Adam Levin - Hot Pink

“Not to interrupt or be crude or anything, but this question just popped into my head, or maybe not, maybe it’s been in my head for a while, since because, you know, of what you said earlier, about the desk and everything, and us being high even though we’re pretending not to be high maybe provides me the space or excuse or whatever you want to call it to ask you this question, but are the workings of… Rather, can you—”

Carla is blushing.

“Blusher,” says Susan.

“Does your…”

“Yes. And I call it my naz-naz , which is Farsi. What do you call yours?”

Carla kisses her knuckles smackingly. “Tell me about your leopard,” she says.

“It might have been a car,” says Susan. “I don’t know. Sometimes I think it was a car, and that’s what everyone tries to tell me, but I tend to doubt it was a car.”

“Why would they tell you it was a car if it wasn’t a car?”

“Any number of reasons. Maybe they do it for my benefit or maybe for my mother’s. If it was a car, then according to them I was trying to save my box turtle, Pedro, who I’d brought outside to play with, from being run over by the car. But I know otherwise. I know that if it was really a car, it was because Pedro was crushed, either accidentally or on purpose, while I tested the strength of his shell beneath the wheels of my mountain bike, and that Pedro’s death destroyed my will to live, so I threw myself into oncoming traffic with suicidal intent. That’s too ugly, though, so they say that I fell into the street while trying to save Pedro from being crushed by a car, because that way accidental circumstance — rather than I — can be blamed for my state of leglessness. That’s how the lie would benefit me . As well, it serves my mother on a couple levels — no mother can be expected to keep an eye on her thirteen-year-old daughter at all times, let alone control the pathway of a wayward box turtle or an oncoming car. However, a mother can and is expected both to keep her infant daughter off the floor of a jungle where hungry leopards live and to raise such a daughter not to have suicidal ideations at the age of thirteen.”

“Well, so wait,” Carla says, “do you have any memories of walking?”

“I have millions of memories of walking, but I also have memories of dreams, of flying.”

“Those were dreams, though.”

“But they feel similar enough, dreams and memories, that it wouldn’t be rigorous to trust the distinction.”

“What about photographs?”

“You can doctor those things,” says Susan. “It’s all beside the point, anyway. I’m legless. Hopefully I make up for it with brains.”

“You make up for it by a long shot,” whispers Carla. She is leaning over, separating Susan’s bangs with her thumbs. “Does your fancy brain make it up to you, though?” she says.

“Without my fancy brain, I wouldn’t be here right now.”

“Here where?”

“Here here. Let alone right here , able to demand you remove your snowpants.”

“I already said I would.”

“You said you would before I was in a position to demand it… This is a confusing courtship, at least in light of what I’ve read so far, but I know it wouldn’t be right unless there were a few feints before revelation. We can’t just have everything without complications, you and I. There’d be no story without complications. With nothing to overcome, we’d die unstoried deaths. My distant cousin invented a new and wholly novel egg dish that is probably extremely delicious and she can’t imagine its immediate success, even though most success, nowadays at least, tends to be immediate. She can’t see Eggs Jiselle becoming instantly famous. She sees an extended process where the name of the dish changes over a long stretch of time and respect slowly builds for her, and fame collects at the same turtle’s pace, and the Ritz begins serving Eggs Jiselle some ten years down the line, and ten years later Caesar’s Palace and Hotel Nikko, and even Spago eventually takes its own stab at the dish, adding rosemary or wasabi or something, and there’s a lawsuit over recipe patents or copyrights, which probably don’t even exist, but a struggle and a long time and a lot of effort, because if Jiselle imagined it otherwise, there’d be nothing to look forward to looking back on. So if without a story even the fame of an egg dish isn’t viable, then how about true love — it would be impossible.”

“What about first sight? There’s tons of stories about love at first sight.”

“In the good ones, though,” says Susan, “the love’s thwarted by outside forces. And if it isn’t, then death comes to one if not both of the lovers as soon as the love’s consummated.”

“So they never have the chance to betray one another. It’s merciful.”

“Not entirely, though. The one who lives, if one of them lives, ends up struggling to find meaning in a seemingly meaningl—”

“I don’t think this’ll kill you too fast, Susan.” Carla lowers her head, kisses Susan’s neck.

“If it doesn’t…killyoufast…it isn’t…true… I really should get… I have a presentation to make in Media Stud … ”

“Are you dying?” Carla says.

“Yes, please.”

Carla gets off of Susan, removes her snowpants. She doesn’t have a big ass at all.

“You don’t have a big ass at all.”

“Would you have preferred a big ass?”

“I might have, but it doesn’t even matter. I’m impossibly dedicated to your true ass.”

“Have you ever had sex with a girl, Susan?”

“No, Carla, I haven’t even been kissed by anybody but you and my mom, and those kisses were so long ago, they might not have happened, even.”

“Do you want to smoke more opium before we do? To guarantee we’re high? It’ll thwart us sufficiently, I think. When we look back, we’ll have to worry about the possibility that it was the drug, rather than love, that allowed for the damned good time we’re about to have. We’ll have to meet again sober to find out for sure. But we’ll smoke more opium then, too, and every time after that, and so we’ll continue to worry and we’ll struggle and struggle, thwarted forever. You can’t doubt a plan that pretty, can you? Isn’t it a pretty plan?”

“Yes.”

CHAPTER 130,031

NOT FRENCH

Jiselle and Susan are on opposite sides of the tiny balcony. A half-tempo electronic rendering of Mozart’s The Magic Flute is coming through the speakers of the box on the railing. At the end of the overture, Susan says, “Hey, Jiselle, can I borrow a cigarette?”

“ Borrow a cigarette? What, are you gonna give it back to me when you’re done?”

Jiselle thinks this is awfully funny when, really, it’s just stupid fucking banter. On the other hand, Susan knows that one asks not to “borrow” a cigarette but rather to “bum” a cigarette for precisely the reason Jiselle has made salient.

Jiselle says, “When’d you start smoking fags, anyway?”

“This afternoon.”

“How’d you like the eggs?” Jiselle says.

“They were ungodly,” Susan says.

“They were not.”

“I didn’t actually get to eat them, but Jiselle, let me ask you. In terms of cousinhood, exactly how distant are we?”

Jiselle extends her arms as far as they’ll extend. “No blood,” she says.

“Wow, your armpits are shaved.”

“I’m British, Susan. I’m not French.”

“Neither am I. Fuck.” Susan puffs at her cigarette.

“Are you gonna inhale on the bloody thing or what?”

“What?”

Jiselle demonstrates.

Susan mimics, coughs, considers.

Her mind twirls at the thought of getting high on opium that never entered her system; at the thought of Adam distinguishing between himself and the world and its future and his own; the thought of a man, not yet slated to die, thinking to give seventy years away; of how to understand the difference between giving and having while alone and immortal in Eden. How you could mourn the end of something you never had a chance to take for granted.