Love Creeps

by Amanda Filipacchi

  1.

  Loss of vitality.

  2.

  Loss of perspective.

  3.

  Loss of sanity.

  4.

  Loss of the full and rich spectrum of happiness that human beings have the potential to experience if only they were to be subjected to the lifestyle they were made for.

  He propped the chalkboard up on the table next to his plate for them to see and said, “Have you noticed how even just reading a book about miserable physical conditions is enough to increase your appreciation of small ordinary comforts? Well,” he snorted, “just imagine how much more potent the effect would be if we actually lived those miserable conditions. I think it’s pretty clear where I’m headed, right?”

  The nuts stared at him without responding. Alan was sitting on his hands.

  “In a nutshell,” Ray said, “once a year we should try to endure something extreme in order to come to our senses. It’s psychologically hygienic. Just like getting your teeth cleaned, or taking a shower. To maintain optimum mental health, we’ve got to have strong stimulation occasionally. And since our modern life doesn’t provide that, we must manufacture it. What do you think?”

  “Well, it’s an interesting idea,” Lynn said, thinking of Judy. “It reminds me of a friend who got hit by a truck and said it was revitalizing. So eventually, she did it again, and died.”

  “That may well be, but can you imagine how much better off she would have been had she lived?” Ray said.

  “Better off than dead?”

  “No. I meant, if she had survived without being seriously hurt, she would have been better off than if she hadn’t been hit by the truck.”

  “I disagree,” Alan said. “I don’t believe in that dumb quote ‘What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.’ I think the truth is the opposite.”

  “To a certain extent, you’re right,” Ray said. “What doesn’t kill you usually makes you weaker. But some things that don’t kill you do make you stronger. And happier.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like certain types of dangerous situations.”

  “But like what?”

  “I think we should pick one all together,” Ray said.

  “I think it’s an excellent idea,” Roland said, fingering his empty locket.

  The food arrived.

  “We could drink sour milk,” Alan said.

  Roland dropped his head in his hands.

  “I’m not sure I understand,” Ray said to Alan.

  “Well, aren’t we supposed to subject ourselves to more danger and unpleasant things?” Alan said.

  “Yes, but I think we should pick something a little more dangerous than expired milk,” Ray said.

  “We could chain ourselves inside a burning house,” Roland said.

  There was silence.

  “That’s a bit extreme,” Ray said. “Ideally, I think there should be a 25 percent chance of a negative outcome. Not much more and not much less.”

  “What do you mean by ‘negative outcome’?” Alan asked.

  “I’m not sure we should be speaking so explicitly,” Ray answered, “but by negative outcome I mean death.”

  “I’m not wild about this idea, Ray,” Lynn said.

  Ray stroked the stem of his glass pensively and said, “Let me ask you an awkward question. Are you happy?”

  “I’ve been worse,” Lynn replied.

  “That’s great. I’m really happy for you,” Ray said.

  Of course he had a point with his sarcasm, Lynn thought.

  “Listen, I don’t think any of you are as happy as you should be,” Ray said.

  They could not argue with that.

  He continued. “We want to put our lives at risk, not squash them. Do you have any ideas, Lynn?” Since she didn’t answer, he added, “Hypothetically?”

  Finally, she said, “I didn’t mind Alan’s idea so much, of eating something bad. Something we might pick out of the woods.”

  “Like what?” Ray asked.

  “Poisonous mushrooms, of course!” Roland said. “That’s a cool idea, Lynn. I think we should do it.”

  “Is that what you meant, Lynn, poisonous mushrooms?” Ray asked.

  “It crossed my mind, but I think the risk is too high,” Lynn said. “I’m sure it’s higher than 25 percent.”

  “I’d say so,” Alan said. “Count me out.” He ordered a glass of wine in the hope of getting carded, but he wasn’t.

  Ray put his chalk away. “I think we should give it some thought until we come up with an idea we can all live with.”

  “Or die with,” Roland said.

  “Yes, or die with,” Ray said.

  The next evening, they were all in Ray’s winter studio, coming up with more ideas that none of them could agree on. Even though the season was no longer winter and Ray was subletting the studio from Roland for a modest sum, they continued calling it “the winter studio.”

  “How about if we played Russian roulette with Alan’s gun?” Roland said.

  “It was Jessica’s gun, and she took it after we broke up,” Alan said.

  “Anyway, Russian roulette would do no good,” Ray said. “Our lives need to be placed at risk for more than a second. We need to remain in the dangerous situation for a while. That’s when the mental good happens.”

  Alan and Roland were sitting on the sofa, and Lynn had gotten up from between them and was sitting on a chair, next to Ray. “Why do you want to do this with us, Ray?” she asked. “You’re not in the same boat as us. You’re not unhappy.”

  “I am in the same boat. We’re all in the same boat, even though it may not seem so sometimes.”

  “Yeah, and I am, too, even though I know it may not look like it,” said Roland.

  They laughed. On occasion, Roland could be amusing.

  Lynn said, “We could all go out in the same boat and jump overboard. And then the disagreement would be settled. We would no longer be in the same boat.” She chuckled.

  “We would have to let the boat go,” Ray said. “We’d have to jump out while it’s speeding.”

  “Why?” Lynn asked.

  “So that we couldn’t get back in the boat.”

  She nodded.

  Ray went on. “So that we would float. And wait. And witness our life regain its perspective, its value. And witness ourselves regain our sanity. There’s a very good chance we’d get rescued and reap the benefits of the risk we took. And I’d say there’s approximately a 25 percent chance that … we would not.” Ray’s eyes were opened wide like vast oceans where floating people always got rescued.

  It took a week for Lynn and Alan to decide if they wanted to go ahead with Ray’s idea of risking their lives to improve their lives.

  After spending some time on his armless white easy chair with his rat, thinking it over, Alan agreed to the idea of jumping off a boat with the others. He had learned to swim and was proud of it, was no longer afraid of water, and anyway, they’d be wearing life vests. Besides, he’d wanted to kill himself. Just because fate had beaten down on him recently and weakened him didn’t mean he couldn’t fight fate a bit. Once again, he’d take a few days off from work—or forever, depending on the outcome.

  Lynn agreed to the idea, because Alan agreed to it. When she looked at her calendar, she objected to the date they had chosen. She was booked for a dinner she had been dreading for weeks but was obligated to go to. It was being hosted by an obsequious collector who had bought work from her many times. She had already tried to get out of the dinner by saying she had another engagement that night, but the collector had changed the date just so she could attend. Lynn told the others about the conflict and asked whether they couldn’t all jump off the boat a few days later.

  “Why not a few days earlier?” Ray said. “This way, if you die in the ocean, it’ll be a perfect excuse not to attend the dinner, and if you survive, then the danger you will have experienced will make the dinner more tolerable.”

  Lynn
considered this for a moment and agreed to move up the date of their semisuicide.

  “Does the date suit everyone’s schedule now?” Ray asked.

  Alan nodded, and Roland said, “I have no schedule.”

  “What do you mean?” Ray asked.

  “I’m free all the time.”

  “Within reason, no?”

  “No, all the time. I got fired.”

  The days passed, and the four nuts quietly went about their lives with the calm awareness of a day that was approaching, and of the act that would take place on that day. They did not even think of it as an act so much as a sort of gesture. They rarely spoke of it to each other anymore, and when they did, it was always obliquely.

  Before taking the plane, Alan left the same suicide note in his apartment that he had written before. He told his doorman he was going away for a couple of days and asked him to go into his apartment if he hadn’t returned in a week, to give his “gerbil” more food. The suicide note would be next to the cage, so the doorman would understand what had happened.

  Alan kissed Pancake, held him against his heart, and said good-bye.

  Lynn told Patricia she was going on vacation for a few days. Patricia said, “The Harlem Globetrotters just rejected your application for a tryout. That should sustain you and keep you sane while you’re gone.”

  The three nuts and the bum packed their bags and boarded a plane for the Bahamas at 8:00 A.M. They checked into Hotel Atlantis on Paradise Island. They sat on lounge chairs by one of the pools, staring tensely at the fake waterfalls and at all those people who were not going to jump off a boat the next day to make their lives happier, fuller, and more valuable.

  They went to dinner at one of the restaurants in the hotel. They ordered a bottle of wine. The waitress asked Alan for some ID.

  “I lost my driver’s license a long time ago, and I left my passport in my room. I’ll have a Coke,” Alan said.

  “He’s thirty-five, you know,” Roland said to the waitress. “And looks older, in my opinion.”

  As Alan sipped his Coke, he said to the others, “We are quite young, you know.”

  “Yeah? So?” Roland said.

  “So nothing,” Alan said.

  During the meal, the four friends passed the salt and pepper while Ray made a few attempts at a conversation, but his heart wasn’t in it, and he soon gave up. He couldn’t get himself to ask them if they were still okay with the plan, since he himself did not feel completely at ease with it.

  After dinner, they went back to the pool and sat on the same lounge chairs, side by side, in the dark, alone. It took a long time for one of them finally to speak.

  It was Ray. “I thought eleven o’clock might be a good time. That leaves us with many hours of daylight during which we might be more likely to get rescued.”

  Alan said, “It’s strange. It’s kind of like committing suicide in reverse, or something.”

  “It’s true,” Roland said. “It’s almost like suicide, but instead of being performed out of hatred of life, it’s out of love of life, out of wanting to recapture it. It’s a sacrifice for life.”

  The next day, out at sea, all in the same boat, wearing bulky red life vests and little white hats, they stared at the land that was now only slightly visible, extremely far away. They had no excuses. And it wasn’t as if they hadn’t been—and weren’t still—searching for excuses. But there were none: The ocean was not rough; the air was not cold, nor the water; there were no jellyfish in sight; there were a few pleasant clouds to protect them from sunstroke.

  Roland dropped a penny in the boat.

  When the time came, Ray slightly increased the speed of the small motorboat they had rented for the day. The four of them climbed on the side of it, held hands, and jumped off.

  Fourteen

  They watched their empty boat speeding away, wondering if it would keep going, hoping it would not, but it did—there was no reason it wouldn’t. And then they glanced around to see if they could see any rescue boats, but they couldn’t.

  “Well, here we are,” Alan said, once they had settled into the water and found comfortable positions amongst each other.

  “This was a mistake,” Lynn said, after five minutes. “If we live through this, you really think we’ll appreciate life more?”

  “It’s too late to ask that question,” Ray said.

  “I think it would be tragic to die in these beautiful, sunny surroundings,” Lynn said. “Death, if you’re going to die, deserves to have a certain amount of drama and importance, but this death would not be dramatic.”

  “It was your idea to do it this way,” Roland said. “If we die, it’ll be a beautiful death, and if we live, it’ll be a beautiful life.”

  Alan started laughing. Then he realized he was also crying. The others waited, alarmed, to see how it would develop.

  “Are you okay?” Ray asked.

  “You know what’s ironic?” Alan slapped the water a little.

  “What?” Lynn asked.

  “We’re all, still, in the same boat.”

  Roland sighed, but the others smiled, to be nice, and said, “That’s funny, Alan.”

  Lynn added, “The point was not really to be in different boats, but to be … in a better boat. Right?”

  Alan calmed down.

  In order not to get accidentally separated from each other, they had devised a system. They had brought the belts of their hotel bathrobes, tied end to end, forming a complete circle. They had each worn a regular leather belt and each brought a rock climbing clip, so that they could attach themselves, by the waist, to the circle.

  After two hours in the ocean, Lynn, Alan, and Roland realized how nuts they were. They congratulated Ray on his helpful idea. They couldn’t believe they had put their lives at risk, that they were bobbing around like corks, when life was so full of exciting and pleasurable things they could be doing.

  After two and a half hours, insults started flying and accusations that Ray was a “fucking cult leader.” He said he accepted their anger and that he had made this sacrifice for them.

  At one point, he said, “If we don’t get rescued, it’s a terrible death. But even if that happens, we’ll get the pleasure of knowing how great life could have been. We’ll die with that knowledge, which is a very pleasurable thing in itself. It’s a gift.”

  Lynn threw water in his face. Alan kicked him under the water.

  After six hours, they panicked when they saw a shark swimming around them. Alan, Lynn, and Roland were flapping their limbs, screaming, and Ray was hysterically trying to quiet them down, warning them that their behavior was the most effective way to get the shark to attack. They froze, which, according to Ray, was not much better in avoiding an attack. He told them they had to move in a calm, confident, healthy way.

  “Move in a healthy way? What the hell does that mean?” Alan hissed.

  “Now is not the time to analyze,” Roland hissed back. “Just move in a healthy way.”

  “Stop bickering,” Ray said. “Bickering will also make the shark want to eat you.”

  “Is anyone bleeding?” Roland asked. “Sharks can smell blood from miles away.”

  “No, why would anyone be bleeding?” Alan said.

  “That thing, there, is a woman,” Roland said, pointing to Lynn. “Those things bleed from time to time. Are you bleeding?”

  “I think I am,” said Lynn, who knew she was not. “Why else would the shark have come? Others will probably come, too.”

  The shark seemed to go away. It was hard to be sure about things of that sort.

  They were thirsty. Alan wanted to drink the seawater. Ray told him not to, that he’d be the first to die if he drank the seawater.

  “How can we be in water and not drink it?” Alan asked. “Why didn’t you warn us we’d be faced with that kind of temptation?”

  “Don’t do it, Alan. Exercise some willpower,” said Lynn.

  Two hours later, as the sun was setting, they saw w
hat they thought was another shark, and Alan immediately resumed moving in a healthy-looking fashion.

  “Sharks come out at night even more,” said Ray. “To feed.”

  But it was only a dolphin.

  Lynn couldn’t believe she was bobbing around in the middle of nowhere. She was a supersuccessful gallery owner. She was mad at herself for having followed Alan into the ocean. A life with so much potential, wasted. Not to mention the huge amounts of time she’d wasted stalking. She thought she deserved to die.

  Night came. They were tired, cold, still thirsty, and now weak from hunger.

  “I’m cold,” Alan said.

  “Yes. Our bodies may be suffering, but our minds have never been healthier,” Ray said, to everyone’s exasperation. “Just think: The more we suffer now, the happier we’ll be later.”

  “You’re sick,” Lynn said. “You need to see a therapist.”

  Roland took a penny out of his pocket and stared at it in the moonlight. He released it under the water, watching it flip, flip, and fade.

  Then he began moving his limbs energetically in the water.

  “What are you doing?” Alan asked.

  “Trying to warm up.”

  “That’s a good idea,” Alan said, and began moving his body and limbs enthusiastically. Lynn and Ray did as well.

  “But you have to make sure to move energetically and healthily,” Alan instructed. “That’s important. Lynn, your movements don’t look healthy enough. They look weak and tired. Put more vigor into them, or stop moving.”

  “I’m tired,” said Lynn.

  “Well, please hide it,” said Alan. “You might attract a shark who’ll then eat any one of us, not just those of us moving unhealthily. It wouldn’t be fair.”

  “The problem with moving energetically,” said Ray, “is that it dehydrates you more quickly and burns a lot of calories, and those are not good things for us right now.”

  They all stopped moving.

  “But I’m cold!” Alan said.