The First Bad Man

by Miranda July

How good this world was, with its large and real concerns. There was the couple who blamed each other—they were holding hands and smiling tenderly. I was a ghost, spying on my old life without me.

They were terrible people, even slightly worse than most. I stalled, fumbling with the sleeves of my gown. Should I introduce myself or try to kill them? Not violently, just enough that they wouldn’t exist.

I felt shame for my disgust. The shame felt like love.

When the doors opened, the young father glanced back at me and I gave him a nod to say, Yep, your life, here it is, go into it. And they went.

Was I like honey thinking it’s a small bear, not realizing the bear is just the shape of its bottle?

I smiled like someone’s nervous aunt.

I WOKE WITH A START like a passenger on an airplane—for a moment I could feel how high I was and had an appropriate terror of falling. It was three A.M. We had just left him there. Tiny him. He was alone in the NICU, lying there in his plastic box. Oh, Kubelko. A howl was curdling inside me; the ache felt inhuman. Or maybe this was my first human feeling. Would I put on my clothes and drive to the hospital right now? I waited to see if I would.

It was a Gregorian chant from the seventh century called “Deum verum.”

Anyone who questions what satisfaction can be gained from a not-so-bright girlfriend half one’s age has never had one. It just feels good all over. It’s like wearing something beautiful and eating something delicious at the same time, all the time.

Was all this real to her? Did she think it was temporary? Or maybe that was the point of love: not to think.

Sometimes I looked at her sleeping face, the living flesh of it, and was overwhelmed by how precarious it was to love a living thing. She could die simply from lack of water. It hardly seemed safer than falling in love with a plant.

Should we keep an eye out for anything in the future?” “Oh, the future. I see.” A shadow fell over the doctor’s face. “You’re wondering if your son will get cancer? Or be hit by a car? Or be bipolar? Or have autism? Or drug problems? I don’t know, I’m not a psychic. Welcome to parenthood.” He swiveled and walked away.

But as the sun rose I crested the mountain of my self-pity and remembered I was always going to die at the end of this life anyway. What did it really matter if I spent it like this—caring for this boy—as opposed to some other way? I would always be earthbound; he hadn’t robbed me of my ability to fly or to live forever.

If you were wise enough to know that this life would consist mostly of letting go of things you wanted, then why not get good at the letting go, rather than the trying to have?

Melancholy suddenly plumed in my chest, as if I missed the homeless gardener. Or missed the past—the hospital, the nurses, the call buttons, the way she looked in braids and the badly fitting cotton gown.

We had fallen in love; that was still true. But given the right psychological conditions, a person could fall in love with anyone or anything. A wooden desk—always on all fours, always prone, always there for you. What was the lifespan of these improbable loves? An hour. A week. A few months at best. The end was a natural thing, like the seasons, like getting older, fruit turning. That was the saddest part—there was no one to blame and no way to reverse it.

A real mother throws her heart over the fence and then climbs after it.

Morning had gotten lost on the way home. We would lie this way forever, always saying goodbye, never parting.

WE DIDN’T SAY THE LAST night was the last night but the next day was the day she would move into her apartment in Studio City and it followed that she would sleep there that night and the night after and for years until she moved, probably into a bigger place, maybe with someone, someone she’d marry, maybe they’d have kids. Eventually she’d be my age and Jack would be in college and this time, this very brief time when we lived together, would just become a bit of family lore about an accident and a family friend and how it all worked out for everyone. The details would be washed away; for example, it would not be told as a great American love story for our time.

Reflections, shadows, smoke—these things were morose and distant cousins at best. No, rainbows are in their own class of spectacularity, every single one of them impressive, never a bleak rainbow, never with just some of the colors. Always all the colors and always in the right order. She didn’t call.

She was exactly the kind of woman who ends up murdered.

There would be other unpardonable crimes, I could feel them coming—things that in retrospect would become my greatest regrets. I’d always be catching up with my love. How terrible.