Posts filed under ‘Fiction’
Excerpt from “Who Wants to Marry a Savant?”
Nicole Mitchell was her name. All of the girls at our high school called her “Nicole Bitchell” because, as I often overheard, she was a “heinous bitch on wheels.” I didn’t know Nicole well enough to confirm the accuracy of all the rumors that surrounded her, and I didn’t care. All I know is that she had an exceptional voice.
I was a freshman. She was a senior. We had dress rehearsal the night before the opening of the spring pop show, and all the choirs were practicing together for the first time. The freshman show choir had just finished our final song, and we sat on the risers instead of leaving the stage. We cleared a path in the middle for Nicole, who planned to begin her performance of “River Deep, Mountain High” right after our number ended. Our choir director told us to pretend we were at a concert with Nicole as the main attraction.
Nicole entered the stage at the top center of the risers as the fog machine began to gently huff. She wore a white, strapless dress that was so tight you could practically see the outline of her ovaries and so short you could . . . Her curves spilled out of both sides of the dress, and her tangerine stilettos added nearly half a foot to her petite stature. The background music began to play as Nicole slowly strutted down the risers. I gazed upward at her, as instructed by our director, as she drew the microphone to her plump lips.
When I was a little girl
I had a rag doll
The only doll I ever owned
Now I love you just the way
I loved that rag doll
But only now my love has grown
Nicole paused on the last step. She tilted her neck back.
And it gets STRONGER in every way
And it gets DEEPER let me say
And it gets HIGHER day by day
Nicole arrived at the front center of the stage just before she began singing the chorus. Her chestnut hair cascaded down her back, ending at the top of her ample backside.
And do I love you, my oh my?
River deep, mountain high, YEAH, YEAH, YEAH
If I lost you, would I cry?
Oh how I love you, baby, BABY, BABY, BABY!
When she began the next verse, I felt a sensation—foreign yet familiar. I don’t remember the rest of the performance. I just remember feeling giddily nauseated by her white-hot aura.
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Excerpt from “Safe Mode”
I was so busy—and so distracted—I almost didn’t find time to read Google’s newest updates to its privacy policy. The changes would be enacted on March 15, and the symbolism was not lost on me. With less than an hour before the consummate adjustment, a friend dropped off a hard copy of the policy updates. She had altered the text so that a video camera couldn’t easily pick it up.
The apprehension festered in the pit of my stomach. I read down the page to the important part:
Whenever you use our services, we aim to provide you with access to your personal information. If that information is wrong, we strive to give you ways to update it quickly or to delete it – unless we have to keep that information for legitimate business or legal purposes.
A rigid lump welled up in the back of my throat. The broad scope of the language made me dizzy. I scanned the rest of the document. The policy was concise, so I quickly memorized it. Of course, I could have summed it all up in one sentence. But let’s not go there yet.
As I drove toward The Dalles, the following language kept playing in the back of my mind:
Where we can provide information access and correction, we will do so for free, except where it would require a disproportionate effort. We aim to maintain our services in a manner that protects information from accidental or malicious destruction. Because of this, after you delete information from our services, we may not immediately delete residual copies from our active servers and may not remove information from our backup systems.
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Excerpt from “Who Wants to Marry a Savant?”
“Edgar, I want you to be perfectly honest with me—do I emasculate the men I go out with?” I sat next to him on his sofa. I had just returned from another abortive attempt at dating.
“Not on purpose.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Wait, let me explain. To the extent that your actions or personality/aura make men feel intimidated or even emasculated, it’s not your fault. And I’m not saying they’re justified in feeling this way or responding problematically, I just think it’s something out of your control.”
“So . . . you’re saying I do emasculate them. This is all really ironic.”
“How so?”
“They feel emasculated, subordinated by me. And yet it’s out of my control.”
“Look, it just means you’re gonna have to have high standards. As you should. Here’s the thing: you are more woman than they will ever have and more man than they will ever be.”
I took a moment to process what Edgar, my seemingly gay best friend, had just said. “You’re totally right. Did you come up with that?”
“No, but I wish I had.”
“Well, it’s absolutely the kind of thing you would come up with. You’re the best! I love you so much, man!” I pulled his face toward mine and kissed him passionately on the cheek without thinking about how that might make him feel.
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Excerpt from “Safe Mode”
Even if you think you have nothing to hide, it always makes sense to cover your e-tracks. When it used to matter, I had three browsers I’d use for different purposes. Google Chrome was for email, LinkedIn, casual browsing, and other activities I generally didn’t need to purge from my record. Firefox . . . I forget. And then there was Internet Explorer.
At one point, I had two YouTube accounts—one I’d open with Google Chrome, and the other I’d open with Internet Explorer. But then they made you link your YouTube account to your Google account. So I linked my “legit” account to my Google account and dropped the other one, the Internet Explorer one. So there were some videos I just didn’t get to see after that. Which was a shame. It wasn’t like they were illegal or immoral or wrong or anything. I just felt paranoid about looking at anything restricted through my Google account.
I liked at least to pretend I was anonymous. That’s what I’d use Internet Explorer for—all of my anonymous activities. I had some silly username like gemini84 (I’m a Sagittarius and wasn’t born in ’84), and I’d change my password regularly (It would always be something nonsensical like &%$#fraDujlKja9899i9W23). None of that ultimately mattered, but at least I felt I had a sense of autonomy and privacy in a world of virtual spotlights and actual predators.
Turns out I was wise to drop that YouTube account, never to enjoy those restricted videos. Somewhere out there, they really do have more records than the KGB.
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Excerpt from “Safe Mode”
Professor Heart Attack (not to be confused with Professor Heartache) used to always tell me that the future—and the now (then)—was all about information sharing and social networks. He had a bit of an obsession with Mark Zuckerberg (and, incidentally, with me). He used to tell me things like, “If I were Mark’s father, I’d tell him to marry you.”
It just so happened that I was a freshman at Princeton when Mark Zuckerberg was a freshman at Harvard. (No, I don’t know him personally. I know a handful of people who went to Exeter with him, but whatever. It doesn’t matter.) When I joined Facebook my sophomore (or was it junior?) year in college, back when it was called “The Facebook,” I had no idea what a key role it would play in my undoing.
I used to resent that Professor Heart Attack, more than 30 years my senior and (last time I heard) without a cell phone or personal email account, was so ahead of my time. He was seemingly compassionate, extremely intelligent, not at all attractive, cosmopolitan, wealthy, and—it turns out—deeply insecure and duplicitous. It seemed cruelly ironic that he—of all people—appeared to escape the disaster when most of us had our worlds ripped out from under us.
Of course, he hadn’t anticipated the ultimate irony. Neither had I.
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Excerpt from “Who Wants to Marry a Savant?”
Edgar and I were talking in front of my bathroom mirror as I put on makeup to go out in. I was in the middle of telling him about all the problematic men I had dealt with over the last few months. Dating had become so tiresome.
I just wanted to dance the night away without thinking about hooking up or playing games or trying so damn hard. We were going to meet a few friends from college at a gay club a few blocks from my apartment. It had practically become a monthly tradition at that point. This was before I knew Edgar was straight and, incidentally, madly in love with me.
“What about that guy who was inexperienced but good in bed?”
“He turned out to be an uptight pothead if you can believe that.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever met one of those. I’ll take your word for it. What about that guy who was pretty stable and treated you with respect and always paid when you went out?”
“He’s still in love with his ex. I refuse to play second fiddle to anyone. Hell, if I’m gonna be with someone, there better not be any other fiddle he’s listening to! I know it’s one of those ‘it’s not me, it’s him’ sort of situations, but it still sucks and I can’t not take it personally.”
“I hear ya. What about . . . I think his name is Paul? What’s the problem with him?”
“Paul.” I couldn’t keep from smiling a little at the sound of his name. “Well . . . nothing.”
“Then what’s the deal?”
“He’s honest with himself. And he’s honest with me. He’s not at a point in his life where he can completely give me what I need.”
“He can’t? Or he won’t?”
“Does it matter? He doesn’t.” And, with that, I broke into song: All my hangups are gone / How I wish you felt the same.
“I love it when you sing Prince or The Artist or a symbol or whatever his name is these days. Are you ready yet? You look great.”
I put my arm around his shoulder and gave him a peck on the cheek. “Let’s go, baby!”
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Excerpt from “The Rental Property”
“He’s like in this band called Orange Penis, and he only showers once or twice a week—but that’s okay with me—and he has this sorta androgynous hairstyle, and he went to Duke or Carnegie Mellon or maybe Swarthmore…” Aubrey inanely boasts.
“Sounds like a real charmer,” I roll my eyes and light a joint.
“And, I mean, his girlfriend has like the perfect body… I mean, I wouldn’t want a body like that (I don’t want to be fat!), but it’s perfect, you know?” Aubrey plucks the joint from between my fingers.
“He has a girlfriend?” I shove a handful of Nacho Cheesier Doritos into my mouth. “Are you like some sort of wannabe-indie-hipster garage band groupie or something?” Underwhelmed, I fall back into the neon green overstuffed beanbag chair in Aubrey’s living room.
“No! It’s like a post-modern meta-garage band.”
The Lollygabber 
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