people do?”

  “I mean such a blatantly untrue story.”

  “I was testing you,” I say.

  “And the girl that you punched,” he goes on, “you said that she is quite attractive, is that right?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “Why do you ask why I ask?”

  “I don’t see what her relative attractiveness has to do with it. Because my mom was not attractive? I’m confused.”

  “About?”

  “Everything.”

  There’s a long silence. Then he says, “Perhaps you blame yourself for your mother’s death, even though you had nothing to do with it. You blame yourself for hitting your girlfriend even though you did not hit her. And you blame yourself for hurting people at your firm even though that too is a situation you cannot control.”

  “How did you know about that?” I asked him, even though I knew the answer.

  “I think we’re going to have to stop for today,” he says.

  “But I thought I got an hour,” I reply. This guy really had his scam going. Not that we both don’t.

  “And it appears we’ve gone over,” he says, pointing at the clock on the wall, and from my prone position I crane around but can’t really read the clock since it doesn’t have any numbers and from where I am a three could easily be a six or a nine is a twelve. So I sit up and try to focus on the clock with its inane swinging cat eyes, and he’s right, somehow we have gone over, way over, although it’s also highly possible that while I wasn’t looking he got up and moved the little hands. As I stand he passes me his business card and I take it, look at it, he has scrawled on it the time of our next appointment: tomorrow at two.

  As I’m walking back to the office I realize I left the mental fitness form on his desk; this was either an oversight on my part or, now that we had begun actual therapy, perhaps he didn’t mean for me to take it. I turn onto Fifty-third and pass a falafel cart and so I stop and get a chicken shawarma. I stand there watching this protoslave slopping ash-white lettuce and tomatoes onto a slab of blanched pita, then he dumps some pieces of genetically modified chicken flesh on top of that, and then he smothers the whole thing in a thick white fatty sauce. My plan is to take it to my office and eat it there, but instead I stop about a block farther down the street and just stand there stuffing it into my mouth and chewing; I realize this is the first meal I’ve had in almost a week, I need to eat more slowly. I get about half of it down and then I stuff the remainder into my mouth and watch as goo drips down onto the curb. Then I wipe my chin with my sleeve and head back to work; within a few steps I don’t feel well. At the corner of Forty-ninth and Broadway I stop and involuntarily upchuck onto the sidewalk; what was I thinking eating this shit? I finish expectorating my Jihad Chicken and get up and stand there looking around as if vomiting on the street is something I want some fucking attention for, people, hello, look at me. Then the light changes and I cross the street toward the office; to complete the picture I take out my phone and make a call to a friend as if nothing at all could ever be out of the ordinary. I redial the last number in my phone, which it turns
out is the Magic Man, Seth Krallman, his own line of digital yoga mats coming soon, and as I’m walking south I tell him via the phone the one thing I’ve been meaning to tell him for days now, but didn’t have the chance to, and that is that I really should buy his car.

  2.14

  After hanging up I wander into the Starbucks on Thirtieth about a block from my office and sit down and wait for Seth to swing by in his Range Rover, which he has agreed to sell me for a yet-to-be-determined price. I came in here because I thought I was going to throw up again, and ended up sitting in the bathroom for a good forty-five minutes just waiting. Then I felt guilty using their bathroom for so long, and so I bought a green tea and sat down and called Seth and told him I wouldn’t be coming to Brooklyn, that he should bring the car to me.

  “What am I, homes, like your freakin’ delivery bitch?” he says at me with a laugh but I can tell he isn’t happy about it.

  “I’ll add a c-note to the price for your trouble,” I tell him and he says OK.

  An hour later he pulls up and honks outside. I clean up my spot at the table, throw the remains of my tea away in the hole in the counter where the half-and-half is, and go outside. I am the one who replaces the will to survive with the need to consume, I tell Seth. He asks me if I am OK and then we drive downtown.

  “Without me there would be nothing but the pure anguish of being alive, which is too difficult to bear, so I am providing a pubic service.” I use the word “pubic” as a joke and as a means of telling Seth that we are friends for the time being.

  “Dig it,” Seth says, and turns up the Odd Future track that he is playing via his iPod in the car’s music system. “We be bangin’!” he says as the music shakes the vehicle’s chassis. I roll up the passenger-side window lest Earl’s lyrics offend someone on the street, I’m very sensitive to the feelings of strangers. Then Seth says something about where he got the system, how it was custom or something, a significant feature that you can’t get off the lot, and if I want it it’s an add-on, an extra One Large, because it’s removable and imminently salable, but I don’t even listen to him. We drive down Eighth and he turns the music off and when we stop at a light he looks over at me.

  “Are you OK?” he asks again.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Nothing, just, you don’t look so hot, man.”

  “I almost puked in the Starbucks if that’s what you mean.”

  “Just now?” he asks.

  “Yep,” I say, “ten minutes ago.”

  “Cool,” he says. “Why?”

  I don’t answer and he says I need to get laid more is my fucking problem. I need to use my bone more. I needs to be bangin’ my hos more. Of course he doesn’t know anything about Intern and so I don’t bring her up. I let him tell me a lame story about how he’s been seeing this girl that lives in his building, she sells macramé unicorns on Etsy or something, she came over one night and asked him to turn his music down, and he invited her in for a drink, and she said no, but the next night he turned his music up again really loud and she came back, this time with a joint, and they smoked it and drank some beer and then they had sex.

  “That’s awesome,” I say. “You are totally my hero.”

  We pull over around Union Square and change places in the car and I drive. The Range Rover cruises quite smoothly and has plenty of pickup, which you would expect from an $85,000 automobile. I’ve already decided to buy it so this isn’t in any way a test outing. For fun I pretend that I haven’t driven in so long I can barely remember how; I screech to a stop a couple of times just inches from whatever car or person happens to be in front of me, forcing Seth to put his hand against the dashboard.

  “Easy, dog,” he says. “Easy on the brakes, they’re Brembo and they’re drilled.”

  Crossing east along Delancey and over the Williamsburg Bridge into my hood I suggest to Seth that we get a cocktail at the Hotel del Homo, on Berry Street on the North Side. It isn’t a gay bar, but that’s what I call it, because the cocktails are ridiculously bespoke.

  “I’ll pay,” I say in response to Seth’s scrunching up his face, because I know the place is not cheap. When we get to the bar it’s the middle of the afternoon and so almost no one is inside, just a couple of pose-afarians writing in Middle English in their Moleskine notebooks with fountain pens. I order a bottle of a champagnelike drink to celebrate our big car-purchasing JV, and a couple of glasses into it I take out my checkbook and write Seth a check for thirty grand, which is the amount we decided on, plus the one-hundred-dollar delivery fee, less the cocktails. I don’t bargain at all with him, that was the price I had floated out there initially, and if I change my mind I can always stop payment on the check, as at that point I will have his car ensconced in my building’s garage and he would have nothing but a worthless piece of paper in his henna-wrought hand. It was probably quite dumb of Seth to sell me a basically new car at such a discount, but he so badly wanted to be my friend, and I don’t know yet if I really want the car so we’ll see. I’m thinking of it like a car I would acquire in Second Life, it doesn’t really matter one way or the other, it’s like a quantum cat particle at this point, poised and shimmering between being real and not having ever existed, even in jest. As we are drinking our second bottle of Cava I bring up the idea of his getting into the advertising business, which I know is the moment he’s been waiting for. I can really see him salivate now, he’s like a puppy and I have a fake bone that I am dangling in front of him, and he is playing it cool because he’s seen me dangle it and then withdraw it before.

  “No worries, but that would be so awesome,” he says. “Don’t I need a portfolio or something?”

  “No, dude, chill, I’ll get you in there,” I say, speaking his language at long last. “But here’s the thing, dog, you have to do me a favor first.”

  “Talk to me,” he says, leaning forward.

  “I’m in this kind of situation and I need some help getting out of it.”

  “Shoot, son, anything at all, I’m there for you, you know that,” says the Seth. And then I tell him the story of Intern, how she was stalking me, black-hatting my e-mail, hitting on me when I was drunk and defenseless, causing herself to have a black eye and telling everyone I was the one who did it to her, while also implying that her father’s attorney would be lobbing a call into the firm’s general counsel, whose name is Barry, who is a walking one-man reason why feminism was invented.

  “What do you want me to do?” he asks, big-eyed.

  “I want you and your two friends, Titmouse and Pain, or whatever their names are, to go and pay her a visit, nothing too scary, just tell her that if she doesn’t recant this black eye bullshit there will be some real, actual trouble in her vicinity.”

  Seth sits there and looks at me for a long time and then he says, “Dude, I dunno.” He doesn’t yet get that I am only fucking with him, and so I say, “What don’t you know?”

  “Well, I don’t know if that’s cool is all.”

  “What, you think it’s cool for her to stalk me and try to get me wrapped up in some kind of human resources nightmare? Do you? You think it’s cool that she gets me fired just as I’m about to bring you on board?” My voice has enough edge that now he backs off, sets his fluted flute down as if to say, I ain’t drinking your booze no more, yo.

  “Are you fucking with me, Eric?”

  For a moment I consider laughing and slapping him on the back, filling up his glass and ordering another bottle and then the real friendship can begin, he and I, close enough to kid each other in a serious manner about something of no importance. But I want to keep the whole game alive.

  “I just bought your piece of shit automobile for more than the Blue Book, asshole, and I offered you a fucking job even though the only sentences you’re capable of writing are all cribbed from Peter Handke,” I say now, pausing to give him time to be impressed with my highbrow lit references before continuing, “so why would I fuck with you? Why? You’re like my best frie
nd.”

  He melts at this, a little bit, but I can see he still has some second thoughts. “I dunno, man,” he says again.

  “I’m not saying you do anything illegal,” I say, “I’m saying you just make certain things clear to her.”

  “Me?”

  “Yes, you, why not? Those two hip-hop poseurs aren’t going to do it. They’re pussies.”

  “Like what do you want me to do?”

  “Like I dunno you have an affadavit with you that says she caused the black eye herself and that I never touched her except in the act of sexual congress, something like that, and you get her to sign it. And Titmouse and P-Dog are your friends who come along for the ride, they provide a presence.”

  “And what if she refuses to sign?”

  “She’ll get the general drift. And if things get rough, make sure you shoot everything with your phone so there’s evidence.”

  He says nothing. Then: “Where does she live?”

  I tell him I don’t know but I can get it from the office. “Cool,” he says. “You don’t even know her name?”

  “Not really,” I say. “We just hang out from time to time.”

  “Sweet,” he says.

  By this time we are finishing our third bottle, a Sardinian prosecco now, and then a minute later I’m migrating us to shots of tequila, and the place is filling up with an early evening crowd; anywhere else I’d call it a postwork crowd but not around here, the scribbling of a few lines of poetry and a half-baked idea for a Kickstarter hardly qualifying as work. A couple of young girls, pretty, excruciatingly so, are sitting in the banquette next to ours and looking at photos in their mobile devices; the one with the straight hair I think may have been in this band Au Revoir Simone, who I saw play once at Secret Monster Island Robot Basement back before it became a Whole Foods, back when it was “kewl.” I can tell Seth likes them because he keeps looking over at them longingly, and he wants to impress them so I start talking, a little too loudly, about Seth’s exploits as an avant garde theater director, about the piece he did in the bra factory in Long Island City, which referenced the history of Times Square topless bars, and the awesomeness of breasts, but I don’t think they give a shit.