The Feast of Love - Charles Baxter [83]
That’s not healthy.
THAT NIGHT, WE WERE MAKING hamburgers at the tiny stove, so close to everything that it’s not even in a kitchen, and I told Oscar about it, Janey’s proposal, and you know what he did? He sat there. So I just sat there. Then we both started talking. Eventually he yelled at me and I yelled at him. He and I fought and we ended up crying together, but by the end of the dinner hour we’d decided.
We told each other it wasn’t a big deal.
After all, everybody likes to watch. I mean, I like to watch Oscar, I even like to watch him shave when he’s naked, and he likes to watch me.
We decided to do it. But we wouldn’t go to anyone else’s house, we had to do it here. The guy would have to come in and we would close the door. Those were the conditions. And we did. I called Janey and Janey called him.
THE GUY CAME OVER, just this anonymous middle-aged smallish bald guy with asthma, wearing an old-fashioned gray fedora hat. You could tell his upper lip had been surgically reconstructed. There were flesh fault lines heaving upward from his off-center mouth.
Anyway, this citizen sat on our chair, our furniture — and that was almost the worst part — and we did it for a while, for long enough, anyway. The trouble was, it was an act. And I never felt that Oscar and me were an act before. I couldn’t look back at the guy watching us. I just concentrated on Oscar. I never took my eyes off him. I held on to Oscar like you’d hold on to a lifebuoy that keeps you afloat. At one point his eyes said he couldn’t go on, and my eyes told him he had to, so he did. It was the low point of my life so far.
When we were finished, the guy said he wanted to see us do it again, with some variations.
Oscar sat up in bed. He said okay, sure, in a minute. Then he said he wanted to talk about a movie he’d seen. Did the guy like movies? The guy shrugged. So Oscar said he’d just seen this movie called Cyber Catch or something, and in this movie there’s a vast evil megacomputer that the super-secret government owns that can analyze your DNA from a blood sample. And the computer, the big mainframe, has some people all predicted from here until infinity, their lives laid out and everything based on the DNA, even their afterlives are predicted by the computer before they’re born, in their pre-life. The computer also knows if you’ll go to hell or not, even before you’re born. Your entire post-life is completely mapped out. What it doesn’t get from blood it gets from handwriting samples. The computer wants total control for a consumer society, including the afterlife. The hero and his girlfriend are trying to get at the computer, but the computer knows all about them, so the guy-hero has to think his way into being somebody else in order to defeat the computer, and the girl-hero has to change her identity into, like, this minimum-wage cleaning woman. They’ve got to imagine their escape.
Oscar sat up in bed naked doing this plot summary for about ten minutes. I never knew he could make up stories before that. Then the bald guy with the facial fault lines said, “That’s nice, kid. But if I wanted to go to a movie, I’d go to a movie. Maybe you could do what I’m paying you for, okay?”
“Okay,” Oscar said, and he shrugged his naked shoulder. He turned to me and gave me a peck on the cheek, like the show had to go on.
The second time was harder, that’s all I’ll say. We earned that money. At the end of the show, when we were finished, we got paid. I’d almost never seen so much cash in my life.
I swore off life for a day or two after that. My New Year’s resolution was to bag it.
I won’t even tell you