Drops
Image by Malte MuellerMy girlfriend says someone in America invented a medicine against feeling alone. She heard about it yesterday on Nightline, and now she’s sending a special delivery letter to her sister to ask her to mail her a crate of it. On Nightline they said that all the retail chains on the East Coast were selling it already and that in New York it was a big hit. It came in two forms, drops and spray can. My girlfriend asked for the drops. Just because she doesn’t want to feel alone, there’s no reason to harm the ozone layer.
You put the drops in your ear, and within twenty minutes you stop feeling lonely. It works on some chemical thing in your brain, they said on the radio, but my girlfriend couldn’t follow. She’s not exactly Marie Curie, my girlfriend. She’s kind of dumb, even. Sits around the whole time thinking I’m going to cheat on her and leave her and all that. But I love her, I love her like crazy. Now, she says when she gets back from the post office, she doesn’t have to live with me any more. Because the drops will be here any day, and she’s not afraid of being alone any more.
Leave me? I say. For some drops? Why? But I love her, I love her like crazy. Move out if you want, I tell her, but for your information, no stinking eardrops are going to love you the way I love you. Except that eardrops won’t ever cheat on her either. That’s what she says, and then she leaves. As if I would.
She’s rented a loft downtown, and now she waits for the mailman every day. Me, the mail doesn’t do it for me, and I don’t have any friends in other countries who’ll send me things anyway. If I did, I’d have gone to them a long time ago. I’d go out drinking with them and I’d tell them my troubles. I’d hug them a lot and I wouldn’t be embarrassed to cry next to them and stuff. We could spend years that way, our whole life. A hundred per cent natural, much better than drops.
Housekeeping Note:As requested by readers, my narration of the story in English is followed by a bonus recording. So if you hear me talking to you in a weird language after the story ends, I’d like to assure you that I’m not mumbling a spell to conjure up the spirit of Lilith or trying to hypnotize you into joining the Mossad. It’s just me reading the story in Hebrew.Translated by Miriam Shlesinger. Published by Vintage 2008, First published in Great Britain in 2007 by Chatto and Windus. Copyright © Etgar Keret. English translation copyright © Etgar Keret. Published by arrangement with the Institute for the Translation of Hebrew Literature.Intro translated by Jessica Cohen.
