Three weeks after I sent you the four-page story that you said saved your life, you woke me at 2 a.m. by phone from Tualatin and we talked for forty minutes. You talked, rather. I pressed the phone to the topside of a head I was unwilling to lift from the pillow. You posed a battery of questions about the story I had written, at first typographical ones about how I wished dialogue to be represented (quotation marks or dashes?), eventually letting go that pretense to interrogate me about the character I had created in the story. I had based it on you, of course, and specifically on the way you had acted in the wake of our breakup. It wasn't my idea. It was your prompt. “I don't want to be invisible,” you said. “I want to be seen by your talent. It's the least you can do.” But now I had to do more. I had to field your questions. Who did I think owned the character? Who deserved to control him? In changing him from a depressed but manic young suitor to a cheery young husband, was I erasing you? What trace of you remained? All I remember saying was that I had considered every consequence, because I felt that saying otherwise was an abdication of my responsibilities as a writer, and also because I wanted to get off the phone. Four days later, you bulled into a local coffee shop at closing time, ranting about how aliens had probed you and sucked your soul out through a small metal tube. My fiancé said it was a sad circumstance, but he was laughing when he said it. “And the story you wrote,” he said, “is hi-larious.” He was in the room with me, not on the phone, but next to me in bed, as he had been when you called.
©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
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