Bubblegum

by Adam Levin

“ ‘Pain,’ ” he said. “Or ‘feel’ for that matter. Even ‘eating,’ ‘drinking,’ ‘hungry,’ and ‘thirsty.’ Please forgive this annoying thing I’m doing with my fingers when I say those words, but they’re not the right ones. They’re insufficient metaphors. We don’t, however, have the right words yet, so they’re the ones I’m forced to use. But ‘pain’ is a kind of information, and ‘feeling pain’—or ‘feeling’ anything at all—is a process. ‘Eating’ and ‘drinking’—responsive behaviors to processed information, to the ‘feelings’ of ‘hunger’ and ‘thirst.’ Maybe try, Mrs. Magnet, to think of a personal computer. It ‘eats’ and ‘drinks’ electricity, its ‘body’ is plastic and metal, its ‘organs’ silicon and plastic and metal, and when it processes code it doesn’t ‘know’ how to handle—if, say, it’s an Apple computer, and you insert a Windows diskette in its drive—the computer ‘feels’ ‘pain,’ in response to which it behaves by beeping and sometimes giving off grinding sounds.

What more was one’s sense of humor, she asked, than one’s sense of when it was appropriate to make laugh sounds? And how, she asked, does one first learn when it’s appropriate for one to make laugh sounds if not by observing when others make laugh sounds? And why does one bother to learn to make laugh sounds at appropriate times if not to fit into the group from which one’s learning?

second opinion, given the amount of time and stress and pain and extra cost involved, wasn’t—not by any human measure—worth spending a moment of her life’s final energies on. She had a family. She could go home that night. She should go home that night and be with her family. The opiates and benzodiazepines would help. She went home with us that night. The drugs might have helped.

She’s embarrassed for me to see her in pain? She thinks I’ll be ashamed of her or something? Or that I’ll think…what? That’s almost worse than I caused it. No, it is worse. I’m her husband. It’s worse. She shouldn’t…” He’d started to cry.

The whole time, your dad had his arm around me, and he’d held me tighter while I was making the crying sounds, and once I’d ceased attempting to speak, the crying sounds stopped, and he asked me if there was something he could do to help me feel better—which, you should know (one last important lesson from your dying mother, here) is really the best way to deal with crying people you love (assuming they’re really crying): you hold them tight and wait til they’re quiet before offering any kind of practical help (you want them to feel free to cry, unrushed; you want to avoid giving the impression that their crying’s a strain on your ability to comfort them)—and when, forgetting myself, I tried to explain to him all I’ve just described, of course all that came out was the moaning and clicking, the humming, the shushing. And again, of course, your father held me tighter.

Hating my death—and, Belt, please make no mistake, I hate it—is a matter, first and foremost, of hating the fact that I won’t get to keep on being your mother.

If your father has done as I’ve asked him to—and I have no reason to believe he hasn’t, he promised—you were given this letter in the very same moment that you learned of my death, and, as you read it the first time, I doubt much of what I’m saying is getting through to you, but it comforts me to think that when you read this letter down the line, when you’re older, you’ll know I avoided the very worst. Not just that I didn’t (as I believe I’ve already demonstrated) choose, while in a state of rage or confusion, to die, but that I did not die in a state of rage or confusion. That I died when I should have, when it was the single best thing I could have done, and that I knew it was the single best thing I could have done. Please, for the sake of your own well-being, try to know those things as soon as you can. Knowing them won’t by any means make my death less devastating for you—I’m your only mother, and I’m gone—but it should mitigate any devastation that might have otherwise arisen from the fact that I died of suicide. That, at least, is my hope. Given the content of your journals, I think it’s a reasonable hope.

We each ate a couple or three spoons of ice cream, then she started to cry, or to try to talk, and then she stopped crying or trying to talk, and she paused the movie, took our bowls from our laps and set them on the table, and extended her arms and hugged us together, all our heads touching, and I don’t know who was sobbing but one of us was sobbing, my father or me, and the other one told her we both understood, said, “I understand. He understands, too,” and for a while we remained that way, pressed head to head, then my mother sat upright, and we followed suit, and she gave us our bowls of ice cream back, and she unpaused Star Wars, and we finished our ice cream.

No, all I’ve ever needed to convince anyone of—less often than some women, more often than others—was that, despite being a woman, I was also a human being.

All I was saying was that the members of my organization treat overloading as a sacrament. We believe that Curios, wherever they come from—and the Universal Family of Integrated Generosity has no official dogma regarding their origins, by the way—we believe that Curios are here to teach us the beauty of selflessness. Why else, I ask you, would they incite us to overload? to bring about their own permanent deactivation? to do so at the very moment, Philip, that we love them most? They are selfless beings.”

Klar, entweder sie sind Roboter oder heilige Wesen - hauptsache sie dienen uns und unserne Wünschen

because it appeared to suggest there was more to imagine, far more to imagine (if not to discover), than I’d long suspected. New modes of fascination. New tales to tell. Deep and formerly unthinkable thoughts. And the world seemed generous and full of potential, pregnant with thrilling, benevolent mystery.

Notch enhancement’s never been a very popular procedure, and Jonboat didn’t want anyone butchering his bride, so he actually found women—half a dozen of them—for the surgeon to practice on before it was my turn and—oh

She’s the only one who could possibly imagine how miserable my sense of timing with women was, how divorced from reality my sense of proper romantic contexts. And maybe you, reader, since you’ve read that scene.

thinking in terms of responsibility was just a way to avoid facing the fearsome truth: that, as always, and like everyone else, I lacked control over just about everything, my death was encroaching, as was the death of anyone else I cared about, the death of everyone I didn’t care about, eventually the death of all living things, thus the death of memory, and so the end of meaning, of the illusion of meaning.

thought better of being discovered in so meek a pose—I didn’t want the doc to fall under the impression I’d resigned myself to receiving bad news—and

They think they want machines that behave as though alive, but what they want are living beings that behave like machines.

“So that’s how I spent the end of my time in what I thought was hell. Trying not to think about an elephant. Trying to look at the parts of this picture of you that I’d already probably seen too much of, and without noticing any of the details I hadn’t seen yet that I wanted to see because I knew they’d be vivid, which would make me feel better if seeing them didn’t make it even harder to haunt you.

As a reader, you’d either 1) spent your life being complicit in the systemic injustice that had caused the adversity, but now that you’d read the book, you’d been awakened to the role you played and were thus made virtuous (perhaps even brave), or 2) you’d spent your life being a victim of the same systemic injustice as the author while being equally virtuous, but it wasn’t until you read the memoir that you were able to realize just how virtuous you’d always been, just how much adversity you’d already overcome. Congratulations, either way! I failed to see the appeal, remained unbolstered, missed fiction, was sad.

serious-sounding people kept saying this word about it that I keep forgetting…parataxis, I’m being reminded.

Ahahaha, show don't tell :)

I didn’t know what that meant, apparoh. Do you know? I’ll tell you. It’s my new favorite thing. From now on I’m gonna do it every day. It’s a drink or a small food you eat with people before dinner, and if you’re having a good time with it, it either turns into dinner or more apparoh. The whole reason these people here eat dinner so late is because they need to have enough time after work to have apparoh first, which is, in my opinion, and the opinion of anyone worth listening to, better than dinner.

Yes, Apéro!

How could anyone know? I’m not saying they couldn’t. I’m saying I didn’t. I’m saying I don’t and, because I don’t, I fail to imagine how others might. Yet others seemed to. They seemed to know. They seemed to think they knew what was right and what was wrong, what was good and what was bad, and what impact they made on what and who, and how to destroy the least amount of good, how to prevent the most amount of evil, how to progress toward solving the world if only everyone else would listen, and all I knew was what I liked and didn’t like, what moved me and what didn’t, what I found beautiful and what I found ugly, who I found attractive and who I found repellent, and I wasn’t very good at knowing even those things, but the point is, reader, it was nice outside, to me it felt nice, and despite my father’s letters, the news of his happiness, the thought that he might have met a lovable woman who could love him in return, the thought that he’d discovered a way of life that appealed to him among people who appealed to him and that he wouldn’t (it looked like) die too early of early retirement (which I suppose I’d been worrying about more than I’ve let on), and the news that other writers admired my books (writers I’d heard of, but hadn’t yet read, haven’t yet read), and that one of those writers had bothered to think about and misunderstand the swingset murders in a way that sounded flattering and deliberate and made Clyde proud—despite all of it, the only thing I had, out th...

But Eddie Murphy hadn’t said volume. The joke was my own, and no one else got it.

People needed novels. They needed great novels. What people who thought they needed memoirs should do, I thought, was read great novels.

“Well, like a second shot at not destroying ourselves. A second shot at being. And maybe we could do better with a second shot. Probably not, but maybe. With the wisdom and guidance of a superior alien society or an advanced new species? one that was skilled enough to develop technology to bring us back from extinction? Not totally impossible.”