Bermuda Shorts - James Patterson [25]
Agnes has joined us and is taking us all in with a grain of salt and a shot of tequila. She waits to get a word in edgewise and then informs us that she has problems too. Her boyfriend has dumped her. “Good riddance!” we all agree, then vote to move on to another topic. Not good enough. Agnes wants a pound of male flesh, but she’s come to the wrong place. We’re only willing to cough up an ounce apiece. Why are men like this? Where is he? Have we seen him? He must have another girl. That’s it, isn’t it? You guys are protecting him! What an asshole thing to do!
“The problem we have here,” I interrupt, “is that you’re the dump-ee and he is the dump-er.”
“I’ve been dumped on all right!”
“Well, yes, but you see, in this situation, when you are the dump-ee, all you are left holding onto are a lot of worthless conjectures. Where is he? Where did you go wrong?, etc. It’s like this big iron door slams shut on you, and you’re locked in this deep dark Conjecture Chamber where the most complicated personal questions are posed and, since you are suddenly cut off from the data flow, out of the loop, those questions can only be answered hypothetically by your deepest fears and insecurities. These horrific negative scenarios are displayed over and over as if on a big-screen TV for your own private torment. No good can come from spending time in the Conjecture Chamber. What’s worse is, the longer you stay in there, the further from reality you stray. So, when and if you do emerge, the further you have to go to make it back.”
“Okay, that’s exactly where I am. Now how do I get out?”
“You have to change the subject, but it doesn’t occur to you to change the subject when you’re in the Conjecture Chamber because that’s not the Conjecture Chamber’s function. So something has to be randomly introduced that changes the subject naturally.”
“Like getting rid of the hiccups,” Cid says to Earl, tossing him a wink.
“It’s pitiful being the dump-ee. I wish he would take me back just so I could dump him and see how he likes it in there,” she scowls. Now she’s slid from anger to depression. She turns to Cid for some positive reenforcement, but his divorce has left him cynical and broke all the time. When he realizes it’s his turn to speak, he shrugs and says, “Look, you’re in love. You thought he would be different.”
A heavy silence descends.
Agnes watches that weight settle on our brows, then lets us know she isn’t finished. Cid’s last remark has pissed her off again. She is dangerously close to tossing the lot of us in the same boat with her despised lost love. “Men—you’re all brain damaged at birth. It’s a scientific fact. Did you know that?”
She’s got our attention.
“I’ve always suspected it was something like that,” I say, trying to humor her but a little afraid that she might be onto us.
“It’s true. In the womb we all begin as females, then, when the first jolt of testosterone gushes through the forming corpus callosum it turns you into males and turns your brains to shit. All of you. Shit for brains. That’s what I’m going to call him from now on. Shit for Brains.” That said, she looks at us defiantly, awaiting rebuttal. We look at each other stupidly and launch into a discussion of contemporary films.
Cid quit going to the movies years ago. Can’t remember the last film he went to see. “They’re all made for adolescents. Superheroes, pirates, cartoons, and TV sitcoms pretending to be movies. Films made for people my age are about depraved serial killers or drug addicts. I have zero interest in or empathy for either.”
Amanda Gay’s death has jerked my mind around in another direction. I’m thinking of a worrisome spate of films that have come out in the past decade also aimed at teenagers. Films like Mr. Destiny, Ghost, Ghost Dad, Weekend at Bernie’s, Weekend at Bernie’s II, and a whole bunch more, all with this cavalier, sophomoric, thoughtless attitude toward death. It’s healthy, I think, to whistle past the graveyard, but these films take us somewhere else. Death as adolescent situation comedy.