Archive for the ‘Authors’ Category
“Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily…”
Tuesday, December 22nd, 2009
Consensus molds reality. Why isn’t there a manifest God? No consensus! For every Baptist sure of Christ’s divinity, someone else fervently believes the opposite. Even two people who sit together in church don’t worship the same God. They may suppose they do, but ha! Six billion unique concepts cancel each other out. But you can game the system.
I decided to create the perfect partner for myself. I didn’t worry about official records. No one really cares about those. I made a Facebook page, Twitter account, LiveJournal, personal website, even a couple of T-shirt designs at Café Press. I invented a small business complete with everything except a product. (She’s a consultant; I left it vague.) Building a girlfriend from the bottom up, so to speak, kept me occupied. I posted elaborate descriptions of our dates. Natalie was so busy, I told my friends, that she didn’t have time to meet them in the flesh. She confirmed this in stressed-out posts on her blog.
Soon I was the biggest problem, because only I knew she wasn’t real! As time went by, more and more people added their increments of belief. Then my sister emailed.
“Invited Natalie for lunch,” Charlotte said, “it was so nice to finally meet her.” Um…what? I hadn’t even answered Charlotte’s invitation. That night my mother texted that she and Natalie were planning a joint shopping expedition. I stopped writing messages “from Natalie.” Didn’t matter. Everyone kept getting them, except me. I suspected a joke, even thought about ways to catch the perpetrators.
Then I realized I’d fallen into a trap. I couldn’t believe in a conspiracy. I had to believe all these messages were from the real Natalie. Only then could that become true. I took a few days off. I didn’t eat or sleep. I posted reminder notes from Natalie all over the apartment. I dug out unused Christmas cards, addressed them to Natalie and myself, and put them all over. I constantly repeated things like “don’t forget Natalie wants low-fat milk.” Pretty soon I was so hungry and so short on sleep that the distinction between reality and myth almost completely disappeared.
—
I woke up on the living room floor, dizzy with hunger. The TV mumbled. I smelled pizza.
“Dinner’s here,” Natalie called. “Hurry up, I have to be at the airport in an hour.”
“Coming!” I struggled to my feet. Better wash my face for our first date.
The Topaz
Monday, December 21st, 2009
It was a great golden topaz. A man in rags carried it in his last pocket across the hundred-year ice, until he came to the watch house at the mountain’s foot. The sentry took him in and gave him soup.
“What’s your name?” she asked.
“Jim Carrys It,” he said. “I’ll tell the story of it later; it ain’t a disease. Your name?”
“Annie Watches,” she laughed. “That’s the story of it, too.”
“Well,” he said gently, “someone else will have to watch, because you have to carry this now,” and he pulled the topaz out of his pocket.
Her eyes got round as soup bowls.
“The stories are true?” she asked.
“They are,” he nodded. “Except nobody knows if the ending is gonna be true.”
In the morning they decided he should stay and watch, as if they had a choice.
“You have enough food here till I get back. Feel free to carve,” she laughed, waving at ice walls covered in old stories about iPods and fields of grain and so on, and new ones, like the one about the topaz.
“It’s true?” she asked. “I just have to give it to the next person?”
“We hope it’s true.”
When she got to the village we all went down to the longhouse; she said, “Now I’ve got here the topaz that we heard the stories about. The man who gave it me is watching for me. We might be the last people to get it. The stories may be true: if we pass it to every person who was born when it was found, every person on earth…” She stopped there, too scared of hope.
We passed it hand to hand round the circle, like people had all over the world.
My name was Nicky No-name-yet. I sat by Annie, so I was going to be last, and I worried I might really be the last person of all, because I thought it should be somebody special.
When the topaz came to me it felt warm from everybody’s hands. Then it got warmer. It burst into light like the sun we’d seen once. It vanished.
Nothing else happened. Later Annie went back. A month after, she and Jim came over the peak and said, “the ice is cracking.”
“Look by your foot, Nicky Topaz,” said my sister. There was a tundra-pea sprout there, the first we had ever seen. We quick put a seal bone fence around it. Then we started dancing and shouting.