Either swear or don't

One day I woke up and went into the kitchen to pour myself a bowl of cereal and I was already sitting at the table eating a bowl of cereal, and I was only fifteen years old. It took me a second to realize there were two of us.

“You look like a wreck,” he said. I told him I had been out drinking the night before.

“By yourself?”

“I don’t think I have to answer that.”

He shook his head and turned on Sportscenter and muttered something under his breath.

“What did you say?”

“I said, nothing.”

***

I got home from work to find me on the computer.

“Hello,” I said. He just grunted. “How long have you been on that computer?”

“I just got on.”

“Listen, I have some important work stuff I need to do, so you’re going to have to get off in a minute.” He stormed off and ran into my bedroom and slammed the door.

I knocked. I asked him what was wrong. “It’s just—” he muttered. “Nothing. Nothing.”

“What are you saying?”

“It’s just—I HAD A REALLY TOUGH DAY AND I JUST WANT TO USE THE COMPUTER FOR LIKE FIVE MINUTES AND I CAN’T, APPARENTLY.”

“Well, I have to do work. You should be hanging out with your friends or doing things after school.” I heard him turning on the TV in my room. I was exhausted. “Besides, you were on it all day.”

“YOU NEVER BELIEVE ME.”

I wondered, what was wrong with me?

He wondered, what happened to me?

*****

“Here. I brought you flowers.”

“Flowers? For me???”

“Do you like them????”

“All my life I’ve wanted someone to give me a nice bowl of flowers. Not for the flowers themselves, you understand, but merely for the symbolism. What they symbolize.”

“The bowl is mine. I’m taking the bowl with me. But you can just keep the flowers in a drawer.”

“Take them. I don’t want them anymore.”

*****

He asked me, so what do I do? I told him I work at a small marketing firm.

“Marketing?”

“I just copyedit their web site. And write a blog post for them every now and then.” He rolled his eyes. “I’m not in marketing.”

“Uh huh.”

“Besides, it’s a good firm. We only take on clients we feel passionately about.”

“Passion, huh.”

“I’m looking for other work. It’s real easy to be an idealistic little roach when you’re 15. When you’re my age? In this economy?”

“I can’t effing wait.” He gave me this big obnoxious grin. I told him he sounded like a fucking idiot when he went out of his way not to swear like that.

***

I told him we can’t both be called Chris. It’s too confusing. Someone says “Chris” and we both say what. There have been all kinds of telephone mix-ups.

“You’re going to need a new name,” I said. “So what’ll it be.”

“How come I’m the one who has to get a new name?” he said. “I’m in school. It would be traumatic.”

“Fine. I’ll be Chris and you can be Other Chris.”

“Why don’t you be Other Chris?”

“Or you can be Young Chris. Or Lil’ Chris. Or you can pick a whole new name altogether. Like Mark. Or Mike. Or Mick.”

“I’m sure you’d love to give me a different name, so you could pretend I don’t exist. That’s it, isn’t it?”

“How does that follow?”

But he didn’t want to hear it anymore and had already stormed out with my wallet and keys.

*****

“Can you write the letter ‘C’?”

…

“Very good! Now can you write your whole name?”

…

“Wonderful! Now can you sign this form granting me power of attorney?”

…

“You’re being very cranky today.”

*****

“I hate myself.”

“You’re only 15.”

“So? So I hate myself.”

I laughed. “You just wait…”

***

I got home from my date at 10:30 on a Friday night. He was there on the couch, watching TV.

“You’re home early,” he said.

“She wasn’t my type,” I shrugged. “She wasn’t very interesting. A law student.”

“Uh huh. She wasn’t interesting.”

I frowned. He was watching some stupid-looking cartoon on Comedy Central. “I guess your friends all decided to spend nice, quiet nights at home too.”

He turned off the TV and gave me a look and locked himself in the bathroom for a while.

*****

“Would you like me to pay attention to you?”

“No.” (but what he’s secretly thinking is YESSSSSS)

“Do or say something worthy of my attention.”

“I am a unique individual. Of the billions alive and the countless more dead, none are like me. Is that not enough?”

(turns on the tv)

*****

I went to pick him up at school one day because he had to stay after and couldn’t catch the bus. He was sitting on a bench in front, talking to a girl who looked older than him. I drove right up but he didn’t see me, so I got out of the car and walked up to them.

I introduced myself. “Peter” (I’d decided his new name would be Peter) looked very nervous around her. He looked nervous when I’d driven up before he’d seen me, and he looked even more nervous now.

“I’ll see you later, Chris,” the girl said to him.

“Seeya” he said real fast and he grabbed his saxophone and ran to the car and threw himself into the seat, practically.

“You should ask her out,” I said pulling out of the lot.

“No,” he sighed. He had his head up against the window and wasn’t looking at me. “She has a boyfriend.”

“So what. You’re in high school. That doesn’t matter at all.”

“Well I just like to have a little respect for her and her choices, since she is a person and all.”

“So ask her and let her say no, if that’s what she’s going to do.”

“What do you care?”

“Maybe if you ask her I’ll see an equivalent improvement in my own life.”

“Is that how it works?”

“It must be. Or I would have kicked you out months ago.”

“Look, just let me handle this MY OWN WAY.” He turned on the radio and cranked up the volume — it was a jazz station, that was all he listened to these days, was jazz.

***

I brought a woman over. I made dinner.

“Who’s that?” she asked.

“Oh, that’s me. But you can call him Peter.”

He made a point of sulking in the living room watching TV all night. She left early.

“She was the worst,” he said.

“She wasn’t so bad,” I said.

“She was boring. She only wanted to talk about herself.”

“That’s true of all people.”

“She took herself too seriously.”

“That’s true of you, more than anyone.”

“She’s sheltered and ignorant. And politically wrong-headed. She blames her failures on circumstance and everyone else’s failures on their own mistakes. She has no sympathy for people who have it worse than she does. She treasures her own pain above everyone else’s. She thinks she is miserable even though she isn’t, because she has no perspective. She wore too much makeup and smelled like the inside of a volleyball. She had a long nose and too many teeth. She was the worst.”

“She is neither no better nor no worse than any other human alive. They are all exactly as you describe them.”

“You only say that because you’re old and sad.”

“Go to bed.”

“No.”

So I went to bed.

*****

“I am going to push you down this staircase.”

“I may die.”

“I’ll bet you $10 you don’t die.”

“But if I win I can’t collect.”

(pushes him down the stairs)

*****

He wondered, what’s wrong with me?

I wondered, what happened to me?

***

I thought, maybe it’s like that movie “Groundhog Day.” Maybe he’s here for a reason. Maybe if I get him to discover true love or whatever we’ll both disappear.

“Are you going to the homecoming dance?” I asked.

“Do you feel at least vaguely stupid for asking that question?”

I did.

On the night of homecoming dance, I jumped him from behind and wrapped him up in an oriental rug and drove him to the school and kicked him out of the car. I told him to go inside and enjoy the dance, and I’d be back to pick him up after it was over.

He showed up at the apartment about an hour later.

“How’d you get back so early?”

“I walked home.”

“You walked home instead of spending a few hours at a school dance with your classmates?”

He walked past me into the kitchen. He grabbed a grape soda out of the fridge and drank it facing away from me. The faucet was dripping; I needed to get that fixed.

*****

“My father has a new girlfriend. She plays xylophones made out of animals’ ribcages, professionally, that’s what she does. She orders them from all across the world, gleaming white musical ribcages She usually plays the cow, because that’s the one people ask for, but she says it’s far from the best — the pig is more versatile; the horse more powerful. The rat is surprisingly lovely. But the most beautiful is the pigeon. She has one pigeon ribcage, it’s so tiny you feel like you’re going to break it just by looking at it. You’d never think you could produce a sound from the bones of some old filthy bird. In fact you can barely hear it. I would describe the sound as pinpricks on your eardrum.”

“And how does it make you feel, that your dad has a new girlfriend?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you subconsciously want to have sex with your mother?”

“Y—no.”

“…”

*****

One day I woke up and went into the kitchen to eat a bowl of cereal with myself and I was already sitting at the table eating a bowl of cereal with myself, and I was fifteen years old and I was forty-five years old. It took me a second to realize there were three of us.

“This kid keeps calling me a ‘hollowed-out old man,’” I said.

“This hollowed-out old man keeps calling me a tax drain,” I replied.

Finally, I’d had enough. I want all of me out of my apartment, I told us. Who says it’s your apartment, they said. I said, of course it’s my apartment, I’m the one who found it, it’s all my stuff that’s in here, it’s my salary that paid the security deposit, it’s my name on the lease. But they said oh no, that’s our name, it’s our stuff, it was us who led you here. Therefore, they said (they were speaking in unison now), it was their apartment, and it was me who had to remove myself from the premises immediately. I said, but where will I go? They said, oh you won’t go anywhere, not without us. You’ll follow us, wherever we are, that’s where you’ll be, we’ll drag you by the nose if we have to, we won’t allow you so much as a second out of our sights. Then they hopped on their broomsticks and flew out the window to commit crimes in my name, and I tried to stop them but as soon as they were out of sight I fell asleep right there in the kitchen right there on the tile and I didn’t wake up until right now — I can hear them in the living room, watching TV, both wishing the other one would go to bed.