All Our Wrong Todays(8)

I should’ve spoken, I wanted to, but I couldn’t get any words out that day.

After the vacuous eulogies that, to be clear, still made me cry like hell, everyone watched, solemn, as my father sprinkled her ashes at the base of the lemon tree that was planted on the day of my birth and prevented his death, and I wanted to scream that this was a repulsive commemoration of a kind, brittle woman who collapsed into herself for her husband. Except it wasn’t. It was in fact a perfectly appropriate commemoration. Her final living act was to slow the malfunctioning hover car just enough that the lemon tree could stop its deadly momentum. In death as in life she was there for my father.

So, he scattered her ashes and, after the reception, I slept with one of my ex-girlfriends in my childhood bedroom.

In full disclosure, I subsequently slept with the other two ex-girlfriends who came to the funeral, as well as one of my closest friends from high school, whom I’d never made a play for because she was so cool that I didn’t want to screw up our camaraderie by inevitably disappointing her as a boyfriend.

I’m not bragging here. I mean, I could be more discreet about it, but I’m trying to do that by not mentioning their names. Out of respect. Or, I don’t know, maybe not mentioning their names seems sleazy.

All four encounters followed more or less the same script. She would ask to talk in private, really talk, she’d say. I got the wary sense she felt some shudder of excitement at me so openly expressing my grief to her, to her alone, as if she were the only one who could coax it out of me before it rotted right through my skin.

Looking back, it’s like the grief was an offering I made to them in exchange for their bodies and, for reasons I’m not insightful enough to understand, my tears turned them on. Or maybe it was just a simple thing that each of them decided I needed and they could do for me and I should be grateful, because it helped. At the time it felt like an honest moment of sadness and want. I was flailing out for something alive. Sex was basically the first thing I could think of to knit back together my unspooled heart, and if those four women had declined I guess I’d have come up with a second idea. But their gentle willingness and my lack of imagination led to four nearly identical encounters.

We’d be alone, late at night, and I’d tell them about sitting with my mother at the hospital in the hours between the accident and her official time of death, while the stasis field kept her alive from the waist up because she’d been obliterated from the waist down, and how all she could do was repeat the same phrase over and over, like the trillions of neurons in her brain had cooperated in a final slurry of consciousness to make sure her last thought was transmitted to whoever might listen.

“He’s lost, my love, so you must help him be found,” she’d say, again and again.

And I’d cry and say she’s right, I am lost, but I don’t think I can be found. I knew saying it like that, sobbing and jagged, instead of shrugging it off with a self-deprecating joke or a snarky dismissal, would resonate with the woman I was speaking to, because three of them had ended things with me for the same reason, which is that they got sick of my bullshit and realized I wasn’t going anywhere in my life, except for my friend from school, who knew me well enough to discount a romantic relationship before one could even start, no doubt aware she’d eventually end it with me because she’d get sick of my bullshit and realize I wasn’t going anywhere in my life.

So I’d cry and they’d hold me and we’d look at each other and I’d kiss them.

“I don’t know if this is a good idea,” they’d say.

“It’s the only idea I have,” I’d say.

They’d kiss me back. We’d take off our clothes. I’ve lived in a world of infinite amazement and technological marvels, but none of it was worth a damn to me compared to those four nights.

I doubt they felt the same about me. Maybe I just seemed pitiable and pity is a strange aphrodisiac. It definitely screwed things up with my friend from school. She insisted she didn’t regret it, but that I was obviously in a difficult place and it was a mistake to consider anything more right now, and she hoped in time things would get back to normal between us. And I said I hoped the same, but after that we only hung out one last time, surrounded by our other friends, who tried to keep it light and airy around me, unsure how to behave with someone whose mother died and so acting like it didn’t happen, even though they were all at the funeral. Except her, my friend, more quiet than usual, smiling sadly at my dumb jokes, as if she thought that’s what I needed to feel better, her sad smiles at my dumb jokes.

Just because we could holiday on the moon or teleport to a shopping mall or watch a fetus gestate in a celebrity’s uterus or regenerate body parts from a plasmic soup or any of the countless things that sound like science fiction to you but were documentary to me, it doesn’t mean we had everything figured out. We were still just people. Messy, messed-up people who didn’t know how to act when one of our lives came undone. So my friends cracked jokes and squirmed in my presence and I slept around, and whether or not it was right or wrong it helped for an hour or two at a time. And I’ll never know if my friend and I would’ve figured out how to be friends again or if I would’ve gotten back together with one of my exes. I’ll never know if one of those nights of sadness and want could’ve turned into years of happiness and plenty.