Screw Everyone

by Ophira Eisenberg

  Softly, Michael said, “What?” and then again a little louder, “What did you say?” His voice crescendoed as he pelted me with more and more questions.

  “What the hell are you talking about?! Did you go to the police? Where was this? Why didn’t you tell me?”

  He grabbed me by the shoulders and demanded I tell him every detail of what happened.

  Hesitantly, looking at him sideways, I told him about the excursion to Fraser Island and the nameless Brit, exaggerating certain aspects to make the story work with my fabrication. Michael stopped me mid-alibi and looked at me dead in the face with unsympathetic sapphire eyes.

  “You’re lying.”

  “How dare you say that to someone who’s been raped!” I said, feigning indignation.

  He didn’t blink.

  “You’re lying.”

  It was my move.

  I was officially out of moves.

  “But it was awful. I got really, really drunk and—”

  “‘You got really, really drunk?’” he repeated slowly, while rubbing his face. I wanted to throw myself from the car—if only it were moving.

  “Jesus Christ, Ophira,” he said in a scary-soft voice. “You know, Ophira, I love you, but I am so disappointed in you.”

  He started the car and looked at me again, maybe for the last time.

  “We can’t be together now. It’s over.”

  The cold words resonated in my head like a death knell. This was it. There was no REVERSE or BACK button. To make matters worse, I had to sit next to him in that car for at least three more days with my heart in my throat, living out my own Swan Lake. In my case, a Canadian goose lost in a storm of regret.

  I spent the rest of the trip punishing myself, inwardly flogging every aspect of my personality, while Michael continued to complain about his undiagnosed infection. We went through our daily routines but hardly talked, making record time on the highway. There was no need to stop to take photos. A vacation with an STD in the backseat is a fast one.

  Occasionally, the tension would break. At a self-serve gas station, I passed Michael some money and accidentally rolled the window up on his finger. He cried out in pain, and in an effort to fix it, I mistakenly rolled it up more. When I finally pulled the switch and released his hand, he laughed.

  “What’s next? Are you going to run me over?” he quipped.

  “That would be too easy, right?” I nervously joked back, trying to share in the moment, but the smile quickly faded from his face, and we resumed the drive.

  Somewhere close to Oregon, Michael had a sore throat and complained that the infection was taking over his body. I couldn’t tell if he was honestly worried or was enjoying torturing me, but I’d reached my limit.

  I insisted that we drive to a hospital to get a diagnosis. He resisted, claiming that they wouldn’t be able to tell him anything definitive in such a short time. With my remaining young-adult resolve, I insisted that he follow the signs to the next hospital.

  It was in a town called Eureka.

  While he saw a doctor, I slumped in a waiting-room chair and aged a few years. Ten minutes later, he materialized with a bottle of tetracycline and very few answers. They told him he was suffering from an infection but didn’t specify what kind. They suspected gonorrhea and asked him to tell his girlfriend to get herself checked out as soon as possible.

  I was the infected body. The dirty girl. The Whore of Fraser Island.

  I could not believe I screwed everything up with one stupid evening. I despised myself.

  By the time we reached my house on a beautiful, sunny day in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, our relationship was dead and buried. My mother and her new boyfriend, Zeke, greeted us full of smiles and hugs. I didn’t have the energy to return a fake smile as I lugged my beat-up backpack and beat-up heart through their happy-homecoming gauntlet and down to my old room. From my small basement window, I watched the tires on Michael’s car spin and drive away with my now unrequited love and the didgeridoo.

  For the next few weeks I talked to Michael on and off, agreeing with him that I was a terrible, terrible person—and begging him to take me back. As prescribed, I made a trip to the local health clinic, which was decorated with posters reading, SO YOU’RE CASUAL ABOUT SEX? ARE YOU CASUAL ABOUT DEATH? I swear that even the nurses gave me dirty looks.

  They called with results a week later, and I braced myself for English syphilis, but was told that I had . . . nothing. I was completely healthy. In my warped mind, all I could think was that with this news, Michael would have to take me back.

  I drove to his house. At first he didn’t know quite what to say, but settled on, “It’s probably lying dormant in your body, which happens, you know. The STD could flourish at any time.”

  My mind flashed forward sixty years. I was in a nursing home in a pink housecoat, concealing a flourishing case of chlamydia.

  I stood there on his front steps, blinking, like a computer trying to process but coming up with the same error message. It didn’t matter what I did, I couldn’t make it work out. I couldn’t get him back. Irritated that I wouldn’t leave on my own accord, he slammed the door in my speechless face.

  But where did his infection come from?

  Did I just provide him with the perfect cover?

  I couldn’t decide which was worse: the possibility that I was the cause of all Michael’s ills and the end of our relationship, or him creating all that unnecessary righteous drama to hide that he’d cheated on me too.

  Since I didn’t have the guts—or the confidence—to confront him about his own infidelity, I got back into my car and drove away.

  I scolded God, the universe, dead relatives, and the laws of science for letting me down. There was no cosmic destiny at play here. The only person writing my romantic fate was me.

  Great.

  The road to cultural enlightenment and spiritual fulfillment that I thought would come from my epic solo trip abroad was paved instead with painful life lessons. As far as wisdom goes, beggars can’t be choosers.

  So I drove to Seth’s place. I’d heard he’d been back a week. I wondered if he liked jazz.

  CHAPTER 8

  HEX AN EX

  My mother always said, “Never plan your life around a man.” Whoops.

  Summer faded into fall. I enrolled in general studies at the University of Calgary and holed up in my mother’s basement. This was not how I thought life would be after my “amazing trip abroad,” but I was defeated. Michael hated me, and my other potential boyfriend, Seth, wanted to “just be friends” because I seemed “a little crazy right now.” He moved away for college anyhow, so it didn’t matter. The good news was that my hair grew back, and I wore it straight and long.

  The latent STD Michael had accused me of carrying never materialized, so that remained an unsolved mystery. I spent my days basically stalking Michael, and this was before the Internet, so to stalk someone properly you needed a car. I trailed him from his house, to his classes, to the jazz club where he often played. I can only imagine what that bartender thought, serving me white wines night after night while I sat alone and silent at the bar, always leaving before Michael’s band finished. I was a barfly in the making; I just didn’t know how to tip well yet, so service was spotty. It was probably better that way; the less I drank the less likely I’d make a fool out of myself by calling out from the audience or not leaving when his set was over.

  I wouldn’t always be that wise when it came to bars and men.

  AT SCHOOL, I didn’t spend one lick of time in the humanities building getting to know my fellow classmates; instead, I’d hurry over to the music building while fixing my lipstick, hoping to run into Michael.

  I relied on constant stimulation to distract me from analyzing my sad life. Going home at night was too depressing, so if I couldn’t find Michael, I’d drive back to the university and hang out with a med student named Hal. I admired Hal so much because he possessed two qualities that I didn’t: the abilit
y to make goals that had nothing to do with Michael, and the discipline to see them through. He’d stay up all night studying, and I’d sit beside him attempting to absorb the words in my Intro to Evolution textbook, which must have read like pulp fiction next to his thick medical manuals.

  During coffee breaks, I’d talk Hal’s ear off about my damaged love life, and he’d advise me like an older brother by prescribing a reality check. He said that I needed to face facts and move on. Put science ahead of emotion. I understood perfectly well what he meant but was still secretly counting on Michael coming back to me.

  By constantly loitering around the music building, pretending not to be waiting for Michael, I met Leo. Leo was a jazz pianist with long, stringy dirty-blond hair who was too skinny for his frame. He also smoked and drank too much. He was nothing like Michael, but he liked me, which I was slowly learning was “my type.” Our connection was born out of proximity, driven by my desperate need to feel loved, and sustained by our mutual appreciation of this one Talk Talk album. Add a couple of six-packs and you’re guaranteed some sloppy sex. Leo claimed he was too screwed up to get in a real relationship, and as far as I was concerned I was already in one, so that wasn’t a problem for me.

  My nightly schedule alternated between stalking Michael, drinking and sleeping with Leo, and studying with Hal. They were my Three Stooges. This pattern continued for months, well into midterms. In my Primatology textbook, I learned that I was pushing the limits of my “Dunbar number,” or the maximum amount of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships. Dunbar didn’t know who he was dealing with.

  I’m not sure if Michael caught wind of Leo, or if I was succeeding in slowly breaking him down, but all of a sudden he responded to my relentless coaxing and we wound up in bed, or rather back on the floor of his music studio. It was like winning the federal lottery, having all the money taken away by taxes, and then winning it back again on a scratch ticket. The next morning, I asked him if he wanted to meet me for lunch after my Sociology 101 lecture, but he said, “We’re not getting back together.”

  Yeah, whatever. It would happen eventually.

  But on the sixth or seventh time when Michael said, “Ophira, we’re not getting back together,” while buttoning up his jeans, it finally sank in.

  I ran to Hal and told him through my tears that I had reached my limit and was going to move to another city to start all over again. Everything in Calgary reminded me of Michael, and the only cure was to strip my life of everything and create an entirely new one somewhere else. I was shocked when Hal said that sounded like a good idea for me. I trusted he was right. For the next month, I surgically removed myself from Calgary. I applied midsemester to McGill University in Montreal and was accepted. I packed up my stuff and called about a room in an apartment with a grad student and an artificial intelligence professor. Two days before New Year’s Day, I flew two thousand miles across the country to Quebec and walked into a new gray cement humanities building, intending to lay down some roots. It was a ballsy move, and I didn’t even tell Michael. It was too delicious to fantasize about how sorry he would be when he found out I was gone.

  Yes, I’d heard that saying “You can run, but you can’t hide.” Fine, but you can still run.

  Unfortunately, although I’d moved, I hadn’t moved on. I’d altered every aspect of my surroundings, yet all I could do was obsess over Michael. The lack of familiarity reinforced my old bad habits, and I was so consumed with keeping his presence in my life, I titled all my journal entries “Dear Michael” and played silly mind games with life: If the bus comes in two minutes, we’ll get back together. Okay, three minutes. How about four minutes?

  At night, I’d buy a sesame bagel fresh from the oven and eat it out front of the shop, which happened to be on my street (this ritual was arguably more satisfying than any relationship). With my eyes to the night sky, I’d ask the stars, “Does he notice that I’m gone? Does he miss me? What is he thinking? Is he hurting?” And because I really loved him, I really wanted him to hurt.

  Once again, my only welcome distraction was Leo, who had also moved to Montreal—not to escape, but to be closer to his family. We continued our periodic friends-with-benefits situation (but it was before we knew that term, so it was called “I dunno”) of guzzling cheap beer and waking up beside each other. Neither of us uttered a word about what was “going on,” which made us fantastically compatible.

  One afternoon, I was sitting on my red IKEA couch, pretending to read the ethnography Yanomamo: The Fierce People when my attention was actually on the phone, wondering if I could will it to ring. After an exhausting hour of inconclusive mind control, I convinced myself that there was no reason why I couldn’t call Michael. People, friends, exes, check in with each other all the time. It’s totally normal, not to mention courteous. Once I made the decision that I was allowed to call him, my mood lifted. I was happy for the first time in months.

  Michael’s cheerful “Hello?” set my heart cantering. This was back before caller ID, when people picked up the phone with excitement because they didn’t know who or what might be waiting for them on the other end.

  “Hi, Michael. It’s Ophira!”

  I heard a deep, audible sigh. “Oh. Hi, Ophira.”

  It was the equivalent of a party balloon deflating. I carried the momentum of our awkward chat, asking him all the standard questions about life and work, peppering the conversation with my own answers, since he wasn’t asking. He’d heard that I’d moved but sounded totally indifferent about it. I could feel the unsatisfying conversation wind down, so in a last-ditch effort to make the call worth something, I asked the one question you’re never supposed to ask an ex.

  “Hey, Michael. I was wondering . . . are you seeing anyone?”

  He replied effortlessly. “Yes, I am.”

  What? My insides twisted up. There was no way! He must be lying. How could he be seeing someone?

  I weakly inquired, “Who?”

  “Kimberly.”

  I’d seen Kimberly around the music department. She played the flute and was everything a flautist should be: waify, airy, blonde, and dumb. Actually, I didn’t know if she was dumb or not; I just thought of her as the antithesis of me. It’s flattering when the next person someone dates reminds people of you: he has brand loyalty; he just didn’t like your particular model. However, it’s a total insult when she’s the polar opposite. That means he wants nothing to do with your company ever again. It seemed that I might have turned Michael against “Persistently Pining Acerbic Brunettes” forever.

  There wasn’t anything more to say, so we hung up. I thought of my anthropology book Intro to Tribal Cultures, feeling numb and jealous of all the brides captured in tribal wars. At least someone wanted them.

  My new friends were so patient with me. They took me out and consoled me, reassuring me that I could do so much better while pointing out cute drunk guys that I should take advantage of on my rebound. One friend, Suzanne, who was particularly sick of my never-ending desperate ramblings, said in her thick Quebecois accent, “Why don’t you go visite de Haitian witch doctor, no?”

  Finally someone with some decent advice! She gave me the number, and I called to make an appointment with a woman named Natasha. The name threw off my confidence. Instead of conjuring the image of an exotic dark-skinned woman wearing necklaces made of bones, “Natasha” brought to mind the cartoon character from Rocky and Bullwinkle: the evil girlfriend with the heavy Russian accent and edgy haircut. Then again, as long as she could cast a spell, her name could be Scamarella, for all I cared.

  On a cold, snowy Saturday afternoon, I knocked on the door of a suburban house, worried that I was being had. The house didn’t look much like a witch doctor’s abode, with its light-blue stucco and Hummel figurines peeking out of the window. There had better be a basement, I thought as the door opened. I envisioned walking into a room filled with heavy red drapes and low lighting, decked out with occult symbols, snarling taxi
dermy, and dripping candles. I also imagined that Natasha, despite her name, would at least be dressed like a gypsy. Instead, a very plain-looking woman in her thirties wearing a faded pink T-shirt and a pair of Gap jeans welcomed me in. Between voodoo appointments, she could have easily worked as a kindergarten teacher. At least she had a slight accent.

  Natasha ushered me into a living room filled with shiny faux-mahogany furniture and a velvety green couch covered in plastic. I went to sit down, but she motioned to a small wooden chair instead. I guess I had to earn my spot on the good sofa. It didn’t matter: I was sure I was getting scammed, but my skepticism suddenly morphed into a new, more hopeful idea: She doesn’t need to hide behind mysterious razzle-dazzle because she is an authentic Haitian witch doctor. Still, a little extra black eyeliner would have been nice.

  She clasped my hands in hers and asked very seriously, “What brings you here?” Talking to a Haitian witch doctor was like a therapy session, the difference being at the end she’d cast a hex! She studied my face as I blathered on about my love for Michael—how we dated and it was fireworks, endured a year apart, suffered a cataclysmic breakup, followed by me chasing him for another six months, and, finally, moving here. I wanted him back. She nodded like she’d heard it all before and said that for forty dollars I had a choice: I could cast a “Move On with Your Life” spell, or a “Come Back to Me” spell. Was she kidding? Without pause I said, “Come Back to Me.”

  She kept trying to sway me. “Are you sure?” she asked. “Because there’s a special on the Move On with Your Life spell. I would recommend it for you.” But I was dead set on Come Back to Me. There was no question. That’s why I came.

  Natasha gave me two green drugstore-quality candles and told me to mark each one off into seven sections. Every night at sunset for two weeks, I was to place one candle on his photo and burn a portion while reciting a passage of Haitian text that she’d written out phonetically on a card—much like the transliteration printed in a Passover Haggadah so you can sing along even if you don’t know Hebrew.