Boy Oh Boy Read online

  When your boyfriend asked you to consider moving to the desert you assumed water would be dear, but the people who live in the desert town throw it away casually. People take showers three, sometimes four times a day. The streets are lined with troughs of water for thirsty animals to drink from. Every square has a fountain, and all of the fountains run all night. The town has a greenhouse where a sophisticated irrigation system rains a month’s worth of water down on a flourishing rainforest ecosystem several times a day. You went to the greenhouse once and found it an almost hallucinatory experience, so hot it felt like you’d caught a fever. As water rained down from the sky you sat on a bench and pretended you were dying of dysentery. You contemplated stripping down to your underwear and standing greasy and wet under the trees, feeling the heat and water directly on your skin. Instead you slicked your hair back and felt the water drip down your neck and between your shoulder blades. Hot as blood.

  You rinse out your boyfriend’s metal bowl with a few pumps from the old cast iron water pump outside. It’s tremendous overkill, the rush of water thinning the almostblack blood to a winsome pinkish color before washing it away. You’re standing in a mudhole before you know it. The bowl never comes quite clean; on the inside is a wide black mark that doesn’t wash out, the discolored stainless steel gritty to the touch. You scratch at it with your fingernails but can’t get the stain to lift. Once, you used the bowl for mixing cake batter, blending eggs for omelets or swirling vegetables around in olive oil. Now, to think of it having once contained food makes you ill.

  Since coming to the desert you feel exhausted and sexual. You feel like you have been drunk since noon. You feel like you are at the end of the party, like it is two in the morning and a boy is following you around and you know that he’s in love with you and it would be easy. Since you left the greenhouse that stripped-down-and-slick feeling hasn’t gone away. You pass the Old West Doctor, who is just leaving your home, and you try to wedge him into a sexual fantasy, you try to make yourself want him. It doesn’t work. You don’t want him. You are angry that he left your boyfriend alone. You are angry he didn’t wait to give you an update. You are angry with yourself for not staying, for going out to wash the bowl. You could have washed the bowl anytime.

  When you get the bowl back to your boyfriend, he looks relieved, you think to see you, but immediately he leans forward and releases the mouthful of blood he had been holding into the bowl. It isn’t thick and sludgy this time, it gushes and splashes, maybe because he’s been holding on to it for too long. It runs down the sides of the bowl like water.

  Your boyfriend’s condition keeps you near the house. You tell yourself that it is your boyfriend’s condition. Really you are walking around in a state of constant arousal. You don’t want to be too far away from your boyfriend in case he wakes up and suddenly feels capable. While he is asleep, you take showers, the water as hot as you can stand. Once, you turn on the shower while you are still fully clothed and remove your drenched clothing one article at a time. Afterwards, you can’t bring yourself to put new clothing on. You walk around the house naked. This does something for you, but not enough, so you open the doors and windows, let the air and heat in. Your wet clothes remain at the bottom of the shower and dry into strange, stiff shapes.

  Your body has changed since you came to the desert town. You remember feeling dissatisfied with your disappointing body before, the sagging inner tube of fat around your midsection, the marshmallows of your upper arms. Mostly your body felt too heavy, like you were sagging, bouncing, dragging along. In the desert your body is like someone else’s. It is lean and controlled. Nothing bounces. You are all clean lines and tight, geometrical shapes. You no longer lament that you are not fit or attractive. You feel incredibly fit and attractive. Your body is a powerhouse, but you don’t feel strong. Instead, you are full of energy, brim ming over, barely contained, but fragile. Like a glass jar that could easily break and spill its contents.

  You spend much of the day pacing the house, walking to the living room, the bathroom, the small, dark room you use as an office, the bedroom where your boyfriend sleeps. You repeat a circle around the inside of the house. You pass every open door and window, where you would be visible to any passers-by, although frustratingly, there are none. You stop in the bedroom, sit on the bed next to your boyfriend. You are not gentle. You rock the bed hoping to wake him up. You touch him, his face, his shoulders, his chest. You pretend that your hands are careful, clinical and precise, taking measurements, assessing health, but really you are groping at him sloppily. Your hands are paws. They are damp and swollen. You hope he will wake up, but instead you hear the landlady walk up the path and knock.

  Rent’s due, the landlady says, and if she registers that you are naked, she says nothing. It is sweltering in your house, you are sweating so profusely that your feet slip on the floor. The landlady doesn’t come inside.

  I just paid the rent, you say.

  Been a month, the landlady says, rent’s due.

  You write out and hand her a damp check, the ink smeared from the wet edge of your palm. She takes it, with no comment, just folds it neatly down the center and slides it under the strap of her bra.

  All this—your unapologetic nudity, the landlady’s strange nonchalance, your boyfriend ill in the next room—should seem sexy, but it isn’t. This is exactly a scene from a pornographic video, you think. You have watched many of them in your life. You tell yourself this scenario is hot, despite your body’s objections, but you can’t convince yourself, because it isn’t. You’re just too warm. For her part, the landlady seems similarly unimpressed with you, stands in the doorway waiting for you to say something.

  Outside, clouds are gathering and you didn’t realize how big the sky looked in the desert town until the clouds started to make it seem squat, claustrophobic. There is a yellow quality to the light that is disconcerting to you. A wind has picked up and you can see little flurries of dust stirred up in the distance, gathering quickly, spinning, and falling again.

  I should go back inside, you say, not to the landlady or anyone in particular. I should check on him.

  The blood mouth, she says.

  That’s not his name, you say, but she has already started to walk away.

  For the rest of the afternoon, you sit in a chair by your boyfriend’s bedside. He wakes up occasionally, reaches for you, but by the time you reach back he has passed out again. You begin to worry about the amount of time he spends passed out. Then you envy him. You wonder what kinds of dreams he has.

  It starts to rain, but it is still oppressive in the house. You put towels on the floor beneath the open windows to keep the rain from damaging the floors, although you don’t really know if it will do any good. The water collecting on the towels contributes a musty smell and an incredible amount of humidity. You wonder if this kind of heat is good for your boyfriend, but you don’t know what else to do, you have not seen a single fan or air conditioner since you came to the desert town.

  You watch your boyfriend lie still in the bed, occasionally leaning over to spit into the metal bowl. He is sweating and has kicked all the blankets off. You crawl into the bed with him, nestle his body in yours. He has gotten so small you can easily wrap your arm around his chest, pull his body into yours. You are holding this small, sweaty thing that you love, and soon you are uncomfortable because it’s too hot to be this close to anyone. You let yourself sweat, you let him sweat, you both soak the sheet and the mattress protector and the mattress. Even though the roof is protecting you from the rain it suddenly feels like you and your boyfriend have been standing together in the downpour, both of you getting soaked and slick.

  You are thinking about how much you want to be inside him. You are not sure if you mean this in a sexual way, although, sure, you can imagine entering him in the traditional way. You can imagine penetrating him. The way you imagine it, he is awake, and not just awake but eagerly awake, awake and kind and encouraging. Maybe he says yes to
you a lot, maybe even asks politely, says please and thank you.

  But more than that you want to be inside him in whatever other way you can. You want to open up his back and crawl inside, where it is hotter, unbearably hot and wet and bloody. You want his body to be your body and his thoughts to be your thoughts. You want to have everything be together, all jumbled up, both of you part of the same unruly mess, inseparable. You want uncomfortable closeness. You want to hold him so hard that you mush together, but no matter how you try the membrane separating you remains disappointingly impermeable.

  Eventually you untangle from your boyfriend and go outside, where it is pouring so hard that your clothes immediately soak through and cling uncomfortably to your body. You are shocked to discover you are wearing clothes. You wonder if you’ve been wearing them this whole time. Looking at the clothes, they aren’t familiar. You don’t look like you. You don’t recognize your fingernails or your knuckles or your palms or the chubby pads of your fingers. You don’t recognize your wrists or your forearms, your chest or the gentle slope of your stomach.

  Whose body is this, anyway, you wonder. Who am I?

  Standing in the rain, you are reminded again of the greenhouse. You try to picture yourself there, but it seems so possible that you imagined it. Did you really leave your sick boyfriend alone to wander into town and look at plants? Is the desert town really full of water?

  But the streets are filling like rivers and, at least for the moment, the desert town really is full of water, though you don’t know where it all goes.

  You check your body again. The feel of standing in it, walking in it. Nothing feels right. Maybe it’s the rain, and you go back inside, drip water behind you on the floor.

  Your boyfriend, still sleeping, looks more like you than you do, and you wonder if you’ve had it wrong the whole time, if you are actually your boyfriend and you are the one who has the blood mouth, the one lying in bed and, for all Old West medicine can do for you, dying. You try to imagine mourning yourself, preparing to live the rest of your life without yourself.

  This seems preposterous to you. Yet, whoever you are, you are no one recognizable.

  Here’s what you do know:

  You and your boyfriend met for the first time at a bar. You waited until the bar was closing, around two in the morning, and kissed him on the sidewalk outside. You wanted to make him wait around for you. It was so easy. You had both been waiting for you to get around to it. He was so eager it felt like he was already in love with you. It was raining but not cold. When you picture it, the person who was kissing your boyfriend was recognizably you. He had the body you were used to, the non-desert body. Your boyfriend was recognizably your boyfriend. You remember the smell of smoke, the sound of music from inside the bar, the girl screaming I love this song! and you remember thinking, yes, me too, I also love this song. This was the first time you remember trying to collapse your two bodies together. You kissed him so hard you cut his lip with your teeth. It bled enough that you could taste it.

  VI

  The Game Begins to Occupy a Very Central Place in Your Life

  Zombie Apocalypse Story

  EVERYONE LOVES YOUR boyfriend. There was a time when you were proud of this, but then it got worse and eventually it was a huge problem. It started small. The neighbor would come over to talk to your boyfriend while you were at work. He would smile at your boyfriend. He would bring gifts. Eventually he stopped waiting for you to be at work, he would come over at all hours of the day and night to say hello to your boyfriend, to chat. Your boyfriend was polite but has never been very friendly. Eventually you would wake up in the morning to find the front porch covered in presents for your boyfriend, from the neighbor. Piles of gifts, all wrapped in beautiful paper, letters splashed with the most expensive cologne. A fragrant heap. One day you couldn’t open the door. It’s just a crush, your boyfriend said, but you couldn’t even find the fucking garage when you got home from work. Then there were the dead animals. The neighbor would bring little dead animals and leave them on the porch for your boyfriend. Rats and squirrels and small birds. Then dogs and cats. Then humans, children and old people, then small adults, then that one coworker your boyfriend couldn’t stand. You had to move.

  You don’t really get it, the way that everyone loves your boyfriend now. He’s incredibly beautiful, yes, but not more so than any model on a runway or in a catalogue. His personality is what you would describe as fine. He has a good sense of humor but he’s moody. He’s kind-hearted but not especially friendly. Sometimes you spend the day looking at him, squinting your eyes this way and that, trying to figure it out and failing, utterly failing, because to you he’s just your boyfriend. He wakes up with bad breath. He never does the dishes. He leaves his laundry in big piles on the sofa. He doesn’t answer his phone, even in an emergency. He’s a bad driver.

  He’s such a bad driver that when you go on the run he never drives, it’s only you. After the neighbor incident, you both move across town, to a different house with different neighbors. After a day, the new neighbors, men, women, and children, surround your home in a thick circle of bodies. They are chanting your boyfriend’s name, uttering declarations of love. They press their bodies against the exterior walls of your house and moan. Several times you wake in the middle of the night to hear hands clawing at the windows and doors. Parents try to shove their small children through your dog door so the children can unlock the house and let them in. At the darkest part of one night, you stumble into the kitchen and turn on the light to find a child stuck in the dog door, one shoulder dislocated so he will fit. He is thrashing against the confines of the door, drooling on the floor. I love your boyfriend, he says. I love your boyfriend so much.

  You ask your boyfriend if there is anything he wants to tell you about this situation, but he just shrugs and says no. He is upset that you disturbed him in the middle of the night when you know he does poorly on too little sleep. I find this behavior inconsiderate, he says.

  The next morning you pretend that you are heading off to work like usual but you hide your boyfriend in the trunk of your car. After that you are on the run. You learn not to stop for cops, who only stop you to get to your boyfriend. You turn the car radio off after the radio stations stop playing music and instead dedicate themselves to your boyfriend, only your boyfriend, 24/7. I have not left the studio in six days, one radio announcer says. I have not eaten and I only pee in a jar. I just love your boyfriend so, so much. He concludes his broadcast by weeping and moaning and chanting your boyfriend’s name, over and over. This is what being on the run is like. You have to hide your boyfriend under a pile of blankets when you get gas. It’s too hot under here, he says, and you tell him to shut up.

  Obviously this has strained your relationship with each other. He is always annoyed at having to hide and run and spend all day in the car. You are always annoyed that he is not taking this seriously enough. Sometimes, after a fight, he presses his lips together into a flat line and says, I could just leave and anyone I met would take me in and protect me and treasure me. You want to say, you have no fucking idea what these people would do to you, but instead you say, you’re right. I probably like you less than anyone else in the world right now.

  This is not, strictly speaking, the truth. You are annoyed with him, yes, but because he keeps making it so hard to keep him hidden and safe. You are trying to protect him. You are trying to make sure no one can take him away from you. Every morning, you drive down the road, watching over your shoulder for a caravan of cars coming to chase you down and steal him away. Sometimes your eye drifts over to your boyfriend, who has a bored expression on his face, his cheek resting on one hand, elbow propped up on the side panel of the car. He is so beautiful. You love him so much, so violently. There is nothing you wouldn’t do for him. Still driving, you lean over to kiss his neck.

  Manure

  YOUR BOYFRIEND KIDNAPS all of the talking animals. They had such a nice existence, before. The talking ani
mals were friendly and enthusiastic. They danced and sang and did stand-up comedy. They dispensed the most excellent advice, it was widely known that the talking animals gave the best advice, always there with a shoulder to cry on and a reasonable way out of a problem. They were deeply anthropomorphic; many of them stood on their hind legs and had opposable thumbs. The talking lions could open a can of beer, the talking kangaroos could play ping-pong, the talking dolphins were able masseurs. It was a happy existence, just an incredibly happy way to live. You wished you were a talking animal, in those days.

  But your boyfriend is good at kidnapping, maybe too good. He hunted the talking animals down, one by one. He caught the talking bears, eating tuna sandwiches on their lunch breaks, he caught the talking elephants at their tennis lessons, he caught the talking owls in their adult movie theaters. Most of the talking animals he captured but some of them he killed, because you only need so many talking alligators before you have too many and he has limited space. It’s like a Noah’s Ark thing, he says, but you fail to see the logic in it, the odd numbers of animals, sometimes one or three or five in a cage, the fact that there is no reason for it, that there is no ark or biblical flood or need to repopulate the earth. That he keeps them underground in the dark. Really, you don’t even know what he wants with them, certainly not conversation, not advice.

  Life is as terrible for the captured talking animals as it was wonderful before. Your boyfriend is not kind to them. He takes away their clothes—their tiny animal pants!—and doesn’t allow them access to their favorite reality shows. He keeps them in your very dark basement, and it is inadequately ventilated and your boyfriend is not conscientious about cleaning the cages, which are piled haphazardly one on top of the other, all the way to the ceiling. You shudder to think of it, as you spend your days reading on your window seat in the afternoon sun, eating poached eggs alone in your breakfast nook, tending to your beautiful garden. All that, while in your basement there are all those talking animals, most of them professionals, doctors and lawyers and scholars, weeping in their own filth, and when you imagine you can hear them you quickly raise the volume on your radio. You listen to Ira Glass interview a very old man who has had some trouble with a woodpecker attacking his house.