Чарли Андерс: Six Months, Three Days, Five Others

“And what’s that?”

Judy finds the bag of marshmallows. They are stale. She decides cocoa will revitalize them, drags them back to her bedroom, along with a glass of water.

“I have no idea, honestly. That’s the way with epiphanies: You can’t know in advance what they’ll be. Even me. I can see them coming, but I can’t understand something until I understand it.”

“So you’re saying that the future that Doug believes is the only possible future just happens to be the best of all worlds. Is this some Leibniz shit? Does Dougie always automatically see the nicest future or something?”

“I don’t think so.” Judy gets gummed up by popcorn, marshmallows and sticky cocoa, and coughs her lungs out. She swigs the glass of water she brought for just this moment. “I mean—” She coughs again, and downs the rest of the water. “I mean, in Doug’s version, he’s only 43 when he dies, and he’s pretty broken by then. His last few years are dreadful. He tells me all about it in a few weeks.”

“Wow,” Marva says. “Damn. So are you going to try and save him? Is that what’s going on here?”

“I honestly do not know. I’ll keep you posted.”

Doug, meanwhile, is sitting on his militarily neat bed, with its single hospital-cornered blanket and pillow. His apartment is almost pathologically tidy. Doug stares at his one shelf of books and his handful of carefully chosen items that play a role in his future. He chews his thumb. For the first time in years, Doug desperately wishes he had options.

He almost grabs his phone, to call Judy and tell her to get the hell away from him, because he will collapse all of her branching pathways into a dark tunnel, once and for all. But he knows he won’t tell her that, and even if he did, she wouldn’t listen. He doesn’t love her, but he knows he will in a couple weeks, and it already hurts.

“God damnit! Fucking god fucking damn it fuck!” Doug throws his favorite porcelain bust of Wonder Woman on the floor and it shatters. Wonder Woman’s head breaks into two jagged pieces, cleaving her magic tiara in half. This image, of the Amazon’s raggedly bisected head, has always been in Doug’s mind, whenever he’s looked at the intact bust.

Doug sits a minute, dry-sobbing. Then he goes and gets his dustpan and brush.

He phones Judy a few days later. “Hey, so do you want to hang out again on Friday?”

“Sure,” Judy says. “I can come down to Providence this time. Where do you want to meet up?”

“Surprise me,” says Doug.

“You’re a funny man.”

Judy will be the second long-term relationship of Doug’s life. His first was with Pamela, an artist he met in college, who made headless figurines of people who were recognizable from the neck down. (Headless Superman. Headless Captain Kirk. And yes, headless Wonder Woman, which Doug always found bitterly amusing for reasons he couldn’t explain.) They were together nearly five years, and Doug never told her his secret. Which meant a lot of pretending to be surprised at stuff. Doug is used to people thinking he’s kind of a weirdo.

Doug and Judy meet for dinner at one of those mom-and-pop Portuguese places in East Providence, sharing grilled squid and seared cod, with fragrant rice, with a bottle of heady vinho verde. Then they walk Judy’s bike back across the river towards the kinda-sorta gay bar on Wickenden Street. “The thing I like about Providence,” says Doug, “is it’s one of the American cities that knows its best days are behind it. So it’s automatically decadent, and sort of European.”

“Well,” says Judy, “It’s always a choice between urban decay or gentrification, right? I mean, cities aren’t capable of homeostasis.”

“Do you know what I’m thinking?” Doug is thinking he wants to kiss Judy. She leans up and kisses him first, on the bridge in the middle of the East Bay Bicycle Path. They stand and watch the freeway lights reflected on the water, holding hands. Everything is cold and lovely and the air smells rich.

Doug turns and looks into Judy’s face, which the bridge lights have turned yellow. “I’ve been waiting for this moment all my life.” Doug realizes he’s inadvertently quoted Phil Collins. First he’s mortified, then he starts laughing like a maniac. For the next half hour, Doug and Judy speak only in Phil Collins quotes.

“You can’t hurry love,” Judy says, which is only technically a Collins line.

Over microbrews on Wickenden, they swap origin stories, even though they already know most of it. Judy’s is pretty simple: She was a little kid who overthought choices like which summer camp to go to, until she realized she could see how either decision would turn out. She still flinches when she remembers how she almost gave a valentine in third grade to Dick Petersen, who would have destroyed her. Doug’s story is a lot worse: he started seeing the steps ahead, a little at a time, and then he realized his dad would die in about a year. He tried everything he could think of, for a whole year, to save his dad’s life. He even buried the car keys two feet deep, on the day of his dad’s accident. No fucking use.

“Turns out getting to mourn in advance doesn’t make the mourning afterwards any less hard,” Doug says through a beer glass snout.

“Oh man,” Judy says. She knew this stuff, but hearing it is different. “I’m so sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Doug says. “It was a long time ago.”

Soon it’s almost time for Judy to bike back to the train station, near that godawful giant mall and the canal where they light the water on fire sometimes.

“I want you to try and do something for me,” Judy takes Doug’s hands. “Can you try to break out of the script? Not the big stuff that you think is going to happen, but just little things that you couldn’t be sure about in advance if you tried. Try to surprise yourself. And maybe all those little deviations will add up to something bigger.”

“I don’t think it would make any difference,” Doug says.

“You never know,” Judy says. “There are things that I remember differently every time I think about them. Things from the past, I mean. When I was in college, I went through a phase of hating my parents, and I remembered all this stuff they did, from my childhood, as borderline abusive. And then a few years ago, I found myself recalling those same incidents again, only now they seemed totally different. Barely the same events.”

“The brain is weird,” Doug says.

“So you never know,” Judy says. “Change the details, you may change the big picture.” But she already knows nothing will come of this.

A week later, Doug and Judy lay together in her bed, after having sex for the first time. It was even better than the image Doug’s carried in his head since puberty. For the first time, Doug understands why people talk about sex as this transcendent thing, chains of selfhood melting away, endless abundance. They looked into each other’s eyes the whole time. As for Judy, she’s having that oxytocin thing she’s always thought was a myth, her forehead resting on Doug’s smooth chest—if she moved her head an inch she’d hear his heart beating, but she doesn’t need to.

Judy gets up to pee an hour later, and when she comes back and hangs up her robe, Doug is lying there with a look of horror on his face. “What’s wrong?” She doesn’t want to ask, but she does anyway.

“I’m sorry.” He sits up. “I’m just so happy, and… I can count the awesome moments in my life on a hand and a half. And I’m burning through them too fast. This is just so perfect right now. And, you know. I’m trying not to think. About.”

Judy knows that if she brings up the topic they’ve been avoiding, they will have an unpleasant conversation. But she has to. “You have to stop this. It’s obvious you can do what I do, you can see more than one branch. All you have to do is try. I know you were hurt when you were little, your dad died, and you convinced yourself that you were helpless. I’m sorry about that. But now, I feel like you’re actually comfortable being trapped. You don’t even try any more.”