The Theory of Opposites (5 page)

“Wait.” It dawns on me. “I’m fired?”

“Alan was given my job this morning.”

“
Alan Alverson?”

“Live free or die, Willabee. Live free or fucking die.”

“I don’t…” I snap my mouth shut because I don’t have any idea what she’s talking about, much less how to respond.

She rolls her head upward and meets my gaze square on.

“No,” she says slowly. “You
don’t
. You never do.”

—

The TV is blaring when I unlatch the apartment door, which is odd because Shawn is at an all-day coding conference. I abandon my half-filled cardboard box on the floor. It turns out that the accumulated contents of five years of dedicated work don’t amount to all that much: a few insignificant industry awards (my campaign for a dandruff shampoo was nominated for an Obie but lost to Herbal Essences), a framed photograph of me with David Hasselhoff (he was the spokesman for an engine oil we repped), some documents that I’ll probably never look at again.

I reach into the box and grab a fistful of papers. Just to be totally sure that, in fact, I truly do
not
look at them again, I cram them into wads and throw them in the garbage, slamming the lid shut with force. But it’s one of those automatic lids that eases its way closed, so it just sort of lingers in the air, then slowly begins its descent. I watch it make its pitiful fall when the noise from the living room brings me back.

Why is the TV on so goddamn loud?

I head to the couch and run my hands under the pillows, in search of the remote, and then I realize:
Shit. Shawn may be here. And he may not be alone. (!!!!)
My mind spins in all the various ways that my life is about to become undone: that the universe giveth me Shawn and also taketh him away.
I duck under the side of the sofa, because that’s what they do in the movies, and I don’t know what the hell else to do. I squeeze my eyes tightly shut and wish that I’d called that therapist.

Shawn may be here and he may not be alone! Grape! It doesn’t matter that I’m his Switzerland! He might be defecting.

A toilet flushes, and I press myself further into the couch, like that can render me invisible. I squeeze my eyes shut. There are footsteps (
one set or two?)
, and then the bounce of the cushion as someone settles back in on the sofa.

Suddenly, from above me, I hear a voice that is most definitely not Shawn’s say, “Hey.”

“Holy shit!” I scream and jump to my feet.

Nicky starts cackling, curling himself into a ball and flat out howling.

“Oh my God, Jesus! You should have seen your face.”

My chest cavity feels like it might detonate.

“God, Nicky, you startled me. What are you doing here? Don’t you have school today?”

He shrugs, like that’s an explanation for whether or not he has school today.

“Does your mom know you’re here?”

“She knows I’m coming here tonight.” He locates the remote and turns it up a click, as if actively attempting to blow out my eardrum.

“Turn it down!” I shout.

“What?” he shouts back.

His eyes return to the screen. He’s watching a documentary on venomous spiders, and at this exact moment, a hairy, slithery tarantula gets its close-up. Nicky’s mom had warned us that he was going through “a dark period.” That he was increasingly becoming consumed with death, not least his father’s and why it happened and what it meant in the grand scheme of things. But Amanda didn’t have any explanations for that, for Kyle’s fate, just as none of the other 3000 families had explanations. How do you explain to a child that his dad went to work one morning, a morning like any other, and then nineteen terrorists decided that it was the right time to fly a plane into his building, and that’s what ended his life, even when his wife had just discovered that she was pregnant, and really, Kyle’s life in many ways had just begun?

You can explain the facts and include all of the right words, the right adjectives, the right level of vitriol and disgust, but still, after all of that, there is no explanation, no answer to his question of “Why?”

My dad would say, of course, that there is no correct answer to “why” because there is no rational answer to begin with. “Such is life,” he would say, as if he invented this phrase, which he didn’t, even though millions of his readers have been brainwashed to think that he had.

I take the remote from Nicky and lower the volume two beats. The tarantula has taken down its victim now: a field mouse that is at least twice its size. Nicky is rapt, wide-eyed and slack-jawed, watching the feast. I sit beside him, and he breaks from his gaze and offers me an impish grin.

“This is pretty effed up, isn’t it?”

“Yeah.” I sigh. The mouse is gone now — deader than dead, felled by a threat it never saw coming.

“Yeah,” I say again. Then I add: “This really is pretty effed up.”

—

Excerpt:

New York Times
bestseller,
Is It Really Your Choice? Why Your Entire Life May Be Out of Your Control,
p. 73.

In 1975, my colleagues at the University of Australia, Brisbane, conducted a study on 400 rats. They constructed a series of mazes (the maze being a metaphor for our lives, dear reader), and along the way of each maze, placed a series of traps, of temptations, of obstacles. At the end of the maze sat a pungent piece of cheese — the scientists settled on Roquefort, and thus, this experience was deemed the Roquefort Files, a tongue-in-cheek shout-out to the lead scientist’s favorite show, The Rockford Files. (A wonderful play on words that I only wish I had coined myself!)

They gave approximately one-third of the rats a tiny nibble of the cheese before placing them in the starting gate, so these animals understood (and sensed, both literally and intellectually) what they were hunting for. (You surely see the metaphor here too, dear reader, correct? That they were introduced to their end game, just as humans often set their own end game, their own personal aspirations. Which, if you’ve read this far into the book, you know I believe are completely out of our control.) The remainder of the rats either got a sniff of the cheese or…got nothing. (Welcome to life, fair rodents!)

My colleagues’ goal was to determine whether or not when offered a variety of temptations or alternate routes to the cheese, the rats who understood the reward and the task at hand would be less swayed to stop along the way in the maze, if they would work diligently toward the goal, even when traps were sprung, when marbles were rolled in their direction, when loud noises should startle them in the opposite direction. And whether or not these rats would have a higher success rate than the rats who weren’t yet sure of what they were working for or had only had a literal sniff of the grand prize.

Here is what they found, dear readers: they unleashed the rats and discovered that there was not one single correlation between the animals who understood the goal — and thus it can be assumed who also aspired for the goal, because, let’s be honest, there are few things that a rat craves more than cheese — and their rate of success compared to the rats who were left to wander the maze listlessly, dodging obstacles out of self-protection rather than out of aspiration. Rats from all three sets of groups got lost, got turned around, and quite a few ended up contained in the ultimate trap of the snapped-shut cage. Similarly, approximately one-third of the rats made their way to the Roquefort, most often by luck, and certainly, simply because they just kept moving forward. A few ran fast enough to elude the traps; a few others went slowly enough that the traps sprung before their arrival. There wasn’t much rhyme or reason to any of the successes at all. Just rats running through a maze, following the walls to their next destination, their choices and instincts rendered pointless.

Dear readers, I don’t think I need to point out the metaphor here, now do I?

The cheese always stands alone.

5

Shawn isn’t home by 7:30, so I send Nicky out to get a pizza on the corner, and when he asks if he can duck into the deli for Skittles, I think, “What the hell, I’m not his mom,” and hand him three extra dollars. I’d tell him to pick me up a cheap bottle of wine, but I don’t want to know if he has a fake ID. At twelve in New York City, you can’t be sure.

At twelve in New York City, I was the last thing from sure. My older sister, Raina, was the confident one (she’s now a partner at Big Law with a perfect husband and four kids); my little brother, Oliver, was the creative one. (He’s now teaching yoga on an ashram in India — he evidently has a Twitter following of over 100,000 people, which I point out to Raina seems counterintuitive to a devoted yogi, but what do I know?)

But me, I was never really anything. I was William who should have been Willa. I wasn’t Nicky, all shadows, so many question marks, but I had my own shadows all the same. I wasn’t popular; I wasn’t unpopular. I wasn’t smart; I wasn’t unsmart. I was pretty enough with brown hair and big eyes but not really pretty in the way that mattered, and my breasts didn’t come in until way too late, so I didn’t lose my virginity until November of my freshman year in college. By then, I’d met Vanessa, and she told me who I should be, and so I listened. I wore Doc Martens (until they were no longer cool); I decided that Amstel was way more awesome than Zima (even if I actually secretly preferred Zima); I learned to dance to Prince and smoke a cigarette without coughing and kissed enough boys that eventually, one of them slept with me.

But at twelve? Who knew who I was. For my twelfth birthday, my mom and I flew to Disney World. I was too old for it, but she offered, and I’d never been, and besides, I never got alone time with just her, so I acted excited and clapped my hands and hugged her tightly when she suggested the trip. On our first day there, right as we were about to fly down the ramp on Splash Mountain, the ride broke. Actually broke. Broke long enough that we made the national news.

We were stuck up there on the precipice for nearly five hours — teetering, not going up, not going down — and at about hour four, the guy behind us, a newlywed from Kentucky, started screaming about suing Walt Disney. His bride kept yelling things like, “Yeah!” and “You fucking tell them!”

The quartet in the car two cars in front of us was close enough to the splash pool that they gave up and jumped, and though I saw three of them pop up from the water for air and scramble to the ledge, the fourth took longer, and I watched and watched and watched, holding my breath, wondering if this was going to be that woman’s fate: that she would jump from a broken car due to a blown fuse on Splash Mountain and land on the cement floor of the tide pool and drown. Eventually, she bounced to the surface and started screaming about a broken ankle, and another man threw himself into the water to rescue her and drag her over the side. My mom watched all of this with a certain stoicism that I’d inherited from her — part fascination with what would happen next, part uncertainty at her own fascination — and looked at me with a shrug.

“I’m sorry your birthday was the pits,” she said.

“Don’t be sorry. You couldn’t have known.”

“Maybe,” she said. “But it’s the pits all the same.”

We finally got moving after hour five, and we were offered vouchers for a midnight buffet and another voucher for free lifetime entrances to the park. But my mom and I, we weren’t up for the adventure, so we took a taxi to the airport the next morning and came home early. My dad had seen the news report, so he just laughed and handed me a skateboard with a bow on it. As if I’d ever wanted a skateboard or as if he’d ever paid attention to what I’d wanted anyway.

“I’m not William,” I said to him. He looked at me with a cocked head and wrinkled brow, so I just sighed, then tossed the board in Oliver’s room on my way to shut my own bedroom door.

—

Nicky returns with a pepperoni pizza and Tropical Skittles, which sound awful but work fairly well as an appetizer if you want them to.

“It’s cool,” he says. “My mom never lets me get shit like this. She’s totally organic.”

“I should go organic,” I say. “They say you can add three years to your life.” I lick the grease off the pepperoni and stick the disc to the roof of my mouth.
Organic or not, it doesn’t really matter.

“Or you could get hit by a bus tomorrow.”

I nod my head in acknowledgement and wonder if he’s thinking about his dad like I’m thinking about his dad.

“Getting hit by a bus wouldn’t be that bad,” he says, dribbling a long string of melted cheese into his mouth. “I mean, in terms of ways to go. Boom. That’s it.”

“I got fired today.” The pepperoni grease oozes down my throat.

“That blows.”

“You’re the first person I’ve told. Which is sort of screwed up.”

“Yeah,” he says. “Where’s Uncle Shawn?”

My phone lights up with a text, and like a Pavlovian rat, I reach for it.

“This might be him.”

FACEBOOK ALERT

THEODORE BRACKTON HAS ADDED YOU AS A FRIEND

THEODORE BRACKTON HAS SENT YOU A MESSAGE

“Shit,” I mutter, then feel Nicky’s eyes on me. “Sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. Shoot. Shoooot.”

“I say ‘shit’ all the time.”

“You shouldn’t. Why isn’t your mom telling you that you shouldn’t say ‘shit’ all the time? Like, if you have to go to a college interview, and you say ‘shit,’ you won’t get in.”

I head to the refrigerator in search of some wine. There must be wine somewhere in the house.

“I’m a 9/11 kid. I could say, ‘Your mother is a total piece of fucking shit,’ and they’d let me into Harvard.”

I stop my excavation of the fridge abruptly and face him.

“First of all, that’s a terrible thing to say. Second of all, I doubt that’s true. Third of all, you should have some standards for yourself, even if it were true.”

“I do have standards for myself,” he says. “My teacher said I have the best imagination in my English class. That I could be a writer someday.”