The Book of Other People

Gideon by ZZ Packer

You know what I mean? I was nineteen and crazy back then. I’d met this Jewish guy with this really Jewish name: Gideon. He had hair like an Afro wig and a nervous smile that kept unfolding quickly, like origami. He was one of those white guys who had a thing for black women, but he’d apparently been too afraid to ask out anyone, until he met me.

That one day, when it all began to unravel, Gideon was working on his dissertation, which meant he was in cutoffs in bed with me, the fan whirring over us while he was getting political about something or other. He was always getting political, even though his Ph.D. had nothing to do with politics and was called ‘Temporal Modes of Discourse and Ekphrasis in Elizabethan Poetry’. Even he didn’t like his dissertation. He was always opening some musty book, reading it for a while, then closing it and saying, ‘You know what’s wrong with these fascist corporations?’ No matter how you responded, you’d always be wrong because he’d say, ‘Exactly!’ then go on to tell you his theory, which had nothing to do with anything you’d just said.

He was philosophizing, per usual, all worked up with nervous energy while feeding our crickets. ‘And you,’ he said, unscrewing a cricket jar, looking at the cricket but speaking to me, ‘you think the neo-industrial complex doesn’t pertain to you, but it does, because by tacitly participating blah blah blah you’re engaging in blah blah commodification of workers blah blah blah allowing the neo-Reaganites to blah blah blah but you can’t escape the dialectic.’

His thing that summer was crickets, I don’t know why. Maybe it was something about the way they formed an orchestra at night. All around our bed, with the sky too hot and the torn screen windows, all you could hear were those damn crickets, moving their muscular little thighs and wings to make music. He would stick his nose out the window and smell the air. Sometimes he would go out barefoot with a flashlight and try to catch a cricket. If he was successful, he’d put it in one of those little jars – jars that once held gourmet items like tapenade and aïoli. I’d never heard of these things before, but with Gideon, I’d find myself eating tapenade on fancy stale bread one night, and the next night we’d rinse out the jar and voilà, a cricket would be living in it.

Whenever he’d come back to bed from gathering crickets, he’d try to wedge his cold skinny body around my fetal position. ‘Come closer,’ he’d say. And I’d want to and then again I wouldn’t want to. He always smelled different after being outside. Like a farm animal, or watercress. Plus he had a ton of calluses.

Sometimes I’d stare in the mid-darkness at how white he was. If I pressed his skin, he’d bruise deep fuchsia and you’d be able to see it even in the dark. I was very dark compared to him. He was so white it was freaky, sometimes. Othertimes it was kind of cool and beautiful, how his skin would glow against mine, how our bodies together looked like art.

Well, that one day – after he’d railed against the Federal Reserve Board, NAFTA, the gun lobby and the neo-industrial complex – we fed the crickets and went to bed. When I say went to bed, I mean, we made love. I used to call it sex, but Gideon said I might as well call it rape. Making love was all about the mind. One time, in a position that would have been beautiful art, he said, ‘Look at me. Really look at me.’ I didn’t like looking at people when I did it, like those tribes afraid part of their soul will peel away if someone takes a picture of them. When Gideon and I did lock eyes, I must admit, it felt different. Like we were – for a moment – part of the same picture.

That night, we did it again. I couldn’t say for sure if the condom broke or not, but it all felt weird, and Gideon said, ‘The whole condom-breaking-thing is a myth.’ But we looked at it under the light, the condom looking all dead and slimy, and finally he threw the thing across the room, where it stuck to the wall like a slug, then fell. ‘Fucking Freestyles! Who the hell buys fucking Freestyles?’

‘They’re free at the clinic,’ I said. ‘What do you want, organic condoms?’ We looked it over again but that didn’t stop it from being broke. Then Gideon made a look that just about sent me over the edge.

I had to think. I went in the bathroom and sat on the toilet. I’d done everything right. I hadn’t gotten pregnant or done drugs or hurt anybody. I had a little life, working at Pita Delicious, serving up burgers and falafel. Almost everything there was awful, but the falafels weren’t half bad. It was at Pita Delicious that I first met Gideon with his bobbing nosetip and Afro-Jewish hair. The Syrian guys who owned the place always made me go and talk to him, because they didn’t like him. The first couple of times he came in he’d tried talking to them about the Middle East and the Palestinians and whatnot. Even though he was on their side, they still hated him. ‘Talk to the Jew,’ they said, whenever he came in. Soon we were eating falafels on my break, with Gideon helping me plot out how I was going to go back to school, which was just a figure of speech because I hadn’t entered school in the first place.

When I came back to bed, Gideon was splayed out on top of the blanket, slices of moonlight on his bony body. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Let’s get a pregnancy test.’

‘Don’t you know anything? It’s not going to work immediately.’ He made a weird face, and asked, ‘Is this the voice of experience talking?’

I looked at him. ‘Everyone knows,’ I said, trying to sound calm and condescending, ‘that it’s your first missed period.’

He mouthed Okay, real slowly, like I was the crazy one.

When my period went AWOL, I took the pregnancy test in the bathroom at Pita Delicious. I don’t know why. I guess I didn’t want Gideon hovering over me. I didn’t even tell him when I was going to do it. One pink stripe. Negative. I should have been relieved, relieved to have my lame life back, but the surprising thing was that I wasn’t. Then I did something I never thought I’d do, something unlike anything I’ve ever done before: it was really simple to get a pink marker, and take off the plastic cover and draw another little stripe. Two stripes, the test said, means you’re pregnant.

When I got back home, I told him the test was positive, and flicked it into his lap: ‘What do you care?’

I told him that I didn’t know what I was going to do – what we were going to do. He paced in front of the crickets for a while. Then he put his arm around me, like I’d just told him I had AIDS and he’d mustered the courage to give me a hug.

‘What’re we gonna do?’ I asked. I don’t know what I expected – whether I thought I’d catch him in a lie, or he’d say something about not wanting the baby, or what – I forgot. All I knew was that something was pressing down on me, drowning me. If he’d said anything, anything at all, I would have been fine. If he’d start talking about the dialectic or about mesothelioma or aïoli or how many types of cancer you could get from one little Newport menthol – I’d have been all right. Even if he cursed me out and blamed me and said he didn’t want the baby – I’d have understood.

But he didn’t say anything. I saw everything he was thinking, though. I saw him thinking about his parents – Sy and Rita – growing worried in their condo’s sunny Sarasota kitchen; I saw him never finishing his thesis and going to work for some grubby non-profit where everyone ate tempeh and couldn’t wear leather and almost had a Ph.D.; I saw him hauling the kid around to parks, saying it was the best thing he’d ever done. Really. The best.

I walked out of that room, out of that house he rented with its really nice wood everywhere. I kept walking away, quickly at first, then so fast that the tears were the only thing keeping me from burning myself out like a comet. I wasn’t running from Gideon anymore, but even if he was following me, it was too late. Even with no baby, I could see there’d be no day when I’d meet Sy and Rita, no day when I’d quit Pita Delicious before they quit me, no day when I’d hang around a table of students talking about post-post-feminism, no day when Gideon and I would lock hands in front of the house we’d just bought. Anyone could have told him it was too late for that, for us, but Gideon was Gideon, and I could hear him calling after me, hoping the way he always did that the words would do the chasing for him.