“Fuck you,” Chrissy said. “Yeah you did.” At this point in their relationship, it was overridingly important to win all arguments. Things were somehow at stake. Chrissy picked up Brian’s shoes. “Look at me,” she said. “Hey. Come here.” She went to the window and opened it, held the shoes outside. Brian looked. His head had begun to hurt. “Admit it,” Chrissy said. “Or I’m dropping your shoes.”
“I don’t lie,” Brian said.
“I’m dropping your shoes.”
“Are you going to drop them,” Brian said. “Or just talk about dropping them?”
“No I’m not. I’m not that kind of person. What if I hit someone’s head? See, you don’t even know me.”
“You think you know you?” Brian said. “Chrissy, you might not even be yourself. Remember that homeless woman you wouldn’t give money to? Yeah, I saw that. Well you might be her. So fuck you.” He put his head back in the refrigerator, and grinned. Sometimes you had to be a little bit insane. You had to say, “Give me that. Let me do it.” You had to take things from the world and bend them and then put them back in the world, bent like that.
It had something to do with fear. You had to reverse things. Make the world afraid of you.
Chrissy moved home to the Midwest. They had lived previously in her apartment, paid for by her parents, and Brian now moved to Jersey City, which was the other Brooklyn.
He used his college degree and got a job at a magazine corporation.
There were rooms with desks and rooms with views, and they gave Brian a room with a desk. “All the rooms have desks,” they said. “It’s a joke. So keep your pants on. It’s all a joke. Everything. You, me, this room. This whole damn spinning-swaying, car-crashing world.”
That was the tone of the place.
Each morning, a girl named Jennika would enter Brian’s room with a list of tasks.
“Here’s your tasks for today, Brian,” she would say.
Brian soon developed a crush on Jennika. She had a face, had all the right angles. She was shy and intelligent. Or else conceited and slow. Still, they could be happy together, Brian guessed, if she were only willing.
“That’s a strange name,” Brian said one morning.
“Oh.” Jennika hesitated, then smiled. “Here are your tasks.”
“You usually say, ‘Here’s your tasks for today, Brian,’ ” Brian said. He sometimes had the feeling that he was doing something illegal, something that he might be incarcerated for; or else something illusory, something that produced results, but only in some other, parallel universe, something that, in this universe, just did not produce any results.
“I do. Yeah.” Jennika blushed. She turned to leave.
“Wait,” Brian said. “What does this company do exactly? What do we make?” He had been wondering. Had come to one conclusion that they were producing a magazine for robots — because robots, Brian knew, would one day conquer the world. Afterwards they would probably want to read magazines.
“We’re a magazine corporation,” Jennika said. A kind of gluey indecision began in her eyes, a slow and brainward strain — this sort of melancholy distortion. It made it seem like she was very uncomfortable being alive.
“Jennika is a good name.” Brian tried to keep his eyes very wide and friendly, but could feel that the rest of his face was changing. Maybe the strain was in his eyes and not Jennika’s. Moments like these, it was hard to distinguish between yourself and others.
Jennika started to say something. She stopped. Her face became a little grotesque, but she didn’t turn to leave. They looked at each other. There was a long silence. That kind of silence that keeps going, that you then resign yourself to — like taking a step, and your foot going down, going further, not touching floor, your face falling, your thoughts going, “The ground, where’s the ground, oh well, oh well …”
They didn’t talk to each other anymore after that.
After work, Brian would spend a lot of time — too much, he suspected — going around looking for a place to eat. It would often take up the entire night, like some kind of wan and moony quest, something shameful and cheaply existential. He would inevitably be unsatisfied, would regret not eating whatever other food — that eluding food of otherness.
In his apartment he would lie on his bed and allow himself some fantasies, which led mostly to masturbation, though it would also lead to list making — to brief, abstract moments when he would understand that he needed simply to do things and then his life would be changed.
Sometimes, unwilling to sleep into the sameness of tomorrow, he would shower and then go out into the night, hoping to fall in love, to be whisked away into that sort of a life. He would buy fey candies, and a sugary drink. When a car came by, he would fear a drive-by shooting or kidnapping. He stayed close to the street-lamps. To discourage hoodlums — there were hoodlums in this neighborhood, it was said — he walked slantly and often turned to cross the street eccentrically.
It was a little thrilling.
Eventually, though, he would become tired and disenchanted. He would go back to his room and feel as if an entire month was inside of him. He would feel big and emptied like that. He would have a stomachache. Nothing was going to happen tonight, or ever. He would shower. Brush his teeth. Lie on his bed, and go into a flat and perished kind of sleep, one in which all his dreams were fraught and blotched and melodramatic and loud, like watching a movie from the front row.
He began to doubt his ability to make friends. He began, as maybe a kind of detachment — or maybe a kind of antisocial sarcasm — to take things literally. What materials did one need in order to make a friend? Was this mostly a DIY thing, or could you pay someone else to do it for you, diligently and in one night, while you slept? He sometimes brought a second mirror into the bathroom and looked at his face from different angles. Was he ugly? How ugly?
He lay in bed, remembering past things from his life.
As a teenager, he made screaming noises at night in his room, like a deranged person. He threw his electrical pencil sharpener at the walls. His mother was downstairs in bed, crying a little, mostly asleep. Brian, in his room, felt as if he might explode, might already — in a slow and miniscule and lingering way — be exploding. He needed to explode. He lay there motionless, but he also lay there exploding. He smooshed his head into his mattress, making sounds like, “aaaghh,” and “ngggg,” and then went downstairs. He stood in the doorway of his mother’s bedroom. He started yelling things. His mother woke, warm and puffy from sleep, and — after Brian finished yelling — whispered that she was sorry for being a bad mother. Her face, ensconced in hair and pillow, was dramatic and friendless as something cocooning. She looked like a little girl, and Brian stood there, taking this in — trying to get at the meaning of things, to fit at once into his mind all the false and watery moments of his life. He stood there, and he looked. He looked some more. And then he went back to his room. He wrote down on paper: “Don’t hurt anyone again.”
But he did. He went on blaming his mother. Yelling at her. About how he couldn’t make friends, how it was because she spoiled him, didn’t ever punish him, didn’t put him into uncomfortable situations, didn’t socialize him, etc.
“Don’t hurt anyone again.”
Brian had a little stack of those papers somewhere.
And, finally, he had, recently, begun to do less of this hurting of other people, this blaming of others, of his mother. Though it was mostly because he did not see anyone anymore. Probably that was the reason.
At work, he stopped saying hi to people, unless they said hi to him first, at which he would then say hi eagerly back and try to smile. But he was not good at smiling. That ataxic struggle of the mouth, it sometimes felt to Brian like a kind of snarling. He could see it on other people’s faces, that he was not smiling, but probably snarling.