DEAR JOHN
Robin Wasserman
Dear Neckbeard,
The fact that I’m writing this on toilet paper shouldn’t make you think I don’t care. This toilet paper is not symbolic, it’s expedient. Writing you a letter on something I can use to wipe my ass is just a happy coincidence.
These letters are supposed to help us indulge in happier times—that’s what Isaac says. Bathe in all our wonderful memories, then pull the plug and watch them circle the drain. Write out our teary I loved yous and what might have beens to all the people we’ve lost out there in the world, then set them on fire and say goodbye to smoke and ash. Or, in my case: Write, wipe, flush. Farewell. This, Isaac also says, will be closure. Isaac, apparently, doesn’t know from mixed metaphors. And he doesn’t know his flock as well as he thinks, not if he imagines wonderful memories and happy might have beens. That’s not how you end up in a place like this.
You’d probably be surprised I ended up here, fucked up in this very specific way, but then, we haven’t seen each other in a while. Things happen. Maybe I’d be surprised about where you ended up, too. I doubt it, but see me politely trying to give you the benefit of the doubt—one of those things you thought I was incapable of? Things happen; people—at least those of us who venture out of our basement every once in a while—change. Here’s me, since the days of you: Austin, then LA, then back into the nation’s beer belly, even if it was a little too close to home, hop-skip-jumping through crap towns on I-70, six months waiting tables for truckers feeling like I was on one of those serial killer shows waiting for my big scene as a dumpster corpse, desert then mountains then plains, and everywhere I stopped, everyone I stopped for, promised me I’d be stopping forever. Remember when I popped your cherry and you told me you were going to chain me to the bed and keep me as your prisoner until I got old and wrinkled and ready to trade in for a new model? The pillow talk got better, but the men didn’t, and none of them kept me anymore than you did. Maybe people don’t change so much after all. (I’ve changed, you said, but it was only because I changed you, and if that skank you tutored wanted to fuck you, it was only because I made you throw out those orange clogs and stop whispering to yourself when you thought no one was looking.) To wrap this up: I came, they came, then they left. Until I threw in with the Children of Abraham, because Father Abraham said God would never leave me—but then Father Abraham left, and the fucking world ended, on exactly the day he predicted it would—so where does that leave me?
Here, in the Ark, locked up safe and sound in a mountain compound with Abraham’s kid and all of us who were fucked up enough to believe him when he and his dad said the end was nigh. The world left us, but we clued in and left it first. Followed that kid up a mountain, barricaded ourselves behind sheet metal and barbed-wire, waited for God’s wrath and wondered what form it would take. No shock he took us out just like he did the dinosaurs. There’s nothing much to read up here but the Bible, and I’ve read enough to know God likes repeating himself. He likes to smite, and very occasionally, he likes to save. I guess he must like us—the reformed hookers and crack addicts and embezzlers and sad sacks on the run from bad memories and worse husbands—because we’re the ones still here. You were always so pleased with yourself about your lack of fucked-up-edness. I would say look where it’s gotten you, but you wouldn’t exactly hear it, would you, because that’s the whole point of where it’s gotten you. Out in the world with the rest of the assholes, minding your non-fucked-up business when the shit came down. Isaac says we should imagine a happy and peaceful end for all the poor souls caught unaware. An aneurysm at the moment the sky exploded. Swift, unbloodied obliteration.
I would prefer not to.
You were in the basement when it happened—that’s how I prefer to imagine it. You’d been down there two days straight, fingers cramping on your joystick (and yes, I know it hasn’t been called a joystick since 1988 but fuck if you’re going to bully me into caring from beyond the grave), moldy pizza boxes at your feet, porn taped up to the wall because it’s been so many years and so many pounds since you’ve lured a girl down to your dungeon that there’s no point in keeping your inner perv on lockdown anymore. You were blowing shit up and giggling about it and when you heard the first explosions, you probably thought, dude, cool sound effects, whoa, while upstairs the sky fell down and then your roof fell down and it took another day before you thought to heave yourself off the couch and replenish the beer, and that’s when you discovered the door was blocked by ten tons of rubble and the phones were out and the wi-fi was dead and too bad for you, your emergency generator ran out before your food did, so you spent your last days on Earth in the dark, unplugged, fingers twitching at the joystick like you could turn the explosions back on, then eventually switching over to your own personal joystick, huffing and rubbing while you imagined me on my knees, blowing you while you shot the crap out of some imaginary kingdom, jerking off to some sad, faint echo of my voice because you never forget the first girl to get you off, thinking about how you pinned her down on the bathroom tile when she tried to dump your ass, crying and leaking snot and begging please baby don’t leave me while you jackhammered her into a concussion that made her foggy enough to say okay baby if you need me I’ll stay and then she did until you got bored and left her, instead, thinking now how if you’d kept her around you might not be shivering in the dark all alone, leaking sanity at a steady pace until the food runs out, and then the beer, and you die slow and whimpering, in a pool of your own puke and cum.
Thinking of you, keep in touch!
Love,
Dear Moneybags,
Remember how you used to laugh at me for always ordering the same thing? You started ordering it for me, before I could get the words out. Wherever we went, you knew. Veal parmigiana. Pad Thai. Chicken Tikka Masala. I thought it was cute, at first, that you were pretending that it bothered you, because what kind of pretentious turd would actually be bothered by someone who knows what she wants and sticks with it? It’s not like I was bringing peanut-butter and jelly sandwiches with me to sneak from under the table while you ate sushi, so how was I supposed to know that every time I ordered Pad Thai, or let you order it for me, I was proving to you that I was unadventurous and dull and provincial and inflexible and “unwilling to let circumstances exercise their will” on me. I was embarrassing you, somehow, in front of the waiters or your friends or maybe just some all-seeing deity who expected better from you than a girlfriend who didn’t want to try veal kidney.
You wouldn’t much like it here.
Here we eat beans and more beans. Canned tuna and canned peaches. We eat peanut butter when we’ve been especially good; we eat nothing when we’ve been bad. Every day is the same. Sometimes, early on, the men would suit up and go shoot something, and there would be fresh meat for a night, but then winter was too long and too cold and they say the animals are all dead. They say we don’t need the outside, that’s the point of our Ark. We are prepared. Months go by without a dent in our food stores. We planned well—we have enough beans to last us for years.