Tag Archives: short short

173. The Author Going for the Score

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“How do you often embarrass yourself?” she asked him in the fourth quarter of the hard-fought defensive struggle of their first date. 

They had been talking about airline food before that.  She was a stewardess.

“But my boobs are real,” she had said, a non sequitur dropped into the mix as an attempt to draw him off sides, right before she had asked him about how he embarrassed himself.

“Huh?” He was confused. He was still thinking about the reality of her boobs.

“On your dating profile,” she said. “You say that you have a tendency to embarrass yourself in public. What do you mean by that?”

“Oh,” he said. “That.” But he wasn’t sure, suddenly, what to do. He called a timeout and went to the restroom to confer with his coach.

“If you want to get into that end zone,” Coach said, “you got to keep it together.” Coach had the voice of Mickey Goldmill, Sylvester Stalone’s fictional boxing trainer in the Rocky films. “No big mistakes. You hearing me?”

He nodded that he did.

“This is the red zone!” Coach said. “You got to go for the win and punch it in.”

He knew what Coach meant. He could not afford, after the tightly-executed running game tonight, and the smart play-calling, to end as he’d ended the previous four dates, four different women, all from the online dating site.

The first date, after a late and hopeful drive deep into her territory, had ended with him turning over the ball. The second and third stopped him at the goal line, making him settle for a field goal attempt in both cases (the first field goal had been blocked, and the second one he had shanked to the right). His fourth date, a defense attorney, had beat him up so badly over dinner that he limped back to the locker room in tears.

“Now go get ‘em,” Coach said, and patted the Author on the ass as he jogged out to the center of the dining room.

Uncharacteristically, for him, he did not get honest—in his experience, a deal-breaker. He did not tell her, for example, about the “incident” when in grad school. He had come unglued at a reading late spring of his last year, true, but nobody had ever cared to hear his side of the story. They ostracized him, basically, in the writing workshops afterwards, and his thesis advisor refused to return his calls.

This was after the publication and many accolades of his first book of poetry, shortlisted for various awards. But what they didn’t care to know, those that judged him then, was that though he seemed kind of crazy, to be sure, when he came out onto the stage for his reading with what appeared to be some seagull shit on the lapel of his wrinkled tweed jacket—either seagull shit or a little of that bleu cheese dipping sauce served with the buffalo wing appetizers not an hour (and three beers) earlier, the only thing he’d consumed all day beside the Bloody Mary for breakfast—was that his girlfriend had broken up with him not fifteen minutes prior to the reading.

Although it was no excuse, of course, he at least thought that it might help to shed light onto what happened partway through his first poem. A woman in the front row took a call on her cell phone, and though the Author tried to go on, he had been so distracted that he stopped right there and ripped the page out of his book. “What the fuck, what the fuck!” he yelled at the woman. “You’re taking a call right in the middle of my reading? How rude is that!”

He said some other generally awful and douchebaggery type things—really terrible terrible things, actually—until, with tears, the woman said, “My friend was just calling because she loves your work, but she couldn’t make it tonight. Her husband left her last year, and she’s working two jobs to support her family, and all she wanted was to spend her thirty minute lunch hour from her nighttime grocery job to hear you read. I was going to put her on speaker phone.”

But that was not the worst of it. As the Author was walking over to the side of the stage where he had thrown the book, the woman said, while gulping on her tears, “My friend’s youngest son has cancer, and this is all she had hoped for, to get thirty minutes of peace in the back room, sitting on the boxes of bananas or whatever, to hear you read.”

This was one small example of how the Author often embarrassed himself in public. But rather than go there, and because he realized that the scouting team had reported back on this tendency of his, he called an audible and said to the stewardess, “I sometimes hiccup in the elevator.”

“A simple hiccup, really?” she said, and reached across for his hand. “Is that all? We can work with a hiccup or two. In fact, a cute little hiccup out of that cute little mouth”—she reached across for his nose, but missed it slightly, touching him on the cheek, more drunk than he had realized—”and you just might score tonight.”

172. The Author Reflects on the Empty Bar Napkin in His Box of Notes

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Not to overstate the obvious, but I am an old man. I stand before you as an old man and my oldness, most likely—or elderliness, is probably what I mean—is all that you see. Sure, you see me as the culmination of my work, as well, the things that I have done, or accomplished, over my prolific career. You have heard the many stories, too, no doubt, of my long, wild and somewhat troubled life.

But please indulge me, if you will. Tonight, for the first time, instead of reading from my latest work, I have brought in my box of notes. Although there are a few pieces of paper here, and receipts, most of all of these notes that I have before me, after a thirty year tenured position at Oberlin, the Ivy League of the Midwest, so-called [cough, clearing of his mucous-filled-sounding throat], are on napkins, as you will soon see [pulling some from the box now], from pizza places, coffee shops, convenience stores, subway sandwich shops.

This note here is written across Lady Gaga’s face, from an article in People magazine, while in the waiting room of my doctor’s office for a colonoscopy.

And this is on a paper towel from the restroom of the court, apparently—or so I scribbled on one end here—when my first wife and I filed for divorce [pausing to read from the note]. I recognize the first few lines for the story that I began here, even if I’m quite unsure at this remove about how that particular story ends. But that is not my concern. The story has been published elsewhere. The beginning—the inception of the idea itself—is what has long appealed to me. And appeals still.

And this long note here, written on toilet paper [pulling it delicately with two hands from the box], I remember well. It was from when I locked myself in the bathroom for three hours fearing my second wife’s plate-throwing tirade. I had a bottle in there with me, and from these notes—written on the whole roll of toilet of paper, finishing on the cardboard roll—I later published my story, “On the Outs,” in The New Yorker.

Some of my best poems started on bar napkins covered with Bloody Mary mix, from my morning trips to clear my head. And this one here [pulling it from the box], and here [pulling it, too, from the box], are time-stamped, as it were, to the later evening bar hours, brownish here and there from the whiskey.

photo-63

I have a special fondness for these notes (more so, probably, than my own kids), although I’m not sure why. One thing I probably like about them is their texture and their texturizing quality, or how they texturized my life. I like their paperish vulnerability. I like how the older notes are yellowed with age and are most difficult to read.

To be sure, these are not mere notes for former (or even future) works-in-progress. Some of them are To Do lists that I’ve kept for nostalgic reasons, for their reminder of my once daily effort of fiercely pushing into and against this world. I also have a few love notes, like this one written here on the back of a grocery receipt [pausing to read], directed towards a Kaitlin, who refused, apparently, to return my calls. I cannot now remember this Kaitlin, but I have the note.

[Again with the cough and the clearing of mucous.]

I am an old man now. You see? You must all think I have senility and that I’ve forgotten that I’ve already mentioned that. You probably all see me as a sad and no more than lost and lonely old man. Am I grieving for a life that will soon be over? Probably not. Do I have any silly or naive notion that these notes will be collected, archived, enshrined? Of course not. I have probably close to five-thousand of them, or more, I would guess, and I will request that all of them be burned when I go. Throw them and me, as well, if it helps, on top of a pyre and burn us both.

There is one thing that troubles me, however, and it is the reason for my deviance in my approach tonight.  I came across this napkin for the first time the other day when going through this box. Is it a bar napkin? [Holding it up to the audience.] Most likely so. But its whiteness, untainted by age, suggests that the drink has not yet arrived. It is still early in the evening.The napkin is empty as well, as perhaps you can see [again holding it up]—certainly, you there, in the front row can—but what might this mean? Why this one empty napkin in my box full of notes? What had I been trying, even if only silently, to say? Obviously, at this remove, I cannot know.

photo-62

It is a little worn, wrinkled, as you perhaps can see as well [once again holding it up to the audience], which makes me love it more. Is this the napkin to be scribbled on in my dying hours? Of course not, no. Life is not like that. Life is not a bar napkin. Life is made on the bar napkin. That’s probably what I mean. But it is the message, haunting me in its invisibility, from this lone napkin, that now escapes me. Strangely, even more so, is that this napkin—the one free of language, of the words that fill our lives, the words that we live by and shape us—is the one I now value most. I’ve grown quite fond of it. Scribble on me, it seems to be saying. Scribble on me, and get on with it. It can taunt me like this, knowing full well, of course, that I will not. I cannot. I won’t.

158. Lord Alfred Tennyson Reincarnates as a Bear

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Lord Alfred Tennyson reincarnates as a bear and lumbers into your campsite while your parents are roasting marshmallows for s’mores. How you know this, exactly, you cannot say. You are only four. You are only four, but it is your first major otherworldly intuition. You don’t even know, of course, who Lord Alfred Tennyson is. Only much later, during your junior year of college when reading Idylls of the King, will you remember again the bear and later that same evening while not even drunk—or not even as drunk as much as your friends (and certainly not stoned)—“fall into” your first channeling session.

Your friends are spellbound as you tell them things about their lives that they haven’t told anybody or have never really understood so completely until now. You soon become infamous all over campus for your Saturday evening sessions and eventually, on the advice of your new boyfriend John, a business major, begin charging for these readings.

You prefer not to think of it as channeling. You rather would like to call it interpretation. You are “reading” the other world is all. But by whichever name it is called, you will understand—or will be told—that a group of non-physical entities has been waiting for the right medium to get their messages across. And you have been chosen. You will eventually learn to call this collective of non-physical entities Alfred or, more privately, Alfred the Bear, after the first experience with the s’mores.

All of this does not go down well with your father, a Baptist minister, nor with your mother, weeping for her many minutes long phone “conversations.” She peppers her weepy madness with the occasional Tourette’s-like outburst, “Satan, get out! Get out of my daughter!” This will begin the next twenty-five years of silence between yourself and your parents.

You will drop out of college during your senior year, marry John, eventually co-author a book, The Law of Repulsion, the first of many bestsellers, and hit the road. In those early years, when you show up in the smaller, unincorporated communities on the outskirts of the larger suburbia areas for your speaking engagements, people will be standing outside the venues with their signs.

Go HOME
to HELL you
F–KING Devil!!!
(John 3:16)

Your husband John will say that this bad publicity is just the kind of good publicity that you need to launch Alfred’s career. And how right he is. He is right about most everything. He will be right until the very end when, after these many years of traveling and working together, and loving one another, John had an affair with a woman half your age and left.

It is not a new story, only new to you.

Since this betrayal, it has been most difficult for you to get out of bed until thirty-minutes before your evening speaking engagements. Another problem, most certainly, is how lately you’ve been feeling Alfred pulling away. More and more recently, in fact, it seems like you are speaking not for Alfred the Bear so much as you are for yourself. If John were only here, he would know exactly what to say to soothe you.

Perhaps it is time to retire Alfred to the Empyrean, or wherever it is that this collective of non-physical entities “lives,” outside of space and time, and get on with your own retirement, in the here and now. Although no longer young, you are young enough. But retirement is a big decision and part of you wishes to continue on, if for no other reason to show John that you don’t need him.

And so swings the pendulum of your heart.

On one side: Soothe me. Look over me. Love me.

And the other: Satan, get out! Get out of my life!

To help yourself get back “into the right space,” you’ve been brushing up on your aborted English degree. Most specifically, you’ve returned to Tennyson’s Idylls of the King. Idylls is a cycle of twelve narrative poems based on the Arthurian legends, particularly the great betrayal by Queen Guinevere, who falls in love with Lancelot, and seeds the beginning of King Arthur’s fall from power.

And then in Milwaukee one February evening, during a particularly hard-driven snow, you feel terribly homesick for the first time in years. You decide to visit your mother, a now mostly harmless, muttering old woman. Your father had died several years earlier.

When drinking tea with your mother in the living room of your childhood home, she tells you for the first time most candidly that she doesn’t know anymore what she believes. She says that the old story no longer holds her as much as it once did.

You cannot believe what you are hearing, of course, and keep as quiet as possible, with your cup of tea in your lap, hoping that she will go on. She tells you that after her husband, your father, died, she found a secret shoebox of letters by a long-time friend of his. She looks over at you. “A sexual friend.”

“Dad had a secret lover?” You feel the blood returning to your hands and feet. The frozenness over the last few months since your own husband’s betrayal, even if only slightly, begins to thaw. “But who was she? Did you know her? What was the woman’s name?”

It takes your mother a long while to respond. You wait. You will wait as long as it takes, listening to the grandfather clock ticking from the corner of the living room. Finally, she says, “It wasn’t a she.”

You literally drop your cup of tea right there onto the floor, so that in a mad dash for the towels and a bucket of hot, soapy water, to clean it up, the moment is lost. It will take you a long while—many months, actually—to digest what your mother, a stout Baptist believer for most of the eighty years of her life, one-time missionary to Africa, volunteer at the food bank, choir leader, and etc., etc., has revealed to you.

What does it mean to no longer believe in the old ways? What does it mean to no longer understand the world as it has long been understandable?

Tomorrow, for the first time, most clearly when looking out onto all those open and expectant faces in the hotel meeting room packed to capacity, will you see how wrong you’ve been. You’ve been wrong all along. But only when these same people come up to you afterwards to thank you and Alfred, will you see how you’ve written about it even more wrongly, printed there in the books that they’re now holding out to you, asking for you to sign, holding your own books out to you, with tears in their eyes.

The interpretations that we most need, Alfred once said to you, have to do with where we stand, and with what we never really fully understand, and with how we are too often misunderstood, at any given moment, in the here, as the saying goes, and now. A line then will come back to you from Idylls, “All at once they found the world,” and you will regret that you had not at least tried to comfort her, Guinevere, left behind staring into her tea. You could have told her that everything will be fine, in time, even okay. But then again, maybe it won’t be. Who, really, can say?

139. WARNING! Please READ THIS Before Adopting a Pet

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To be clear, I had wanted a fish. It was my wife’s bright idea to get the dog, a Collie-Rottweiler mix. We called him Roger. We were doing a good deed. He was a shelter-rescue with a limp. Yes, there were some warning signs, things I should have picked up on right away. The dog growled, for instance, whenever I got within five feet of him, but my wife assured me that he would get better over time.

One evening I came home late from work to find my wife drinking Zinfandel by the fireplace in the living room and reading poetry by Wallace Stevens out loud to the dog, curled at her feet. When I tried to step into the living room, Roger growled at me. I asked my wife from the other side of the couch if I could speak with her and motioned her into the entryway where I told her that perhaps it was time to ask the dog to leave.

“But where would he go?” she said. “He has no home.”

“I don’t really care,” I said. “He’s dangerous. He’s a threat to our safety.”

“Don’t you think you’re overreacting?” she said.

“No, I do not.”

“Oh, honey,” she said, and patted me on the head. “It will all be good. You’ll see.” She spoke to me in a chirpy, sing-song voice, and again patted me on the head.

“Why are you talking like that? And stop patting me on the head.”

The next week when I came back from a business trip, I found Roger and my wife spooning in the bed, under the sheets. The TV in the room was on. When I tried to lift one of Roger’s paws off the remote control to turn the TV off, he jumped out of the bed and pinned me to the floor, his fangs hovering over my neck. My wife hurried out of bed to pull Roger away and ask me what I had done to set him off.

“Are you kidding? Me? You’re blaming me? That damn dog nearly killed me!”

“Honey,” she said. “You really need to pull yourself together. I’m glad you’re home and everything, but if you can please go sleep in the den, both Roger and I would appreciate it.”

“Roger and you? So you two are a unit now?”

The dog, pacing behind her, began to growl as my wife smiled at me sadly and said, “Be a good boy, and go sleep in the den, and tomorrow you’ll get a treat.”

“I don’t want a treat. And stop using that stupid voice with me. I’m a grown man!”

The next night when I came home from work, as my wife had promised, there was a treat for me—two wrapped gifts, actually—sitting on the table. I felt bad then. Perhaps I had been overreacting. My wife did love me, after all.

“Wow,” I said. “What’s the occasion? Is it my birthday?”

After a dinner of prime rib that I basically gulped down without mastication, it was so delicious, I unwrapped the first gift.

“Is this a collar?” I said.

“Of course not. Think of it more as a choker. It’s very fashionable these days with all the men.”

“Which men?”

“Oh, you know, the men.”

“But I’ve never seen a man wearing something like this. No man I know at least.” The collar had a pet tag attached to it printed with my name and number. ”But thank you anyway. I appreciate the thought.”

“For my sake, though, can you just try it on?”

“But shouldn’t Roger wear this?”

“Why?”

“Because, not to point out the obvious or anything, but isn’t Roger the dog?”

And then I unwrapped the second box, the bigger of the two, and pulled out a cone-shaped thing.

“What’s this?” I said.

“It’s a lampshade collar.”

“But what’s it for?”

“Well,” she said. “It’s meant to prevent the wearer from not biting anyone, and I thought it might be appropriate—”

Roger barked twice.

“Yes, sorry,” she said to the dog, and turned back to me. “Roger and I both would feel most comfortable if you wore that around your head whenever you were in our presence.”

“But what for?”

“It’s frankly your anger,” she said to me. “You have some real anger issues, and we’re concerned for our safety.”

“I DO NOT HAVE ANGER ISSUES!” I slammed my fist against the table.

My wife said, “That’s exactly my point. You can put the cone around your head whenever you’re feeling exactly how you’re feeling now.”

One late morning when working from home, I heard my wife talking on the phone with the people from the shelter. I clearly heard her say, “Return adoption,” and I went out to the kitchen to find her. I felt as if my whole body was wagging.

“Thank God, Shirley, that you’re finally getting your wits about you,” I began to say to her, but was distracted by the smudge of something brown on the top of one of her clogs. Chocolate, I thought. I bent down to sniff at it, and though my highly sensitive sense of smell these days let me know that it was more than likely only a dried swath of mud, I licked it off anyway. Yep, mud. And then as I was trying to get the bad taste out of my mouth, Roger came up to stand behind my wife.

“The dog is walking now?” I snarled from the floor.

“Please,” she began to say to me.

“Shirley,” Roger said, putting his arm around her waist to get her attention. When she looked over at him, he said, “Remember what the therapist said? Don’t engage.”

“He’s talking too?” I said. “And what therapist? Who has been paying for that?”

But they clearly could not understand me.

Roger poured himself a cup of coffee and sat down at the table, in my spot, with the paper.

I whimpered and went to my bed in the den where I also had a bowl for food and one for water, along with the TV and my toys.

Things were tense, to be sure, with our new arrangement, but were generally okay until, one day without the cone, I don’t know what came over me, but I bit my wife in the leg. After locking me in the den so that she could go to the emergency room for stitches, my wife returned for me, told me to put the cone over my head, and then ushered me out to the car.

“Where are we going?” I said as I crawled into the passenger seat.

“To a happy place,” she said. ”Think of your most happy place in the world.”

I thought of that place. “Okay,” I said. My voice came at me in strange echoey reverb from inside the lampshade collar. “I think I’ve got it.”

“Good,” she said. “That’s a good boy.” And drove in silence the rest of the way.

121. Dear Eddie Vedder

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January 20, 20–

Dear Eddie Vedder,

I sometimes imagine Stone Gossard ramming you with his electric guitar while you sing the song Jeremy up into my vadge hole

I especially like that part “Jeremy spoke in class today Jeremy spoke in class today.”

Love,
Jessica

January 25, 20–

Dear Eddie Vedder,

My counselor does not think it appropriate for me to imagine Stone Gossard ramming you with his electric guitar while you sing Jeremy up into my vadge hole. He says first off vadge hole isnt even a word. No duh I want to say to him. Its two words. But I say instead would you prefer I say snatch and my counselor goes all pinkly embarrassed and for like a looooonnnnggg time. (Thank goodness I didnt say cunt.)

My counselor says after the pale color of his face comes back that he doesnt think it respectful to have Mr. Vedder singing any song up into any womans vadge hole. Including mine. Or up into any other hole for that matter. (He calls you Mr. Vedder can you imagine that?) Fine I say but what if he sings it into my cleavage and my counselor looks at me sadly and clicks his pen and scribbles down some notes about how crazy I must be.

Love,
Jessica

P.S. I am crazy (just so know).

P.S.S. But probably everyone is at least a little crazy dont you think?

February 1, 20–

Dear Eddie Veddie (if I can call you that),

Sorry if you thought it was wrong for me to fantasize about you getting all up into my vadge hole with your voice. i’m in here exactly for these sorts of things. The counselors are working on it. I guess I should introduce myself. My name is Jessica. i’m fifteen. I used to listen to Jeremy when my father YOU KNOW WHAT way back when. Its very fucked messed up in here. The kids are all so messed up in here.

I love Betterman, Nothingman, Off He Goes, Alive and Black. But Jeremy is my ALL TIME FAVORITE. (I dont like any of the new stuff. The newer stuff no offense is gay.)

Will you send me something? Like a sweaty shirt that you wore at a concert in 1993 and havent washed yet?

Love,
Jessica

P.S. My counselor says that he wont send the last letter until I admit that nothing ever of the sort happened with my father who left before I was born. These delusions are what the medications and the talk talk talk is supposed to help me with. They say i’m a good candidate for schizophrenia.

P.S.S. There is a schizophrenic in each of us (I sometimes hear myself say).

February 14, 20–

Dear Mr. (hahaha!) Vedder,

I was thinking that you should sing a Valentines Day song to me today and broadcast it around the world. I will be the one alone at home drawing pictures with my shirt off and also the one running in the woods. I like that video with Jeremy. Ive seen it a thousand times maybe more.

Anyways, i’m thinking about you as always. Give my love to Broadway. JK. I dont even know what that means, but I guess its a famous line otherwise how would I have ever even heard of it?

Love,
Jessica

February 23, 20–

Dear Ed,

It snowed again today and I have not heard from you.

Love,
Jessica

March 9, 20–

Dear E,

I still love you even if you keep ignoring me.

Love,
J

March 19, 20–

Dear Eddie,

My counselor says you must be very busy. I understand. i’m pretty busy myself just so you know. It isnt like i’m just waiting around for your letters or anything. i’m very important in here nowadays. The other kids all want to talk to me. They want to hear the lyrics for all your songs. I can sing most of them except for the gay stupid ones which you have to admit you wrote a lot of those especially lately. But that is okay. You are only human after all is what my counselor says. You put on your pants one leg at a time just like everyone else he says. Whatever that means. Of course you do. I wasnt even talking about how you put on your pants. (But I would like to know how you take them off. JK!)

Love,
Jessica

P.S. Please dont let my bad or crazy manners get in the way of communicating with me.

April 1, 20–

Eddie, Eddie, Eddie!!

I got out yesterday and my foster family is letting me take care of the puppies the family dog just had and they said I could have a puppy too. I know exactly the one I want. He is the runt of the litter. I will name him Eddie.

April Fools! I will name him Jeremy of course!

Okay, I have much poop to clean up. Make sure to write me. My new address is on the front upper left corner of the envelope. I dotted the i in my name with a heart. Did you see that? Do you like it? I could dot with hearts everywhere if I wanted but I didnt know if you would think it was too crazy.

Love,
Jessica

P.S. The enclosed underpants are mine but they’re washed just so you know.

P.S.S. Send me some of your facial hair next time you shave.

April 4, 20–

Dead Ed!

Is that it? Are you dying and therefore cant respond? YOU ARE VERY MEAN!

Love,
Jessica

P.S. But I still love you.

P.S.S. EVEN IF YOU ARE ALSO A VERY VERY VERY MEAN MAN WHO NEVER RESPONDS TO ONE OF MY LETTERS!!

P.S.S.S. (Is this what you do to all your girls?)

P.S.S.S.S. Jeremy is so cute you would really love him.

April 9, 20–

Eddie,

All day Ive been unknown to myself and walking around strange.

My new foster mother Betsy said they gave Jeremy away but nobody gives puppies away especially in the middle of the night. I know exactly what they did. They took Jeremy out and they killed him. They killed him Eddie. They killed Jeremy while I slept and i’m very sad about this and I will probably start cutting again just so you know.

But anyway its not that bad. They have some video games here that I like.

Make sure to write, K?

Love you always,
Jessica

P.S. Say hi to the rest of the guys for me will you also? Say hi to Mike and Jeff and Stone and Matt.

P.S.S. Say hi to Boom Gaspar for me too even if I dont know why he plays in the band because he doesnt seem like he does anything except pound around on his organ like he is having a seizure during that super gay song about crazy mary.

115. My Dog Paul

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My dog Paul was twitching beside my chair in his sleep, and I knew what that meant. The bad dreams had returned. A few months earlier, I went to a pet psychic to try to determine exactly what these bad dreams were about. It had gotten so bad at that point that I’d wake to find Paul hovering over my body, growling at me in his sleep. After I slapped his muzzle to wake him up, he would lick my hand, at once embarrassed and ashamed. 

I learned from the pet psychic that several lifetimes earlier Paul had been the head Buddhist monk in a Tibetan monastery, and I his loyal and faithful servant. Aside from my duties as some sort of glorified gong-sounder at the approach of prayer time, I massaged the head monk’s neck with aromatic oils. I fed him water from a bamboo cup when he was fasting, applied the strong-smelling eastern remedies to his limbs to help the blood circulate, and took him for walks in his rickshaw while he swatted at himself with his fly wand. These were only some of my many, daily tasks, and I performed them happily, with only the thought of nirvana.

I also had my secret name for the head monk. The pet psychic was reluctant to tell me this until I plied her with another twenty dollars. I called him Vagina Mouth, apparently, in the language of whatever Tibetan people speak. He had been silent for as long as the other monks had known him, for over thirty years, and perhaps Vagina Mouth was my attempt at some sort of clever wordplay.

Only during my next visit with the pet psychic did another possibility arise for the nickname. In this session, I learned of my secret “oral explorations” with the monk. That’s how the psychic phrased it, anyway: “oral explorations.” All the while, she had Paul under hypnosis. He lay still on the couch as if dead.

One afternoon during prayer time, the head monk broke his vow of silence to whisper, “Peat moss”—a most strange thing to say. Even when hearing it now, it sounds strange, and I understand what it basically means. But being as our community of monks lived on top of a mountain, we knew nothing then of peat moss or even of these places called bogs in the first place. We had a hundred words for prayer and snow and chanting and enlightenment, but not one practical word to explain this strange noun. At least we suspected it to be a noun, although we couldn’t, of course, be sure.

The head monk went into another period of extended silence. How long he would remain with his lips closed, it was difficult to tell. But his revelation troubled us. We could not find the definition of peat moss in our library of scrolls that predated history. We consulted the I Ching and came up empty there as well. We painted mandalas in an effort to help rebalance our community after the arrival of this potentially threatening word. We fasted for weeks and fondled our prayer beads incessantly, but nothing helped. One monk went crazy and began eating his feces. Another monk was caught sleeping with the goats. Something had to be done.

The other monks came up with a plan. What this plan was, the psychic could not tell. It is possible that the plan itself had never been put into action. Whatever the case, what came in very clear for the psychic was how a monk on a meditative walk one spring afternoon, discovered the head monk and I rocking the rickshaw in a cave along the mountain path leading to the monastery.

Our sin was reported to a tribunal of monks who, after a long period of discussion and prayer, reached a decision. If Paul broke his vow of silence to tell the community what he had meant by peat moss, both of our lives would be spared. Paul silently accepted his guilty plea with one sad shake of his head. Both of us were later bound together as I screamed at him to talk to them, to try to reason, to open his goddamned mouth. But it was too late. They put us into his rickshaw, set the rickshaw on fire, and pushed us off a mountain slope.

Give or take a few minor details, this basically brings us to the strange happenings of this afternoon. After waking him from his bad dreams, I said, “Do you want to go for a walk, Paul?” He barked that he did and, once outside, began taking us in a direction that I was not used to going.

Rather than reining him in with a stern word as I might have done on any other afternoon, I allowed Paul the belief that he was leading the way. He came to a house that I had never been to before. He parked himself on the sidewalk in front of the house and would not budge for as hard as I pulled on his leash.

“What is it, Paul? You want me to go up to the door? Is that it?”

Paul wagged his tail.

“Fine,” I said and walked up the pathway to knock on the door. I waited a few moments and looked back at Paul as if to say, There, are you happy? 

I turned to go when the psychic herself answered the door, wearing a GAP sweatshirt, her hair all staticky and mashed down on one side, as if I’d woken her from a deep nap. “What are you doing here?” she said.

I looked back at Paul. He barked. I turned back to the psychic.

Again, she asked me, “What are you doing here? And how did you find my address?”

But I could not say, and so I said nothing at all.