This is a story about every relationship I have ever had.
Of course, he sees her in the coffee shop where he had sat thinking of her, one way or another (Will she? Does she? Why didn’t she?) for months. Here they had stared over the rims of their mugs at each other, their eyes like milk, full moons, or the eyes of some cow-moon goddess he was sure he had read was worshipped in India. Now she is here like Kali, destroyer of men, eater of souls, ravager of hearts. She is wearing his necklace that he must have left at her apartment- a coin on a leather string. “She misses me,” he thinks. But it is because she likes the way it dangles between her breasts, the way men look at her.
*
He knows that she smiles at strangers in the street. He wants to kill everyone.
*
She has seen him. She is coming to talk. He wishes he had worn the blue shirt, anything but this stupid shirt.
She says his name, her voice holding to the friendly fall.
“How are you?” she says. “I’ve taken up garbage collecting,” he tells her. “I scrape cats off the street and tan their hides for profit. It’s not as lucrative as you’d think, considering that there’s almost no overhead. I make coin purses out of their balls. Their hollow little balls.”
She says “Be serious,” and he says “I’ve been doing volunteer work with Vietnam vets who mutilate their own penises to enact their private rage with the dark father of Reagan” and she says “Don’t be like this” but he can’t stop.
*
The first time they had sex, he had been so relieved when it was all over, when they could lay touching each other gently, without goals. After, they had gone to an all-night diner at 3 AM. It was crowded and the servers were like medics in a warzone, yelling how many eggs or waffles were needed as if they had the power to save from death. He bought her toast, orange juice, bananas, pancakes, bacon. This is the beginning of us running out of things to say to each other, she had thought. She knew by now, of course, she knew what that first silence meant, of course he didn’t know, of course, she never said this, of course, of course.
*
“Oh my sweet tycoon,” he used to call her. “Oh, my crab-apple pie.”
*
He knows that she considered saying “I’ve been seeing someone” but has decided against it. He is thankful for this mercy. He hates her for this.
“I thought you might be here” she says, then admits “I haven’t come here in a while. I know how you like it. It’s yours.” She stops, starts again. “You graduated?”
In their own ways, they both feel sick.
*
In the months after they broke up, he had begun watching porn regularly, even compulsively. It was satisfying to watch these scenes, never repeated in the bottomless and shifting buffet of thumbnails, yet formulaic, familiar, mannered; to view this endless fuck, dead inside, the black men fucking the latina teens dead inside, the horny cam girls dead inside, the creamy cumsluts dead inside, the hot and horny schoolgirls and their bald teachers in ill-fitting suits dead inside, the hungry, hungry girls, all of it ending and without consequence. He watched it in his room with the sound off while his flatmate was in the kitchen or in the living room; quietly, like someone else might cry in a bathroom stall.
*
He has a dream that his car is leaking some sickly, viscous soda-ish substance, the color of Mountain Dew or a pedestrian crossing sign. The green fluid pooling and encroaching and creating a brownish green neo-neon hell (nightmare) sludge that would eat through your skin, if given long enough. He is helpless. The container had cracked; it was leaking out under the hood, welling under the pedals, forcing him to lift his feet, even to ball himself up in the driver’s seat although there was no reason to think the leak would reach that far.
*
Driving home, he sees a bumper sticker on a car that reads “Don’t Postpone Joy.” He tries to experience joy. Was that it? Why try, if you need a cause, and if you don’t need a cause, then why try? He feels that he finally understands why the cat doesn’t make a dash to go outside when he leaves or comes home.
*
He says nothing about the necklace to her. He thinks that he is showing a mercy that she doesn’t deserve, but really, he is afraid. He thinks she wears it because she misses him, but really, she wears it because she likes the way it dangles between her constrained breasts, how she feels a way she doesn’t understand when men look at her.
