____________________

When Everyone Comes To Your Birthday Party

By Bill Kte'pi

____________________

It was silly, the whole birthday party, friends driving down from Vermont and New York, some of them people Carl had always kept in touch with but for the last ten years had seen in person only at weddings and funerals. Even Matt and Brian were there, buddies from high school, the kind you fell out of touch with but re-found every three or four years and spent a drunken weekend with at the ballpark or someone's fishing cabin.

Everyone brought presents in boxes and wrapping paper. Becky passed out hats, lemon fried chicken—his favorite—and ice cream cake, in that order. There were thirty-four candles on the cake. He hadn't had a cake in years. He hadn't had a birthday party in even longer.

But he knew this wasn't really about his birthday—it was about his heart attack.

It'd been four years since he'd gone from a sharp pain in his chest to sprawling out in the grocery store parking lot, groggily aware of panic and concern and discomfort around him, four years since he'd spent a week under observation after surgery that “didn't go as swimmingly as we would have liked,” and after his latest twice-yearly physical, he was finally where he was supposed to be. Cholesterol healthier than ninety percent of men his age. Forty pounds lost over four years, and the blood pressure of a teenage stallion.

He could do enough push-ups without stopping that he didn't know how many he could do, because he didn't need to push to the limit anymore.

He did crunches every morning, played tennis twice a week, and swam on Sunday afternoons before his weekly pizza with Becky at the

checkered-tablecloth joint where they'd had their first date.

She'd never said, “Hey, for your birthday, let's invite all your friends to celebrate you not being dead,” but that was pretty clearly what had happened. And—it had struck him, he'd written this in one of the journals he kept in an office where he never seemed to get anything done—he had known she was going to do it. There hadn't been any moment when the idea had struck him, or any doubt at all.

He'd known she was going to invite all his friends, he'd known Matt and Brian would be there, and he didn't think he had written it down, but he'd swear he'd known Brian would give him the Star Wars DVDs as a gift.

Maybe he just knew them that well.

He lost himself in the party easily enough, catching up with everyone and sitting back and watching that curiousest of curious things: when your separate close friends, who've heard about each other for years but never met, meet each other. It'd been since college that he'd actually tried to introduce friends to each other—living in three different states since high school, and spending a semester abroad, he'd accumulated pockets of friends who, like oil and vinegar, would never find each other unless he emulsified them—and it was a very different thing now, with a whole house and yard for them to roam through, independent of him as a conduit.

Brian from high school and Sarah from graduate school had a mutual

attraction he pursued too aggressively; Carl knew Sarah's marriage was tugging at its last frayed edges, but Brian always pushed too hard, and nothing was going to come of this. Jenna from Brookstone and Donna the junior-year girlfriend turned out to have a friend in common despite living five hundred miles apart. Matt and Sayid were both diehard Steelers fans with their own secret language and backlog of shared experience.

By eight, everyone was drunk on wine and beer and outside on the lawn dancing to “Push It.”

Carl watched them, and smiled when smiled at, spoke when spoken to.

He would have bundled up the wrapping paper and thrown it away, but someone—Becky?—had beaten him to it. The dishes were done, too—where did they even get enough dishes to feed thirty-four people? And where had they gone?

“Thirty-four people?” Matt asked. He'd come in for another beer, apparently.

Carl didn't realize he'd spoken out loud. “That isn't right, is it? It's twenty-three people. Thirty-four years old.”

Matt grinned and made an Alzheimer's joke or a senility joke, it didn't make much sense, and they made small talk about a movie they'd both recently seen where a renegade cop stopped a terrorist attack despite the corruption of his superiors, and rescued his daughter from the trunk of a sports car the terrorists had used to transport their bomb. Or something. It was very vivid for the duration of the conversation—wasn't the daughter the girl from those Pepsi commercials or something? And the terrorists had spoken in bad Eastern European accents—but as soon as they were done talking about it, he couldn't remember any of the details. Another haze.

“You all right, man?” Matt asked him.

Carl looked at his wine glass, wondering how much of it he had drunk.

He couldn't taste anything in his mouth, no residue, but—come to think of it—

“Matt,” he asked. “How'd the wine taste?”

Matt shrugged. “I stuck to beer, man. You know I don't drink wine much.”

Carl nodded. Sophomore year, they'd gotten drunk as shithouse whiskey on bottles of red wine Matt's parents had opened during a party but never finished—Matt had been as sick as Carl'd ever seen anyone, and hadn't touched wine since. “Right.”

“Why?”

He shook his head. “I was thinking it tasted funny.” I was thinking. I couldn't remember the last time I tasted anything. “Not important. How you doing these days?”

Matt shrugged. “You know. Working at the Fox affiliate doing the sports. It's not bad.”

“Oh, yeah?” Carl had known that, right? “Just like you wanted, man. Excellent.”

More small talk flowed around them, and at some point most people went home, or all of them did, and Carl sat in his office surrounded by legal pads and composition books, his journals. The door was locked—padlocked from the inside. Becky knew not to disturb him when he was in here.

He wasn't sure she knew that, exactly. He wasn't sure she knew he was in here at all.

“Birthday party,” he wrote in the latest composition book. “Turned 34. Ice cream cake—Carvel? Do they sell that here?—Lemon-fried chicken like they had at the Italian place I worked at in high school.  Everyone here. Everyone. All my friends from high school, college, grad school, work.”

He flipped back through the books to jog his memory, and nodded. Work. Brookstone. He was an assistant sales manager at Brookstone, a mall store that sold cash-sinks like massage chairs, executive desk water fountains, and leather remote control cozies. “Mom and Dad weren't there, I don't think. I wonder if Becky will say they were if I ask her?”

He paused, lit a cigarette. This was the only place he smoked. The doctor didn't know about it, and his blood pressure seemed unaffected.

 “I'm being paranoid again. I'm being paranoid again. I'm being.”

Carl stopped writing, and turned the page.

“I'm not dead,” he wrote. “My heart attack didn't kill me. All of this is real. Becky is real. I have a job that pays my bills. I am studying to be a lawyer.” After years of hemming and hawing, he'd started law school after his PhD in English. “I really should speak to someone about this.”

***

My mother had me by Cesarean section, he'd written at some point, because she was afraid if she waited for me to be born naturally, I'd be born a Scorpio. I heard this story so many times when I was a kid, that I don't even know when I heard it first. My mother never read her horoscope or anything, not that I saw—she didn't seem especially interested in astrology. I don't know if she got out of it, or if she just hated Scorpios. Anyway, when I was twelve or thirteen, I became very fascinated with the idea that I was born when I “wasn't supposed to be.” Like I was out of sync with the world somehow. Like I'd been born before my soul was completely ready for me. So three days after my birthday—three was an arbitrary number as good as two or four—I celebrated my “scorpion day,” something I've done ever since.

The first time, I celebrated by smoking a couple of stolen cigarettes in the Stop ‘n’ Shop parking lot.

***

“Hey,” Becky said, poking her head into the living room, where he was sprawled on the couch and watching television. “Today's Scorpion Day, right?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I guess.”

“This is what you're doing to celebrate? Watching golf?”

He shrugged, thought about pointing out that he was drinking the good beer, too, but didn't. “I don't know, I couldn't think of anything.”

“Jesus Christ,” she said, and she projected frustration but he could hear disgust behind it. “Carl.”

“What, what?”

“You just had a birthday party with practically everyone you care about. What do you have to be depressed about? Nobody's sick. We don't have any money problems.”

“I dunno.” He didn't. “I don't think I'm depressed, exactly.” He didn't. “Just—I don't know. Apathetic? Disinterested. Detached.”

She pulled him up until he was sitting, and took the beer from him. It was cold still, sweaty with condensation, and she sat down in his lap, straddling him, cooling her brow with the bottle. “Is it our sex life?”

He started to say something, but didn't. It wasn't, but he knew she knew it wasn't and wasn't actually asking. Her hair was so red it was almost impossible to believe it was natural. She rubbed the cold beer bottle down her neck, and unbuttoned her top to brush it over her breasts, dampening her bra, her nipples making bumps behind the fabric.

He unzipped his pants, and she pulled her skirt out of the way, and he sighed into her.

Soon, looking up at her, her hair making a collage of her face, her mouth moving wordlessly, he kept asking himself if she really looked familiar. If she really stayed the same. If she looked the same today as she had a year ago, or if she was a box with WIFE written on it, so that he'd always see her that way.

He loved her, but not actively.

***

I feel terrible for thinking this, he'd written, but Becky is part of what makes me suspicious. I mean, she's just so... something. She fits in too well. She only argues with me about things I've argued about before or things I don't care about. She's a gorgeous redhead, and I'd never dated a redhead but always been attracted to them.

Do you see what I mean?

She's a logical extension.

I'm not sure she's read any books I haven't. She doesn't quote any movies I don't know.

She's been places I haven't, and knows people I don't, but nothing she tells me about them is shocking. Nothing is new. It's all things I could have made up myself. Do I know for sure people in Florida have orange trees in their backyards? No. But couldn't I have guessed that?

Have we done anything new sexually? I can't remember. It's been three years we've been together—it's hard to remember sex with other people. And if I try too hard to recall specific encounters, I feel guilty.

How long have I felt like this?

How long have I felt this way about her?

***

She put the legal pad down on the desk and looked at him with hurt all over her face. It was still Scorpion Day. He'd gone out to a strip club for lack of anything better he could think of—the stripper had writhed back and forth on his lap, his beer bottle in her hand and rubbing against her breasts —

No. No, that had been Becky. Before he went out. But the stripper had—had something. He was getting everything muddled again.

“I can't believe this is what you think of me,” she said, Becky did, and he wondered which journal she had read. “That I'm, what, that I'm not real? Or not real enough for you? Too boring for you?”

“No, no.” Yes. Sort of. “That's not how I meant it. I meant —” He sighed.

“What?”

“I meant, you know, when I had the heart attack.”

She nodded, urging him on.

“Everything since. It's just felt. Hollow. Fake. Like going through the motions.”

“Like me.”

“It's just—it's not an insult —”

She laughed.

“It's because you're too good.” That sounded lame. “Because you're what I would have wanted. How you look. Your voice, even. How we kiss, especially. The things we do. Everything I would have wanted. You let me do—you let me do anything.”

“It's not letting you do anything,” she said, and went off on a rant he barely heard, about lovemaking and cooperation and mutual respect and affection.

He just watched her talk.

***

“What's so different?” she asked later.

“Things used to be newer,” he said. “Or fresher. More out of the blue. Movies, I used to laugh harder. Or horror movies would scare me. Give me nightmares.”

“You don't have nightmares.”

“Not now.”

“Since me?”

“Since then.”

“What else?”

“Like Matt. He's doing everything I would have expected him to. And Brian. I'll bet he hooked up with Sarah and then got too clingy.”

“I got an email from her yesterday, they hooked up.”

“Just a matter of time till he's trying to move in, then, and she'll change her phone number.”

She touched his neck. “How much of this is just cynicism?”

“How much of anything is?”

“Tell me more things.”

“Music. It's all just more of the same now, isn't it? Just variations of everything. More cover songs. More remakes of movies, too. More TV shows based on movies, or sitcoms with people at work never getting work done, and couples who fight about everything but never really fight. Everyone's just coasting. The world's just coasting.”

“And you really—I mean, from the sound of things in your journals—Jesus, do you write in them every day? You really think you're dead?”

“I'm afraid I might be dead.”

She nodded against his shoulder, and they fell asleep.

***

She was sitting up in bed when he woke up, looking out the window at the other side of the bedroom, where the sun started to rise but the street lights hadn't turned off yet. Her arms were around her knees, and she looked thoughtful.

“Good morning,” he said, and didn't know if they were still fighting.

“We're not,” she said.

“What?”

“We're not fighting.”

He nodded. He could smell coffee downstairs and didn't know if she'd made it. “You've been up all night?”

“I guess,” she said. “So, what, do you think this is Heaven, then? Us?”

“Maybe everything. Maybe just us.”

“But you think that's what it is. This is what comes after. This is Heaven.”

He thought about it and shrugged. “I don't know. No matter how much I think about it, it can't seem to bother me. Heaven or Hell, dead or alive, I can't seem to get upset about it.”

She looked at him, and looked older than he remembered her ever looking, and nodded after a long time, kissing his cheek. “Then I guess it must be.” She got up out of bed, green silk robe offsetting her hair, and never brought it up again.

main