Joy Cancer, page 6
“Well, it’s your business, of course, but personally, I think you should only apologize if you did something wrong accidentally, or if you didn’t realize at the time how the consequences of your actions would affect someone, or you’ve changed since then and now you truly regret what you did. I knew someone who would get drunk as fuck and, as a result, repeatedly break promises and let people down, but that didn’t drive me berserk as much as the fact that every time, he would say, ‘Sorry, I’m such a fuck-up.’ Sorry? What are you sorry for? Tonight you’re going to get wasted again. I know that, you know that. Don’t give me your ‘sorry’ shit. Have the decency to say, ‘I wanted to get drunk, and I did. I knew I was supposed to pick up the fucking kids from school, and I got drunk anyway. And I’d do that again because that’s who I am. Cheers.’ ” All the while, Adam keeps grimacing and looking around, as though he were giving an interview he couldn’t ditch, and he hated the question and probably the interviewer, too, for good measure.
I don’t see what any of that has to do with my mechanical (and harmless, the way I see them) “sorries,” but I smile helplessly and offer him my hand. “R-right. It’s nice to meet you.”
Adam frowns, lifts his chin, and shakes his head. “Don’t do this.”
“Uh, don’t do what?”
“This thing with your teeth.” He twirls his index finger pointing at my mouth.
“I, uh—I believe they call it a smile,” I say, wishing I had the guts to just bark at him as if I were nuts and crawl away, with dignity, on all fours.
“So, an hour ago, you were going to kill yourself, and now you’re smiling and saying shit like ‘nice to meet you’? The fuck is wrong with you?”
My eyebrows fly up and my lower jaw drops. The fuck is wrong with me? The fuck is wrong with you!
“Politeness!” I say, in a rather rude tone.
“Pretense! Just as you pretend you don’t care we’re a couple.”
This time, I downright gasp in surprise and indignation. A rush of heat runs through my body and then condenses in my chest into an almost unbearable knot of shame. Tense, anxious phantom shame you feel when you’re accused of something you didn’t do and you’re afraid that nobody will believe you. “Whoa, what? What’s that supposed to mean?”
Adam purses his lower lip, as if in disgust, and shakes his head again. “Which are you?” he says challengingly. “You act like it’s not a big deal, but you’re suddenly all nice, so which are you? Let me guess, you must be that fake-lesbian type—you know, the ones who date girls just to appear ‘different’ and complain about how they’re oppressed.”
Christ, what a douchebag. “Oh, fuck off!”
“Excuse me?”
“Fuck. Off. I’m not going to go out of my way to prove to you that I’m normal!”
“Normal? Do you even hear yourself?”
“ ‘Normal,’ I mean, not as in ‘not lesbian,’ but as in ‘not giving a fuck as to who wants whom.’ I’m not going to tell you that—well, whatever it is people usually say when you make them feel like they need to justify themselves.” I pause to gulp some air, having spat that sentence out in one breath. “Ah, fuck it. You’re right. I shouldn’t be nice to you. I don’t like you. Not because you’re gay, but because you’re not a likeable person. You’re arrogant, you’re pretentious, you make assumptions—is that because Kirk told you I was from Eastern Europe? Who’s being presumptuous now, you, you judgmental—?” I struggle to find an offensive enough word. “You know what, I’m out of here, and you can fuck off, I don’t care what you think.”
If I had held that imaginary cup of tea to my face, it probably would have boiled dry by now, through sheer force of my irritation. I shove past Adam, my shoulder throbbing as it collides with his, and I head for the exit, but he grabs my elbow, and says, in a completely different, soft tone, “Wait, that was a test.”
“Fuck off with your tests,” I suggest, ripping my arm free from his grip, and I turn away.
“Wait, wait, I’ll get you an apology beer!” he shouts after me. I stop dead and roll my eyes. Does he really think my pride is that easy to neutralize?
The acid in my stomach is corroding its lining already, and my throat feels like sandpaper with thirst, and Adam’s face, unfittingly pale for the local climate, doesn’t look as haughty anymore, so I guess he’s right. It really is that easy. Bye, pride—hello, beer.
“It’d better be a good one.”
Adam lets out quite an innocuous laugh. “There’s no good beer on this island. It’s all shit. It’s disgusting.”
“Oh, God, it’s disgusting!” I say, after I take a sip from the cold dewy bottle he gave me and cover my mouth with the back of my hand to prevent myself from spitting the beer out.
“Warned you.” He tilts his bottle toward mine so they clink, and takes a great swallow. “Christ, you’re hysterical.”
“That’s recent. I don’t really shout at people.”
“You should. You’re good at it.” He pulls a creased pack of cigarettes out of his back pocket and, probably having noticed the desperation flaring up in my eyes, offers me one.
“Thank you,” I mouth emphatically. “So what’s with the test?” I ask, after we light up and I savor an almost cathartic feeling of smoke filling the emptiness in my sore chest. I throw my head back, open my mouth, and let the smoke slowly escape from my lungs. Heavenly.
“Ah, forget it, you passed.”
“Hey, not so fast, smartass. You owe me an explanation. That wasn’t cool.”
Adam takes a deep breath, as if he were about to dive in. “All right, but remember—you brought this rant on yourself. You see, there are certain kinds of people I like to avoid, so I try to identify them as soon as I can. There are these tolerant folks, who only treat you decently because that’s what progressive society bugs them to do now, because they’re afraid to be seen as the shitheads that they are. They smile at you (through gritted teeth) and say how they respect your rights, but they don’t really recognize you as their equal. They would never even consider you a potential friend. They would shudder with fear internally if you talked to their kids. And if their kids are gay? They’d hang themselves. ‘Where did I go wrong?’ ” he mimics in a high-pitched voice. “Fuckers. I don’t need their tolerance. I hate that word. It means you put up with something unpleasant, something you fear or don’t like. Something that is somehow beneath you. Seriously, I’d sooner shake hands with an open hater than listen to that tolerance crap. Those are at least true to their beliefs, however fucked up.”
“Okay, but what did lesbians do to you?”
“Lesbians? Nothing. Fake ‘gay’ pisses me off. You know, the ones who inform everyone about how gay they are and how every lamppost is mean to them, and end up marrying some rich idiot of the opposite sex and assuring you that you’re only still gay ‘cause ‘you just haven’t met the right person yet.’ Oh, come on, what’s with the frown? You know I’m right. We’re not supposed to say that out loud, because tolerance, but no one has canceled attention seekers. They’ve always existed and they’d do anything to have some drama in their shallow lives. Those clowns are so loud and obnoxious everyone sees them and assumes that that’s what most gay people are like. They make it harder, you know, to be taken seriously, for those of us whose orientation is just a natural part of our personality, not some fashion statement,” Adam says, the bitter repulsion in his expression unmistakable. “Not that I give a shit, of course.”
“Of course,” I agree. “You’ve made it quite clear that you don’t.”
Adam looks at me half reproachfully, half cunningly, as in “I see what you did there, but can you not?”
“And then there are those girls”—he lets out a small humorless laugh and takes another giant gulp of beer—“who’re dying to make a gay male friend, because they think they can ask you to do all the shit for them without feeling ‘threatened’ by the possibility of you falling for them, and they can show you off to their girlfriends and Instagram followers, and what drives me nuts the most, you’re like a pet to them—call them fat or ugly or whatever, and they’re just going to giggle and go ‘aww, you’re so cute.’ They wouldn’t bother to really get to know you, because your orientation is, like, the only thing about you that matters to them. If you were one of those, you’d start to apologize again and mumble about how you love ‘the gays’ more than you love straight people and how you’ve made your Facebook profile picture rainbow-colored.”
I chuckle and measure him up with narrowed eyes. “You’re not a nice person, are you?”
“Fuck being nice,” Adam says hotly and raises his almost emptied bottle as if in a toast. “I’m angry.”
Well, cheers to that. I gaze at Adam and get the weirdest feeling that I’m looking at myself from the outside—not appearance-wise, of course. I’m not yet sure I like what I see, but it feels so. . .familiar, in a good way, so oddly intimate. . . .
“Religion,” I say.
“Huh?”
“Take, for example, religious and non-religious people. Some people believe in God. I might believe in reincarnation. In their reality, after I die, I’m probably going to go to hell. In my reality, after I die, I’m going to be reborn as someone else.” I pause to take another sip of my beer, which gradually becomes less and less disgusting as I find my company for tonight more and more agreeable.
“I’m really sorry that you’re going to burn in hell.” I remember yet another awesome conversation I had with a guest at the hotel.
“I’m really sorry to disappoint you, Sir, but I’m not, for there is no hell.”
“You see, that’s exactly why you’ll end up there. I will pray for you.”
Smirking, I swat the memory away and return to Adam. “But does it mean I’m absolutely sure that just because I believe in reincarnation, I will be reborn? No. Because, you see, in my reality, after I die, I won’t be able to believe in anything much anymore, so my thoughts won’t be able to affect reality anymore, which means the default reality is going to happen, whatever that is. And I can only hope that I’ll either forget this life and be reincarnated, or I will simply be no more, and it’s going to feel the way it had felt before I was born, which is like nothing at all. I just won’t exist, I won’t be feeling anything.” I fall silent for a moment, the sweet idea of my non-being taking over my mind, and, nodding to myself, I finish, “And I think it’s great.”
A cloud of cigarette smoke is drifting between us like a bizarre pearly nebula, and through it I can see Adam’s face, which is grinning at me. His eyes and teeth mirror the warm twinkling lights adorning the room, about whose existence with all its people and noises I have completely forgotten by now, and I beam back at him. And I mean it.
The next four hours we spend in the backyard, sitting across from each other on the floor of an empty swimming pool and talking, talking, talking greedily.
“So how do you think reincarnation works? You’re going to be a pineapple in your next life?” Adam says. We have already established that neither of us really considers reincarnation a plausible possibility, but it’s still fun to fantasize about it a little.
“Yeah, looking weird and digesting people’s mouths while they eat you is alluring, but let’s face it, I’m more likely to turn into a banana. I mean, they’re radioactive, they make you fat, and most people would be embarrassed to hang out with one in public. No, I think you only climb higher from where you are,” I say, having given it a more serious thought. “If you don’t screw up too much in this life, next time you’ll be a bit wiser, a bit more. . .enlightened. That’s why there are super-smart people—their aggregate experience is so vast. They don’t remember it, of course, but everything they’ve ever known and gone through is still there, so they learn faster, seem to understand life intuitively, and they are kinder because they have suffered, they have seen so much. And that’s why I believe you shouldn’t be angry with ignorant, petty people. Maybe it’s one of their first lives—they didn’t have as much time to figure things out. They are like newborns.”
“So how high are you?” Adam says, and after we stop laughing, he adds, “I mean, on this ladder?”
“Pretty low. I mean, I’m angry all the time, and I don’t ever understand anything. Aliens!” I almost spray whatever I’m drinking at this point (I have no idea, honestly, and I don’t care) out of my mouth with this sudden electrifying insight.
“Aliens?”
“Then, we can be reincarnated as aliens! How could I have forgotten about them? You agree that aliens exist, right?”
“Of course! God, I have so many theories. What do you think they’re like?”
My heart is jumping up and down in its cage; euphoria clouds my mind like laughing gas. It’s so pointless, so silly—aliens, reincarnation, society’s disapproval of our minor differences, but I feel so happy and grateful to talk about all this right now I want to sing—which I’m pretty sure we’ll get to at some point when discussing our favorite bands.
“Psst! Oi, you aliens!”
We both look up and see Kirk lying on the edge of the pool, his red hat hanging over us. With a myriad of big blue stars scattered above his head, he looks like a Christmas card, Santa staring down into a chimney. He keeps his hands behind his back, as if he’s brought some gifts, too.
“Hey, Joy, how’s stealing my boyfriend going?”
“Just fine, thanks! We’re getting married in the morning,” I say.
“Good! I love me a spontaneous wedding—did you know I’d actually met Adam at a spontaneous wedding? Well, it was my wedding. Well, it was a fake wedding, but—anyway. Some heated discussion you’re having there, though.”
“Yeah, can’t help it, darling, we’re on fire,” says Adam.
“You have no idea,” Kirk says, sounding as if he’s struggling to suppress laughter, “how funny it is that you should say exactly that. But you will in a moment.”
He gets up and stretches his arms out in front of him so we can see what gift he’s been hiding behind his back.
“Kirk, don’t do this,” Adam says, trying not to laugh himself. “Please, just don’t.”
“Nonono! Not funny! Kirk, I’m sorry! I’m sorry I was going to marry your boyfriend! It has always been only you!”
“It’s too late,” Kirk says gravely. “I shall avenge my bruised ego—I mean, ‘heart.’ ”
Our cries of exaggerated terror are drowned in the deafening hissing sound, and we ourselves are drowned in a violent stream of water and foam. A minute later, the hissing is over and I dare to open one eye, blinking several times to shake the white flakes off my lashes. Kirk brings the nozzle of the fire extinguisher to his lips and blows away the last bubble of foam as if smoke off the barrel of a gun.
“I knew that that fire safety course would come in handy one day. Nobody move. I’ll be right back,” he says, his tone menacing, “with some liquid cement.”
I take a moment to become aware of how completely wet through I am and how the shirt is sticking to my skin like static cling. Adam, who’s sitting in a puddle of suds reaching as high as his waist, lets out a somewhat dazed snort, and a soap bubble pops out of his nostril. That makes me laugh so hard my supporting hand slides on the slippery floor, and in a wink, I find myself buried under the sizzling white mass as if under a lightweight snowdrift.
“Jack! Jack!” Adam calls in an affectedly hoarse whisper. He pulls me back to the surface, and I can barely breathe for laughing and coughing and spitting the bitter water out of my mouth.
“There’s a boat! Jack, wake up!”
Clutching at his hands and peering right into his eyes, I say dramatically, “Don’t say your good-byes, Rose. You’re going to die an old lady, not here, not this night. . . . Promise me you will survive, promise me now, and never let go of that promise.”
“I’ll never let go, Jack,” Adam says, knitting his eyebrows to emphasize the gravity of his vow.
And we laugh, and we talk, and we talk, and we talk. About the acts of human kindness and cruelty we heard of or witnessed ourselves, about global problems and plot holes in a certain sci-fi TV show that we pledge to love until the end of times no matter how crazy it gets, and about how hypnotic and frightening whales are, and the oceans they roam, too, and other fantastic creatures they might be hiding, and the cold black space we’re wandering through. We talk, and we barely notice that the cigarettes in our hands have long since gone out and turned into narrow sticks of ash.
I know him. I know Adam. I only met him several hours ago, and yet I know him better than I know anyone else, I understand him better than I understand myself. It’s almost as though we kept meeting in all of our lives, and we forgot, but then we remembered—not the times and places that had brought us together, but the feeling, the beautiful feeling of having found each other.
As if from somewhere far, far away, I can hear funny voices yelling and laughing, and that wakes me up.
“No, wait, don’t use it up! I’m going to need this!” I climb up the ladder and get out of the pool, shedding lumps of foam like feathers all around me. Not without some struggle, I win the helium tank from the red-haired couple Kirk and I met on our way here, and leave them giggling on the swing set in shrill voices.
“Sorry.” I slosh back to Adam, pressing the tank to my chest. The magic dissipates.
“So you’re going to try that again, aren’t you?”
“Yeah.” I shrug. “Tomorrow night, I guess. Actually, can I borrow a plastic bag from you, please? If you have a clear bag, that would be great, but honestly, anything will do. And maybe some tape? I don’t think I’ll manage to prepare everything before the morning tide, and, you know, I don’t want my body to lie around in the sun for too long, ‘cause—”
“I get it.” Adam nods, interrupting my ramblings. I can’t express how thankful I am that he doesn’t act like it’s a tragedy, that he doesn’t try to talk me out of it. That he doesn’t ask why. “Look, do you mind if I show you something? I, uh—come on, come with me.”
