by Mark Leidner
“So,” the more trusting member of the malcontent couple says to the skeptical one, “is this really the end? For us, I mean? I guess I hadn’t thought about how much I actually do respect you. This was all your plan, dating to spite them, coming over here, trying to get our soulmates back. You just… go for what you want. You’re so bold, even though you’re skeptical. That’s a rare combination, and I would’ve never gotten this close to getting my ex back without you.” The more trusting member of the malcontent couple starts softly weeping. “I’m hopeless… I’m a follower. I might… I might love you too much to let you go. Oh God…”
At this point, one of the members of the couple who had been having sex climbs out of the limbs of the other—the hardball negotiator—and says to the self-described follower while wiping off, “But I’ve always loved you for being who you are, and you’re not a follower, you’re emotionally open. In fact, you’re the only one here who actually knows how to love, how to give themselves completely to another person.” Then this person points at the bold, skeptical person. “Even though I don’t know you, I’m just guessing, based on the speech you just made, that you don’t know how to love. It’s not much of a judgment, since it’s true of me, too. I mean, I’m sure you’re nice, but you don’t strike me as particularly emotionally open, at least not as open as your current partner and my ex.” The emotionally open follower weeps even harder. The bold skeptic frowns. The former partner of the emotionally open follower looks back at the hardball negotiator and asks, “Does that make me a fuck up? That I love this other person for being weak, for having the strength to be weak, I mean? Instead of flexing and striding and barking orders and hardball negotiating all the time, even though I was unhappy when I was with them? And I’m happy with you, but I don’t love you? And at the end of the day I choose love over happiness? I mean, that’s what I’m asking. Can that even be? Or am I missing something important that I don’t understand? I’m happy all the time with you, but I still don’t love you, because what I really love is someone who knows how to love, how to believe in someone else, because that’s what I lack.” This breaks the hardball negotiator into tears. Then the trusting, vulnerable follower’s ex suddenly kneels and starts kissing their feet, declaring their adoration of the vulnerable follower over and over in such exaggerated terms that it sort of embarrasses the vulnerable follower. The hardball negotiator stops crying to look up at the bold skeptic and says, “Maybe we should all just break up. Maybe… we should all just become single and wipe the slate clean. A hard reboot.” The hardball negotiator looks at all of them. “I love everybody in this room now. I love you because of how self-abasingly you love them and how good our sex life is, and I love you because of what we had that did work, in public. And I love you because we hardly know each other and it seems unlikely that you’d be half as crazy as these two are, and maybe it is beautiful that you love so vulnerably. I’m not sure what that means, but I’ll tell you this. I’d like to find out. Maybe we have more in common because we’re the only two people in the world who know these two in the same way. Maybe that’s not love either, but like I said, if we were to get together for a drink, or coffee, just the two of us, who knows what we might discover about love that we don’t know already.” “Really?” says the follower. “Hey!” interjects the bold skeptic. “You already have someone kissing your feet. Hardball negotiator’s mine.” The bold skeptic faces the hardball negotiator. “I want you back. And I want you to want me back. And you do because you just said you did. So just act on it. It can be like it was.” The bold skeptic looks at all of them and says panickedly, “Let’s just keep it simple!”
“You’re not listening,” the hardball negotiator says, “you’re just being bold and skeptical, as usual. We should all break up. Clear the air. Just for an hour, just to take some time to think. If we all broke up, and I mean really broke up, and banned anyone from getting back together for an hour, we might give ourselves the emotional space we need to realize who we really want to be with.”
The follower is the first to nod. Then the one kissing the follower’s feet stops and stands and says, “I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I think the hardball negotiator is right.” The foot-kisser then turns to the follower. “And if you don’t want to get back together, it’s okay. I’ve learned from you that that’s what love means.”
“Hey! Stop that,” says the hardball negotiator.
“What? I just agreed with you.”
“No, you’re setting it up so you and the follower can get together when the moratorium lapses.”
The foot-kisser looks offended. “I’m sure I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“You do so! You’re gaming the system!”
“Not everybody’s as hardball as you. It’s obviously made you paranoid.”
“That’s exactly what I would say if I was gaming the system! You’re not a foot-kisser, you’re a gamer of systems.”
“Both of you stop,” the bold skeptic cuts in. “Look, we just have to do it. No more caviling. Four-way split. Plain and simple.” The bold one looks straight at the hardball negotiator. “Everyone ready?”
“Thank you,” says the hardball negotiator to the bold skeptic, fairly surprised at the bold skeptic’s change of mind.
The bold skeptic bows and offers a smoldering look.
“But no smoldering looks,” adds the hardball negotiator, pretending to be addressing everyone. “And no seductive posing.”
The bold skeptic frowns, hurt.
“No moving,” the vulnerable follower adds diplomatically. “If we’re statues, our minds will be free to examine our hearts without interference.”
“You’re making a lot of sense right now,” says the foot-kisser smoothly.
The hardball negotiator elbows the foot-kisser in the torso.
“Ow!”
“You’re doing it again.”
“Jeez.” The foot-kisser rubs their torso tenderly. “Sorry.”
The bold skeptic tries to smile at the hardball negotiator, but the hardball negotiator is gazing at the vulnerable follower.
“So, that’s it? We’re broken up?” asks the foot-kisser, still massaging their torso.
The foursome nods in a circle, then stands extremely still.
After a quarter of an hour without incident, the bold skeptic whispers to the room, “This is really good, guys. I think I’m really getting somewhere.”
“Shhh,” says the hardball negotiator, whose eyes are closed.
“Yeah,” agrees the vulnerable follower. “No one can concentrate with you talking.”
“All you do is agree with everyone,” the bold skeptic snaps.
The vulnerable follower looks hurt, then glances at the hardball negotiator for support. The hardball negotiator winks, then goes back to meditating.
The foot-kisser sees this and whispers to the bold skeptic, “You saw that, right?”
The bold skeptic nods and announces to the group, “Guys, we have a problem. Me and the foot-kisser don’t even like each other. So it’s not fair if you two get together. We’ll only have each other to choose from.” The hardball negotiator and the vulnerable follower ignore the announcement. “Hey!” the bold skeptic shouts. “I’m talking here. This is a real issue. We need to talk about it.”
“Please,” pleads the vulnerable follower. “We still have three-quarters of an hour left in which to reflect. Who knows what might happen if you allow peaceful contemplation to work its mellowing effects on your addled psyche. Can’t you just trust the system?”
Tears are running down the bold skeptic’s cheeks. “No! How can you all trust the system so easily? Especially when we’ve got a system-gamer right here?” The bold skeptic gestures to the foot-kisser and says to the hardball negotiator, “Your words. Not mine.”
“Hey,” replies the foot-kisser to the bold skeptic. “How would you like it if I accused you of being a system-gamer?”
“Don’t listen to them,�
�� the vulnerable follower says to the foot-kisser. “You’re a foot-kisser. The bold skeptic is just lashing out in pain.” The vulnerable follower then touches the bold skeptic’s cheek and says tenderly, “It’s the only system we’ve got. That’s why we believe in it.” The vulnerable follower gestures at the foot-kisser. “You might even find that you’re able to love certain people more than you once thought possible. If only you’d try.”
The bold skeptic looks the foot-kisser up and down, and, with great resignation, sighs and wipes away tears and resumes standing still.
A minute later, everyone appears to be thinking about what they genuinely want, what they genuinely don’t want, what they genuinely might want someday, and what they genuinely believe they once wanted, and how those past wants might influence the desires to which they’ll be subject once the moratorium on binding romantic decision-making expires. Fragments of an enormous, vaguely school bus-shaped asteroid, however, strike planet Earth and end all life before the forty-five minutes elapse.
9
TWO WRIGGLING-TENTACLED ALIENS WHOSE ONLY job is to observe Earth and ensure that it isn’t destroyed by an asteroid, and who have been doing that successfully since their first fuckup annihilated the dinosaurs, are currently fighting, at least on the surface, about whether they should put in for a promotion that would enable them to observe a more interesting planet. The green alien is angry at the purple one for being dishonest about their motivation for the promotion. The green one has accused the purple one of wanting to abandon Earth not because it’s dull, but because it’s politically unimportant. The purple alien rejects this accusation and insults the green alien’s lineage and intelligence, but the green alien is relentless in the accusation, and the purple alien reluctantly confesses that its desire to observe a different planet indeed hinges on that planet’s importance. The purple alien then makes a passionate appeal for the green alien to assist in the attainment of this promotion. If they could observe a more important planet, the purple alien urges, they’ll be paid more, the craft in which they live and from which they observe whatever planet they’re assigned will be more deluxe, and the new challenges and change of scenery might rejuvenate their partnership.
The green alien shakes its sixty heads and says sadly that it has no desire to abandon Earth. The purple alien gently counters, “What if we found a planet that was more interesting and more important? Then we could both be happy.” The green alien shakes its sixty heads again and confesses that it never wanted to leave Earth at all, not even to find a more interesting place, and it was only pretending to consider that to please the purple alien, whom it loves. The purple alien looks sad and says it loves the green alien too, but it has to leave. There’s no way that it could ever be happy here behind this lifeless moon, watching this dusty, stupid, self-destructive, squabbling little ball of repetitive trauma and melodrama burn itself out for the rest of its limited millennia. The purple alien would always wonder what would’ve happened if it had tried to climb higher in the Galactic Bureau of Planetary Observation. The green alien’s sixty eyes glimmer with fluid and it says that it knows this about the purple alien. Then, the green alien says, as if saying something extremely difficult to say, that perhaps if they broke up, the Galactic Bureau of Planetary Observation would send it a new romantic and professional partner, and the purple alien could get a promotion to wherever it wanted, or no, needed to go. The purple alien’s sixty eyes look into each of the green alien’s sixty eyes, and both aliens instantly understand that, in order to truly show their love for one another, they must split up, since it would be torture for the green one to know the purple one didn’t want to be there, and it would be torture for the purple one to stay, knowing that the green one knew that, not to mention the disappointment of never pursuing its own dreams of rising through the Galactic Bureau of Planetary Observation to become a famous and powerful protector of the galaxy’s most important civilizations. As the gaze between them climaxes in terms of an interpersonal reckoning, an asteroid slips past them in the background. A few moments later, while the couple is quietly and gently negotiating how they’re going to split up sections of the craft so that they don’t constantly run into each other until the purple one’s transfer request goes through, a million alarms go off. Both aliens turn and rush to the cockpit of their craft and see the vaguely school-bus-shaped asteroid as enormous as Madagascar hurtling violently along a vector to impact Earth somewhere in the middle of the Pacific. All one-hundred-and-twenty of their eyes go wide. They leap to the controls and initiate the deployment of an elaborate array of enormous lasers mounted on the hull of their craft. The purple one’s one-hundred-and-twenty tentacles rapidly type coordinates onto a screen while the green one looks back and forth between another screen and the window shouting out numbers to adjust the aim of the lasers. Their gray rock-colored camouflage craft drifts out from behind the moon where it’s been hidden, and in the silence of space the laser array unfolds like a scorpion’s tail whose stinger is trained on the Madagascary asteroid. Then helixes of bright green anti-matter coil from the base and around the stinger until the point is glowing with a ball of green and gray light. The ball suddenly lengthens into a beam and cleaves the asteroid into several smaller pieces. Some glance off Earth’s atmosphere like pebbles skipped across a pond’s surface and speed off into the void of space, but two slivers do make earthfall, one as big as Manhattan and another as big as Puerto Rico. The one as big as Manhattan lands in Wyoming, where it disturbs the supervolcano beneath Yosemite that had been dormant for 174 millennia, triggering a cataclysmic eruption. The fragment shaped like Puerto Rico lands in Kazakhstan, obliterating the Eurasian steppe like a thrown brick hitting a wedding cake. As the North American supervolcano gushes material from the mantle into the atmosphere, its shockwave combines with the shockwave from the Russian impact, and all of Earth except part of Antarctica is engulfed in a succession of mile-high moving walls of thousand-degree nickel, silicone, and iron. “Fuck,” mutters the purple alien. “Fuck,” the green one echoes. They both close their one-hundred-and-twenty eyes. “We’re fucked,” the purple one says. There’s a red phone-like device on the wall of the cockpit with a sign above it that says Headquarters for the Galactic Bureau of Planetary Observation, and it starts to flash like a strobe. The pair of aliens stares at Earth through the annoying flashing lights. The once blue and green marble is now all but a fireball, waves of molten air and liquid rock washing endlessly around it like clouds once did. The aliens look back at the strobing phone, then resignedly at each other.
It all just reminds me of a famous epithalamic fragment by Sappho. Originally only three lines in Greek, my maximalist and admittedly self-indulgent translation is meant to emphasize the height of the branch and the weight of the misapprehension:
The final apple
redder than yesterday
hanging from the tip
of the highest branch
of the tallest tree
miraculously overlooked
by those who picked clean
the rest of the orchard.
Wait, nevermind.
Not overlooked.
Just out of reach.
8-6
MANY YEARS BEFORE THE PERFORMANCE artists taught the nurse not to meddle in the breakups of strangers, they are practically strangers to each other, having just met at a performance art show that had been very bad, and at which they’d made each other laugh by making fun of the artist whose show it was, and after that laughter had decided to go home together, and now being on the subway sitting side-by-side and unselfconsciously making out because there’s no one else on the train.
They stop at the next stop when a mother and father with a young boy and girl enter the car and sit directly across from them. The young girl starts to cry from something, perhaps the noise of the train or perhaps the late hour. Neither member of the couple smokes at this point, but the one who would go on to become a smoker starts making faces at the girl, a
nd for whatever reason this relieves the girl’s unease. The girl playfully sticks her tongue out at the future smoker. The one who would eventually be proposed to looks on admiringly at the future smoker’s rapport with the child, and scoots an inch closer to her.
The father of the girl then sees his daughter with her tongue out and calls her name. The girl’s mother, who had been looking dead-eyed at the row of advertisements above the heads of the future performance artists snaps out of her trance and shouts the name even louder. The girl, chastised, climbs out of her seat and waddles to the mother, who holds her in her lap until the family exits the subway car two stops later. At this point, the couple starts making out again. Then they stop. They talk about the family they just saw. They talk about what happened with the daughter and how mean the parents seemed. Both are relieved to find out that this conversation is as good as their conversation at the art party was, and they both comment on this, congratulating each other on their apparent chemistry. They don’t make out for the rest of the ride because they have too much to say. They agree on many things, and the things they disagree on are interesting rather than worrisome. They both agree that chili is an extremely economical and healthy food to build a diet around, for example, but they disagree on which ingredients make the best chili. During this discussion, in which many other topics are covered beyond chili, several people get on and off the train, but all of them go unnoticed by the couple. Eventually the train emerges from the earth to travel aboveground for several stops, and everyone on the train except for the couple checks their phones. Out the window, every light on in every window of the city’s many buildings seems so quaint in the crisp winter evening air that it quiets even the couple, who stare breathlessly at the almost model-like cityscape, fathoming all the innumerable narratives it wordlessly evokes.
