The First Bad Man

by Miranda July

didn’t explain that I was single. Therapy is for couples. So is Christmas. So is camping. So is beach camping.

That’s the problem with men my age, I’m somehow older than them.

imitating crass people was kind of liberating—like pretending to be a child or a crazy person. It was something you could do only with someone you really trusted, someone who knew how capable and good you actually were.

I always had to resist the urge to go to him like a wife, as if we’d already been a couple for a hundred thousand lifetimes. Caveman and cavewoman. King and queen. Nuns.

He cooed like a mournful dove and smiled up at me with the warmth of total recognition. I keep getting born to the wrong people, he said. I nodded regretfully. I know.

Then I realized that we all think we might be terrible people. But we only reveal this before we ask someone to love us. It is a kind of undressing.

When you live alone people are always thinking they can stay with you, when the opposite is true: who they should stay with is a person whose situation is already messed up by other people and so one more won’t matter.

After days and days alone it gets silky to the point where I can’t even feel myself anymore, it’s as if I don’t exist.

The TV was on all the time, day and night, whether or not she was awake or watching it. I had heard of people like this, or seen them, on TV actually.

He was nervous—men are always sure they’ll be accused of some horrific crime after they talk about feelings.

“How much do you pay him?” “I—sometimes I give him a twenty.” Nothing; I’d never given him anything. I suddenly felt very judged, very accused. “He’s practically family,” I explained. This wasn’t true in any sense—I didn’t even know his last name. “Can you please put him back on?”

“Sorry about that, I’m not having fun in this marriage right now.” “Oh no,” I said, although this was the only way they ever were, like this or loudly entranced by each other. “He makes me feel like shit,” she said, and then to Carl, “Well, then go away—I’m having a private conversation here and I can say what I like.” And then to me: “How are you?” “Good.”

“She might need to call you back.” “Cheryl, hon, just put her on.” She could tell I was scared of her daughter.

I doubted if any man had ever cried this much, or even any adult woman. We would probably switch roles at some point, down the road, and he would guide me through my big cry.

I paused. I had said a lot. Too much? That depended on what he said next. He cleared his throat, then was silent. Maybe he wouldn’t say anything, which is the worst thing men do.

The conclusion I came to—and it was important to come to a conclusion because you didn’t want these kinds of thoughts to just go on and on with no category and no conclusion—was that girls these days, when they weren’t hugging boys unromantically, were busy being generally aggressive. Whereas girls in my youth felt angry but directed it inward and cut themselves and became depressed, girls nowadays just went arrrrgh and pushed someone into a wall. Who could say which way was better? In the past the girl herself got hurt; now another unsuspecting, innocent person was hurt and the girl herself seemed to feel just fine. In terms of fairness maybe the past was a better time.

He drove like he lived, with entitlement, not using the blinker, just gliding very quickly between lanes in his Land Rover. At first I kept looking over my shoulder to check if the lane was actually clear or if we were going to die, but after a while I threw caution to the wind and sank back into the heated leather seat. Fear was for poor people. Maybe this was the happiest I’d ever been.

Everything in the bathroom was white. I sat on the toilet and looked at my thighs nostalgically. Soon they would be perpetually entwined in his thighs, never alone, not even when they wanted to be. But it couldn’t be helped. We had a good run, me and me. I imagined shooting an old dog, an old faithful dog, because that’s what I was to myself. Go on, boy, get. I watched myself dutifully trot ahead.

At the Ethiopian restaurant I requested a fork. They explained that I had to use my hands, so I asked for it to go, got a fork at Starbucks, and sat in my car. But my throat wouldn’t accept even this very soft meal. I put it on the curb for a homeless person. An Ethiopian homeless person would be especially delighted. What a heartbreaking thought, encountering your native food in this way.

Suddenly it occurred to me that nothing might be happening. I’d done that before. I had added meaningful layers to things that were meaningless many, many times before.

The fragrance was abundant and nothing like pomegranates or currants, neither of which is famous for its smell. It was so obviously a candle, the very dumbest present you could give a person.

I locked myself in the ironing room and wrote a long-overdue e-mail to the entire staff about recycling, overpopulation, and oil, then I toned it down a little, then I deleted it.

familiar with the word. I nodded. “I appreciate the gift but I’m not . . . you know. I’m into dick.” She coughed huskily and spit into one of the empty Pepsi bottles on the coffee table. “We’re in the same boat, as far as that goes,” I said. I saw us in a little dinghy together, liking dick on the big dark sea.

“Go like this,” she interrupted, holding her hand over the right side of her face. I mirrored her, squinting in case there was a slap or a punch coming. “That’s what I thought,” she said. “One half of your face is way older and uglier than the other half. The pores are all big and it’s like your eyelid is starting to fall into your eye. I’m not saying the other side looks good, but if both sides were like your left side people would think you were seventy.” I put my hand down. No one had ever talked to me like this before, so cruelly. And yet so attentively. My eyelid was starting to fall into my eye. My left side had always been uglier. Some real thought had gone into this little speech—it wasn’t just careless hostility.

Each of them the center of their own world, all of them yearning for someone to put their love into so they could see their love, see that they had it.

Laughing like friends always emphasized that we weren’t. This wasn’t real like the laughing she did at home.

A dull and respectable text for a dull and respectable woman. We had never been a couple, not on any level or in any lifetime. But wait—my phone shook again. Maybe he was kidding and this text would say I was kidding. HOPE TONIGHT WAS A BIG SUCCESS! Polite—the only thing worse than dull.

They grew still as I slowly rolled by. Twins. I’d never seen them before. Except I had. Where are you going? they asked in unison. Up the block, I guess. But you’ll be back for us? I’ll be back, but not today. They were crestfallen, both of them. Somehow both Kubelko Bondy. Why had this soul been circling me for so long? Did it stay young or was it getting older too? And would it eventually give up on me? This was the wrong question—obviously it was I who would eventually give up. It was just a habit, like memorizing license plates.

And how does Cheryl Glickman feel?” “Me?” “Yes, what do you feel?” Me, I thought. Me. Me. Me. Nothing specific came to mind.

She stared at me for a long time and I wondered if I was her least-favorite patient.

MY EMBARRASSMENT SHADED THE REST of the morning.

Was this the bottom or would my problem get worse? It was a problem. I had a problem.

For the first time I understood cigars and the urge to light one up and lean back.

There was a little tickle in my brain, like the feeling of being about to remember the word for something. I knew I would understand what she was talking about in just a second.

“It probably still fits you.” “I don’t think so.” An older, blue-blooded woman with white hair and real pearl earrings could have been elegant in it. Anyone younger or poorer would look like a soldier from one of those countries where women hold automatic weapons.

“No,” she said huskily. “It happened at his place.” He had a place called his place and it happened there and it was sex. This was both more and less than I wanted to know. “It’s a nightmare,” she said, holding her stomach. “Is it?” I was desperate to know more. She lurched back to bed. “Is it?” I cried again, but she was done, already half-asleep. It could only be a nightmare, someone growing inside you who you hoped never to see the face of.

I could see it so clearly, the zygote—shiny and bulbous, filled with the electric memory of being two but now damned with the eternal loneliness of being just one. The sorrow that never goes away.

All these years I’d been looking for a friend, but Suzanne didn’t need a friend. A rival, though—that got her attention.

In the very beginning she didn’t even like him. She could see his arrogance and his tendency to ignore what was inconvenient to him. The doctor was surprised, taken aback, when she pointed out these flaws. It made him want to have intercourse with her, just to put her in her place.

But eventually she wanted it more than he did, and this made her lower than him. There was no way to knock down a woman who was already lying on the ground.

“Yeah, I’m sure.” I could hear the smile she was using. Last chance, it said. Last chance forever.

There was no way around it. I called back and made an emergency appointment. I would have to tell her what I had done and admit that I was struggling with my conception of her. She seemed pathetic and desperate to me now. Obsessed. “Good, good,” she would probably say. “Keep going.” It would turn out that this was the key, witnessing this exchange between the primordial mother and the primordial father. “But I eavesdropped!” I would cry. “It was essential that you perform the role of a spy, a naughty child,” she would say, excited because for the first time in her twenty-year practice a patient had shifted the field—this was a psychiatric term, shifting the field. It meant everything could be exposed for what it really was, every question answered, total clarity for both doctor and patient, leading to a true friendship inaugurated by the therapist reimbursing all her fees in one lump sum. Dr. Broyard would now come out wearing a mask that was a crude drawing of his own face and it would be revealed that the entire exchange in the hallway was a farce—it was the rebirthing.

She only stopped when the head doctor came over, a tall Indian man. His face was gravely serious. Some people’s faces always look this way, it’s just how they’re raised. But as he talked it became clear he wasn’t one of these people. Meconium was repeated several times; I remembered the word from birth class: excrement. Meconium has been aspirated leading to PPHN. Or PPHM. He was talking slowly but it wasn’t slow enough. Nitric oxide. Ventilator. We nodded again and again. We were actors nodding on TV, bad actors who couldn’t make anything look real. He finished with the words closely monitored. We forgot to ask if the baby would live.

I forced myself to look at the tiny gray body. His eyes were shut. He didn’t know where he was. He couldn’t deduce, from the beeps and the sound of feet on linoleum, that he was in a hospital. He didn’t know what a hospital was. Every single thing was new and made no sense. Like a horror movie, but he couldn’t even compare it to that because he knew nothing about the genre. Or about horror itself, fear. He couldn’t think, I’m scared—he didn’t even know I. I shut my eyes and started humming. It was easier to do back at home, when he was still inside her. That time now seemed like a silly TV show, the three of us floating in a daze, believing we would always be safe. This here was real life.

See, this is what we do, I began, we exist in time. That’s what living is; you’re doing it right now as much as anyone. I could tell he was deciding. He was feeling it out and had come to no conclusions yet. The warm, dark place he had come from versus this bright, beepy, dry world. Try not to base your decision on this room, it isn’t representative of the whole world. Somewhere the sun is hot on a rubbery leaf, clouds are making shapes and reshaping and reshaping, a spiderweb is broken but still works. And in case he wasn’t into nature, I added: And it’s a really wild time in terms of technology. You’ll probably have a robot and that will be normal.

You know what? Forget what I just said. You’re already a part of this. You will eat, you will laugh at stupid things, you will stay up all night just to see what it feels like, you will fall painfully in love, you will have babies of your own, you will doubt and regret and yearn and keep a secret. You will get old and decrepit, and you will die, exhausted from all that living. That is when you get to die. Not now.

Her braids lay on her chest and she looked leaden with sorrow, like a picture from the Dust Bowl. You just knew her whole life was going to be hard, every second of it.

I tried smiling to see if it really was funny, ha ha.

I had thought it was gone for good but of course it wasn’t. Nothing ever really changes.

I turned and walked out of the NICU before Clee looked up. I went down the elevator and into the lobby. I walked out of the lobby into the street. The sun was blinding. People were striding past thinking about sandwiches and feeling wronged.