BETWEEN ONE AND ZERO

(Setting: An interview. Anywhere.)

Interviewer: Hello, Mrs. Reynolds.

Melba: Hazelton. I kept my name.

Interview: For the sake of this interview I’m going to refer to you as Mrs. Reynolds.

Melba: Oh, fine. Whatever.

Interview: You’ll settle for that?

Melba: Get on with it. Please.

Interview: Tell me about what happened yesterday.

Melba: That’s it? Are you serious?

Interview: Everything you can remember.

Melba: It was a beautiful day, I guess.

Interviewer: The weather?

Melba: You know I hate this season.

Interviewer: You hate all the seasons, these days. You only notice in the summer.

Melba: Still, the content was beautiful. I woke up at—

Interviewer: I’m more interested in how it ended.

Melba: In sleep, naturally.

Interviewer: And before that?

Melba: Michael barbequed. The meat came out perfectly, not too well-done. There were some fireflies in the garden.

Interviewer: I don’t care about the animals eaten or alive. Those are trivial, incidental. The details distract from the underlying truth.

Melba: I thought you wanted to know everything. Can’t you filter what you decide is important?

Interviewer: Try to focus on the subtleties. What no one but you had empirical access to.

Melba: Such as?

Interviewer: I think you know what you’re not mentioning.

Melba: I woke up. I went to work—

Interviewer: Tried to ignore it. Won’t work, won’t work.

Melba: What?

Interviewer: Boredom boredom crushing boredom. You notice your heart pumping. You’re aware when your lungs release. These things are supposed to be autonomic, but your brain sends the wrong signal. Boredom. Pump. Boredom. Breathe.

Melba: No, I like my job. It took me years to get here.

Interviewer: Not there. Not any one place. In the lining between. Underneath the perfect meat, boredom is a seasoning.

Melba: I love my children. So I love my life. I can’t be bored when I’m filled with love, I can’t. I love my children.

Interviewer: As you love your husband, Michael Reynolds?

Melba: Yes.

Interviewer: He’s someone you protect and fight for. You feel no vaginal passion and fill this gaping hole with any object you can touch. You look at fireflies and try to make them exciting. You watch your children chase them, and you watch yourself watching them. How idyllic, how artful, you force yourself to think. How lucky I must therefore be, as if life were math and you had the winning numbers.

Melba: Happiness isn’t simple, of course. But neither is its absence. There’s no vacuum.

Interviewer: I’m not suggesting you’re completely unhappy, Mrs. Reynolds.

Melba: Melba.

Interviewer: Merely less so than perhaps you should be.

Melba: What, then, should I be? Who should I be?

Interviewer: Someone who remembers when her last orgasm was. (Pause) My god, you do remember, don’t you? And you count the expanding days.

Melba: There’s always a blank spot.

Interview: Yours will grow until it consumes you, for you know you’re aging and pretend that all progress is good. You’re not quite jealous of yourself at 18, not yet. You remember her pain too clearly.

Melba: I always ache after the orgasm. All consensual sex leaves me sore, broken. My constitution wasn’t built to sustain the rush. The subsequent crash is too frequent, too immediate, to justify the high. And it always comes in that order: First good, then bad, with the latter more intense. It never goes in the other order, things never get better. The initial pleasure is invalidated by the overwhelming sharpness. And then: Despair sets in.

Interviewer: That sounds very clinical. Good for you that you’ve articulated your emptiness in a way that makes sense to you. How cleverly you’ve talked yourself out of what you choose to miss. You still miss it, though. You’re not a robot.

Melba: No. I’m definitely not a robot.

Interviewer: Still, you abstain from both peak and valley, turn your life into a flatline. Who gave you the authority to take that away from yourself? To will yourself, if not happy, then old?

Melba: Dread.

Interviewer: Dread is not an authority. It is a liar, even when proves itself right. How is that working out for you, by the way? Are you living without dread, now that you’ve essentially defined yourself by it? (pause)When was the last time you had enjoyable sex?

Melba: I took my children to the park. That is what sex is for.

Interviewer: Not for you? Is pleasure so shallow just because it touches skin?

Melba: For the children, I submitted. As often as it took.

Interview: And every day since is a “lovely” ordeal.

Melba: You should see them, illuminated by the setting sun, following fireflies off of my porch.

Interview: Well, sure. You have to notice the little buzzing things, enjoy each slowly dying second. This is what unhappy optimists do. They pretend the sacrifice is worth it.

Melba: What—what is the point of this interview?

Interviewer: I am conducting research and contrasting you to your alternate.

Melba: Who never married Michael Reynolds?

Interviewer: Correct.

Melba: Which one? There must be an infinite number of scenarios, literally infinite, where I don’t marry Michael. Am I to compete with all of them?

Interviewer: No, although you’re right that forks beget forks, I’m only observing two possibilities. This man or that man, zero or one. I’m judging you against Mrs. Robert Kane.

Melba: (pause)Bobby.

Interviewer: Do you remember that Christmas party when he came back into your life? Or potentially did?

Melba: Daily. But I’m sure I think of everything daily.

Interviewer: Don’t lie to your sub-consciousness. It never works.

Melba: I had already moved in with Michael when Bobby and I…reconnected. By chance at that party. I never would hurt him by pursuing other men.

Interviewer: Why not? There’s no such thing as being pre-married. In order for marriage to mean anything, you can’t give it away too early. But you thought you were more committed to a very specific universe than was the actual case. You were wrong. Cosmically, fundamentally. Atomically.

Melba: You can’t possibly know that. Not as an absolute.

Interviewer: At the rate you’re going you’ll wind up as lonely and sexually frustrated as you were when you were 18, only this time you’ll have no hope to look to. The thing you’ll most consistently dream of is the sound of your husband’s breathing, never knowing if you’re awake or not. Your good dreams will be the cruelest of false positives. That you’re lying next to another human will do nothing but make your loneliness OBSCENE.

All this because you could never recover from the hurt Bobby accidentally threw at you at 18. You could never give real love a second chance, for fear it would leave again. As if Bobby hadn’t grown up at all. So you settled for the plastic that would never decay. When did beauty become so frightening? Around the same time you confused orgasms with torture? You just want life boring so you’ll be less afraid of death. How morbid. You let death win.

I see Mrs. Kane, the one who chose more wisely. I’m sorry to invalidate everything you’ve worked for, but that’s the point—Her smile is less forced. Thus she’s the one I choose to let life breathe into, to close the gap between potential and forever.

Melba: I love my children. Michael’s children.

Interviewer: Take as long as you need to mourn them. But back they go, no harm done.

Melba: How can you say that? You’re not the one who has to go back to the age of 29, and break up with a man you genuinely love. God, I have to look him in the eye.  I have to watch his face.

Interviewer: No doubt this will hurt. But its prevention isn’t worth a lifetime of mediocre fulfillment, which won’t hurt so much as itch in a place you can’t reach. That would be too high an avoidance cost. Tears, though, tears are cathartic, cleansing. How healthful to the body to relieve its inner conflict. (He hands her a tissue)

Melba: (She accepts it but does not take it to her face)Why would you give me this near-complete contentment only to take it away? Do my modest joys come to nothing, for being modest?

Interviewer: I care too much about you to settle for the beta version. Not when I’ve seen you in more perfect light.

Melba: Oh, Michael. My sweet Michael.

Interview: You will miss him. But you miss Bobby more now, a truth which denying fails to fix. Cognizance is better. Dissonance is a waste of your brain.

Melba: This doesn’t feel like change, it feels like death. This Melba Hazelton, this Mrs. Reynolds, is dying. I’m dying.

Interviewer: Oh, Darling. (pause) You are.