Boy Oh Boy Read online

  When the sky fades and goes dark, your boyfriend takes the last drag of your last cigarette of the evening, and instead of lighting a new one from its burning tip, he grinds the living ember out on the sole of his shoe, right beneath the ball of his foot. When he leans over to do this, you watch him, and you think for a moment you see him from an angle you’ve never seen before, and he becomes something else. Because you’re watching him, you become something else too, and that feeling ripples out until everything, the pavement and the cars, the ugly apartment building and the attractive one, even your chairs and your flowers and the figurines in your window bleached colorless by the sun, takes on a kind of transformed quality. For a moment you are in a parallel reality or a fairy tale, like you have traveled forward or backward in time. Everything is gold. No, everything is the color it is supposed to be, but more so. Even the ugliest thing is beautiful. Maybe it is something holy. But really, that’s a kind of elevation, or even glorification. The moment passes and you aren’t too sure you saw anything worth thinking twice about. You’re that kind of person.

  Sadland

  YOUR BOYFRIEND HAS a conspicuous amount of sadness. He moves through his days in a blue fog, head hung, voice toneless and quiet, hands unnaturally soft. When you hold his hands it’s like your hands might pass through his at any moment, they are so soft, soft as clouds, basically untouchable. Your boyfriend’s sadness is visible but not touchable. You can see the sadness in his eyes and on his nose and cheeks and forehead, the planes of his chest, his hips and the dimples in his lower back, the curve of his heel, the calluses on his toes. Running your fingers along the landscapes of his body you can say, there’s your sadness, and there, and there.

  Even as sad as he is your boyfriend gets up in the morning, does the things he’s always done. He makes pancakes for breakfast but doesn’t eat any. He picks up around the house, takes the dog out for a walk, gives tennis lessons to local teens. He works out but he doesn’t enjoy it. He works out because working out makes him less sad than he is the rest of the time, but he is still very sad, almost immeasurably sad. That’s what he tells you, when every day you ask him how his sadness is doing. You ask him how his sadness is and he tells you it’s the same, that he is immeasurably sad. You ask him at what times he is more or less sad. You make a very detailed chart of where his sadness is at any point in a given day. You make note of the things that make him more sad or less sad. You measure out his immeasurable sadness in the lines and color-coding in your sadness chart.

  You are not sad, or not very sad. You are no sadder or less sad than anyone else, so that when you walk down the street you can look at the faces of people who are walking the other way, and you can say that person is exactly as sad as I am. Really, there is so much to be sad about, small things that make you briefly sad, like when you watch the news or see a homeless person on the street or hear about a friend who lost a baby, but then your day moves on and you feel less sad and at the end of the day you tuck yourself snugly under the covers next to your boyfriend and none of that sadness stays with you. The only sadness in your bed is your boyfriend’s sadness, the sadness you are used to. For all your charts and analysis, you aren’t sure why your boyfriend is any sadder than anyone else, why he is so much sadder than you are. He has, for example, a life exactly as comfortable as your life. When you ask him if he is saddened by, perhaps, the state of the world, events overseas, the war, the other war, some natural disaster or another, he shakes his head at you. I’m not sad about any of that.

  It’s true that according to your chart, your boyfriend is not sadder when there is a suicide bombing, and he is not any less sad on days when you go together down to the lake and hike the trail through the hills all the way around, which he always says is his favorite thing to do with you.

  Some days your boyfriend is so sad that he can’t do anything, he stays in bed with the covers up around him and the lights dim and sometimes he is silent and other times he cries a little, quietly. You try to leave him alone on those days, coming in only to check on him, sit on the edge of the bed and place your hand on the lump of him under the covers. You don’t ask are you okay because he hates being asked that. You let him know you’re there.

  Eventually there comes a time when your boyfriend doesn’t get out of bed for a very long time, days and then weeks. You are worried, troubled that he has given up, but also a little frustrated, because you don’t know what to do for him when everything you do seems like not quite enough. On your chart you circle the dates and make an annotation—critical mass!?—and your boyfriend’s sadness goes on unchanging, no matter how many times you bring him happy news, no matter how many times the dog comes into the room and places his wet nose on the mattress next to your boyfriend’s face. Your boyfriend loves the dog, but he does not get out of bed, he does not remove from his sadness.

  Eventually, his sadness removes from him. You wake up one morning and although your boyfriend is still in bed, you hear sounds from the bathroom, and you find his sadness brushing its teeth, styling its hair, rubbing your boyfriend’s restorative lotions into the lines of its face. It doesn’t say anything or acknowledge your presence, your boyfriend’s sadness, just goes about its version of your boyfriend’s exact morning routine in silence, and slowly, with an exaggerated slowness like it is moving through the steps of some kind of dance.

  Your boyfriend’s sadness looks exactly like your boyfriend but sadder, with a kind of blueness about the face and hands like someone who has been deprived of oxygen for too long, or has been exposed to a nearly lethal dose of cold. You look harder at your boyfriend’s sadness, but the physical differences are subtle, maybe your boyfriend’s sadness has fingers that are too long, or a slightly crooked nose, or thinner lips, but you can’t really tell. The main difference is in the sadness’ eyes, ringed with dark circles, eyelids low, pupils black and huge, so large that your boyfriend’s sadness doesn’t seem to even have an eye color.

  The sadness turns around and walks through you like you are nothing, passes through leaving only a fine mist on your skin where it touched you. When you are in contact with your boyfriend’s sadness, you also become very sad, and you understand what it means to be possessed of an immeasurable sadness. You understand finally that this is a sadness that cannot be mapped or charted, cannot be rendered graphically or numerically or in terms of world events or babies lost. When your boyfriend’s sadness leaves, away to the kitchen to make its sad pancakes, you expect your own sadness to lift, but it doesn’t, you are still immeasurably sad.

  You live a sad life with your boyfriend’s sadness. It disappears at night while your boyfriend is asleep, but otherwise, the sadness does the things your boyfriend did. Somehow it makes pancakes and gives tennis lessons and goes to the gym and walks the dog, does all the things your boyfriend did, but sadder and sadder still. Everyone who is around your boyfriend’s sadness becomes sadder. The dog droops its little head. The other people at the gym move a little slower, lose all or most of their pep. The local teens start to wear all black, dye their hair, write poetry, they are so sad. You are sad while you eat pancakes and find the act of eating the pancakes to also be sad, the pancakes make you even sadder.

  Soon you spend more and more time with your boyfriend in bed. You spoon him and talk into his ear. He mumbles things back. You are both exactly as sad as each other. You thought your boyfriend would become un-sad after a period of separation from his sadness, but if anything, he has become sadder. You understand, as your sadness is also becoming sadder, more profound. More unescapable, more incalculable, every day. Eventually the dog joins you, lays on the bed between you and your boyfriend. The dog is also immeasurably sad, probably, although the dog has always had a sad face anyway, one of those droopy-faced dogs, so it could be sad or maybe it is just being a dog, or maybe it is just pleased to be allowed on the bed. But no, you look the dog in its droopy face and it seems sad to you, no question.

  One morning you wake up but you don’t ge
t out of bed, and your sadness gets out of bed instead. It joins your boyfriend’s sadness in the bathroom, does all of your usual morning bathroom things. The dog’s sadness is there too, and all three together look cold and blue and oxygen-starved, but normal. You realize that they are a matched set and their sadness makes them well-suited for each other. They don’t pass through each other like clouds, when they touch, their hands make contact, skin gives a little. They are a sad family, a family of sadness. Nobody makes a chart because nobody needs to, and from bed you think that it is better, that maybe your sadnesses, as a group, can make more sense of each other than you could. They have no charts.

  What a sad life, you think, planting your forehead in the curve of your boyfriend’s neck, unable to hold your head up any longer. The dog stirs, makes a gruff little noise and shifts his bulk a little bit, gets comfortable in the space between your legs and your boyfriend’s. I love spending the day with you, you mumble into your boyfriend’s shoulder, and he says yes, yes. You are both pretty sad, but slowly you are becoming somewhat happy about it.

  Your sadness takes your boyfriend’s sadness out to the lake that day, with the dog’s sadness and a picnic, and they walk through the hills all the way around, and in the sunlight they seem less blue, less cold, more breathing, less sad. They sit on a blanket and eat fruit and cheese and wine, just like you and your boyfriend might have done. Your sadness and your boyfriend’s sadness and your dog’s sadness have a perfect day together. They throw a sad Frisbee for the dog, take sad pictures of the lake with their phones, hold their sad hands. The whole scene is very sad, and the whole world, too.

  Jane Eyre

  YOU DISCOVER THAT when you cut off your boyfriend’s arm he grows a new arm. You examine the newly grown arm, and find it is exactly the same as the old arm, no better or worse. Under scrutiny, it doesn’t even seem to be any newer. Just a regular boyfriend arm, the kind your boyfriend has, the arm you’re used to. The cut-off arm is also no different. You hold them near each other and cannot tell them apart.

  The room where you lock up your boyfriend is wood with a dirt floor. Really it’s less like a room and more like a shed. You keep your boyfriend in the shed while you work on studying his amazing re-growing limbs. You do the difficult work of sawing through your boyfriend’s skin and muscle and bone. The bone is the hardest, it takes the longest. It’s a pain, it’s definitely a pain. You give your boyfriend a leather wallet to bite down on. This is going to hurt, you say. You dare not use anesthetic in case it negatively affects your boyfriend’s regenerative properties.

  You suspend the cut-off limbs in scientific fluids to see if you can encourage them to grow a new boyfriend. You try to determine the very smallest piece that your boyfriend will re-grow from. But the limbs suspended in scientific fluid are pristine, unchanged. They still do all their usual things—the fingernails grow and the skin cells slough off and replenish. Regular arm stuff. But the jagged wound at the shoulder doesn’t heal and no matter what you do you can’t encourage it to grow another boyfriend.

  Ultimately you wind up with so many spare boyfriend parts you could make an entire second boyfriend if you cut off a few more things, so you cut off a few more things. At this point you are an expert, you have the sharpest tools, your dissections are clean and even and painless. Your boyfriend barely makes a sound. You stitch together all the parts you have, the arms and legs and torso and butt. Even a head. Your boyfriend even re-grew his head. When you stitch the head onto the body (tiny, perfect sutures, almost invisible) the second boyfriend opens his eyes and looks around. Right away he makes inarticulate sounds, a strange howling.

  Now that you have a second boyfriend, you’re not sure what to do with him. You decide he should sit in the shed with your first boyfriend, who spends his days on the cot staring at a wall. The second boyfriend curls into himself in the corner, sits in the dirt and hugs his knees. When you shut the door, he starts crying, sobbing really, and doesn’t stop. You think it’s the second boyfriend who is crying. The next day you come to check on your boyfriend and your other boyfriend, and they have your tools, and they are cutting off their own limbs, cutting off each other’s limbs, but they just re-grow, everything they cut away grows back, and both of them are crying and when you hold them near each other you can’t tell them apart.

  Bump in the Night

  YOUR HOUSE IS very noisy at night, and your boyfriend decides he is going to fix it because he can’t tolerate noise while he’s trying to sleep. He believes that it is your plumbing that has been keeping him awake, and he opens up your toilet tank and replaces everything inside with new valves and pumps, all shiny and clean and modern-looking. When that doesn’t stop the noise, he goes into your walls, pulls out old pipes and replaces them with new pipes. He still hears noises at night. He replaces your sink, your faucet, your hot water heater. He replaces your septic tank with a new septic tank. He can’t find the source of the noise. He’s up at all hours of the night, shaking you awake. Do you hear that?

  He replaces all the wood flooring in case it creaks. He replaces the window glass. He replaces all of the fire alarms. He throws out the radios, the televisions, the computers, the alarm clocks, the grandfather clocks. He unplugs the refrigerator, the dishwasher, the ice maker, the stove.

  He becomes convinced that you are the reason he can’t sleep, and he replaces you. Maybe he sleeps better, finally, but you aren’t sure. You stand out on the curb, it’s about dusk, and everything is so quiet. You can’t hear anything. You look at the house you used to live in, but you don’t recognize it. The walls are gone, the yard has been dug up. There’s nothing left but the studs and the dirt and your boyfriend, tossing and turning in his bed. Next to him is a shape that should be you, still and silent, not breathing. The new copper pipes gleam greasy orange from the streetlight. You don’t know whose house it is, but it’s not your house.

  You stand on the sidewalk with your suitcase in one hand. That’s not my house, you think, laughing as loud as you can.

  Responsible Ownership

  YOUR BOYFRIEND ADOPTS a pet without asking you about it first. You should have called me, you say. Your boyfriend tells you that he found the pet by the side of the road. I don’t think we’re ready for a pet, you say.

  You and your boyfriend are not ready for a pet. One day you realize that the pet’s water dish has been empty and you don’t know for how long. The pet looks at you with its big eyes and it makes you feel bad. You’re late to work that day. Your boyfriend never remembers to feed the pet and when you confront him about it he says it was your turn to feed the pet. It wasn’t your turn, and you make a chart about whose turn it is to feed the pet so this doesn’t happen again, but the chart disappears. Your boyfriend says the pet ate it, but the pet is so skinny you don’t believe it.

  You reluctantly take responsibility for the pet. You take it outside to go to the bathroom, you teach it tricks, you give it treats, and you play with it to make sure it gets exercise. You give it baths, covering your eyes with your hand because you feel uncomfortable watching it bathe. Once, you think you catch it watching from the door while you and your boyfriend are having sex, but when you get up to check, it’s not there.

  Over time, your efforts at caring for the pet never seem more than perfunctory. You’d hoped this would be a rewarding experience but mostly you find the pet incredibly boring. It’s not the pet’s fault, you remind yourself, and try to keep an open mind about it. But you can’t help finding the pet tedious. All it does is cry and ask where its parents are, and you keep saying, I don’t know, I don’t know.

  The Blood Mouth

  YOU MOVE WITH your boyfriend to the desert. Initially this seems like a bad idea, but as you’re driving across the cracked earth, the cracked road, the cracks in the road and the earth and your hands filling with dust, you realize this is the worst fucking idea anyone has ever had. This idea is so bad you choke on it, or you think that you choke on it, you stop the car, you spit and your spi
t is mud. You expect the ground to drink up the moisture, you expect the ground to be thirsty, but really the glob of dust and spit sits on the surface of the desert like a bubble until it evaporates.

  Your boyfriend gets the blood mouth almost immediately. The desert town has an Old West Doctor. He carries a battered leather bag like in the movies. He has a black stethoscope around his neck. He wears a tweed vest and a striped long-sleeved shirt with stains in the pits. I’m trying to live as much like an Old West Doctor as I can, the Old West Doctor tells you, conversationally. I feel like it’s a more authentic medicine.

  While the Old West Doctor tells you this, your boyfriend is bleeding from the mouth, or is spitting up a bloodlike substance, a thick crimson sludge he catches in a metal bowl. Your landlady smelled the coppery stench when she came by asking about the rent. She told you it’s the blood mouth and you should call the Old West Doctor. He’s an asshole, she said, and while this should have felt like she was inviting you into a confidence, something about the way she said it made it seem the opposite. You gave her the rent and called the doctor.

  Old West medicine isn’t much, you think, after the doctor takes a look at your boyfriend and takes a look at the bloodsludge, almost black where it’s congealed in the bowl. He takes a little bit of the blood and rubs it between his fingers. It looks like he’s asking for a tip. Your boyfriend’s bottom lip is a high-gloss red. He became pale and thin almost immediately after he started leaking blood from his mouth. It was his idea to move here, you remind yourself, but now you look at him all sexy and bearded and dying, and it’s hard to hold anything against him. You take his blood mouth bowl out to rinse while he talks to the Old West Doctor.