Magical Thinking - Augusten Burroughs [90]
Of course, I’d made this all up in a moment of inspiration, but she recoiled against the back of her chair.
I went downstairs to the president’s office, and I explained that Chicago wasn’t going to work for me after all. I detailed what happened with Charlotte, revising everything I said.
His eyes slid to the floor, and he admitted, “Charlotte can be difficult. We’ve had some problems.”
Back in New York, I spent the rest of the year loathing Charlotte and then moving past loathing to simply wishing her dead. I decided an emotionally abusive nightmare like Charlotte does not deserve to live. So I willed her under the wheels of a bus.
The following month I got a phone call from one of the account executives at the Chicago agency. “Did you hear?” she said. “Are you coming?”
“Coming where?” I asked.
“To Charlotte’s funeral.”
What do you know? Charlotte was waiting for an elevator, had an aneurism, and dropped dead, holding an armful of storyboards.
I hung up the phone smiling and marveled, “That’s even better than a bus.”
I have also used my powers of magical thinking for good, if you consider tricking Dennis into being my boyfriend “good.”
Dennis is attracted to muscular black guys, and I am unfortunately not an African American man with large, full buttocks. I am a lanky WASP, the product of centuries of inbreeding. I have almost no butt. I am as pale as the moon.
And yet I was able to cause Dennis to see me as a homeboy. I sent my thoughts into his eyes, where they rearranged the neural rods and cones of vision and instead of seeing me for what I am, he saw me for what I wanted him to see me as: a bro.
“And I can’t even get a tan,” I joke to him now, shaking my head at the wonder of it all and sticking my butt out in a pathetic, teasing fashion.
Once or twice, and a person could easily chalk it all up to coincidence, but coincidence implies a lack of control, a random occurrence. With me, I can manipulate the external influences in my life as surely as I can make a baby cry just by grinning.
I can give countless examples. I feel certain that conjoined twins are born so that they can later be profiled on the Discovery Channel and watched by me. My hunger for conjoined-twin stories is so powerful that I believe it actually rearranges molecules in the universe that affect the very cells in the womb. So that when I need it most—when I’m feeling depressed or anxious and turn on the television to distract myself—there’s a two-headed girl in a one-piece bathing suit!
Skeptics might say “Yes, but who doesn’t enjoy a good conjoined-twin profile on the Discovery Channel? Surely, you can’t think you’re the only one? You didn’t cause them to be born . . .it was a simple matter of an egg not dividing correctly.”
Fine, another example: I obsess endlessly over wanting a French bulldog puppy. I check websites and call Dennis over to the computer. “Look!” I say. And each time he says, “No way. Absolutely not. We’re not getting a dog.”
One evening, we find ourselves downtown shopping for halogen light bulbs next door to a place with puppies in the window. “Oh, let’s just go inside and look,” I whine. Dennis agrees. “But just to look. We’re absolutely not getting a dog, Augusten. I’m serious.”
They have a French bulldog puppy in a cage. He’s skinny and shaking, sickly. He looks more like a lab rat injected with shampoo than a puppy. I ask to see the puppy, and they take him out of the cage and hand him to me. He trembles in my hands, terrified, undoglike.
At this moment, he becomes mine.
Dennis says, “Oh, that’s so sad. The poor thing.”
We put the puppy on the floor, and he trembles, unsteady. The salesman informs us that the dog is from Russia, that he had recently had an operation to treat his “cherry eye.” The salesman says he’s nine weeks