The Nimrod Flipout: Stories (6 page)

Even though he could have called Neeva to ask whether Darko had come back, Ronel decided to go home. It was close by, and besides, now that Alma had managed to convince him that Darko might be there, he didn’t want Neeva to be the one to tell him the good news. “She and I,” he thought, “should have separated a long time ago.” Once, he remembered, he’d looked at Neeva when she was sleeping and imagined a horrible scenario in which she died in a terrorist attack. He’d be sorry for cheating on her and he’d cry live on the six o’clock news out of guilt cunningly disguised as pure grief. That thought, he now remembered, had been sad and terrible, but, to his surprise, it also made him feel a kind of relief. As if her being wiped out of his life might open up a space for something else, something with color and smell and life. But before he could feel guilty again about this sensation of relief, Renana made her entrance into the scenario and now that Neeva was no longer in the picture, she moved right in with him, at first to give him comfort and support. Then she stayed for no reason at all. Ronel remembered how he’d gone on and on in his imagination, till he reached the point when Renana said to him, “It’s me or Darko.” He chose Darko and remained alone in his apartment. Without a woman. Without love, except for Darko’s, whose existence only intensified the terrible loneliness he called his life. “Terrorism is awful,” Ronel had thought that night. “It destroys life in an instant,” and he gave Neeva’s sleeping forehead a gentle kiss.

Ronel walked past Darko almost without noticing him. He was too busy trying to find a lighted window in his third-floor apartment. Darko was busy too, his filmy glance admiringly following the quick hands of the owner of Tarboosh Shwarma as they cut thin slices of meat from the revolving spit. But when the two friends finally spotted each other, their reunion was replete with lavish face-licking and emotion. “That’s some dog,” the shwarma guy said as he knelt in front of Darko, placing a piece of paper with a few greasy slices of meat on the sidewalk like a high priest making a sacrifice to his god. “I want you to know that a lot of dogs come here, and I don’t give them anything. But this one…” he said, pointing at Darko. “Tell me, does he happen to be Turkish?” “What do you mean, Turkish?” Ronel asked, offended. “Oh nothing,” the shwarma guy apologized. “I’m from Izmir, so I thought…When I was a kid, I had a dog just like him, a puppy. But he used to pee in the house, which drove my mother crazy, so she threw him out, like he did it on purpose. But you, you’re a good man. He ran away from you and you’re not even mad. Believe me, that’s how it should be. I don’t understand all those tough guys who clobber their dogs with the leash if they stop for a minute to watch the shwarma turn. What are they, Nazis?” “He didn’t run away,” Ronel corrected him as he pressed his tired forehead against Darko’s sturdy back. “He got lost.”

That night, Ronel decided to write a book. Something between an educational fable and a philosophical treatise. The story would be about a king beloved by all his subjects who loses something he cherishes, not money, maybe a child or something, or a nightingale, if nobody’s used that yet. Around page one hundred, the book would turn into something less symbolic and more modern that dealt with man’s alienation in contemporary society and offered a little consolation. On about page one hundred sixty or seventy, it would change into a kind of airplane novel in terms of readability, but of much higher quality. And on page three hundred, the book would turn into a furry little animal readers could hug and pet, as a way of coping with their loneliness. He hadn’t yet decided on what sort of technology would turn the book into that ever-so-touchable animal, but he pointed out to himself before he fell asleep that in the last few years, both molecular biology and publishing had taken giant steps forward and were crying out now to join forces.

And that same night, Ronel had a dream, and in his dream he was sitting on the balcony of his house concentrating on the newspaper in a courageous and sincere effort to solve the enigma of human existence. His beloved dog, Darko, suddenly appeared on the balcony wearing a gray suit, a giant bone in his mouth. He put the bone down at his feet and hinted to Ronel with a tilt of his head that he should look for the answer in the financial pages. Then he explained in a deep, human voice, which sounded a little like his father’s voice, that the human race is nothing but a tax dodge. “A tax dodge?” Ronel repeated, confused. “Yes,” Darko said, nodding his clever head. He explained to Ronel that his tax consultant, an extraterrestrial who lived on the planet Darko originally came from, had advised him to invest his earnings in an ecologically oriented enterprise, because ecology was big with the extraterrestrial IRS. And that, using shell corporations, he soon got involved in the whole field of developing life and species on planets. “In general,” Darko explained, “everyone knows there’s no real money in developing the human race. Or any other race, for that matter. But since it’s a new field that’s wide open taxationally, there’s nothing to stop me from submitting a mountain of receipts.” “I don’t believe it,” Ronel said in his dream. “I refuse to believe that our only function in this world is to be a tax shelter so my beloved dog can launder money.” “First of all,” Darko corrected him, “no one’s talking about money laundering here. All my revenue’s clean and aboveboard, I don’t go in for anything shady. All we’re talking about here is a semilegitimate inflation of expenses. And secondly, let’s say I grant your first premise that it isn’t humanity’s real function to be a tax shelter for me, OK? If we take this argument a little further, what other function could it have? I’m not asking pragmatically, but theoretically.” Darko kept quiet for a little while, and when he saw Ronel didn’t have a single answer in his arsenal, he barked twice, picked up the bone with his mouth and left the balcony. “Don’t go,” Ronel begged in a whisper. “Please, don’t leave me, my dog, my friend, my love…”

That morning too, Ronel woke up with a glorious hard-on and Darko’s as-yet-to-be-defined licking. When he finally opened his eyes, Darko was running around the room boneless and completely naked. “It’s not sexual,” was the first thought that came into Ronel’s mind. “It’s sociable, maybe even existential.” “Darko, my angel, my friend,” he whispered, trying to contain the overwhelming joy he felt so as not to wake Neeva, “you’re the only one who really loves me.”

This is one story you’ve got to hear! Two identical twin brothers from Jacksonville, Florida, met two identical twin sisters from Daytona Beach. They met through the Internet. Or to be exact, it started with just one couple, Nicky and Todd, and when Todd brought Nicky home for dinner at his parents’ place, his twin brother, Adam, got really excited. That’s when Todd told him she had a sister. Not just a sister, an identical twin. Todd and Nicky set up this blind date. Of course it couldn’t exactly be called a blind date, considering that Adam and Michelle both knew what the other person would look like. To make things less awkward, they turned it into a double date and the four of them went to see a movie at the drive-in. And what movie did they go see? No, not
Twins
with Schwarzenegger and DeVito. They went to see
Les Liaisons dangereuses
. Can you imagine? There couldn’t be a worse movie for a blind date—it’s all intrigues and cheating and lies—and yet it went well. After the movie they drove to a diner. The girls made a point of dressing in different colors so it would be easier to tell them apart. The guys came in jeans and white T-shirts, looking exactly the same. And at one embarrassing point that she’d still remember years later, Nicky made the mistake of kissing Adam, because she thought he was Todd.

When you meet someone and fall in love, what’s the strongest emotion you have? I don’t know about you, but what I always feel when that happens is that I’m with someone who’s completely unlike anyone else in the world. But when Michelle and Adam were sitting across from each other in the diner, what did they tell themselves? That there was no other man in the world like Adam? That there was nobody else at the table like Michelle? Whatever they might have thought at that moment, in the end it led to marriage. Well, actually I’m wrong—in the end it led to death. But at some stage in between, it led to marriage.

When Michelle and Adam got married, it was a year after Todd had slipped the ring on Nicky’s finger. Identical twin sisters married to identical twin brothers. I don’t know if there’s ever been anything like it in all of history. Forget the history of Florida, the history of the world. It was so uncanny, they were even approached by a talk show, and I don’t mean some local affiliate. Someone from NBC, but Michelle said no, because she claimed that if she went on the show she’d feel like a bearded lady. “I mean, it’s not like they’re asking us because of anything we did. The only reason they want us on the show is because they think it’s weird. I bet they’ll tell us to dress the same and they’ll start asking Nicky and me why we’ve got the same haircut, and even if we try to explain it’s because that’s the haircut that looks best on us, it’ll still come out perverted,” she told Adam with great conviction. “They want us there like some freak show. And I bet the host will make fun of us and tell lots of little jokes and make us look bad. And the audience at home will laugh, and you and Todd will laugh, because you and Todd laugh at everything, and I’ll be the only one who’s dying of embarrassment.” The truth was, Adam would have loved to be on the show. He’d never been on TV, and he knew how impressed the guys at work would be if they saw him on a talk show, and so would the customers. He’d have enjoyed the hell out of it, but he didn’t even try to reason with her. Because once Michelle had made up her mind, there was no point, she’d never listen to a word that anybody said. In the end, Adam did wind up on TV—prime time no less, coast-to-coast. It wasn’t exactly in the studio, but they showed him for almost one whole minute in a home video his dad had taken years before, playing basketball with Todd. It was a segment where he was waving at the camera, and Todd took advantage of it to grab the ball away from him and shoot a basket. “Even then,” the announcer in the studio intoned, “you could sense the rivalry between them.” And it wasn’t as if there
had
ever been any rivalry, but that’s how it is on TV. They love to blow things out of proportion, for dramatic effect. And if they can’t find anything to blow up out of proportion, they make it up.

In real life, Adam and Todd had actually been on very good terms. Altogether the two couples got along great. They lived near each other, and spent their weekends with one another. And when they started talking about having a family, they even figured on having kids at more or less the same time, so they’d grow up together. And those plans would probably have worked out, if it wasn’t for what happened. And it’s not that anyone suspected anything. Even looking back, it was hard to suspect such a thing. And even if one of the neighbors did happen to see Adam and Nicky kissing on the street or on the porch, they probably took Adam for Todd, or figured that she must be Michelle.

And their affair went on that way for more than a year. At one point, they even thought of coming out with it, telling the whole world, getting divorced and marrying each other. But Nicky knew it would destroy Michelle, and Adam felt a little sorry for her too, and also for Todd, because even if Todd had hurt him once in the past, maybe more than once, he’d always loved Adam and only wanted what was best for him. Then there was a point when Nicky suggested that they stop. That was when she’d begun to think that Todd might be catching on. Nothing definite, she just had a feeling, and they really did stop seeing each other for a few weeks, but then they got back together, because the separation turned out to be more than either of them could bear.

I only met Nicky a few years after the whole business ended badly. Adam was dead by then, and Todd had already done a lot of time for it. Michelle hadn’t spoken a word to her since the whole thing came out, which in her case was on the day Todd put three bullets in Adam’s head at point-blank range. Michelle had never exactly been the forgiving type. I had arrived as a guest lecturer at the university and Nicky was the department secretary. I first heard her story from another teacher on the faculty, a guest too, from Turkey, and then from her. She and I wound up getting pretty close that year, and at some stage she told me what had happened. Even before we slept together.

She said she’d left Florida to get away from it all, but that it hadn’t really made a difference because everyone here knew about it too, and they all talked about it behind her back. She said that in some strange way, “perverse” is what her sister Michelle would probably have called it, she really missed the whole twin-hood thing, the way people they’d meet would confuse her with Michelle. “Somehow,” I remember her telling me, just before we kissed for the first time, “when you’ve got an identical twin sister in the same neighborhood, you feel more. As if you’re more than one person and you’ve got more than one life to live. The very fact that someone tells you ‘I saw you an hour ago eating vanilla ice cream’ or ‘I saw you at the bus stop in a pink dress’—you can explain it was your sister if you want, but somehow you feel like it really was you having that ice cream or wearing that pink dress. It’s a strange feeling, like you’re living another life and using your expanded life to do all these mysterious things you’ll never really know.” That’s not all she missed, she missed her husband too, and above all she missed Adam, a guy who was the spitting image—but the absolute spitting image—of her jailed husband, and someone she loved a lot more, even if she couldn’t say why.

That night I told her about my own life too, and about my affair. Not with my wife’s sister. Just a girl at work who didn’t look anything like my wife. She was younger than my wife and much less attractive, but I felt then the same way Nicky did, that I was getting myself more life. Not necessarily a better life, not a life more promising than the one I already had. But because I thought this life was in addition to and not instead of, I devoured it without a second’s hesitation. In my case, nobody shot anybody and even though my wife suspected something, I never got caught. She and I stayed together. Except that, like everything in life that seems to come for free, that affair at work cost something too. When they offered me this job abroad for a year she preferred to stay home. The official reason was the kids, that the move would be hard on them, but the truth was that maybe it suited both of us to be apart for a while. When I met Nicky it was long after I’d promised myself I’d never cheat on my wife again. But I did anyway, and it wasn’t any great love story, nothing like that, just a chance to gain that much more life.