The Wallcreeper

I was looking at the map when Stephen swerved, hit the rock, and occasioned the miscarriage.

At Elvis's suggestion I took a course in Berndeutsch. I learned ten verbs for work: work hard (drylige, bugle, chrampfe, schaffe, wärche), get stuck with jobs no one else wants to do (chrüpple), work slowly (chnorze), work carelessly (fuuschte), work absent-mindedly (lauere). Stay at home and putter around doing little harmless chores (chlütterle). I learned fast and the teacher said maybe it was an advantage my not knowing any German. Then the ten weeks of the course were over and I didn't know anything anymore, except that I would never look for a job.

Now, all my life I had fantasized about being used sexually in every way I could think of on the spur of the respective moment. How naïve I was, I said to myself. In actuality this was like using a bedpan on the kitchen counter. I knew with certainty that “pain” is a euphemism even more namby-pamby than “defilement.” Look at Stephen! He thinks he’s having sex! Smell his hand! It’s touching my hair! I thought, Tiff my friend, we shall modify a curling iron and burn this out of your brain. But I didn’t say anything. I acted like in those teen feminist poems where it’s date rape if he doesn’t read you the Antioch College rules chapter and verse while you’re glumly failing to see rainbows. I was still struggling to dissociate myself into an out-of-body experience when Stephen came, crying out like a dinosaur.

I gasped for air, dreading the moment when he would pull out, and thought, Girls are lame.

“He then proceeded to dance as if he had never seen me, or any other human being, before in his life. Cranes came to mind.”

“The ospreys would have to take a back seat, because he and I were that most common of endangered species: adulterers.”

“At the funeral, I finally met [name redacted]’s mother. She looked at me with a hatred I’d only ever seen before on a caracal in the zoo.”

“Your mom told you to smoke weed?”
“No! She told me drummers smoke weed to keep from getting carpal tunnel syndrome.”
“I thought they did it because drumming is boring and monotonous.”
“It’s not monotonous if you smoke weed.”

"Once I moved out of my parents’ house, I calmed down a lot. I just didn’t like having people breathing down my neck."

That made sense. It would be a reason to marry someone too shy to ask personal questions. It was also a way of saying: I wasn’t doing drugs when we met and I’m not doing drugs now, but if you breathe down my neck, I’ll do drugs.

[...]

Our next stop was called Mancuso’s Loft. It was running drum 'n' bass. The proprietor waved us in. Here I saw Stephen through new eyes. Then I ran to the ladies’ room and stuffed my ears with toilet paper. Stephen led me to the floor and yelled, “I’m going to dance a little bit!” He then proceeded to dance as if he had never seen me, or any other human being, before in his life.

[...]

She stumbled along, obviously unused to explaining her actions or motivations to anyone and therefore making them as transparent as frog spawn. She wasn’t up to prevaricating with every word, the skill she so admired in Stephen. It takes a lifetime of practice. She had found her master, her teacher, too late. She simply knew she was about to lose something valuable, and like anybody else, she wanted to take the next logical step to make it her own: She wanted to fuck it.

The poster campaign hadn’t cost Stephen any real heartache. But once the money ran out, Global Rivers Alliance’s self-promotion migrated online, and to his sorrow, every single person who toyed with the idea of wiring two dollars to George first felt compelled to debate the merits of Wasserkraft Nein Danke with him. Most were themselves running tiny organisations that had arisen by spontaneous generation or mitosis. No one had supporters. Stephen spent hours writing closely argued defenses of himself and his aims. Each one is unique, because you can’t copy anything anymore without being caught. Rushed, because anyone who didn’t get an answer within fourteen hours would write again with more questions.

He was silent for three minutes, as long as the minutes of silence that pepper the conversations in Women in Love by D.H. Lawrence.

[...]

“A life laid waste before it begins,” I said, quoting Stephen’s frequent references to the profoundly discouraging climax of the classic Icelandic novel Independent People by Halldor Laxness.

“I wouldn’t go that far.”

[...]

The sordidness of my reflections was dragging my mood through the cocoa powder, as the Germans say, and I recalled that the author of Philosophy in the Boudoir did not come to a good end, so I joined in the conversation. “I like birds,” I said.