by Mark Leidner
A year and six weeks later, they break up. Two weeks after that, they get back together. A full year after that is another breakup, and that’s followed by a reunion three months afterward. A third breakup occurs at the six-year mark, and it lasts an entire year before the couple reunites once more. As far as breakups go, all of them are bad, but only extremely so when weighed against the relative serendipity and sweeping innocence of this moment, with the dark, magisterial city scintillating before them as they gently travel through it on a fixed but rickety track.
When the train goes back underground, the couple is laughing about the performance art they saw again, and they’re crying from laughter when they walk up the steps of the subway platform and lock elbows and zip up their coats and throw on their hoods as they enter the neighborhood where the future proposed-to person lives. On the way to her house, the future smoker gives a beggar a whole twenty-dollar bill, and after they are out of earshot, the proposed-to asks why the future smoker gave so much money away. “I don’t know,” the generous future smoker says. “It’s cold, and they looked hungry.” The skeptical future proposed-to person scrutinizes the character of the generous future smoker for the first time. The generous future smoker, a little too drunk, excited, and happy to care about feeling scrutinized at all, keeps walking into the street just as a school bus, driverless, with all the windows down, with the cold air whistling through the windows, speeds toward the generous future smoker, who has just thought of something else funny about that night and is laughing while turning around to face the scrutinous one and tell her. The scrutinous one sees the bus in time enough to jerk her future lover forward by the fur of her coat as the school bus barrels down the avenue, throwing up paper trash, shaking and veering, obeying no traffic signals, striking a recycling bin that had been blown into the street by the wind, and shattering it. While the wind from the bus is still blowing on them, the generous one gratefully beholds the scrutinous one and says, “I think you just saved my life.” The scrutinous one glances premonitiously down the street and watches the bus as it skids around a corner. At this moment, the generous one tilts the premonitious one’s face toward her and kisses her. This specific kiss instantly erases from the other’s mind both the fear of the mysterious bus and the issue of the kisser’s profligate generosity.
In the proposed-to’s house the two have sex that surprises them both in its satisfaction relative to how drunk they are. Afterward they talk about their past. Every story the future smoker tells resounds thematically with the future proposed-to’s own mental autobiography, and equivalent portions of the stories told by the future proposed-to resound with the future smoker. Both have an enormous feeling that for the first time in their lives, everything about the person before them fits what is missing in their theory of themselves. When they finally sleep, they don’t wake up for nine hours. The generous future smoker has an epic, happy dream. The scrutinous future proposee, however, has many fragmentary and frightening dreams. All their dreams are forgotten, however, when they see each other the next morning. A ray of sunlight has reached through the window and warmed a yellow parallelogram on the floor of the bedroom that the generous one steps directly into when getting up to go to the bathroom. The scrutinous one observes this footstep from the sheets with no small measure of joy. Alone in the room, the scrutinous one thinks generous thoughts about the generous one. The scrutinous one feels herself floating through these thoughts as if though a palace of comforting clouds, the bed underneath a kind of enchanted chariot, her own bedroom a kind of endless sky. This is also the first time the scrutinous one considers becoming a performance artist, but this ambition will be withheld from the more generous future performance artist for several weeks.
This reminds me of a poem by a 14th century French priest. His name is unknown, and it’s only presumed that he’s a he, or that he’s a priest. That profile is, however, unlikely to be incorrect, since male priests would’ve been the only people likely to have scribbled anything in the margins of the transcribed pages of the sort of dense, ecumenical histories in which this Old French poem was found. It’s my own translation, and an incredibly loose one:
What if love is Eden
and we but Adam and Eve
all just desperate not to err
so badly we’re bidden to leave?
But the scripture is written already.
The fall to come foregone.
So exiled by language we’ll never be ready
to read, we must let go and love on.
For what may or may not be obvious reasons, but which I have no desire to go into, I’ve decided to keep this final, semi-autobiographical vignette rather brief. I’d also like to add that I in no way consider it anti-breakup propaganda. Unlike the nurse in his interaction with the performance artists, I know that dissuading others from breaking up is at best futile, and at worst invites calamity by forestalling the inevitable.
5-1
A COUPLE KEPT BREAKING UP, but first they had to get together, which they did. Then they broke up. But then, after breaking up, they got back together. Then things were fine for a while. Then they broke up. They decided not to get back together, but once they decided that, they did. Then they were happy, but they broke up again for other reasons. Then, when they least expected it, they got back together another time. Then, just as suddenly, broke up. Now, when either tried to remember a time when they were neither together nor broken up, they couldn’t. They decided this meant they should get back together, and they stayed together after that, until late in middle age when they happened to break up again, and this time they didn’t get back together. Through the end of middle age, both regretted not getting back together. Then, in early old age, one of them stopped regretting it, but not the other.
UNDER THE SEA
THE WORDS HAD NOT SEEMED REAL.
“One day?” I asked.
The doctor nodded. He looked guilty, as if the diagnosis was somehow his fault, which was not reassuring.
“What do you mean one day?”
He blinked, and his professionalism seemed to kick back in. He pulled off a glove, put his hand on my knee, and said, “I’m sorry. But yes. It’s not long.”
“How can you even know that?”
“Diagnostic techniques advance every day. Better data, finer instruments. It’s all algorithms now. In a few years, we’ll know to the minute, maybe to the second, how long people have. Some places in China can do it already.”
“There’s nothing I can do?”
The doctor shook his head. “It’s too advanced.”
“But I feel fine!”
“It’s that type of disease. You feel fine right up until the end. You’re lucky.”
THE CLINIC’S DOORS SLID OPEN, and when the hot, wet wall of humid air hit my body, it felt like an alien planet. There was its sun. There was its sky. There was a parking lot. There were some cars, my own somewhere among them. I saw fast food trash in the pinestraw. I saw a strip of bushes and a strip of traffic past that. I saw a saggy stoplight, saggy power lines, puffy white clouds. My heart was pounding in my ears like I was alone at the bottom of the ocean, and all of this was the ruins of Atlantis.
The doors whooshed closed behind me, cutting the cool air from the clinic off from my back, and the wet afternoon enveloped me. My legs felt like they were spinning inside my pants.
I guess I crossed the parking lot and walked into the street. I didn’t even know I’d ended up there until a car slammed on its brakes. I looked all the way back at the clinic and felt like I’d teleported.
More cars zoomed around me. I raised my hands. A semi stopped screechingly. Through the glare of the windshield, the trucker was only an outline. The road was hot on my feet. I was barefoot, I realized. I looked back and saw my shoes a few feet apart from each other in the parking lot of the clinic. A white van rolled over them without touching them.
The trucker honked, and I crouched and held up my hands and apologized. I stopped tr
affic in the other lane, staggered to the other side of the street, and stepped through a hedge into the parking lot of a rundown shopping center.
The pinestraw in the hedgerow had pricked the bottoms of my feet, and now the parking lot asphalt was pricking them in the exact same places, only with heat. I closed my eyes and stood there letting it soak up through my heels. My legs felt like little elevators, lifting the energy of the earth up into my body. I realized how cold it had been in the clinic. I stood there a moment more, hoping to wake, but it wasn’t a dream, and when I opened my eyes again, a headache I had not even known I’d had had gone.
In the shopping center was a huge shuttered drug store, an open deli, a closed bar, a used clothing emporium, and a decrepit arcade. I realized I was clutching my phone as tightly as if it was a fingerhold on a cliff keeping me from falling into a chasm. I was supposed to be calling my husband, I realized. Looking at my sad little phone made me dizzy. It was like a shard of dark matter—a hundred times lighter or heavier than expected. Around it my hand already looked skeletal. My skin waxy, my fingers like someone else’s. I looked back up at the puffy white clouds. I don’t know what they looked like, but it was something. I don’t know why I was looking at them. I pulled the phone up to my ear like I was a doll made to do make this one motion, and nothing else.
I gazed down at the stains in the parking lot as it rang. Thousands of black dots marred the asphalt, ancient remnants of dropped gum and infinite spills. I couldn’t understand how there had ever been so many people chewing gum and spilling beverages all over this irrelevant half-acre. The call went to voicemail. I left no message. I texted him and used his first name so he’d know it was urgent. I refrained from disclosing that I only had one day to live. He’d have assumed I was joking, or worse, being dramatic, and that would’ve made him take even longer to reply. That I had used his name but not mentioned why was the most effective way to communicate the urgency with which I desired to speak with my husband without having to say something I couldn’t even yet comprehend. Besides, my fingers were sweaty, and every single letter had taken monumental effort to input. Every breath I took left me feeling more delicate. Every speckle of asphalt prickling the soles of my feet as I staggered toward the arcade, I guess to await his call, and I guess because its door was open and was closer than the deli or the store.
An air conditioner hanging from the ceiling of the arcade was dumping cold air straight down and right out of the open entrance, where it was instantly absorbed by the sweltering heat. When I walked through the doorway, I paused in the bath of this weirdly cold, estuarial column and for a moment felt as if coated in magical fog.
Near the back of the arcade, three young men were blasting pink plastic shotguns at a two-paneled screen. Then they seemed to get into an argument over who got to shoot next because there were only two guns. Everything on both screens was on fire. Only the tall one glanced over at me.
He was kind of punk-looking with a chiseled jawline. They all were tattooed and pierced, and handsome, to be honest, but only the tall one’s eyes sparkled with anything like kindness or intelligence. Immediately, I had a vision of seducing him as the final, crazy act of my otherwise not very spectacular life, but it passed as quickly as it came. Then I glanced at him again and wondered why not. What else was I going to do, lie down and cry in the parking lot? The word seduce suddenly came to life in the weird little theater between my ears. I saw a small, cute snake biting a piece of wet fruit. Seduce. I saw a face chewing ice in a dark hotel room. Seduce. I saw another face without eyes whose mouth had a glacier for a tongue. Seduce this dude, it said.
I felt like Eve almost, but old instead of young, and in the dumb, violent dump at the end of time instead of a golden Garden at the beginning. The thought of seducing him passed again, but in a strangely persistent way, like a holiday bellringer you ignore on the way into the supermarket knowing you’ll have to ignore it—or not—at least once more.
I glanced around the arcade again, looking for something to look at. It took a conscious effort not to fall down, and somehow looking was helping. The arcade’s oversized doormat was littered with cigarettes, like the boys had attempted to flick them outside from all the way back by the gun game, but the falling column of air-conditioned air had knocked their cigarette butts down into the doormat. The smell nauseated me and, simultaneously, reminded me pleasantly of college. I leaned on a candy machine for balance, which made a noise and caused all three of them to turn from the game. I fumbled, pretending I was buying candy. It was an old-fashioned plastic bin half-full of dust-coated M&M’s, a collection of tiny ugly worlds. I suddenly realized I should drive home, but then I couldn’t imagine walking back across the street and into the clinic parking lot. It felt like walking right into hell through my own open grave. I hadn’t had any M&M’s in years and would’ve bought some, but didn’t want my last mouthful of candy on Earth to taste how they looked.
I tried to exchange a dollar for tokens but found I couldn’t hold the bill still. George Washington’s eat-shit smirk, his ridiculous cravat, the boxy patterns, the flourished borders, the inscrutable numerical sequences, the fucking tint of the ink… it was all just preposterous. All of history. My throat leathered up. I could’ve been knocked over by a shhhh. I wanted to be. I wished the trucker would’ve hit the gas instead of the brakes. Suddenly my thoughts didn’t feel like mine. The dollar fell from my fingers. I was a statue watching a smaller artifact from the same culture that had fashioned her fall to the floor.
When the dollar bill started spinning in the flow of the air conditioner, I felt relief, its own motion permitting mine. Reaching down and picking it back up felt wonderful, oddly, so I knelt even slower than I would’ve. It was a mini-vacation, picking up paper money, a small, perfect action, quasi-religious. And when I stood back up with the dollar in my hand, I understood all of history, all of economics, all of politics, all of love, and all of art, or felt like I did. But I couldn’t have explained it to anyone who wasn’t also already dead and still walking.
I faced the token exchanger like it was my nemesis and fed George Washington confidently into its lips. It took it without hesitation. Behind its eyeless face, the brain of the machine grinded emptily for ten seconds, then vomited four light-colored copper tokens. They were light in my palm. Ms. Pac-Man was closest, but the screen was directly in the sun coming in through the doorway, so you couldn’t even see the game. Just outside the sunlight, however, was a pinball machine that looked twenty years old or more and was themed on a roller coaster. I walked to it and touched the glass covering the game, and the glass was cold, and the coldness soothed me.
The vertical panel of the game showed a blonde head stretched back and screaming as she gripped the crossbar in her cart, eyes wide in joy and terror. My knees crumpled, and I pressed my palm against the glass to hold myself up, but my sweaty hand squeaked on its surface. I felt the boys look. They must have thought I was drunk. Then I remembered I was barefoot and thought that they must have thought I was crazy. I inserted a token but it took two, so I added another. A dark, miniature amusement park behind the glass blinked creepily to life. I wanted it to possess me. I wanted the pinball machine to be haunted like in a movie. I wanted it to suck my soul into its machinery so I could live inside it. I could be the blonde on top, gaping at braindead teenagers forever, feeling their grubby fingers on my dusty red buttons, sucking their parents’ money from them, dead and immortal.
I looked at the young men, bragging and smoking and joking and blowing up scenery. The tall one’s backwards hat was pointed toward me, and it showed the Denver Broncos’ logo, which is my husband’s favorite team because he grew up in Colorado despite being born in Ohio. For a moment, at least, the hat seemed to portend my seduction of its wearer, but I shook the notion from my mind. This was my last desperate act, not that. This would be the most beautiful round of pinball anyone ever played. Three silver balls, Scheherazade-style, this was the method through which I would
hold back death.
Knowing as long as a ball was in motion I’d still be alive, I plucked the plunger, and ball number one looped up and disappeared into a panel of mushroom bumpers. Then it bounced off a little shield-shaped thing and hit an unforgiving pole. The ball, spinless, slid toward me like an anvil on a doomed trajectory. I pounded the side buttons, but the ball was going to split the flippers. I pushed the whole machine left and knocked the ball off its path at the last second and attacked the left flipper, but by then the buttons were all dead. Nothing was flipping. The marquee beneath the blonde flashed TILT, buzzed once, and the game went black.
My reflection in the dark glass panicked me. I checked my phone, but he hadn’t gotten back. Dizzier, I touched my navel and tried to focus on breathing. I wondered if dizziness was a symptom or if I was wasting time by panicking about whether it was or wasn’t. My diaphragm tightened and receded. I was able to not think of anything. A dozen breaths later I was standing with a hand on the pinball machine as a crutch. The machine lit back up, and I remembered I still had two tokens. I put them in and pulled back on the plunger.
