One More Thing (17 page)

“Hypothetically,” he said.

“Okay,” I said. “Can you pass the chocolate sauce?”

He handed me a fragile-looking glass bottle.

“We don’t have chocolate sauce. This is agave syrup.”

“I met my real father today,” I said.

It wasn’t that I didn’t love my parents after that. I did, and I still do. We’re still in touch.

But while I loved my family, I also knew that it wasn’t who I was anymore. If it ever even had been.

I was a name-brand kid, and I was meant to have a name-brand life.

Sometimes I wish I had learned everything earlier and that my real life could have started sooner. Other times, I’m glad that the first part of my life lasted as long as it did. It doesn’t really matter, though. None of it could have been any different.

As for fate—or not-fate—I’m still not sure about it, but it’s not something that keeps me up at night. I’ve lived it, and the people who still wonder about that kind of thing can call it whatever they want.

The Man Who Posted Pictures of Everything He Ate

Once there was a man who posted pictures online of most of the things he ate. He put up pictures of most of his meals and some of his snacks with little captions.

And plenty of times—most of the time—he simply let the pictures speak for themselves.

The sixteen, then fifteen, then sixteen, then fourteen people who followed him made fun of him for it mercilessly.

The more they teased him, the more he did it, and the more he did it, the more they teased him.

He did it because it made him feel like he was eating his meals with more people.

It was the same reason he liked the teasing.

Closure

“I want closure.”

“There’s no such thing as closure.”

“Please. I have to see you. Please. Please.”

“No.”

“One last time.”

“No.”

“Real quick. Ten minutes. Five minutes. One minute.”

“Annette, we have nothing to talk about. You know I love you. But I’m at this point—”

“I know, I know! I can’t hear all this again! Please! I just need closure.”

“There’s no such thing as closure.”

“I just need closure. I know I can get closure. Ten minutes. Please!”

“Okay. When?”

“Let’s meet at the bench by the river. Right now. Where we had our first kiss.”

“Now? The bench by … At eleven at night? Come on, Annette. Can you … can you just come over?”

“Come over?”

“I mean, just, it’s late, and if it’s so important for this to be
right now—
”

“That’s not what this is about!”

“No, I didn’t mean—”

“I need closure, David. I just need closure.”

David met Annette by the river.

“Wow. You look really amazing.”

“Thank you,” said Annette with a two-blinks-and-you’d-miss-it half curtsey at once feminine and mean.

For the first time in her life, Annette looked exactly the way she wanted to look. Her hair was mostly neat, mostly down; she wore a simple dress that was the exact medium shade of red of all the shades of red in the world. It wasn’t even that hard to look this way, she noted as she caught a last look at herself in the mirror on her way out; it just took some effort and thought and luck—a reasonable but attainable amount more of each than usual. A good lesson to learn for the future, she thought; a future that could begin tonight, right after she got closure.

“I want to say something.”

“Okay.”

“Everything is okay.”

She smiled. He smiled back.

“Everything in the past,” continued Annette, “is in the past. The cheating—the cheating you admit to, and the cheating you still can’t bring yourself to admit to—”

“Wait, Annette—”

“And the lies
about
the cheating—the stories you made up that you eventually felt more loyal to than you did to the relationship—”

“Annette—”

“It’s all okay! I’m saying it’s all okay! All the times you made me feel like your backup choice when it would have been so simple to just tell me I looked beautiful; all the times you made me feel like the girl you were just killing time with while you waited to find your true love, even though you knew I loved you; or the times you made me feel like your stupid little sister, or your employee—”

“Annette—”

“No, I forgive all of it. You don’t have to admit it or even accept it. I choose to let it go. I don’t want to carry it around in my heart anymore.”

“Okay … Well, Annette—”

He paused, then rushed to make up for whatever the pause had cost him.

“Annette, just because I’m accepting this doesn’t mean I’m conceding anything you say is true—”

“You don’t have to,” she smiled. “It’s all in the past. It’s all over.”

“Okay, well, that’s good. Some of what you’re saying is unnecessary and implies, I think, an excessive level of … I mean, I understand, as a thought exercise, for the sake of—”

“Now I want to kiss you.”

“Annette …”

“A goodbye kiss. Just one. For closure.”

Annette took a step toward him.

Closure, so close.

“Annette … I want to … But I don’t think … God, you look beautiful, trust me, it’s not … But this is, I’m kind of seeing someone, and—”

“One kiss! You don’t even have to kiss back. I just need to kiss you goodbye. For closure. One last time. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“Open your mouth and close your eyes,” said Annette, coyly.

“I thought you said I didn’t have to kiss back,” said David, coyly.

“Well, then you can keep your mouth closed, if you want,” said Annette, coyly.

David half opened his mouth and closed his eyes.

Annette kissed him.

While she held the kiss she pictured everything she could remember from the relationship, in chronological order, from the first email to the last text message, and every kiss and laugh and fight in between. When she had pictured absolutely everything she could bring herself to remember, which was everything, she visualized herself literally kissing the block letters of the word GOODBYE.

As the E started to fade in her mind, and her real lips stayed on his real mouth, she held out her left hand and snapped her thumb and index finger together—the softer and more difficult version of the snap—and eight men masked in black descended swiftly toward her ex-boyfriend, quiet enough for all their footsteps to be flattened by the squish of her kiss.

The first man injected David’s neck with a clear liquid that knocked him unconscious. A second man pulled David’s phone out of his front pocket, right where Annette had told him it would be. Two men wheeled out a cement box from behind a parked truck and removed two sacks of beach sand, and then a fifth masked man joined them to lift the unconscious body into the box, then split open the sacks of sand and fill the rest of the box to the top. A sixth man fastened a cement lid to the top of the box on a preset row of hinges and then, together with the third and fourth men, carried the box to the edge of the river and
tilted it in, while the seventh man swept up all the miscellaneous bits of debris that had accumulated into an opaque plastic bag. The second man, still holding the phone of the man in the box, showed what he had been typing into the phone to the eighth masked man, who had been simply watching everything as it unfolded and nodding, and who now nodded more as he read:

The eighth man showed the phone to Annette, who nodded, and then handed the phone back to the second man, who pressed a button that sent the email to every contact in the phone.

Then the second man plugged a new program into the phone. It was an application called Closure, and according to the people on the since-deleted message board who had recommended this team, it was what meant the difference between being the best at this and being only one of the best.

The program, using data that Annette had provided to them in advance, was said to be able to infiltrate every record-keeping website and database that had ever recorded the existence of her ex-boyfriend and erase all written and photographic evidence of him that was labeled by any of the four most common spellings of his full name. The program was guaranteed to work in under ten minutes. It finished in six and a half, and when it was done, the second man threw the phone into the river, where it, too, died instantly and anonymously.

That was it.

Annette approached the eighth man, pulled fifty one-hundred-dollar bills from her purse; handed them to him in a roll; and then impulsively kissed him on the side of the mask, making him blush, or so she imagined.

“Congratulations,” said the eighth man. “The first person to truly achieve closure.”

“Am I really the first?”

“Well, if you weren’t, I guess I couldn’t tell you, could I?”

The eight men walked away and got back in their surprisingly domestic-looking minivan and drove off, leaving Annette, heart racing, all alone.

There was a beaded line of sweat across her forehead, which she wiped off, and her lipstick was smeared a bit, which she corrected;
now she looked close to perfect, which, she had always suspected, was actually a little hotter than perfect.

She walked alone to her favorite bar, ordered her favorite drink, and stirred it as she waited for the rest of her life to approach.

Kindness Among Cakes

CHILD:
“Why does carrot cake have the best icing?”

MOTHER:
“Because it needs the best icing.”

Quantum Nonlocality and the Death of Elvis Presley