Raised in Captivity Read online

  They all sat for a moment, saying nothing. Paul broke the silence.

  “We really need to get Hank’s thoughts on this,” he said. Hank was the bass player. “Why isn’t he here? What’s he doing?”

  “He’s back at the hotel,” said the drummer. “He’s working on a new song. I’ve heard a little bit of it, and it’s good. Almost a power ballad. It’s apparently about his parents’ divorce, although I would have never figured that out if he hadn’t told me.”

  “That’s wonderful,” said Barb. “Hank is usually so reticent to write anything personal. This is a big step forward for him. What’s the song called?”

  “He told me the working title is ‘Bomb Israel.’ But maybe we’ll want to retool that.”

  Of Course It Is

  This is not the way I’m supposed to do this. I get that. I also know I’m not supposed to admit that I know I’m doing it wrong, as that compounds the original mistake. I don’t care. The objective here is not elegance or craft. I don’t want to waste your time. I’m just going to start.

  I wake up this morning with nothing to do. The only thing I know for certain is that I don’t need to go to work. What do I do for living? I can’t recall. But I look out the bedroom window and the weather is ideal, by which I mean ideal for me specifically. It’s either early spring or late fall. Do I find it odd that I don’t know the season? I do not. You can see where this is going. It’s almost eleven, so I take a hot shower and throw on a green sweater and walk to the Chinese restaurant around the corner. Everything on the menu is cheap, almost to the point of parody. It’s like a menu from before I was born. I order four different entrees, and they’re all slightly better than I expect. I bus my tray and start walking back to my apartment, but I pick up the scent of sandalwood incense wafting from a street-level window. Some doomed entrepreneur has opened a record store right next to my building. It’s a terrible location for a retail outlet and there’s no way it will survive, but the selection is incredible. They have a live bootleg of Jimi Hendrix playing with Miles Davis in Stockholm, on vinyl. They have a soundtrack Black Sabbath recorded in 1974 for a never-released animated film about Genghis Khan. I buy nine or ten albums and drop them off at my apartment, a third-floor walk-up that’s clean and organized and smells like oranges. I head back outside and stroll to the darkest bar within walking distance. It’s empty in that way bars are always empty in the late afternoon. The muted TV is rebroadcasting an NBA game from the night before. The score is tied, the fourth quarter is just starting, and Rajon Rondo already has sixteen assists. I watch the game and drink draft beer from a glass mug that’s been stored in the freezer. My growing level of intoxication is synchronized with the setting of the sun. The bartender looks like Winona Ryder’s taller, Catholic sister. She’s a graduate student in political science. We talk about H. Ross Perot’s impact on the 1992 presidential election and why pancakes are superior to waffles. Her favorite comedian is Neil Hamburger. She sells me drugs and I leave without saying goodbye. When I get home, there’s some leftover beef stew in the fridge, which I couldn’t possibly have cooked and which contains spices I’ve never previously encountered. I go to bed early and it starts to rain.

  Now, I don’t need to tell you what’s happening here. That would be insulting to you, and maybe to me. It’s obvious to both of us. There’s a certain genre of story that’s always the same, and this is one of those stories. In no way am I trying to blow your mind. You get it. I get it. We all get it.

  There is, however, one aspect here that warrants examination, and I’d love your feedback on this point, although that’s impossible for many reasons, chiefly the fundamental illogic of this document’s very existence. But here again, let’s not waste our energy with something as worthless as logic. I’m just going to get into it.

  What’s the only thing we all know about every variation of this particular scenario? What’s the one thing that’s always true, the one thing that must be true, in order for this scenario to have any meaning at all? It is, in simplest terms, the telegraphing of the twist: It has to be that the individual at the center of the experience initially assumes he’s in some version of heaven, only to realize he’s actually in his own version of hell. I fully accept that this must be what’s happening to me. Every day, I wake up with nothing to do. I have a gratuitous lunch, I flip through a bunch of records that can’t be real, I get drunk in the afternoon, I talk to multiple incarnations of a female bartender who’s a projection of my most sophomoric desires, and I find some surprise stew in the best possible rendering of my kitchen. How many times has this occurred? No idea. Rondo is always playing for the Dallas Mavericks, so I must have died in the vicinity of 2015. But I’m also not sure if a “day” in this reality is twenty-four hours. Sometimes I get the sense that this has happened to me hundreds of thousands of times, even though I never remember the previous day. I’m always surprised by everything that happens, every single time. It’s only at the very end, when I’m lying under a gravity blanket I’ve never purchased and listening to the rain, that it gradually dawns on me that I’m operating inside some perpetual post-existence loop I won’t recognize when I wake up tomorrow morning. Which, based on every short story I read in junior high and every Twilight Zone episode I’ve ever watched, is the moment I’m supposed to be overcome with the existential terror of my imprisonment.

  Except that last part never happens.

  I just fall asleep and forget.

  Sometimes I briefly think, “Maybe this is heaven. Maybe that’s the twist on the twist.” But that can’t be right. Things aren’t that awesome. I buy interesting records but I never get to hear them. I never have sex with the bartender. I like stew, but I wouldn’t order it at a restaurant. It’s a pretty banal paradise. I suppose an argument could be made for the sensation of anticipation; maybe what makes a person happiest is imagining all the music they have yet to hear and fantasizing about all the sex they have yet to have. Maybe my stomach likes stew more than my mind is willing to admit. Still, I know what I know. I’m just not getting an Elysium vibe from any of this. It’s mystical, but low-grade mystical. One way or the other, this has to be a projection of whatever used to be my consciousness. And if that’s where the projection originates, the internal rules of its consequence must come from the same source, which is my own brain. And my brain knows this scenario can only have one explanation: I am dead, and I am in hell. This must be hell, and I must deserve to be here. So what am I doing wrong? Where is the torment? Can’t I do anything right?

  The fact that I’m in hell is surprising, but I wouldn’t call it shocking. I can’t remember the person I was when I was alive, so I can’t assert that I didn’t do terrible things. Maybe I burned villages. Maybe I died while torturing a baby sloth. That, however, is almost beside the point. If I was anything like the post-person I am now, I’d have operated from the position that hell probably doesn’t exist, but if it does, it’s a place where almost no one goes or where almost everyone goes. The fact that this was the full extent of my spiritual perspective would likely be enough to place me in the second category. Sometimes I wonder if perhaps I was a completely different guy when I was alive, with a wife and kids, and my eternal separation from those people is the crux of my castigation. I can’t remember any wife and I can’t remember any kids, yet this feeling persists. It’s (almost) troubling. But of course, I only have these nagging thoughts when I’m falling asleep, and only if I choose to fixate on the possibility that I’m missing some critical clue within this otherwise pleasant eternity. I never feel sad. Never. Annoyed, sometimes, but never despondent. One night I had this breakthrough vision that I must be in purgatory and that the moment I finally embrace my sadness will be the same moment I ascend into heaven. The only problem is that you can’t make yourself sad without the benefit of personal memory, and I can’t even remember my name without looking at my driver’s license. Plus, if purgatory is a Chinese restaurant and a recor
d store and a decent bar, heaven might just be a shopping mall in Minneapolis. Plus, this is not purgatory, because this is hell, because of course it is.

  I once read something (I can’t remember where or when) that claimed the hardest work a soul could do was to be aware. It strikes me as strange that I can remember this specific line, and that my inexplicable memory of that sentiment must mean something vital (in light of my current situation). The thought has occurred to me that intellectually realizing I’m secretly in hell might be the definition of hell itself, just as this thought has likely occurred to you. Part of me wants this to be true. I like the idea of things being the way they’re supposed to be, even if the outcome contradicts my own self-interest. Consistency matters. But that’s not how it is. My soul is not working hard. It’s not working at all. It’s aware of nothing. This is just how I am.

  Time to sleep. Talk again tomorrow, or not.

  Skin

  It was the best restaurant in the city, assuming you believed the reviews, which are a terrible thing to believe. Reviews dwell on the ancillary—the atmosphere, the service, the presentation. Logan only cared about the food. The food needed to be incredible. But what can you do? Reviews are all you have, so he made a reservation for Plaza 221 at eight o’clock.

  They met at the bar. Logan showed up early and Gwen arrived on time. It was tense. There was no illusion of normalcy. Gwen didn’t want to look at Logan’s face and kept pretending to notice other things. They were soon seated in the middle of the crowded restaurant, just as Logan had requested. The lighting was dim, the table was wide, the menu was abstruse. They’d never been to a place this posh.

  “You should get the duck,” said Logan. “They say the duck is the best meal in town. They say the skin is a meal unto itself.” Gwen ordered the duck. Logan chose the salmon. He insisted they both get pumpkin soup, and some oysters, and a shrimp cocktail to share, and maybe the pot stickers. “Don’t worry about the price,” urged Logan. He even considered selecting the second most expensive bottle of wine, but then he remembered that expensive white wine sometimes tastes like expired antibiotics, so he opted instead for the second cheapest. Gwen drank most of her glass in two swallows and immediately refilled the goblet.

  “Why are we here?” she asked. “Why didn’t we go to Olive or Bucky’s?” They had gone to Olive at least once a month for over a year. They went to Bucky’s when Olive was crowded and they were out of ideas.

  “Don’t worry about it,” said Logan. “Wait until the duck arrives.”

  It took forty minutes. The service was slow by design. Every time Gwen tried to start a normal conversation, Logan commented on how delicious the appetizers were. He wasn’t necessarily wrong, but a tad unconvincing. He overplayed his hand. Gwen was relieved when the duck finally arrived.

  “Look at that duck,” he said. “That’s a quality bird.”

  Gwen started to carve a fork-sized slice. Logan stopped her. “The skin,” he said. “Try the skin first. That’s supposed to be the best part.”

  She stopped carving and looked straight at him. His tie was colorful and too wide. He used a lot of product in his hair. His smile was asymmetrical. He looked like a loser, but she loved him. He was the loser she loved. She took her fork and ripped off a large chunk of skin. It was crisp and salty, lined on the inside with a thin layer of limpid fat. It dissolved in her mouth.

  “How’s it going down?” asked Logan. “Overrated or underrated?”

  “It’s excellent,” she said. “It’s the best skin I’ve ever tasted.”

  “Take a full bite,” he said. “See how the skin interplays with the flesh.”

  She did as requested. What else could she do? It was food. She was eating food. And as she chewed, Logan started his ramble.

  “I’ve been thinking a lot, about everything,” he began, trying to replicate the speech he’d rehearsed since New Year’s. “Life is complicated. Being in love is complicated. We’ve been at this a long time. Two years is a long time. I can’t even remember what it was like before we started dating. I was different. You were very different. We were going to move in together, and then we didn’t. Maybe we should have. Maybe if we’d done that, we’d be less different now. But I feel like if the person I’ve become met the person you’ve become, there’s no way we’d go on even one date, much less live together. You’re always nice to me, but everything I say seems to annoy you. We only have sex when one of us is drunk, and that can’t be normal. I used to hate being alone. Now I love it. We don’t even watch the same TV shows anymore. I don’t like your friends and you don’t want me to have any friends at all. We probably do still love each other, maybe even more than we did when things were good. But not in the way old married people are supposed to love each other, and it’s been two years, and we’re not getting younger and we’re not getting married. So I want to get out of this, and I think you want the same.”

  Gwen did not disagree with anything Logan said, except the part about her not wanting him to have friends (although she understood why he thought that, as many of his closest friends were degenerate gamblers). Their relationship wasn’t awful, but it was boring, and not in a way that doubled as reassuring. She had indeed become a different person, and so had he. Gwen was a different person because she’d finished graduate school and lost her mother to leukemia. Logan was a different person because he’d installed SiriusXM radio in his car. There wasn’t much about him she’d miss, or even remember. Still, two years is a long time to spend with someone you’ll never see again. He knew everything about her, and now she’d have to find someone new and retell all the same stories. Logan had always been sweet to her, especially at the funeral. She’d never been this intricately intertwined with another person. Being unsatisfied was a lot of work.

  She began to cry, quietly. Quietly, but obviously.

  “Wait,” said Logan. “What are you doing?”

  “What am I doing? What do you think I’m doing?”

  “You’re crying,” he said. “You’re crying.”

  “No shit.”

  “But . . . the duck?”

  And here is where we see the problem with Logan and Gwen, and the larger problem with Logan, and the still larger problem with people who want simple things to be true. Logan had heard an interview. He was driving to Home Depot to buy a hacksaw, and he heard a radio interview with a psychologist who explained how there are certain combinations of things that humans cannot do simultaneously. You can’t sneeze with your eyes open, this psychologist explained. You can try, but there’s a biological protection drive that will stop it from happening. It’s built into our nervous system. You can’t sing a song aloud while simultaneously remembering the melody to a different song. You can’t experience orgasm while you vomit (it can happen right after or right before, but not concurrently). You can multiply two-digit numbers in your head if you’re juggling three objects, but not if you’re juggling five objects. The mental multitasking is too extreme. And you cannot, this educated man on the radio explained, begin weeping while tasting something new and delicious. People with eating disorders often eat while they’re crying, but that’s not the same thing—the crying happens before they start or after they’ve finished. Within that express moment of ecstatic gustatory inception, the psychologist claimed, a human’s tear ducts mechanically block themselves. To Logan, this was a revelation. He did not want to be with Gwen. He did not want to spend time with her, or take responsibility for his laziness, or meet her friends at wine bars with limited menus, or remember nonessential holidays, or get criticized for wearing shoes that were no longer in fashion, or think about any sociopolitical issue that did not directly impact his own day-to-day life. He wanted to disappear, and if that was impossible, he wanted her to disappear. But he did not want to see her cry. Nothing made him feel worse. He would do anything to keep that from happening, and—at long last—he’d found a way. The radio explained ever
ything. It was so simple. All he had to do was tell her the bad news at the same moment she was eating something she loved for the first time. He spent hours reading menus on the Internet, eventually stumbling upon word of this duck skin. The perfect solution, or so it appeared. But here he was, spending a week’s pay at Plaza 221, and Gwen was still crying, no differently than if he’d told her the news in her own goddamn bathroom. Why had he believed that radio psychologist? Why did he assume the psychologist was credible? He couldn’t even remember the man’s name, or if he’d ever known it at all. And he couldn’t apologize for believing him, because that would mean he’d need to explain his plan, which he now realized was stupid, and which Gwen would view as even stupider than it actually was. And then she would be crying and angry, which was the only thing worse than crying.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I guess I just expected you to enjoy the duck.”

  It might not be so terrible to start again, Gwen thought to herself. It might be easy.

  The Perfect Kind of Friend

  I value my friends more than I should. It’s a weakness. People have told me this in the past and I can never prove them wrong. Every rebuttal falls flat, so I just pretend to be happy about it. I pretend like it’s a good thing. My friends have more control over my life than they possibly realize. No matter how much I like them, I want them to like me more. If they don’t, I live in fear that they’ll lose interest in our rapport and pursue other, deeper friendships with other, deeper people. I spend an inordinate amount of time nurturing relationships that provide no satisfaction to either party. This includes relationships with people I don’t know.