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He had, once or twice, imagined it. How it would feel to say, to his bank account and his car and his condo and his girlfriend and his job, Go away. Leave me alone. So he could rest, and listen, and think, and maybe have a chance, one last chance, to remember what he’d been meaning to do before all this life he was living got started.
“Because you have accepted the central, implicit thesis of existence—you exist as real because you know, as of yet, no other way of being. But that’s the rub, aye. There are so many ways of being, of being real, of living, right now. And the true prize, the jewel at the end of the journey, is the discovery of the self. The selves, whether they be wrought or revealed, recognized at long last.” Vince’s voice quieted. “Tell me, Dex Howard. Who are you? How were you made, and how much of your making was by your own hand?”
“We are many. All of us.”
She had her dog, a mutt named Giles Corey, who was too dumb to be a familiar but super-cute.
She knew what to expect of a given day, but that didn’t always mean life was particularly interesting, or that she was particularly fulfilled, or that she knew what the point was, other than moving from one space to the next. At least when a guy with a butcher knife is after you, when a werewolf is loose or a poltergeist is messing with your furniture and your head, you know what you’re fighting for.
It was a game of his own invention: he sang songs of his choice in the style of an artist chosen by the whims of the Shuffle feature on his iPhone. That was the whole game, and that was how he came to know the genius of, say, belting Rage Against the Machine’s “Killing in the Name Of” in the style of Barbra Streisand. It was a very dumb and very entertaining game that Dex could play all by himself but chose not to. It was objectively obnoxious.
Yes,’ I told Heather. Yes, I would rather eat delicious falafel at the joint around the corner than flatter my way to an intimacy with someone for whom marriage is a financial transaction, young flesh for old, security for heirs. Yes, I would rather enjoy creamy tahini, a soft pita, those perfectly fried little balls, than torture myself about what was or was not happening in my life when my life was good. Yes, I rejected marriage—as an abstract, arbitrary signifier, as a legal and social status that determined my value, as a bullshitty benchmark I’d blown past years ago anyway. Yes!” She
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“The Arches and the Pryces aren’t exactly the Hatfields and the McCoys.” “That’s exactly who they are,” said Tuesday. “In a higher tax bracket.” She jiggled her leg. “And not to be a pedant, but the plural of Arches is Archeses. Feels weird, doesn’t it?” “Yeah,” said Dex drily. “The plural form of their last name is what feels weird about them.”
Oh you sweet, stupid man, he thought. He had broken not one but two of the Tuesday commandments: Thou shalt not gaslight. And thou shalt not condescend.
Maybe this was how adult friendships happened: by accident, embroidered over time, visible only from the height of years.
“All humans are filing cabinets,” she said finally. “Some are just better organized than others.”
Tuesday had shone a klieg light on his naked need for attention, and what was drag—what wasn’t drag, really? Drag was punk, drag was protest, drag was performance and art and fantasy, drag was as many things as there were people who practiced it—though for him, what was drag but a sequined scream? Look at me. Really look at me, please. I dare you to look at me and know me and love me.
“This would be an extremely complicated way to kill people,”
“Don’t cheat your friendships. Don’t ask them to mean less to you than they do, or think they only have value if they’re a stop on the way to a real relationship.” Dorry rolled her eyes. “All relationships are real,” said Tuesday. “Friendship can be as deep as the ocean. It’s all a kind of love, and love isn’t any one kind of thing.”
