Helen Phillips - Some Possible Solutions

Panicking, I looked across the table at Tem, who was gazing at me openly, boyishly, the way he’d looked at me for almost four decades. Tem and I — we’ve been so lucky in love.

“Tem,” I choked.

“You okay?” he said.

And then he realized.

“Damn it, Ellie!” he yelled and hit the table.

I quietly quit my job, handed in the paperwork, and Tem took the week off, and we spent every minute together. We invited the blissfully ignorant kids out for brunch (I clutched the baby, forced her to stay in my lap even as she tried to wiggle and whine her way out, until eventually I had to hand her over to her mother, a chunk of my heart squirming away from me). Everything I saw — a fire hydrant, a tree, a flagpole — I thought how it would go on existing, just the same. Tem and I had more sex than we’d had in the previous twelve months combined. Briefly I hung suspended and immortal in orgasm, and a few times, lying sun-stroked in bed in the late afternoon, felt infinite. What can I say, what did we do? We held hands under the covers. We made fettuccine Alfredo and, cleaning the kitchen, listened to our favorite broadcast. I dried the dishes with a green dishcloth, warm and damp.

3.

On the morning of April 17, 2043, I was astonished to open my eyes to the light. Six hours and four minutes into the day, and I was alive. Petrified, too scared to move even a muscle, I wondered how death would come for me. I supposed I’d been hoping it would come mercifully, in the soft sleep of early morning. I turned to Tem, who wasn’t in bed beside me.

“Tem!” I cried out.

He was in the doorway before I’d reached the “m,” his face stricken.

“Tem,” I said plaintively, joyously. He looked so good to me, standing there holding two coffee mugs, his ancient baby-blue robe.

“I thought you were dying!” he said.

I thought you were dying . It sounded like a figure of speech. But he meant it so literally, so very literally, that I gave a short sharp laugh.

Would it be a heart attack, a stroke, a tumble down the basement stairs? I had the inclination to stay in bed resting my head on Tem, see if I might somehow sneak through the day, but by 10 a.m. I was still alive and feeling antsy, defiant. Why lie here whimpering when it was coming for me no matter what?

“Let’s go out,” I said.

Tem looked at me doubtfully.

“It’s not like I’m sick or anything.” I threw the sheets aside, stood up, pulled on my old comfy jeans.

The outside seemed more dangerous — there it could be a falling branch, a malfunctioning crane, a vehicle running a red light. But it could just as easily catch me at home — misplaced rat poison, a chunk of meat lodged in my throat, a slick bathtub.

“Okay,” I said as I stepped out the door, Tem hesitant behind me.

We walked, looking this way and that as we went, hyperaware of everything. Vigilant. I felt like a newborn person, passing so alertly through the world. It was such an anti-death day; the crocuses. Tem kept saying these beautiful, solemn one-liners that would work well if they happened to be the last words he ever said to me, but what I really wanted to hear was throwaway words (all those thousands of times Tem had said “What?” patiently or irritably or absentmindedly), so eventually I had to tell him to please stop.

“You’re stressing me out,” I said.

“ I’m stressing you out?” Tem scoffed. But he did stop saying the solemn things. We strolled and got coffee, we strolled some more and got lunch, we sat in a park, each additional moment a small shock, we sat in another park, we got more coffee, we strolled and got dinner. Mirrors and windows reminded me that we were a balding shuffling guy hanging on to a grandmother in saggy jeans, but my senses felt bright and young, supremely sensitive to the taste of the coffee, the color of the rising grass, the sound of kids whispering on the playground. I felt carefree and at the same time the opposite of carefree, as though I could sense the seismic activity taking place beneath the bench where we sat, gazing up at kites. Is it strange to say that this day reminded me of the first day I’d ever spent with Tem, thirty-eight years ago?

The afternoon gave way to a serene blue evening, the moon a sharp and perfect half, and we sat on our small front porch, watching cars glide down our street. At times the air buzzed with invisible threat, and at times it just felt like air. But the instant I noticed it just felt like air, it would begin to buzz with invisible threat once more.

Come 11:45 p.m., we were inside, brushing our teeth, shaking. Tem dropped his toothbrush in the toilet. I grabbed it out for him. Would I simply collapse onto the floor, or would it be a burglar with a weapon?

What if there had been an error? Remembering back to that humble machine, that thin scrap of paper, the cold buttons of the keypad, I indulged in the fantasy I’d avoided over the years. It suddenly seemed possible that I’d punched my social in wrong, one digit off. Or that there had been some kind of systemic mistake, some malfunction deep within the machine. Or perhaps I’d mixed up the digits — April 13, 2047. If I lived beyond April 17, 2043, where would the new boundaries of my life lie?

Shakily, I rinsed Tem’s toothbrush in steaming hot water from the faucet; it wouldn’t be me lingering in the aisle of the drugstore, considering the potential replacements, the colors.

We stood there staring at each other in the bathroom mirror. This time I didn’t fall into my own reflection — Tem, I was looking at Tem.

Why had it never occurred to me that it might be something that would kill him too?

In all of these years, truly, I had never once entertained that possibility. But it could be a meteorite, a bomb, an earthquake, a fire.

I unlocked my eyes from Tem’s reflection and grabbed the real Tem. I clung to him as to a cliff, and he clung right back.

I counted ten tense seconds. The pulse in his neck.

“Should we—?” I said.

“What?” Tem said quickly, almost hopefully, as though I was about to propose a solution.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Go to bed? It’s way past our bedtime.”

“Bedtime!” Tem said as though I was hilarious.

11:54 p.m. on April 17, 2043. We are both alive and well. Yet I mustn’t get ahead of myself. There are still six minutes remaining.

The MyMan Solution

I’m not one to hide MyMan away in the intimate parts of the house, the bedroom, the bathroom, the places where interactions are most likely to occur. I like it when MyMan sits at the kitchen counter. I like it when he lies on the white leather couch.

People do judge you for it, though. If your MyMan is sitting there on the white leather couch when friends come over for nuts and martinis, they’ll say, Jesus Christ! Is that really necessary. Please, spare us.

And even though you may stand up for yourself at first, even though you attribute their disgust at least in part to jealousy, after enough harassment (it’s true, it’s true, he’s not wearing a scrap of clothing) you dismiss him, and he rises with his permanent slight smile — a very mysterious smile, an odd wondrous smile, lips parted just enough to let in a woman’s tongue — and bumbles his way down the hallway behind his big ever-erect cock, his lean blue athletic form here and there bopping up against the walls (oh my, the length and strength of his legs!), because the ambulatory function hasn’t yet been perfected (not that I’m complaining).

Then, after that, your friends can sit back and enjoy their martinis. Your loneliness doesn’t seem to bother them in the least.