Authors: Adam Levin
Tags: #Fiction, #Fantasy, #Literary, #Humorous, #Short Stories (Single Author), #Psychological, #Short Stories
Negotiations take seventeen days. Good Parent offers Dad a touch over half a million for the patents. In the end, he goes with Hasbro for something in the low seven-figure range.
Bonnies line the shelves of all the major chains by Thanksgiving. They cost ninety-nine dollars a pop and come with a free tube of paste. By mid-December, parents across the country take to camping out in toy-store parking lots the night before doll shipments come in. A couple predawn fistfights are reported in Lubbock. A Hasbro truck hijacked at gunpoint en route to St. Louis. A Christmas Eve riot in Denver.
Mom is liposuctioned, chin-tucked, retires early. Brian gets an ear with a built-in phone. Timmy is pierced, tattooed, has velvet-tipped fiberglass Pan's horns implanted in his forehead. I can't decide what I want, so I'm given a red Volkswagen and a condo where I lose my virginity to a skinny fatman who's gone by sunrise. Dad builds a private kindergarten in Evanston, pays me to hang out and tell stories to the kids before naptime. I keep fucking up the happy endings, but they fall asleep anyway.
(Author's note: Chapter 130,022 of this story, as seen in the print edition of Hot Pink, features text in its margins. Due to restrictions of the .epub format, marginalia cannot be sufficiently represented on your device, and so the text that constitutes the print version's marginalia has herein been rendered as a pair of footnotes. âLevin)
CHAPTER 130,020
DREAMS ABOUT FLYING
Susan Falls hates the flying dreams. She wakes up and she can't walk, which is beside the point. She can't walk when she wakes from non-flying dreams, either. The flying dreams speak of an unconscious obsession with walking, her therapist tells her.
The therapist tells her about the stages of death and dying, harping mostly on the denial stage. What the rest of the stages are isn't important. What is important is that when the therapist tells her about the stages, he does so, he says, because he does not think the loss of Susan's legs has been properly mourned. To Susan, this is nonsense.
She lost her legs as a baby, in the jungle, to gangrene, after the leopard bit her. So she'd never really had them to begin with, at least not long enough to require her to mourn their loss. Besides, what upsets her isn't that she can't walk, but that she has dreams which would seem to suggest that somewhere deep inside she wants to walk, when nowhere non-deep inside does she.
And tacky dreams at that. The flying is always travel-channel scenic: Susan soaring over the ocean or the mountains, between skyscrapers with puffy-cloud reflections on their windows. It might be different, might point to something real or individual about Susan, if she flew over the Gaza Strip or post-NATO Belgrade. Mazar-i-Sharif. She never dreams of what she wants to, though, no matter how hard she thinks about whatever that might be before she goes to sleep. Last night, for instance, she thought of Carla Ribisi's ass for nearly an hour, and ended up cruising over the Grand Canyon at four thousand feet.
CHAPTER 130,021
THE ACCIDENT, PRETTY TO THINK SO
Susan and her mother are in the all-white kitchen, drinking orange juice, waiting for Susan's father to come downstairs before eating the egg dish that Jiselle, the distant cousin who came to America to be an au pair but could not find a job as an au pair and so has become the cook, has made. Jiselle is on the balcony, smoking cigarettes.
“You don't look so good today, Sus,” Susan's mother says. “Bad dreams?”
Susan nods, staring through the glass table at the glass table's frosted glass base. Where the kitchen isn't white or transparent, it's mirrored, and if she looks up, she risks being confronted with a vision of herself first thing in the morning.
“Was it about the accident again?” says Susan's mother.
Susan shuts her eyes with a force that, had she any magic in her, would be great enough to knock the whole penthouse into orbit. Susan's mother likes to talk about the accident. She likes to say, “Susan would do well to talk about the accident, herself.” She says it to everyone.
“I asked if you dreamed of the accident,” says Susan's mother.
“The accident?” says Susan. “How could I remember the accident well enough to dream about it,
anyway
?”
“Now don'tâ”
“Don't what?” Susan says. “Don't mention your lackluster mothering style? Your irresponsibility? Don't question the sanity and goodness of a woman who'd not only leave her baby on a jungle floor but let the wounds she suffered by the leopard's fangs fester andâ”
“Oh,
the leopard
. Isn't it pretty to think so!” Susan's mother says. Susan's mother sneezes, angrily, and screams for Susan's father.
Susan's father, dressed in beige suit-pants with braces half-braced, his untucked U-shirt flapping at his belt-line, thumps down the spiral staircase to the kitchen. “What is it?” he says. “What's happened?”
“She's talking about leopards again.”
“Oh my God.”
“Forget it,” Susan says. “Forget it.”
“Susan, do you need to go back to the hospital?” Susan's father says.
“You're still in the denial stage,” Susan tells her father. “Dr. Fleem told me to expect that from you. But what I want to know is: what about me? What about me?”
“Damn that Fleem,” Susan's mother says, and to her husband: “Call the Medicar.”
“Frances, just hold your horses for just a second here, honey.” Susan's father pulls a cigar from somewhere in his pants and fondles it against the beam of a mean halogen bulb. He says, “Now Susan. What was it you were saying? Something about leopards?”
“No. Nothing,” Susan says. “I wasn't saying anything about leopards.”
“How did you lose your legs, Susan?” Susan's father says.
Susan is crying. Her mother is staring at her. Her mother looks like a bug and Susan does not want to one day look like her mother. “A car,” Susan says.
The egg dish that Jiselle made is getting cold and it looks very good, too, very tasty. Last night, Jiselle told Susan that she'd been formulating this egg recipe, experimenting with temperature, testing various sauces, spices, and coagulants for nearly six months, and that it had, at last, become perfect; there was not a similar egg dish all the world round, at least not one Jiselle had heard of, and while it was true that the appeal of eggs for breakfast tended to be their banality, Jiselle believed the dish, novel though it was, would, owing to its deliciousness, prove itself to have serious staying power. Last night, Jiselle told Susan that, in her most private thoughts, she called the thing Jiselle's Delicious Egg Dish and that, of late, she had something of a dream, and this dream (in sum) was of Jiselle's Delicious Egg Dish becoming vastly popular over the next twenty years, worldwide popular, and thereby eventually becoming a banal egg dish itself, at which point the dish's name would be simplified, shortened, to Eggs Jiselle.
And now it was getting cold, Jiselle's Delicious Egg Dish. The auburn-tinged glaze atop the whites was becoming a filmy gel.
“She's only just saying it,” Susan's mother says. “She doesn't really mean it. She's only just saying it.”
“Now, now, Frances. Susan, tell us more. You said âa car.' What about a car?”
“I was playing in the street with Pedro. A car ran us over and I lost my legs.”
“How old were you?”
“It was last year.”
“How old were you, Susan? was the question.”
“I was thirteen when the car hit me. It was the day before my birthday. I turned fourteen the day they hacked off my legs.”
“Who hacked them off?”
“The doctors.”
“Where did the doctors hack your legs off?”
“In a rondavel.”
“Susan!” Susan's mother says.
“My legs were infected, Mom, and after lightly anesthetizing me with an orally administered paste of palm wine and pulverized valerian root, the doctors, as you like to call them, chopped off my legs with their rusty machetes in a dung-floored, thatch-roofed rondavel.”
“Medicar!”
“Just kidding,” Susan says. “It was at Children's Memorial.”
“Liar. You're lying. You don't believe what you just said.”
“I need to go to school now,” Susan says.
“You need to go back to high school, young lady.”
“I hate high school.”
“High school was the most glorious time of your life.”
“I need to go to school.”
“Not until⦔
“Please, Mommy. I'm sorry. I love you. You didn't leave me to the teeth of that dastardly leopard. Please, let's just eat our Eggs Jiselle and get on with the day.”
“Eggs Jiselle! Did you hear that, Frances?”
“She sure can turn a phrase, Mike, can't she, our girl Susan. Little smartypants. How much do you love Mommy?”
“This much.”
CHAPTER 130,022
MIDRASH IN THE MORNING, NOWHERE DEEP INSIDE DOES SHE
Susan has the duration of the ride to campus to do yesterday's assignment for Media Studies 761: Consuming God. She takes Genesis Rabbah, a book of midrash, from her bag, and reads a story about God and Adam that her professor has asked her to present to the class this afternoon. He wants her to frame it as “the first ever buyer-empowerment scheme.”
The story: Before there was an Eve, Adam was lonely and bored and sad, and, to fascinate him, God revealed the future of the world, taking care, as He did so, to remove all episodes that would occur within the span of Adam's lifetime. Though God's plan worked at first, Adam eventually grew distracted by his loneliness again. God reconsidered showing Adam his own (Adam's own) future life, but judged, for the second and final time, that doing so would be a grave misstep, and instead chose to try His hand at improvisation. Rather than continuing to show Adam what would be, God showed him what could be, were one event that was slated to occur one way to instead occur another way.
1
The story of Davidâwho slew Goliath, loved Bathsheba, and, as its strongest king, made of Israel an empireâwas particularly moving to Adam, despite his knowledge that it was only a could-be, that David would, as originally foretold by God, die at birth. Only a few words into the Psalms, which God had spelled out for him in clouds, Adam found himself weeping at the thought that David would never write them, and he transferred seventy years of his allotted thousand to David, so that David would survive beyond birth and do everything that, before the transfer, only he could have done.
What Susan believes: Adam gave life to David out of love for David.
What Susan would like to believe: Adam gave life to David out of love for the worldâgave David life so that the world would not be deprived of David.
What she is being asked by her professor to spin: Adam gave life to David out of love for Adam. Being that Adam was the first man, Susan plans to tell the class, all men would be of him, and being that Israel, under David's reign, would be the world's greatest kingdom, Davidic-era Israel would be the greatest achievement to come of Adam's creation. Susan would say that Adam, as he read the Psalms in the sky, was not moved
2
as much by their beauty as by how their beauty would affect his legacy. She would say that Adam wept at the possibility that his legacy could be so glorious, yet wouldn't be so glorious if he failed to take action. She would quip, “And therefore, Adam's giving of life would be better described as spending, and better yet as investing, for its purpose was to ensure a future payoff.” If the class was with herâthey rarely wereâshe planned to close with a joke about “the intricacies of calculating a time-lost to glory-increased ratio.” With or without the joke, she was confident she would get an A.
What Susan Falls is considering for extra credit: how Adam, who was born a man, and who, without his Eve, without knowing he was a male in the male/female dichotomyâand so knowing nothing of human reproductionâcould know that other men would come from him, rather than from the word of God, where Adam had come from.
As the limo exits the Drive at 55th, Susan sets the extra credit aside for later consideration and begins to write in the margins of Genesis Rabbah. While doing so, she is struck by the idea that Adam might be a lot like herâhis seventy years her lower body, David her brain. Some time, early on, when she knew things in a pure sense, she might have made a deal with God, an investment of her earthly legs in a transcendent mind with high-capacity intellect. It was pretty to think so.
So pretty, in fact, that she doesn't realize the limo has stopped, has been stopped for minutes, until Jake, the driver, lowers the separator and pronounces her name. “Susan,” he says, “are you not well? Would you like me to wheel you to class today?”
CHAPTER 130,023
CONSIDERING THE UTILITY OF BLUE SNOWPANTS
Susan Falls thinks Carla Ribisi has a big ass and that Carla Ribisi's big ass is beautiful and that Carla does not know it. And Carla Ribisi is always wearing blue nylon snowpants. The intended effect of the snowpants is to disguise the bigness of the ass in bigger-ness, Susan Falls thinks. It is a complicated trick. It begins with a syllogism. The first premise is that anyone who wears snowpants appears to have a big ass:
1. Anyone who wears snowpants appears to have a big ass.
2. Carla Ribisi wears snowpants.
.
.
. Carla Ribisi appears to have a big ass.
The trick comes of the word
appears
.
Appears
allows for, but does not necessitate, visual trickery. Things that allow for but do not necessitate other things are tricky, and tricky things engender consideration. Things that allow for but do not necessitate trickery itself are even trickier, and these things engender much richer consideration. The richer the consideration engendered by a thing, the longer the time one will spend considering that thing. Consider the following hypothetical situation:
Susan Falls has just started dating Carla Ribisi, and the two go shopping for a T-shirt for Carla. They go into the changing room and Carla tries on one of two stretchy V-necks she's deciding between, a red one, say, a warm kind of red, like that of the hair under Susan's arms. The T-shirt looks good and Susan Falls tells Carla Ribisi that the T-shirt looks good.
Carla tells Susan Falls that this is the first time she's shared a changing room with another woman since the long-lost days when she used to shop at indoor malls with her mother. Susan Falls blushes. Carla Ribisi removes T-shirt #1, and, reaching for T-shirt #2, looks at Susan Falls, longingly(?), and says, “Blusher.”
Being called on blushing causes dollar-coin-size spots of the same shade of blush as Susan Falls's face to appear on Susan Falls's neck.
Carla pulls her head up through T-shirt #2. “I'm sorry,” she says to Susan Falls. “I didn't mean to make you embarrassed when I said you were a blusher.”
The dollar coins darken in time with Susan's ecstasy.
Susan's ecstasy is like neither a balloon nor a hat pin, but like a hat pin's entrance and movement, under the guidance of a cotton-gloved birthday clown, through the skin of a balloon.
There is something that is so Goddamned hot about Carla Ribisi considering and, further, discussing any effect that she has had on Susan Falls. Let alone in a Nordstrom dressing room, trying on T-shirts.
T-shirt #2 looks good, but in a different way than the way in which T-shirt #1 looked good.
“So?” Carla wants to know.
“It looks good,” Susan says. “It makes your tits look bigger.”
“Hmm.” Carla doesn't know if she likes that. She has big-enough-looking tits already. Showing them off, she has decided at different times in her past, makes her look trampy. “That's good?” she says. “That it makes my tits look bigger?”
“You have beautiful tits, Carla. The T-shirt just brings it out.”
“Do you mean to say that my tits are essentially beautiful, and that the appearance of more of my tits reveals more essential beauty?”
“Yes!” Susan says, now thrilled to damp underthings by Carla's obsessive parsing and analysis of a sentence Susan has spoken.
“Or do you mean to say,” Carla says, “that my tits are beautiful because they're big, and therefore my tits, upon looking bigger, appear more beautiful because âyou can't get enough of a good thing'âthe good thing being the bigness of tits?”
“Are you making fun of me?”
“Not at all. I'm having fun with you. And attempting to choose between T-shirts at the same time. So which T-shirt's better?”
“I don't know that we can make informed choices about the T-shirts at this point, because now that we've spent so much more time on the one you're wearing than we did on the first one, we're probably invested in the one you're wearing, andâ”
“I'm not gonna sweat that, Susan. Which one do you like better?”
“My opinionâ”
“Your opinion isn't founded on a bedrock of rigorous analysis and therefore etc. etc. etc.?”
“You
are
making fun of me.”
“I'm telling you that I want and will buy the T-shirt that
you
prefer,” Carla says.
“Are you sure? Because you're saying it in this way that it sounds like maybe you're making fun of me.” Susan Falls begins to shiver, and then she begins to cryânot really, but hypothetically.