• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 254 0

late nineties, wooed her with made-up poetry inspired by boy bands and misquoted Rimbaud, screwed her, and never called her again—the powers of the poet/addict manwhore used to their full effect. When he considers other coincidences of the strange-but-true variety, it’s not at all far-fetched. He could find out for sure right now (What was the name of the guy who screwed your girlfriend?), and yet such validation or repudiation seems irrelevant. Maybe Marcus deserves to be Tased regardless of whether he was the guy who screwed Nick’s ex. Even if Nick’s ex wasn’t one of the forty (and right now Marcus is going with the higher number because his guilty conscience demands it), she very easily (too easily) could have been. And if not him, then she was screwed by someone just like him. Maybe a good Tasing will be emotionally beneficial for both of them. For Nick: payback. For Marcus: punishment. In the moment, Marcus remembers a passage from one of the notebooks Jessica gave him the afternoon of their breakup: I might never be able to forgive you for all the girls who came before me, nor myself for all the men who would come after you.

He makes a decision. “Do it,” he says, dropping his upheld palms. “I deserve it.”

Marcus stands tall, ready to withstand twenty-five thousand volts of agony. Nick extends his trigger hand, winks in concentration … then falls onto the counter in laughter.

“Duuuuuude! I’m just playin’.”

Marcus blinks once, twice, but otherwise doesn’t move.

“I’ve never seen you before in my life,” Nick says, his laughter slowing down.

“You sure?”

“You sound disappointed.”

Marcus is disappointed by this anticlimactic surrendering of arms. Once he had accepted the idea of being Tased, he had embraced it as enthusiastically as he had other experiments in extremity, including a yearlong silence, a monthlong abstention from soap and water, a week-long liquid (i.e., alcoholic) fast, a weekend-long priapic bender with a perimenopausal lover, and a daylong marathon of “My Song Will Never Mean as Much (As the One He Once Sang for You)” on MP3 repeat. He already suspects the truth, however, that this seconds-long shock to his system would have been equally ineffective in making him feel any worthier of the woman who is still asleep in room 2010.

“That’s the most fun I’ve had all week,” Nick says, still wheezing with amusement. “I hate this job. I hope I get fired. My mom forced me to get this job because it works with her schedule at the airport. What about my schedule, huh? What about what’s important to me? I hate my life.”

Marcus isn’t listening to Nick’s rant. He stumbles backward and out of the gift shop, so dizzy and disoriented that it’s as if he wasn’t merely threatened but was actually Tased by the hungover saleclerk bored with life. If Marcus had been listening, he might have suggested that Nick try using the third-person-turning point of view to figure out where his life went so wrong.

fourteen

“WHAT?!” shouts Jessica as she is yanked out of sleep and into wide-awakeness.

I can’t laugh and I can’t sing …

It takes a few eye-rubbing, head-shaking moments for Jessica to realize that she isn’t with Sunny in a bleach-bright hospital room being serenaded by Marcus Manilow (or Barry Flutie), but alone in a pitch-black hotel room being awakened by her cell phone. Jessica knocks over a small lamp in the scramble to grab it off the bedside table before Barry starts finding it hard to do anything. So sure of the caller, she answers it without even checking the ID.

“Sunny?!”

“Of course it’s sunny,” replies someone who is definitely not Sunny. “You’re in the Virgin Islands, aren’t you? But that’s a strange way to answer the phone.”

“Oh, hi, Bethany.” Jessica tries her best not to sound crushed. “Thanks for calling. And I wasn’t providing you with a spontaneous weather report. I thought you were someone else. And I’m not in the Virgin Islands. Yet.”

“What happened? Where are you? Are you going to miss the wedding?”

Jessica replies to the questions in the order they were asked. “I missed my flight. I’m