The Vocation, Part 1

Now, already before I set out to find Nick Laursen—or the Great Dane as they called him back then—he was nothing short of a small legend among all of Toya’s radical Paris friends. At first I guessed he probably wasn’t anything more than one of your standard Euro-trash football hooligans, and so I was skeptical of Toya and her friends' strange hero worship—their strangely devout hero worship, mind you, very strange indeed for those recently so-called disillusioned students of the world, who were all fed up with the fantasy of university life and so moved on to the even bigger fantasy of European dubstep life.

Though not exactly steeped in either the students-of-the-world mentality or the hooligan mentality, I still figured the last person Toya et al. would have as a role model would be some brutish casual with the ridiculous nickname “the Great Dane.” Because by all accounts brutish is exactly what he was, and if Toya and her friends could write me off for being what I was (which is to say—at least in their eyes, but perhaps not untrue—insensitive and condescending), I couldn’t work out how someone like him could appeal to them. I could now follow the logic. Maybe you need to know more about Toya and her crowd to understand what I mean. Of course, perhaps my giving anything more than fuckall over the whole matter indicates that what it really came down to was an issue of pride on my part. I wouldn’t be surprised it came down to pride. At least I don't have so much of it that I can't admit it. Insensitive and condescending I may be, but the way I look at it is that I’m not above questioning myself if it means knowing myself, especially since it has been shown time and time again that there is very little else to know.

And speaking of knowing myself, I can certainly understand my desire to find and meet the one they called the Great Dane. Paris in those days was full of stories about him—or rather, it was if you moved in the right circles, or in my case, was fucking someone in the right circles—and I had been taking in these stories for a while during the period after Toya left me. (More about that whole situation later.) In fact, I had inadvertently come to know many of the stories by heart, even finding myself telling them as if I had been a firsthand witness to them, because there was something I had to admire about their main character, whether he was real or not. So the end result of it all was that I had become secretly determined to see the Great Dane, the-man-the-legend, for myself; I wanted to feel the heat of his legendary energy up close; I wanted to meet at last that hideous Grendel of Paris, the one with the ugly scarred rugby mug I had already sketched in my imagination, the one who (one time) blasted down the boulevards at night kicking off cars' side-view mirrors in a state of Euro Cup fever; the one who (another time) led the sûreté on the sprint of their lives through the streety Marais labyrinth, to be caught up with in a dead-end alley, squatting there trapped and glaring at the two wheezing cops, and that one who then began calmly pulling beer napkins from his pockets, fistful-upon-fistful, which he proceeded to eat then and there before les flics stupéfiés, whose batons were flimsy chopsticks against such a savage display. Then there was his violent side. There were stories of a Great Dane who once discovered to his delight that a particular bar he frequented was, by night, rather sympathetic to a certain obscure French nationalist group, and so spent many nights in a row stirring up those old sailors' and soldiers' sentiments against a make-believe Scandinavian immigrant invasion of France (“The New Vikings,” it was reported he called the immigrants, as if that was the official name they had given themselves), and teased those hateful drunks with conspiracy cut with various Anglo-Danish provocations, and all the while them not catching on for more than a few nights, but who, when they finally did catch on, promptly pulled brass knuckles and fishing knives and various other unprecious metals on the Dane, who did then commence to break the nationalists one-by-one with a heavy barstool, and who did afterwards flee giddy into the night.

I’m sure I sound like an idiot. Because isn’t it idiotic how strangely fixated you become on the one who sucked your lover away from you? I don’t like it, but I’ll admit it. (And I also don’t like the word “lover,” since clearly Toya was more than a lover most of the times, except for some of the times, when she was less than it.) I’ll admit that it’s easy to become fixated on him, until sometimes it will seem like he is the one you are obsessing over. What did he have that you didn’t? and all that. He will become larger than life.

Yes, I was a bit of an idiot, but truthfully I was what I would call appropriately skeptical about the whole thing. But being skeptical meant that I had to acknowledge that someone had to be behind all this—"all this" being his unprecedented emergence and sudden disappearance from the Paris scene, the dust cloud of impossible stories left in his wake, and all the people, including Toya, strung along behind him like a tail of tin cans tied to his bumper—all this, and all this uncharacteristic hero worship, and, even if it might have all been because of stupid pride on my part, the question nonetheless resounded in my mind: what was this thing?

The only aspect on which I could find any sort of general consensus was the reason for his appearance. By all accounts he had come right over to Paris from Denmark as soon as he heard that there were riots, because he wanted a piece of that action, he was a junkie for that kind of thing, he wanted to go someplace where one could set fire to cars as one pleased, and so that was how he not only ended up in Paris, birthed out of the riots like a fucking elemental (because, let me just tell you, that was how people talked about him, like he was a demigod—during that year there were more than a few blogs that posted a certain image Photoshopped to show a German Mastiff wearing a beret in the style of the Guerillero Heroico), but it was also how he ended up with a bad droopy eyelid—he had found himself quite all of a sudden on the rubber end of a rubber bullet volley. Or so I was told. Quelle bête, lui, quelle bête—all the Toya business aside, I had to give him this: I had to admit that this Dane character, whoever he was—if he was—knew how to make fairytale-tellers out of the most fervently cynical mix of humans I had ever encountered. Theoretically, if the Great Dane existed, even I would be forced to admire that kind of intensity and do-as-you-will, as well as that kind of abject sway over Toya’s imagination, who, it seemed, based on the only clues I could find, had probably left me for him when she disappeared after the riots.

Anyway, weeks before I had even heard that name or those stories and before she left me, Toya, after much pleading with me to go with her, had gone off to find some form of solidarity or whatever in the riots, and as soon as the madness died down a few months later she and I picked up right where we left off. Really the only thing that I suspected had changed between us during her absence was that our relationship was no longer technically an “affair” (I hate that word), because Chloe and I had finally parted ways for good. Chloe’s departure from my life, even though it was bitter and not at all on good terms, had always been an inevitable thing to me; I had slowly been coming to realize that the things I was getting from being with her had been slimming and slimming over time, until all that remained was the last fact: Chloe was actually my age, and I never felt with her the abiding sort of guilt I felt while with Toya. But this guilt, though abiding, was never anything like the kind of guilt I felt while leading my double life with the two of them, and so it was obvious which guilt I was best left with.

Many of you would interpret my feeling guilty for being with Toya as a sign of our having an unhealthy relationship, and perhaps you would be right. But to be fair, this would have been very hard for either of us to see at the time, because, almost like siblings, there was this tremendous sense of duty between us that ran deeper than any squabble we might have or even any generational fault line, and I believe that this was complicated by the fact that neither of us could have quite put our finger on this overriding sense of duty to know for sure that it was even there in the first place, because it wasn’t even ours to begin with, because it had in fact been bestowed to us by our fathers of all people, who had become friends while floating around the Persian Gulf in the late ‘80s, and who themselves had come by it—their sense of duty, that is—from the almighty American Navy itself: Non sibi sed patriae!, and all that. But I’m speculating there—that’s just a small theory, and you can take it or leave it. When it comes down to it, really, all of that “duty” shtick is as murky as the shtick about the Great Dane. All that can be reasonably established is that we became close very early on, and without much choice in the matter. I won’t get too much into family politics, but let’s just say that Toya’s father should have installed a revolving door to keep up with his spousal turnover, so to speak, and since he had been the occasional babysitter to me between his wives and before Toya came along, it only felt right to my father that I return the favor to his friend and his friend’s daughter once I was old enough. This was probably when I was around fifteen or sixteen, making Toya about eight or nine. (I’d always joked with Toya and said that she was my first paying job.) Now, I know what you’re thinking, because I realize I’ve sort of brought these associations upon myself, and because supposedly these things can be traced back to your childhood; however, despite what you might think, no funny business at all took place during those babysitting years, no games of cops-and-robbers, games of tie-up, no role-playing whatsoever, unless you count an excess of Nintendo 64-playing; any funny business, funny business in general—all of that took place well after she was in high school, during her senior year in fact. I was very modest in my teens, very unassuming. So to wrap up the following years very quickly (because I’ve already gone over them too much in my mind, looking for answers): after the awkward babysitting years, there were a couple of years during which Toya and I neither saw nor heard from each other at all, and then all of a sudden my father’s friend’s daughter was in high school and had turned out to be very attractive and probably very smart, and my father’s son had just graduated college and had turned out to be probably very smart also but very unsuccessful when it came to relationships with girls his own age—which is to say, powerful girls—and then all of a sudden Toya and I were spending time alone together in the playground in her neighborhood, where I would talk to her about Buddhism and Bulgakov, and in the woods behind her house, where we would get sap all over our jeans, or in my car in her school parking lot, where I brought her attention to more advanced kinds of music. And ever after that, throughout the perils of her high school and her college, there was always one of us, Toya or I, who was in a state of clinging fast to the other: we became the two of us an alternating current of clinginess, and it only stopping when the current stopped to switch poles. And then after that she was in Paris for graduate school, and then I was there too, but without as clear of a reason. And then there were riots, and then there were some more riots, and we split up dozens of times, but always finding our way back to each other “like a spiral dance,” she wrote once in her diary, and there even were more riots, and then things started to change, and finally Toya “got a moral conscience,” which—let me explain—is something that today’s white kids get when they’ve looked high and low for a cause to live for, and, not finding one among the lower-hanging branches of (if they’re stupid) consumerism or (if they’re less stupid) artistic merit, decide that the only place they haven’t checked for a meaningful cause is in “the plight of the underprivileged” (as they call it), which is how Toya ended up in the streets of outer Paris alongside fairly dangerous maghrébin kids—all the underprivileged kids who missed out on being babysat by the nanny state of France—throwing rocks through the windows of jewelry stores. But I rant.

It was grab-and-go operation the day I picked her up from the street corner in Clichy-sous-Bois, where Toya was waiting for me in the rain. The madness on TV was finally calming down. Somewhere, I'm sure, a smoldering car was being put out by the rain. She wearing a pair of my baggy jeans and a black hoodie with rust smears down the sleeves. When she called me on the pay phone, that was where she said she would be waiting, and—when I asked if she really had to arrange it there of all places—moreover insisted she would be waiting, because (she spat at me over the phone) Clichy was “just on the other side of a fucking arbitrary line in the sand, Ty.” Okay, whatever, Toya.

I had talked to her many times by phone over the course of the riots, but, because she had this idea that the police would be listening in to phone calls outgoing from the area, she refused to fill me in on what exactly she was doing. Instead she would give little mysterious hints that suggested that, though it weighed heavily on her spirit—it was a quality to her breathing, great big pauses between her inhales and exhales—whatever it was she was doing was paying respectable dividends to her humanity. (The balance sheet of my “humanity” had been a point of contention for a while now.) So now, in the car on our way back to my apartment, she told me more: about how she had been in and out of Clichy for nearly a month, staying with some friends in a furnished apartment a few blocks away from the HLMs. This was where they printed and distributed “a never-ending barrage” of French-English pamphlets and spied out the window with binoculars and signaled by text message or flashlights or baby monitors whenever cop cars were approaching the tenements, hopefully giving the kids inside enough warning to organize or hide. That was their job, signaling. Most of the rioters were very disorganized, it helped to have some structure, and signaling was structure. Signaling was strategy. Signaling sounds exciting—so did you do any other things too? Yes, of course we did other things, Ty. Some of the things we did were very high-profile things, actually. Well, like what? Something that would have been on TV? I have no idea, I never had a TV, Ty, and it’s not like these things are easy to describe to people who weren’t there. Go ahead, I’m pretty sure I won’t report you to the police, I can hardly even speak French, and also I kind of like you. Grab hand. No, I’m just not at liberty to say right now. Ungrab hand. Well, that’s a good answer, miss, because I am actually a mole for the police. Mkay. Hmmm? Nothing, I just said Okay. Windshield wipers. You would think they wouldn’t take to that, though, right? I mean, a bunch of foreign white kids coming in and organizing them and giving them strategy and whatnot. I’m sorry? What’s that supposed to mean? It’s not supposed to mean anything—I mean, clearly they took to you guys, but I’m saying it’s strange that they would take to you. So you clearly did something right. You think so? You clearly think we did something right? That’s a great stance, Ty, did you get that from the TV too?

And so it went. She was like a kid just returned from summer camp, surly with experience and with mourning at the experience having come to an end. Somewhere in our conversation on the way back to my apartment she also let slip, in what seemed an accidentally-on-purpose way, that a cop had fondled her once during an interrogation, fingered her right through her pants, this male cop, maybe (I thought) even fingered her through my pants, the pants she was wearing right now. (I realize I sound glib about the matter of the fingering. But frankly, factuality was not an area in which I trusted her entirely, and especially if she was starved for attention. So the only reason I refer to it glibly now is because I was very, very accustomed to Toya exaggerating those kinds of things and I figured this was another instance of her trying to get my goat.)

Above everything she told me—even above even my cringing inside at her frank description of her being fingered through her clothing by the cop (but keeping quiet about it)—above everything, what prevailed was that I hoped that the riots would be, all in all, a very good thing for her. How could I really play protective boyfriend with her, and rob her of this opportunity to bask in her own feeling of accomplishment? She had done her part for the underprivileged. Who was I to try to scare her off from doing something she believed in? I hoped that because of the riots Toya's faith in Paris would be somewhat rejuvenated, which meant, by extension, her faith in everything. You have to remember, she was very young at the time, only twenty-two. What she needed, I satisfied myself with thinking the entire time she was gone, was some kind of realistic experience, or even just the facsimile of an experience, and the riots certainly offered one of those things. She needed to riot. She was duty-bound to riot. Better pseudo-political dissention than the kind of boring, grad-student antagonism that she had started to give in to in the months prior, which was mostly petty anger arising out of her inability to be published in literary journals. Apparently, the whole thing is rigged, you see. Apparently, Paris is a useless city to live in as an artist. Concavity, apparently, is the central problem with Paris. “Paris is a concaved artistic anti-center,” for instance. Or, “Being a writer of any creativity in Paris these days means almost certainly that you will not be given much attention so long as you write explicitly about Paris, and especially so if you are writing for Americans. It's become reduced to an issue of supply and demand.” And so on. At least I didn't hear any more pleading for me to move with her to Oslo, for whatever scene there was in Oslo that she had some vague faith in.

This whole atmosphere was why as long as I'd lived in Paris I'd largely stayed away from fiction and had strictly kept to writing travelly stuff—hostel and hangout reviews, mainly, and coverage of the mindless bohemian dubstep scene that had been sweeping the continent, my audience mostly being Erasmus students and backpacker grads. But there were those who held this in high suspicion. How was this fulfilling? was something Toya would ask periodically. All that effort, Ty—why not make something worthwhile? Or at least lasting? At the very least artistic? Things, you see, were real for Toya if they delivered results. How very much unlike her father—our fathers—she tried to be, and how very much like them she ended up.

I could feel her frustration, though—truly. She had years of childhood optimism and moral certitude that were unspooling all around her; I knew this because I had been in the same position before when I was her age. (I always would joke and tell her that the worst break-up of my life was Pavement's.) I suspected she'd come to Paris in the first place, like most people, for the beauty (though she would deny that if you asked her), and then after beauty became a dubious thing to believe in, she stayed for the underlying concept of it all: of Paris being a portal to an underworld of artists and other people who somehow survived happily in a sort of kingdom governed by weird, surreal economics (where, if you just put your mind to it, Supply is actually Demand and Demand is actually Supply and therefore landlords are obsolete) and loved and hated and lived more passionately than they did in other places. Like many other people, Toya loved that idea. But did you find that portal, Toya? Of course you found it, everyone who looks for it finds it, and, just like with everyone else, when you found it the self-import of it all made you just sick. And of course it made you sick, because no one could be anything else but sick if the keys to the kingdom turned out to only unlock its leper colony. Also because you were twenty-two. What did you know? You thought the world could be changed by not wearing makeup or bras, or by letting people know that a specter still hangs over Europe (when the only specter that still truly hung was Chloe's), or by petitioning that Peace Prizes be awarded to obscure Chinese political prisoners. You thought the world could be changed, period. The Paris letdown was good for you, really. You have to first be made sick so that you can even know what well is, when well comes to you when you're twenty-nine and it mercifully sedates you. And so why not burn the whole city to the ground in the riots? I, for one, would support you. You needed to riot. You were duty-bound to riot. I knew you needed to do it, because I had been in your shoes before. You're twenty-two! Why not join up in the riot? I'm Toya and I'm twenty-two! Fair housing for all! Fair retirement! Fair workweeks!

What it came down to was that although I had not gone through the whole tired rigmarole myself, I could certainly sympathize with Toya's feeling of misdirection, her knowing very well the specific feeling or sensation or meaning she needed to have but having no idea what steps to take to get it. She always had the answer, in fact; she knew it when she was a kid: in the days when I would babysit her the answer to the whole problem was right in front of her. It’s just like a video game, Toya, just like everyone says, the whole thing is just like one of the games you and I would play together back when things were far simpler: nothing results from beating the game, you see, beating the game represents nothing at all, except the realization of the man-hours you put into it. So the riots could be very healthy for Toya, a sort of treadmill for her soul, even if they weren’t necessarily beneficial for Paris and for France and for the maghrébin kids. I say let her have a direction without an end rather than an end without a direction.

But I talk to thin air. Toya did not come back from the riots refreshed and revitalized. She came back with a vengeance and a vice. I was slow to pick up on it, because I was really just anticipating our new freedom without the looming shadow of Chloe, and so I was woefully unable to understand the logic of the events that followed. For starters, how did she manage to return from . . . from whatever it was she and the other teenage wastelanders did out there on the streets—throwing molotovs and pissing on people leaving the metro—how did she manage to return from all that as a fully-fucking-deputized member of the Weed Police? Those dots I couldn't make connect at all, seeing as many reliable sources who know Toya’s relationship with weed would point to her as being the central branch of the THC Bank of Paris. But I joke. And even then I joked, and I continued to joke, because it would have seemed like an admission that something was very, very off if I didn’t joke about it.

So, in typical melodramatic Toya fashion, out the window it went. Jesus Christ, Toya. Do you want to just throw my wallet out the window too while you're at it? What the hell did it ever do to you? Something-something-something, “ . . . moral sloth.” What? Moral sloth? Where was this coming from? Okay, whatever. Better a moral sloth than the other kind, right? But even though she threw it all out, I still couldn’t be angry with her, because I refused to take her seriously. (It was only after she left that I realized that she had thrown out all of my Adderall pills as well. If I had known then, you can bet I would have been furious instead of nonchalant.)

That was the first mystery. The second mystery was the name: the Great Dane. The Great Dane. It was then that I first started hearing that name. “The Great Dane is in this part of town,” I heard once in passing when Toya and her world-changin’ cohorts were gathered in my apartment and were talking Causes. What fucking stupid things they say to each other, those hipsters Care Bears. That was the first time I heard the name: the Great Dane. The second occasion I heard the name left me associating it with a really strange idea, an idea of this guy who was this sort of pimp of dissenters. Where are you going again? I already said, Ty, some others and I are going to meet up with this guy, this guy we know from when we were in Clichy. Oh, ‘this guy’? Yes. Well, do I know him? Are you retarded or something? I said we know him from Clichy. That doesn’t mean I wouldn’t know him. I know many of your riot buddies. Yes, it does mean that. You certainly would know him if you participated though. Do I know his name, at least? No, I don’t know his name. His name in the riots was the Great Dane. ‘The Great Dane’? It was his nickname. Are you for real? That sounds stupid as shit. His nickname. You all had nicknames? Jesus, dad, you’re being a prick about this. I’m not being a prick. I just thought this was all very serious stuff. I thought this was about the Malians and the Tunisians and racism and oppressive housing developments and whatever. It sounds like it was a giant clubhouse for angsty trust-fund kids. Nicknames. And, what, code words too? Secret handshakes? What? I don’t even understand how this all started, Ty! How the fuck can you judge anyone, you weren’t there! You don’t have the right to judge!

Oh, we would fight like this before the riots, too. But the tone of our arguing—I knew it had taken on a new character. Underneath it all, on my side, was the feeling that something had changed behind my back. Like something small had slipped past the radar and had come back with Toya to my apartment, from outer Paris into the quarantine zone of inner Paris and into my apartment, something small that clung to her, like a burr on her sock. Perhaps I should have gone with her to take part in the riots. After all, it was possible that I had become detached from things, wasn’t it? Perhaps I was growing comfortable and fat here, perhaps I did need to shake things up from time to time like she did. And it’s not like people were flipping and burning cars for just no reason whatsoever. Clearly there was a societal bug in the system. Something had slipped past their radar too, the radar of whoever kept order there. I really should have gone with her, shouldn’t I?, should’ve gone with her to the apartment near the HLMs and helped her help them, and even if it was all silly and futile in the grand scheme of things, at least I would have walked away from it all closer to Toya, and she and I would have been on the same page and there would be none of this distrust, which was probably just miscommunication because she had been to the riots and had experienced something new, and something new had come back with her, and I hadn’t participated in the riots and so therefore there was nothing new for me, and it was that simple. Perhaps I was just old news. Perhaps it was even simpler: perhaps she was finally bored with me now.

This was not a new realization. I had long braced myself for Toya growing bored and leaving me, and I had been braced for it for so long that I had long ago convinced myself that it wouldn’t be such a crisis if we parted ways. I was under no delusions. In fact, of the two of us, it was probably Toya who was more inclined to believe that people could be meant for each other, etc. But the tone of everything soon changed from suspicious to near-sinister when the next target of Toya’s inexplicable purge was revealed. Not that she hadn’t blue-balled me before, to get back at me for one thing or another, which I would say is probably not all that uncommon among couples. This time, though, it was the way she did it that made it so ominous. Because when I say she made sex embarrassing on purpose, I mean she made me want to stop having sex with her because it felt so uncomfortable and wrong. This is what I came to realize soon after: she took my hand and put the detonator in it.

Now, something that should be known is that when it comes to ethics, I am fairly guileless—by which I mean that I rarely impose myself upon others, and you have probably noticed that this was something I paid for many times over whenever I let Toya walk all over me, as she frequently did. Anyway, I have always operated off of a very simple mantra, a mantra I take to because I love the caustic irreducibility of it: “People,” my mantra goes, “are individuals first”. Which, for instance, is to say that a woman is herself before she is a woman, or, say, that a father is himself before he is a Republican, a French kid himself or herself before they are either French or a maghrébin, or even a him or a her—or that even a Dane is himself before he is a reckless Norse berserker, and a much older boyfriend himself before he is a Nabokovian-style chauvinist and cold-hearted libertarian—you get the picture. In other words, I try to treat everything and everyone as discreet things. Who can argue with that? Who can take offense? (On a side note, I shouldn’t have to mention that one of the small pleasures of such a mantra is how toxic it was to Toya’s self-righteousness, Toya who saw people—such as, for instance, women, fathers, kids, Danes, and older boyfriends—in their respective larger sociological groups, whichever group it was convenient for her to see them in at the time.)

But anyway, in this case I have to drop all ethical pretense. I simply cannot imagine a man doing what Toya did as perfectly as she did it, as what I should think women as a group are able to do inherently better than men, which is to lace so gracefully a self-destruct button into the very fabric of fucking. As much as I want to, I can’t credit Toya-the-individual-first with that kind of ability, Toya who is, as I have mentioned, as subtle as one of our fathers’ aircraft carriers or one of her French-English propaganda pamphlets, and so I will credit Toya-the-female, I will—in this case, this one case—distribute this ability to all women, and you will never see me generalize again. But I procrastinate; I recognize that this is all very uncomfortable to write about.

So how does one do that? How does one instigate that particular bit of brilliance? How very simple you would think it would be, and perhaps it is simple on the outside, but how much self control one must have clenching away on the inside the whole time, self control I can’t imagine in the average male. To do this, to pull it off, the secret is for one to let the other do whatever he wants to her. One strips herself of every single bit of autonomy. One becomes an automaton. One becomes a hand puppet. One becomes a dishrag. One relinquishes too easily. One assumes a sinisterly efficient and inorganic rhythm of humping, a rhythm non-existent in the natural world of humping, a pace that would be impossible to keep under the constant sweaty sticking and unsticking from each other, the heaving and tearing and self-abandon and self-consciousness of normal fucking. One finds a single place on the wall to stare at, as if one’s eyes themselves must be given permission to move. One dilutes the entire lingua erotica with noncommittal words-du-jour such as “whatever” and “yeah, sure” and “go ahead.” One moans—“OOOoooAAAaaawwwhhhhhhh!”—like someone who has never heard a moan in real life but who was told a long time ago in a fairy tale what one sounded like. One plays the other’s games, but ruins all the roles. One becomes a fucking lullaby in bed. “Maybe we should just . . . just stop for tonight, Ty. It’s not you, it’s me.” Well, of course it’s you, of course it’s you. This is the one, I should mention—Toya, the little riot child, the little loopy cunt who, as my friends told me after she disappeared, “always reeked of daddy issues” to them—this is the one who introduced me to sex long ago when she was still in high school and when I was well outside of college, and who, later, when I thought I owed it to myself to try one more time to be with someone more mature than Toya and had consequently gotten with Chloe, also introduced me to exuberant sex—and by “exuberant”, I mean Toya my companion since before puberty had somehow turned out to be one of those oddball types who gets off on being tied down to a bed or led around on a leash, gets off on being stripped of freedom and dignity but of course never really stripped of it, just the facsimile of stripped so that she could sell the fantasy to herself in her mind—this was the one who bought the collar in the first place from the pet store and asked me, kneeling, to please put it around her neck, and when did she ever ask please?, and me standing there dumbshit thinking, holy shit what is she asking what should I do I don’t know what to do please tell me what to do, and then her saying very flatly, “Tell me what to do,” and me still just standing dumbshit there, rooted, not knowing whether I should laugh at the kitsch of it all, because—it was then occurring to me—I really could laugh at the kitsch of it all, because in a small way that would finally start the process of paying her back for being the one who I lost my virginity to, the bitch, that would begin to make us even, wouldn’t it?, I could have just laughed out loud at her, or at least could have been noncommittal, “Uh, sure, whatever you say”—I could have left her stranded, treading water in her own curiosity and desire, could have ridiculed her and put her down, but I didn’t. I didn’t. And clearly “didn’t” didn’t go unpunished, “didn’t” is probably what got us to that point where she was running the whole show in bed, her playing doggie and asking to be hit with a belt, the little freak, never wanting to be done from the front but only from behind, but really running the whole show, because what it came down to was that there she was years later, still running the show, playing the role of a dishrag instead of a dog, the little freak, leaving me stranded.

And why should I notice all of these things, you wonder? Why should I collect all this minutiae? What old and fat jealousy was I nursing that should I be suspicious of her dishrag-ness? Why should I think I was being cheated on, and why in particular with the one they called the Great Dane? Why this elaborate sense of conspiracy, if everything is discreet? I’m sure you see my attention to trivial details in a very different light than how I see it. You’ve drawn conclusions. His insecurity. His self-loathing. His jealousy. Well, I reply, why not be suspicious? Why not, since it was just after she started acting bizarrely prudish, after I started hearing this name, “the Great Dane,” after she ruined sex and left me stranded and treading water, exactly after I began to believe that I was just seeing things and perhaps paying too much attention to trivial details, and that nothing strange was really afoot, exactly after all of that that Toya up and disappeared, leaving only one small, cryptic message written inside a folded-up newspaper, penciled into the crossword squares—just five words to bring to an end our entire relationship. Five words to bring to an end a relationship not with Ty-the-insecure-boyfriend, or Ty-the-tyrant, or Ty-the-nonchalant, or Ty-the-admittedly-overbearing-sometimes; five words to bring to an end a long relationship—a long friendship—with Ty-the-individual-first, who would never bring himself to say it, but whose life it was written all over if she just looked: who simply loved her.

Five words. “Somebody else’s life, not mine.”