latest short story
i wrote this story over a month ago and recently turned it in to my writing class for critique, but barely received any, so if any of you would care to provide some, i would totally appreciate it. the ending was forced, and if anyone has suggestions on how i could make a proper one, that would be really cool. a warning: it's rather long.
Midday, a man in a flannel shirt and a girl in glasses were sitting beside each other on red stools at an oyster bar. They’d been in each other’s company for only a handful of minutes, exchanging banal hi-nice-to-meet-you dialogue that felt more like a chore than it did natural.
It was a blind date off to an awkward start.
The man in flannel, who’d been waiting for a half hour before the girl in glasses arrived, had already ordered beverages for the both of them and slid a beer toward the girl.
“Here, darlin’. Have a drink.”
“No, thanks. I don’t drink,” said the girl in glasses. Her name was Rachel.
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-three.”
“And you don’t drink?”
“I don’t drink.”
“Why’s that? You super religious?”
“Actually, I’m a nihilist. I don’t drink because I have a disease that responds terminally to alcohol and I’d prefer not to die at this juncture in my life.”
“Oh, sorry, darlin’. Didn’t mean to almost kill you.” The man in flannel, whose name was Freddy, wasn’t sure what a nihilist was and ignored that part so as not to appear foolish, this being their first date and all.
“Don’t sweat it. You didn’t know.” Rachel resisted the impulse to tell Freddy she hated being called darling. She especially hated it sans the “g.” She was only okay with her Czech-immigrant grandma calling her darling because it sounded nice when she said it and not condescending or stupid, and grandma had been dead for nearly a decade.
“I didn’t know, you’re right. But now I know. I’ll remember not to almost kill you from now on.”
“Thank you.”
Rachel did not really have a disease but it’s true that she was twenty-three and it’s true she didn’t drink. Her vices were far more curious than alcohol.
Let’s delve for a moment into some of Rachel’s vices.
Compulsive lying for the sake of self-amusement was among them. Whether she had developed her affinity for deception when she first accepted nihilism as the foundation of her existence at age thirteen or if it had been with her since early childhood, no one can say for sure, Rachel included.
Another of her many taboo pleasures was leaving illicit messages-well, often, illicit responses to the illicit messages inscribed by previous visitors-on the walls of men’s bathrooms. She did a lot of road traveling, and whenever she found herself at a rest stop or gas station, she made a point of using the men’s bathrooms since their stalls always contain far more interesting things to read and respond to than the women’s. Rachel kept a sharpie marker on her person at all times because she never knew when she might need to write something down and indeed used it often, in bathrooms or otherwise. To the especially lewd and/or belligerent messages, she would write underneath, simply, “Go home, dad. You’re drunk.” This act, too, was for the sake of self-amusement. Much of her “depravity” was generally administered as a joke. Rachel had recently read in the news of a woman who one day decided to go forth into public dressed in a cow costume and piss on as many things (park benches, trash bins, dead animals, etc.) as she could before the cops arrested her for causing a disturbance. Life was sort of like that for Rachel every day, minus the deliberate expulsion of bodily fluids in public arenas and minus the psychosis. Rachel was only a naughty girl. Not bat-shit crazy, like the woman in the news.
She also made a habit of stealing handfuls of the self-serve Jelly Bellies from the grocery store every time she was there-not so much as a joke but more for the cheap delight petty theft offered her. (The buttered popcorn flavor was her favorite.)
Then there were her more debauched habits, which, for the purposes of this narrative, are neither here nor there.
In not so many words, Rachel preferred to be very aware in her waking state because the world is filled with a multitude of wonders-that’s why she didn’t drink.
Freddy, in contrast, drank too often. The bottle and self-loathing were his only two vices. Freddy was in his late-thirties, but he looked like he was in his late-forties. He’d led a difficult life. Without getting too involved in his history, he’d been married three times and divorced three times. He’d had a total of twenty seven jobs since he was fourteen-years-old, all of them involving hard manual labor. He never finished high school because he wasn’t very good at being a student and thus had to live with the shame of being under-educated in an increasingly progressive society. His only child, conceived out of wedlock with his eventual second wife, died from electrocution during a summer vacation at a beach resort after getting hold of Freddy’s car keys and sticking them into an outlet. The death of his son was a large contributor to the failure of his second marriage. He was never married for more than four years to any of his wives. The first and third wives cheated on him multiple times throughout their respective marriages and ultimately left him for some slightly better off Harry, Mark, or John.
“If you don’t mind my asking, what disease do you have?” Freddy, who had already guzzled two beers before Rachel arrived and was currently on his fourth-the one that was intended for Rachel, was much bolder than his usual reticent self. He hadn’t been on a date in three and a half years and needed to calm his nerves-so he reasoned. He would’ve been drinking anyway, date or not. The bar in which they were sitting was at the suggestion of Paul, the fellow who had arranged the event. Paul was a mutual friend and self-professed philanthropist. He knew Rachel from his previous job as a barista in a non-corporate coffee shop, at which Rachel still worked as a shift manager, and he knew Freddy from the garage band they’d both been members of off and on for several years. He regarded the two of them as his most solipsistic friends and concluded that they both needed very badly to get laid. Paul, the blessed soul he was, felt the merging of the two would prove to be serendipitous, despite the difference in age.
“Ectypal Blasphomorphasia,” Rachel answered. “It’s a blood disease. I have distorted red blood cells that are relatively benign unless I poison my body with such toxins as alcohol or anything that’s been fermented or curdled, which would send my entire body into a state of shock. Sadly, I can’t eat cheese either. When I was a child, I once swiped half a cheese sandwich off a kid at school during lunch, and after I ate it I went into violent convulsions and started foaming at the mouth before I blacked out. I was in a coma for seventy-two hours. Luckily I didn’t incur any major brain damage. The sandwich was delicious all right, but, boy, did I learn my lesson!” Rachel was impressed with the dexterity with which she was able to make up a convincing sounding disease, but it wasn’t the first time she’d done it either. The part about the cheese was also not true. She loved cheese. Especially smoked Gouda.
“Oh, gosh,” said Freddy. “I don’t envy you. I eat so much cheese I think I might be turning into the stuff.”
“It’s possible,” said Rachel, eying his paunch. Freddy saw her looking at it, and she noticed that he noticed. She smiled at him. “Don’t worry. I think it’s sexy.”
Freddy didn’t know how to respond. Instead he ordered a fifth beer.
“Aren’t you going to get anything to drink?” he asked Rachel. “Maybe a Coke?”
“Haven’t you heard? Coke makes sperm explode.”
“Unless Paul forgot to tell me something about you, I don’t see how that should directly concern you.”
“Of course it directly concerns me. Why would I want to ingest something that makes things explode? I’m careful about what I put in my body.” Rachel winked. “And I’ll have a chocolate milk.”
“They have that here?”
“Oh, yes.”
Rachel ordered a chocolate milk, which they did in fact have, and a dozen oysters.
Freddy found the combination nauseating.
The date wasn’t going well but it wasn’t going terribly either. Rachel generally liked submissive older men-Freddy was both submissive and older-and did not necessarily find him disgusting, and Freddy, who was approaching sloshed, did not feel as self-conscious as he normally would’ve and thought Rachel was remotely pretty in a peculiar sort of way. She was certainly nothing like any of Freddy’s former wives, all of whom were blonde by some means or another (birth or bottle), frequenters of tanning beds, and dressed like up-to-date Peggy Bundys-gratuitous cleavage, stiff-as-sheetrock hair, and spiked heels. They were the kind of women you would have no trouble picturing as groupies for bands like Poison and Whitesnake were it the 1980s, giddily jiggling their half-exposed breasts backstage while a strawberry daiquiri occupies one hand and a lit Virginia Slim the other. But instead of hair metal, they all shared a fancy for jam music: Freddy’s first wife used to follow Phish city to city on tours back in her young, enchanted, pre-Freddy days. By the time he got to her, she decided to give up her Birkenstocks and ripped jeans for flashier wares. However, she, at least, was a natural blonde, unlike the subsequent ex-wives. It was funny to Freddy’s friends how each of his wives seemed to transform into anachronisms after marrying him. He tended to have that affect on the women with whom he was romantically entangled, as he himself was bit of an anachronism, more suited for early twentieth century rural life than an era of computer science and affectation-neither of which he was adequately versed in.
Rachel, that diametrically dissimilar darlin’, had a rather boyish figure aside from her plump ass, a dark bob, and milk-white skin that looked paper-thin because Freddy could see all the networks of veins underneath it. Also, she wore glasses as was mentioned earlier, no makeup, and dressed in black dress pants and a fitted black band t-shirt. She was young and hip. Freddy tried, but couldn’t recall being either of those things. The band Rachel endorsed on her t-shirt was called Sparklehorse. Freddy had never heard of them, as his musical inclinations were limited to ‘60s and ‘70s rock n’ roll-further testament to his anachronistic nature. His favorite band was, of course, Led Zeppelin. Rachel would’ve rolled her eyes had he told her this and probably referred to him as “Time Warp Dude,” not that she didn’t have an appreciation for music of past eras herself. She was quite a fan of the British Invasion bands that existed around the same time as Freddy’s beloved Zep, such as the Kinks, the Beatles, and early Who, as well as earlier big band and jazz, but she was never one for talking about music since, to her, that would be a contradiction to the nature of its existence.
Music exists, she’d once said, to make the world shut up and listen. She remembered how her grandma-the Czech-immigrant one-would often shake her head and say, “You Americans, you don’t listen until you’re dead,’ and it was she who’d initially prompted Rachel as a child to rise above the stereotypes of her generation and society. Thus, Rachel was an excellent listener and knew exactly when to shut up. Listening to music was always a very cosmic experience for her. She liked to do it with closed eyes and pretend she was free of her corporeal body, blending her oft-channeled ethereal form in with the cadences.
When Freddy tried to talk music with Rachel, she simply stated that she hated music. “Let’s talk about something more interesting,” she demanded and not suggested.
“Like what?”
“I want to know a secret about you. Tell me something about yourself that you wouldn’t reveal under normal circumstances. Maybe some deeply buried desire. Anything. I’d like to know what a man like you keeps hidden from the world.”
Freddy, whose inhibitions were drained along with the contents of the bottle underneath his nose, felt very compelled to be honest. “Well…” He thought for a moment. “There is one thing.”
Rachel looked interested for the first time the entire date. “Yeah? What is it?”
“I’ve always wanted to-” He stopped short. “Ha, this is weird to say to a stranger.” He laughed uncomfortably and immediately tried to mask his discomfort by coughing into his hairy knuckles.
“Go on. I promise I’ll share something good in return. I bet I can top whatever you have to tell me.”
Freddy found this assuring enough to proceed. “Okay, so, ever since I was a little kid, I’ve always wanted to live on some remote island totally away from civilization and just fend for myself, you know, like the Swiss Family Robinson. Eat coconuts and catch fish and build fires from sticks. Construct an abode out of twigs and palm leaves. Just to see what it’s like to be dependent on only myself. And I wouldn’t have to worry about the rest of the world ‘cause I’d have my own little universe right there on the island. It’s something I think about a lot, getting lost at sea and drifting upon a desert island. But it’s not something I’ve ever told anyone.”
Rachel paused to digest this information for five beats, and then appeared moderately scandalized.
Freddy was moderately concerned. “Is there something wrong with what I said?”
Rachel laughed. “Oh, no, no. Not at all. It’s just that…well, that’s not very exciting.”
Marginally hurt, Freddy responded, “Well, darlin’, I’m afraid my exciting days are behind me.”
“Aw, come on, Debbie-Downer, there must be something more exciting about you than that. Try to think of something. Isn’t there anything lascivious about you at all?”
Freddy tried to think of something juicier, but nothing would come to mind. His life had pretty much been sapped of all its juices long ago. “No, that’s probably it.”
“My goodness, Freddy,” said Rachel. “Your imagination is certainly not at its fullest potential.”
“Sorry, but I wasn’t raised to be much of a thinker.”
“I can tell. That’s okay, Freddy. I might be able to help out.”
Freddy felt a bizarre tingle in his spine whenever she spoke his name. He could feel the tingle move up notch by notch until it reached the base of his skull, where the synapses began to fire messages throughout various parts of his body, which in turn began to tingle. He didn’t like this lack of control. He was used to emotional stasis. His emotions were the one thing in life he had control of. Till then, anyway.
“You okay?” Rachel asked, noticing Freddy’s sudden change in disposition.
“Yeah, fine. Just, ahem, spaced out for a minute.”
“Maybe you should hold off on having another drink. Want some of my chocolate milk? On second thought, that might be an unfortunate combination for your stomach. You should eat instead.” She jabbed an oyster with her two-pronged plastic fork, dipped it in cocktail sauce, and held it in front of his mouth. “Here. Have a bite.”
Freddy felt ill and turned his head away. He hated oysters-was utterly reviled by their texture, and he hated cocktail sauce for its odd pungency. He resisted the urge to vomit. “No, thank you, darlin’.” He waited for Rachel to retract her offering, which she did, and then watched her devour it in childlike fashion, with her head thrown back and mouth wide open, holding the saucy blob a foot above her face and letting it ease down the prongs before it dropped into her maw. After witnessing the spectacle, Freddy mused, “Isn’t cocktail sauce sometimes made with vinegar?”
Rachel ruminated for a moment before swallowing, and then shrugged a shoulder. “Probably.”
“Couldn’t that, like, kill you?”
“Hardly.”
“But…” Freddy shook his head, as if to clear away whatever he had attempted to etch inside of it. “I don’t understand. Why couldn’t it?”
“Because that would be the most ridiculous thing I’d ever heard in my life! Death by cocktail sauce? Come on, now. I suppose it could be possible...and, in fact, may have occurred at some point in the history of the world ‘cause I’m sure everything’s already happened at least once, but really. I mean, have you ever heard of such a thing?”
Freddy, confused, told her, “Wait, I’m confused. Didn’t you say-”
“That I have a disease that restricts me from consuming anything that’s been fermented?” Rachel offered.
“Well, yeah.”
“Oh, don’t be thick! I don’t really have a disease. I made it up.”
Freddy was too mystified and/or drunk to take offense to the slight. “Hm, that’s comforting. You always lie to strangers?”
“I lie to everyone.”
“Why?”
“Because people will believe anything.”
“They won’t after they get to know you.”
“Exactly. That’s why I do it. I want to make people question things. Plus, it’s fun for me.” Rachel observed his face for an instant and could see his displeasure manifesting itself into a half-formed grimace. Freddy had never learned how to fully embrace his emotional tendencies and therefore expressed them accordingly with how he felt them-ambiguously. If there was one thing Rachel couldn’t stand, it was someone who didn’t know his ass from his elbow when it came to matters of feeling-or any matter, actually. But she felt bad, nonetheless, for putting the poor man at odds with his inclination for emotional paralysis because he was obviously very uncomfortable. Not to say she didn’t normally delight in making people uncomfortable, which she did. Normally.
“You’re not mad, are you?” she asked, knowing he would answer in the negative, even if he were quite peeved at her. That was just the kind of person he was, she could already tell. She was determined to change that.
“No, no,” he answered as predicted. “I’m not mad, it’s just…I wonder, you know…what else is a lie? Is your name really Rachel? Are those glasses even prescription?”
“Does it matter? Names are unimportant. It’s just a word, and words are meaningless. That’s what I’m trying to get at. Ninety-nine percent of what comes out of people’s mouths is bullshit. I just try to be more conspicuous about it. What’s important is how you feel.”
“I’d feel more comfortable if I at least knew your real name.”
“What is ‘real’? It’s all relative. My reality is probably not the same as yours. Everyone has a different perception of what is real. Truth is, there is no truth. We all just live inside our own heads, where our egos reign sovereign and our ids are manacled somewhere back in the deepest reaches. It’s rather unfortunate. Everything we think is skewed because of egocentricity. But, for your sake, yes, my name really is Rachel-though call me whatever you want. ‘Irving.’ ‘Pip.’ ‘Stupid cunt.’ Anything you like. I really won’t mind. Like I said, how you feel is most important because it’s the only thing you can trust, so if you feel like calling me by something else, go ahead. Well, I take that back. You can call me anything but ‘darlin’.’ That I don’t like. ‘Puddin’ Pop’ would be okay, though. At least that’s funny.”
Freddy-confused, flustered, demoralized-blushed profusely. “I think I’ll just call you Rachel. That is, if you don’t mind.”
“Whatever suits your fancy, man.” She bared her teeth in a wide grin. The veins in her forehead became more prominent and dimples appeared in her cheeks, the latter of which Freddy instantly took note. He was a sucker for dimples. “I think I’d be good for you to have around,” Rachel continued. “You could use someone like me. You need to learn how to give yourself over to your whims and worry less about things said. I can tell you’re pretty tightly-wound. I bet your asshole couldn’t even be penetrated by an amoeba.”
Freddy again coughed into his fist to veil his embarrassment. His face was beyond red and he could feel his armpits perspiring. He wished he had not worn flannel. “You may be right,” he conceded in a shaky baritone, “at least about the tightly-wound bit, but let’s please leave my asshole out of this.”
Rachel keeled over in hysterics. Freddy laughed, too. He laughed because it wasn’t the first time he’d had to say that to someone and wondered how many more times in his life he would have to say it. How the hell conversations somehow ended up at his asshole he hadn’t the vaguest idea.
“How could I not oblige such a noble request?” said Rachel, still laughing. “Certainly, I will leave your asshole and its penetrability out of any future discussion, unless, of course, you change your mind.”
“Good. Thank you.”
An awkward silence followed, but it appeared that Freddy was the only one who felt awkward as Rachel continued to beam at him in a sagely manner. A sharp “Oh!” suddenly escaped her. She removed her glasses. “And as for these…” She tenderly put the glasses on his face. “You asked if these were prescription or not.” Everything within Freddy’s line of vision abruptly melded together into a kind of ocular seven-layer salad. “Blind as a bat, aren’t I?”
“Jesus H. Christ! Yes, you sure are,” he marveled, removing them immediately, as he felt a sudden headache coming upon him. “Well,” he shrugged, “I guess that’s a relief. I would’ve felt funny about being on a date with someone who wears non-prescription glasses.” Freddy smiled and handed them back to her. “Anyway, what about you?” he asked, in an effort to bring the conversation back around full circle. “What’s your secret? I told you mine and you promised to say what yours is.”
“Oh, Freddy… Freddy, Frederick, Fred. It is short for Frederick, right? Or Frederico, Friedrich, whatever other foreign variation of that name there is.”
“Actually, it’s just Fred. My folks were simple people.”
“Okay, Fred, I’d be delighted to tell you. I was wondering when you’d ask. Not that it would’ve mattered because I would’ve told you anyway.” Rachel was having fun. “Brace yourself,” she warned.
Freddy did as she instructed by holding his breath and tensing his shoulders. He felt silly when he realized he was doing this.
“In keeping with the topic of lies, I feel I should tell you this one thing.”
Freddy waited, his eyebrows raised in anticipation.
“My existence is one big lie. I’m not really Rachel. I killed her this morning and inhabited her form. I’m really an alien from the planet Zartron. It’s in the Andromeda galaxy.” She kittenishly recoiled while waiting for Freddy’s reaction, half expecting him to hit her. She knew how to take things too far with some people.
Freddy felt his asshole unclench for the first time, maybe ever. “You’re an alien?”
“Yes.”
“Oh. Wow. Me, too. What a coincidence, the two of us being set up on a blind date together. Now that everything’s out on the table, you want to get out of here and come back with me to my starship?”
Rachel was taken aback by Freddy’s response and laughed gleefully. “Totally. Let’s go live in pan-galactic revelry and make space babies or whatever.”
Freddy smiled at Rachel confidently-something he didn’t know he was capable of doing. As much as she was unlike any other woman he had ever known, it was for this very reason he found her downright exhilarating. The exhilaration startled him. Maybe she would be good for him to have around, he thought. Maybe, just maybe, she was exactly what he had been missing his whole life. Already he felt more at ease with himself, not worrying anymore about what was going on inside his head and instead focusing on the fact that he wanted very much to take her home with him that evening and never let her go. With his newfound confidence, he knew it was a done deal. In him, Rachel had found herself a man brave enough to be her protégé. She, in return, would be his lemon zest. His lust for life. It would be an arrangement in accord with the cosmos.
Anachronistic Freddy’s luck had finally begun to change.
EDIT: oh, and i added that "go home, dad, you're drunk" part just the other day as homage to the new year's athens trip, for those who will get the reference. i thought it fit in nicely. =)
Midday, a man in a flannel shirt and a girl in glasses were sitting beside each other on red stools at an oyster bar. They’d been in each other’s company for only a handful of minutes, exchanging banal hi-nice-to-meet-you dialogue that felt more like a chore than it did natural.
It was a blind date off to an awkward start.
The man in flannel, who’d been waiting for a half hour before the girl in glasses arrived, had already ordered beverages for the both of them and slid a beer toward the girl.
“Here, darlin’. Have a drink.”
“No, thanks. I don’t drink,” said the girl in glasses. Her name was Rachel.
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-three.”
“And you don’t drink?”
“I don’t drink.”
“Why’s that? You super religious?”
“Actually, I’m a nihilist. I don’t drink because I have a disease that responds terminally to alcohol and I’d prefer not to die at this juncture in my life.”
“Oh, sorry, darlin’. Didn’t mean to almost kill you.” The man in flannel, whose name was Freddy, wasn’t sure what a nihilist was and ignored that part so as not to appear foolish, this being their first date and all.
“Don’t sweat it. You didn’t know.” Rachel resisted the impulse to tell Freddy she hated being called darling. She especially hated it sans the “g.” She was only okay with her Czech-immigrant grandma calling her darling because it sounded nice when she said it and not condescending or stupid, and grandma had been dead for nearly a decade.
“I didn’t know, you’re right. But now I know. I’ll remember not to almost kill you from now on.”
“Thank you.”
Rachel did not really have a disease but it’s true that she was twenty-three and it’s true she didn’t drink. Her vices were far more curious than alcohol.
Let’s delve for a moment into some of Rachel’s vices.
Compulsive lying for the sake of self-amusement was among them. Whether she had developed her affinity for deception when she first accepted nihilism as the foundation of her existence at age thirteen or if it had been with her since early childhood, no one can say for sure, Rachel included.
Another of her many taboo pleasures was leaving illicit messages-well, often, illicit responses to the illicit messages inscribed by previous visitors-on the walls of men’s bathrooms. She did a lot of road traveling, and whenever she found herself at a rest stop or gas station, she made a point of using the men’s bathrooms since their stalls always contain far more interesting things to read and respond to than the women’s. Rachel kept a sharpie marker on her person at all times because she never knew when she might need to write something down and indeed used it often, in bathrooms or otherwise. To the especially lewd and/or belligerent messages, she would write underneath, simply, “Go home, dad. You’re drunk.” This act, too, was for the sake of self-amusement. Much of her “depravity” was generally administered as a joke. Rachel had recently read in the news of a woman who one day decided to go forth into public dressed in a cow costume and piss on as many things (park benches, trash bins, dead animals, etc.) as she could before the cops arrested her for causing a disturbance. Life was sort of like that for Rachel every day, minus the deliberate expulsion of bodily fluids in public arenas and minus the psychosis. Rachel was only a naughty girl. Not bat-shit crazy, like the woman in the news.
She also made a habit of stealing handfuls of the self-serve Jelly Bellies from the grocery store every time she was there-not so much as a joke but more for the cheap delight petty theft offered her. (The buttered popcorn flavor was her favorite.)
Then there were her more debauched habits, which, for the purposes of this narrative, are neither here nor there.
In not so many words, Rachel preferred to be very aware in her waking state because the world is filled with a multitude of wonders-that’s why she didn’t drink.
Freddy, in contrast, drank too often. The bottle and self-loathing were his only two vices. Freddy was in his late-thirties, but he looked like he was in his late-forties. He’d led a difficult life. Without getting too involved in his history, he’d been married three times and divorced three times. He’d had a total of twenty seven jobs since he was fourteen-years-old, all of them involving hard manual labor. He never finished high school because he wasn’t very good at being a student and thus had to live with the shame of being under-educated in an increasingly progressive society. His only child, conceived out of wedlock with his eventual second wife, died from electrocution during a summer vacation at a beach resort after getting hold of Freddy’s car keys and sticking them into an outlet. The death of his son was a large contributor to the failure of his second marriage. He was never married for more than four years to any of his wives. The first and third wives cheated on him multiple times throughout their respective marriages and ultimately left him for some slightly better off Harry, Mark, or John.
“If you don’t mind my asking, what disease do you have?” Freddy, who had already guzzled two beers before Rachel arrived and was currently on his fourth-the one that was intended for Rachel, was much bolder than his usual reticent self. He hadn’t been on a date in three and a half years and needed to calm his nerves-so he reasoned. He would’ve been drinking anyway, date or not. The bar in which they were sitting was at the suggestion of Paul, the fellow who had arranged the event. Paul was a mutual friend and self-professed philanthropist. He knew Rachel from his previous job as a barista in a non-corporate coffee shop, at which Rachel still worked as a shift manager, and he knew Freddy from the garage band they’d both been members of off and on for several years. He regarded the two of them as his most solipsistic friends and concluded that they both needed very badly to get laid. Paul, the blessed soul he was, felt the merging of the two would prove to be serendipitous, despite the difference in age.
“Ectypal Blasphomorphasia,” Rachel answered. “It’s a blood disease. I have distorted red blood cells that are relatively benign unless I poison my body with such toxins as alcohol or anything that’s been fermented or curdled, which would send my entire body into a state of shock. Sadly, I can’t eat cheese either. When I was a child, I once swiped half a cheese sandwich off a kid at school during lunch, and after I ate it I went into violent convulsions and started foaming at the mouth before I blacked out. I was in a coma for seventy-two hours. Luckily I didn’t incur any major brain damage. The sandwich was delicious all right, but, boy, did I learn my lesson!” Rachel was impressed with the dexterity with which she was able to make up a convincing sounding disease, but it wasn’t the first time she’d done it either. The part about the cheese was also not true. She loved cheese. Especially smoked Gouda.
“Oh, gosh,” said Freddy. “I don’t envy you. I eat so much cheese I think I might be turning into the stuff.”
“It’s possible,” said Rachel, eying his paunch. Freddy saw her looking at it, and she noticed that he noticed. She smiled at him. “Don’t worry. I think it’s sexy.”
Freddy didn’t know how to respond. Instead he ordered a fifth beer.
“Aren’t you going to get anything to drink?” he asked Rachel. “Maybe a Coke?”
“Haven’t you heard? Coke makes sperm explode.”
“Unless Paul forgot to tell me something about you, I don’t see how that should directly concern you.”
“Of course it directly concerns me. Why would I want to ingest something that makes things explode? I’m careful about what I put in my body.” Rachel winked. “And I’ll have a chocolate milk.”
“They have that here?”
“Oh, yes.”
Rachel ordered a chocolate milk, which they did in fact have, and a dozen oysters.
Freddy found the combination nauseating.
The date wasn’t going well but it wasn’t going terribly either. Rachel generally liked submissive older men-Freddy was both submissive and older-and did not necessarily find him disgusting, and Freddy, who was approaching sloshed, did not feel as self-conscious as he normally would’ve and thought Rachel was remotely pretty in a peculiar sort of way. She was certainly nothing like any of Freddy’s former wives, all of whom were blonde by some means or another (birth or bottle), frequenters of tanning beds, and dressed like up-to-date Peggy Bundys-gratuitous cleavage, stiff-as-sheetrock hair, and spiked heels. They were the kind of women you would have no trouble picturing as groupies for bands like Poison and Whitesnake were it the 1980s, giddily jiggling their half-exposed breasts backstage while a strawberry daiquiri occupies one hand and a lit Virginia Slim the other. But instead of hair metal, they all shared a fancy for jam music: Freddy’s first wife used to follow Phish city to city on tours back in her young, enchanted, pre-Freddy days. By the time he got to her, she decided to give up her Birkenstocks and ripped jeans for flashier wares. However, she, at least, was a natural blonde, unlike the subsequent ex-wives. It was funny to Freddy’s friends how each of his wives seemed to transform into anachronisms after marrying him. He tended to have that affect on the women with whom he was romantically entangled, as he himself was bit of an anachronism, more suited for early twentieth century rural life than an era of computer science and affectation-neither of which he was adequately versed in.
Rachel, that diametrically dissimilar darlin’, had a rather boyish figure aside from her plump ass, a dark bob, and milk-white skin that looked paper-thin because Freddy could see all the networks of veins underneath it. Also, she wore glasses as was mentioned earlier, no makeup, and dressed in black dress pants and a fitted black band t-shirt. She was young and hip. Freddy tried, but couldn’t recall being either of those things. The band Rachel endorsed on her t-shirt was called Sparklehorse. Freddy had never heard of them, as his musical inclinations were limited to ‘60s and ‘70s rock n’ roll-further testament to his anachronistic nature. His favorite band was, of course, Led Zeppelin. Rachel would’ve rolled her eyes had he told her this and probably referred to him as “Time Warp Dude,” not that she didn’t have an appreciation for music of past eras herself. She was quite a fan of the British Invasion bands that existed around the same time as Freddy’s beloved Zep, such as the Kinks, the Beatles, and early Who, as well as earlier big band and jazz, but she was never one for talking about music since, to her, that would be a contradiction to the nature of its existence.
Music exists, she’d once said, to make the world shut up and listen. She remembered how her grandma-the Czech-immigrant one-would often shake her head and say, “You Americans, you don’t listen until you’re dead,’ and it was she who’d initially prompted Rachel as a child to rise above the stereotypes of her generation and society. Thus, Rachel was an excellent listener and knew exactly when to shut up. Listening to music was always a very cosmic experience for her. She liked to do it with closed eyes and pretend she was free of her corporeal body, blending her oft-channeled ethereal form in with the cadences.
When Freddy tried to talk music with Rachel, she simply stated that she hated music. “Let’s talk about something more interesting,” she demanded and not suggested.
“Like what?”
“I want to know a secret about you. Tell me something about yourself that you wouldn’t reveal under normal circumstances. Maybe some deeply buried desire. Anything. I’d like to know what a man like you keeps hidden from the world.”
Freddy, whose inhibitions were drained along with the contents of the bottle underneath his nose, felt very compelled to be honest. “Well…” He thought for a moment. “There is one thing.”
Rachel looked interested for the first time the entire date. “Yeah? What is it?”
“I’ve always wanted to-” He stopped short. “Ha, this is weird to say to a stranger.” He laughed uncomfortably and immediately tried to mask his discomfort by coughing into his hairy knuckles.
“Go on. I promise I’ll share something good in return. I bet I can top whatever you have to tell me.”
Freddy found this assuring enough to proceed. “Okay, so, ever since I was a little kid, I’ve always wanted to live on some remote island totally away from civilization and just fend for myself, you know, like the Swiss Family Robinson. Eat coconuts and catch fish and build fires from sticks. Construct an abode out of twigs and palm leaves. Just to see what it’s like to be dependent on only myself. And I wouldn’t have to worry about the rest of the world ‘cause I’d have my own little universe right there on the island. It’s something I think about a lot, getting lost at sea and drifting upon a desert island. But it’s not something I’ve ever told anyone.”
Rachel paused to digest this information for five beats, and then appeared moderately scandalized.
Freddy was moderately concerned. “Is there something wrong with what I said?”
Rachel laughed. “Oh, no, no. Not at all. It’s just that…well, that’s not very exciting.”
Marginally hurt, Freddy responded, “Well, darlin’, I’m afraid my exciting days are behind me.”
“Aw, come on, Debbie-Downer, there must be something more exciting about you than that. Try to think of something. Isn’t there anything lascivious about you at all?”
Freddy tried to think of something juicier, but nothing would come to mind. His life had pretty much been sapped of all its juices long ago. “No, that’s probably it.”
“My goodness, Freddy,” said Rachel. “Your imagination is certainly not at its fullest potential.”
“Sorry, but I wasn’t raised to be much of a thinker.”
“I can tell. That’s okay, Freddy. I might be able to help out.”
Freddy felt a bizarre tingle in his spine whenever she spoke his name. He could feel the tingle move up notch by notch until it reached the base of his skull, where the synapses began to fire messages throughout various parts of his body, which in turn began to tingle. He didn’t like this lack of control. He was used to emotional stasis. His emotions were the one thing in life he had control of. Till then, anyway.
“You okay?” Rachel asked, noticing Freddy’s sudden change in disposition.
“Yeah, fine. Just, ahem, spaced out for a minute.”
“Maybe you should hold off on having another drink. Want some of my chocolate milk? On second thought, that might be an unfortunate combination for your stomach. You should eat instead.” She jabbed an oyster with her two-pronged plastic fork, dipped it in cocktail sauce, and held it in front of his mouth. “Here. Have a bite.”
Freddy felt ill and turned his head away. He hated oysters-was utterly reviled by their texture, and he hated cocktail sauce for its odd pungency. He resisted the urge to vomit. “No, thank you, darlin’.” He waited for Rachel to retract her offering, which she did, and then watched her devour it in childlike fashion, with her head thrown back and mouth wide open, holding the saucy blob a foot above her face and letting it ease down the prongs before it dropped into her maw. After witnessing the spectacle, Freddy mused, “Isn’t cocktail sauce sometimes made with vinegar?”
Rachel ruminated for a moment before swallowing, and then shrugged a shoulder. “Probably.”
“Couldn’t that, like, kill you?”
“Hardly.”
“But…” Freddy shook his head, as if to clear away whatever he had attempted to etch inside of it. “I don’t understand. Why couldn’t it?”
“Because that would be the most ridiculous thing I’d ever heard in my life! Death by cocktail sauce? Come on, now. I suppose it could be possible...and, in fact, may have occurred at some point in the history of the world ‘cause I’m sure everything’s already happened at least once, but really. I mean, have you ever heard of such a thing?”
Freddy, confused, told her, “Wait, I’m confused. Didn’t you say-”
“That I have a disease that restricts me from consuming anything that’s been fermented?” Rachel offered.
“Well, yeah.”
“Oh, don’t be thick! I don’t really have a disease. I made it up.”
Freddy was too mystified and/or drunk to take offense to the slight. “Hm, that’s comforting. You always lie to strangers?”
“I lie to everyone.”
“Why?”
“Because people will believe anything.”
“They won’t after they get to know you.”
“Exactly. That’s why I do it. I want to make people question things. Plus, it’s fun for me.” Rachel observed his face for an instant and could see his displeasure manifesting itself into a half-formed grimace. Freddy had never learned how to fully embrace his emotional tendencies and therefore expressed them accordingly with how he felt them-ambiguously. If there was one thing Rachel couldn’t stand, it was someone who didn’t know his ass from his elbow when it came to matters of feeling-or any matter, actually. But she felt bad, nonetheless, for putting the poor man at odds with his inclination for emotional paralysis because he was obviously very uncomfortable. Not to say she didn’t normally delight in making people uncomfortable, which she did. Normally.
“You’re not mad, are you?” she asked, knowing he would answer in the negative, even if he were quite peeved at her. That was just the kind of person he was, she could already tell. She was determined to change that.
“No, no,” he answered as predicted. “I’m not mad, it’s just…I wonder, you know…what else is a lie? Is your name really Rachel? Are those glasses even prescription?”
“Does it matter? Names are unimportant. It’s just a word, and words are meaningless. That’s what I’m trying to get at. Ninety-nine percent of what comes out of people’s mouths is bullshit. I just try to be more conspicuous about it. What’s important is how you feel.”
“I’d feel more comfortable if I at least knew your real name.”
“What is ‘real’? It’s all relative. My reality is probably not the same as yours. Everyone has a different perception of what is real. Truth is, there is no truth. We all just live inside our own heads, where our egos reign sovereign and our ids are manacled somewhere back in the deepest reaches. It’s rather unfortunate. Everything we think is skewed because of egocentricity. But, for your sake, yes, my name really is Rachel-though call me whatever you want. ‘Irving.’ ‘Pip.’ ‘Stupid cunt.’ Anything you like. I really won’t mind. Like I said, how you feel is most important because it’s the only thing you can trust, so if you feel like calling me by something else, go ahead. Well, I take that back. You can call me anything but ‘darlin’.’ That I don’t like. ‘Puddin’ Pop’ would be okay, though. At least that’s funny.”
Freddy-confused, flustered, demoralized-blushed profusely. “I think I’ll just call you Rachel. That is, if you don’t mind.”
“Whatever suits your fancy, man.” She bared her teeth in a wide grin. The veins in her forehead became more prominent and dimples appeared in her cheeks, the latter of which Freddy instantly took note. He was a sucker for dimples. “I think I’d be good for you to have around,” Rachel continued. “You could use someone like me. You need to learn how to give yourself over to your whims and worry less about things said. I can tell you’re pretty tightly-wound. I bet your asshole couldn’t even be penetrated by an amoeba.”
Freddy again coughed into his fist to veil his embarrassment. His face was beyond red and he could feel his armpits perspiring. He wished he had not worn flannel. “You may be right,” he conceded in a shaky baritone, “at least about the tightly-wound bit, but let’s please leave my asshole out of this.”
Rachel keeled over in hysterics. Freddy laughed, too. He laughed because it wasn’t the first time he’d had to say that to someone and wondered how many more times in his life he would have to say it. How the hell conversations somehow ended up at his asshole he hadn’t the vaguest idea.
“How could I not oblige such a noble request?” said Rachel, still laughing. “Certainly, I will leave your asshole and its penetrability out of any future discussion, unless, of course, you change your mind.”
“Good. Thank you.”
An awkward silence followed, but it appeared that Freddy was the only one who felt awkward as Rachel continued to beam at him in a sagely manner. A sharp “Oh!” suddenly escaped her. She removed her glasses. “And as for these…” She tenderly put the glasses on his face. “You asked if these were prescription or not.” Everything within Freddy’s line of vision abruptly melded together into a kind of ocular seven-layer salad. “Blind as a bat, aren’t I?”
“Jesus H. Christ! Yes, you sure are,” he marveled, removing them immediately, as he felt a sudden headache coming upon him. “Well,” he shrugged, “I guess that’s a relief. I would’ve felt funny about being on a date with someone who wears non-prescription glasses.” Freddy smiled and handed them back to her. “Anyway, what about you?” he asked, in an effort to bring the conversation back around full circle. “What’s your secret? I told you mine and you promised to say what yours is.”
“Oh, Freddy… Freddy, Frederick, Fred. It is short for Frederick, right? Or Frederico, Friedrich, whatever other foreign variation of that name there is.”
“Actually, it’s just Fred. My folks were simple people.”
“Okay, Fred, I’d be delighted to tell you. I was wondering when you’d ask. Not that it would’ve mattered because I would’ve told you anyway.” Rachel was having fun. “Brace yourself,” she warned.
Freddy did as she instructed by holding his breath and tensing his shoulders. He felt silly when he realized he was doing this.
“In keeping with the topic of lies, I feel I should tell you this one thing.”
Freddy waited, his eyebrows raised in anticipation.
“My existence is one big lie. I’m not really Rachel. I killed her this morning and inhabited her form. I’m really an alien from the planet Zartron. It’s in the Andromeda galaxy.” She kittenishly recoiled while waiting for Freddy’s reaction, half expecting him to hit her. She knew how to take things too far with some people.
Freddy felt his asshole unclench for the first time, maybe ever. “You’re an alien?”
“Yes.”
“Oh. Wow. Me, too. What a coincidence, the two of us being set up on a blind date together. Now that everything’s out on the table, you want to get out of here and come back with me to my starship?”
Rachel was taken aback by Freddy’s response and laughed gleefully. “Totally. Let’s go live in pan-galactic revelry and make space babies or whatever.”
Freddy smiled at Rachel confidently-something he didn’t know he was capable of doing. As much as she was unlike any other woman he had ever known, it was for this very reason he found her downright exhilarating. The exhilaration startled him. Maybe she would be good for him to have around, he thought. Maybe, just maybe, she was exactly what he had been missing his whole life. Already he felt more at ease with himself, not worrying anymore about what was going on inside his head and instead focusing on the fact that he wanted very much to take her home with him that evening and never let her go. With his newfound confidence, he knew it was a done deal. In him, Rachel had found herself a man brave enough to be her protégé. She, in return, would be his lemon zest. His lust for life. It would be an arrangement in accord with the cosmos.
Anachronistic Freddy’s luck had finally begun to change.
EDIT: oh, and i added that "go home, dad, you're drunk" part just the other day as homage to the new year's athens trip, for those who will get the reference. i thought it fit in nicely. =)