Un-Love Letters was the winner of the 2009 Flatmancrooked Fiction Contest judged by Aimee Bender. It appears in print in Not About Vampires: An Anthology of New Fiction Concerning Everything Else.
A birthday card has come for me in the mail. This is odd because (a) it is not my birthday and (b) this is not the first time I have received this card.
Have a purrr-fect birthday. A cat with cake on its whiskers. “Like, Brian.” He sent it when we were first dating.
“There’s a card here,” I say, showing him, though he does not look. He is lying on the sofa, flicking his fingers across a video game controller. He is here and not here, he is removed.
Removed: at one time, it meant to move to another place: “I removed myself to London.” Sometime between Jane Austen and James M. Cain, it stopped meaning that. But “removal” is a better word than “move.” It describes what happens when you leave. In a few weeks, Brian and I will remove ourselves from each other’s lives.
“The card is from you,” I say.
“No it’s not.”
“Well, look.” And I show him.
“Where did you dig that up?” He has now, finally, bothered to look. On the TV screen, monster aliens pause in their quest to annihilate one another.
I used to love him. I loved him and then stopped. I never did love him, he never did love me. It is one or all of those things, the reason why we are removing.
“It came in today’s mail.”
“I didn’t send it.”
“You signed it.” I show him the inside of the card. “Like, Brian.”
“Is it the same card?”
“It is exactly the same card. This was a very weird thing for you to do.”
He shrugs and flicks the controller again and alien mayhem resumes. “I didn’t send it,” he yells, suddenly engaged as I leave the room.
I start pulling down shoe boxes from the bedroom closet.
Maybe we should have had a baby. A baby and a puppy and a cat, and a house with big windows in the back looking out onto birch trees and a rabbit hutch and a stream. And not so many drunken vacations and fights.
Actually, we did have a cat once. It fell into a pot of boiling water. God, that was bad.
I open the lid of a shoe box. I don’t save much—money, this relationship, cats that have fallen into boiling water—but I do save letters and cards. I used to love words and Brian and now I love one less thing than that.
I stomp back into the living room with the card he sent me eight years ago and the card that has just come in the mail.
“See? It is exactly the same card.”
He eyes me.
“Well, if it’s exactly the same card, how could there be two of them?” he asks.
I am an accountant who doesn’t save money and loves words. (I always act like I have both to burn.) The bookkeeper under me is a large Polish woman whom I have become friends with, sometimes to my regret. She has decided to drink her lunch again today. She will be woozy through the afternoon. I can’t fire Wanda; if I did, I might as well shove her into the street with a pencil cup in her hands.
She looks down at the two cards on the table and is not too tipsy to get the point.
“Why would he send you this again?” she mutters.
“He said he didn’t.”
“He’s lying.”
She was a budding pianist in Poland, if something as large as she can be imagined to have ever been a bud. That was before she removed herself to here. She rarely talks about music now, and when she does, it is not even with regret.
“He didn’t seem like he was lying,” I say.
“You do not know him.” She shrugs. This is Eastern European wisdom. Nobody knows anybody, life is hard, eat your bread.
“I’m forty-two.”
“I am much older.”
“I don’t want to be in a relationship ever again.”
She nods. “You won’t be.”
On the pillow on the bed, there is the plastic mouth guard that was supposed to prevent him from snoring and never did. It’s just where I used to doggedly place it every night before we went to bed, in hopes that maybe that night it would work.
“Did you want that?” I ask, pointing to the mouth guard.
“Um, no,” he says, turning from the very idea. We take turns on the sofa now, a week in the bedroom, a week out.
“I didn’t put it there.”
“I didn’t either.”
“Do you want it?”
He picks it up and throws it into the waste basket.
The next night I find it on the pillow again.
I have fought against the urge to pull out warmer clothes before I remove in early November, and lost. I dig into the back of the closet for sweaters and jackets and toss them onto the floor. Everything gets disarranged just before two people part; things lie in places and stay there. Nothing gets put back. It is not exactly The Fall of the House of Usher, but it is pretty close.
My hand runs across a smooth cotton scarf and I pull it out. A krapa, bought on a trip to Cambodia. I don’t know why people in a tropical country make, sell, and wear scarves, but they do. I bargained down a woman in a market in Phnom Penh to two for a dollar, and gave one away when I got back home.
We went to Angkor Wat on that trip. We took a boat trip and saw people living in corrugated tin shacks built on stilts, brushing their teeth in the river water. Our hotel lost its electricity at twilight and we lay down on the bed under the mosquito netting and let the heat and darkness settle into the room around us.
Halloween is coming.
“…the blue is not as good. See what you think when you get home. It’s different in daylight. I want to go back to the yellow and just re-paint it all with that.”
“It’s not your fault. But it’s not my fault either. You used to coax him onto the windowsill. But nobody could think that an accident like that could happen. I just don’t like thinking that you are blaming me. I don’t blame you.”
“Hi! I bet u didn’t think u’d hear from me again so soon. Is this too soon? I want to go out with you again and talk more about Cambodia. I have read that Angkor Wat is magnificent. Going there is a dream of mine, too. And Turkey, and India.”
I tell Wanda, “He’s sending me e-mails.”
She’s run out of work and she’s online, likely at the CNN website. She’s a slave to plane and bus crashes.
“If he is bothering you, you should just make it plain for him to stop,” she tells me.
“These are old. He’s re-sending them.”
She makes a face. “What are you saying?”
“He’s dug up old e-mails and he’s re-sending them. Some of these are years old. I mean, they’re from today, but—clearly, they’re old.”
“Is he not happy about this break-up?” Wanda asks.
I don’t know what to say to that. Once I read in a magazine that a movie star was “deliriously happy” with her new husband, as if she couldn’t be gotten down off the chandeliers. How do you ever tell if anyone is really happy or not?
“You should move out now,” Wanda adds.
“It’s just a few weeks away.” I have already picked up the phone and started to dial. Brian answers.
“‘lo.” He has Edith Piaf playing in his office, pad-AM, pad-AM, pad-AM.
“I—” is all I can get out. I re-group. “Did you send me an e-mail?”
“Today?” he asks.
“I guess.”
“No.”
Well that sums it up.
“I got some. I think it must be a malfunction.”
“OK.”
He’s not curious. Every strange thing that is happening elicits no curiosity from him.
“One was about Bumptious.” That was the cat’s name.
“Do we have to bring him up again?”
“No, we don’t—”
“I just feel bad every time.”
“I do too.”
“And it takes me hours to get it out of my head.”
“Yeah, I—”
“Look, I gotta go. I have a deadline.”
“OK, just—” and suddenly I’m mad. It drops on me like a safe on a cartoon character. “Just don’t send me any more e-mails!”
He hangs up.
I remember his face as we took off in a tiny airplane from Prague to Budapest. It felt light as a feather, we were light as feathers. There was no weight in the world.
We drank in Budapest. Every night we were drunk. We got drunk and got lost on dark streets. We took a cab and ended up in the countryside after a hundred dollar fare. I thought Brian was going to hit the driver and then get his face blown off.
It took two years for us to break up. We started this two years ago. It was as if we had to pull apart the entire relationship molecule by molecule. It was exhausting. We spent half the time trying to patch it back together and the other half ripping it apart again. I was the one who pronounced it dead.
Presents are arriving—for my birthday, which it is still not, and for Christmas, which it is not either.
Yesterday, there was one in the kitchen cupboard. I left it there and there it still is. Today, one came by mail to my office (a box of chocolates, which I gave to Wanda—I hope they were not tainted). And now there are two here in the bedroom, sitting on a dismantled bookcase. All say the same: “from: Brian!”
I open one. Inside there is a green knit cap with earflaps just like the one he gave me five years ago, which I never wore and then lost. I try it on and look in the mirror. Age has not improved it.
I open the other. It is a bag of treats for Bumptious, who is dead.
“Brian!” I scream. That gets him off the couch. He tears into the bedroom. I hold up the bag of treats. “This is not funny! This has to stop!”
He looks—odd. He tries to take the bag from me and suddenly I don’t want to give it to him. He pulls it from me. “Wait, let me see—” he says. Then his face goes blank.
“Are you doing this to get attention?” he asks.
“I’m not doing anything,” I say. I realize I’m still wearing the cap. I take it off and throw it into a corner. “This gives me the willies.”
“You never did like that cap.”
“Remember when you didn’t like the hotel in Amsterdam but you wouldn’t say you didn’t like it?”
“What was the point of saying it?”
“It’s just—” and I stop. We haven’t talked about the relationship in weeks. His problems have removed back into his column and mine are in mine. “I mean, why not just say you don’t like it if you don’t?”
“I was trying to make the best of it.”
“No you weren’t. Because if you had been, you would have liked it.”
He turns and leaves. “I’m glad I’m moving out,” he mumbles.
I was thirty-four when Brian and I met and now I am forty-two. There is a bridge that you cross between those two ages, but you don’t know that you are going across it until you are looking back from the other side. And then you look ahead and you see more bridges.
We flew to Bali, which took a day and a night and a morning. From the plane’s window we saw the sun rising, bending around the horizon. It turned the clouds a million shades of orange. When we landed in Denpasar it was midnight again.
I arrive at work and music is playing from my computer.
“Why is this on?” I ask Wanda.
“I thought you had it on,” she says.
“I’m just now getting here.”
I catch the tune: pad-AM, pad-AM, pad-AM. Edith Piaf is saying good-bye to her lover, or lamenting the fact that he won’t leave. She is sending him away on a boat or a plane or a camel or an elephant; she is thinking of him while dying of malaria in the jungle, she is mourning his death from malaria in the jungle while sitting alone at a darkened table in a café. I never knew what the words meant and neither did Brian. We just used to go around the apartment singing pad-AM, pad-AM, pad-AM over and over again till one or both of us went mad with it.
I push open the CD drive and pull out the CD and toss it into the waste basket. Then I pull it back out and put it into my desk drawer. Then I pull it out of the desk drawer and throw it back into the waste basket.
“I like that tune,” Wanda says. She goes around humming it most of the morning.
By 3:00 I can take it no longer. I confront her.
“Are you helping him?”
“Who?” Wanda asks.
“Brian!”
She looks at me dully. She keeps her blond hair in a messy bob. Sometimes I think she must cut it herself. She looks like an enormous version of the little Dutch boy.
“Did you put the CD in my computer?” I say.
She reaches out a hand and almost places it on my shoulder, then lets it fall away.
“I am your friend,” she says.
I look down at the cat. He looks up at me.
“Bumptious?” I say
He purrs and blinks. Blinking is a cat’s way of saying hello. Or, in this case, I am back from the dead, unscalded physically and mentally, and perfectly trusting of you again, as I was before.
It cannot be Bumptious. After the accident, Brian and I wrapped him in a blanket and took him, wet and burnt and howling—and then before we got there, dead—to the vet’s office. Brian drove and was on his cell phone screaming to them about what happened when I felt Bumptious jerk and stiffen in my arms. The vet techs grabbed him from me and took him into the back, and then one came into the room into which we had been led and told us, “He didn’t make it.” That was three years ago.
This cat has the same orange fur with tabby markings, the same one white right-front paw. He is trying to crawl up my pant leg just as Bumptious used to, and his purr is filling the room just as Bumptious’ did.
I daydreamed and then later dreamt that I would get a call from the vet’s office saying it was all a mistake—he was hurt but mending, he was up and eating food and purring; we should come and get our boy and bring him back home with us. And then I got a call from the vet’s office saying that his ashes were ready to be picked up, and the daydreams and dreams ended.
I get on my knees and sink my face into this cat’s soft fur and feel his purring against my cheek. He nips my ear and then rolls onto his back and swats my face gently with his claws retracted. He is wet from my tears.
“I’m so sorry, I am so sorry,” I whisper to him. I do not hear Brian come home.
“Is something wrong?” he asks from behind me.
I turn, startled, and then move so that he can see the cat. I hide my face.
Brian takes a half-step forward.
“You got a cat?” he asks.
“When did you get him?” I ask Brian. “Why did you get him?”
“He’s not mine,” Brian says.
“He looks just like Bumptious.”
“He does,” Brian agrees. “So when did you get him?”
“You got him! What are you doing all this for? This is so goddamn fucking upsetting!”
Brian kneels down and pets the cat.
“The presents and the cards and the e-mails, now this cat—you can just never fucking say what you want. If you want to rub my face in everything, fine, you have. You’re angry about us breaking up and you want to make me feel bad. I feel bad!”
His face is a stone.
“This cat must have come in through an open window or something. He’s not Bumptious, he just looks like him,” he says.
He never was readable to me. All I ever really knew was that I didn’t know how to see past his blankness. I’d see shadows and corners and hear mumblings behind the curtain. It was like trying to piece together a tune you don’t quite know.
I haven’t really looked at his face for months.
He picks up the cat, which is limp and purring in his arms, and he opens the back door to the apartment.
“So he’s not your cat?” he asks.
I don’t answer.
“Then he’s somebody else’s,” he says, and he puts the cat down on the back porch and closes the door.
As a child, he never got Christmas presents besides underwear and socks. One year, his older sister got him a T-shirt that he loved and wore every day. Sometimes you want to reach back and touch that little boy, that small damaged boy. But you are just an agent of memory, an unwitting repeat of past disasters.
We met on Halloween eight years ago. We both had masks on. When we took them off we liked what we saw.
He comes out of the bedroom wearing green scrubs and a surgical mask. It’s not inventive but it is a costume.
“You’re going out?” I ask.
“Yeah,” he says.
“Where to?”
“A club.”
All of his things are in boxes now. Most of his furniture has already been removed, including all the rugs that we had bought together, which I let him have on impulse, as a present. Sounds echo with that hollow ring that you get used to if you live in an empty place long enough.
He pauses. He shifts his weight. He looks at me. The fact that all I can see above the surgical mask is his eyes makes his eyes more intense.
“So, no more cards or e-mails?” he asks.
“Hunh?”
“Have you been getting any more cards or old e-mails?”
“No,” I say. “Not the last few days.”
“No more CDs playing on your computer?”
“How did you know about that?”
“Wanda called me and told me.”
He and Wanda are friends too. Sometimes I think she prefers him to me. I am difficult, he is amiable, I am abrupt, he is gentle. He is needy and does not tell you what he needs.
“She thought you were accusing her,” he says.
This man is such a mystery. This man is such a mystery.
“It’s good that you stopped,” he says.
“Accusing her?”
“Doing what you were doing.”
“I wasn’t doing it,” I say. “You were.” I can barely get that last sentence out.
Above the surgical mask, his eyes stare at me and then turn away.
“I don’t think I’ll be back tonight,” he says, as if that were a thing I needed to know. I was the first to cheat and now he will be the last.
And for a moment I long to get up, to walk toward him; I can see myself doing this: I will walk toward him and take off the mask and look into his face.
“Goodbye,” I say, and as he is walking out the door I add, “have fun.”
After you kill off a relationship, what do you do with the body? Do you carry it around on your back? Wrap it in canvas and throw it in the trunk of your car? Chop it to pieces and mail the pieces around the world?
I hear a noise at the back door. It is a kind of tapping, too purposeful to be random.
“Hello?” I ask.
I do not quite know what time it is. Sometime between midnight and old age. I have been sitting in a kind of limbo for—well, my entire life.
I hear a voice outside but the words are blown away by the wind. I get out a flashlight that is heavy enough to be a weapon.
“Is someone there?” I ask. Exactly when does a person call the police?
I approach the door. The tapping gets louder. The voice recurs, familiar but flowing away from me.
“Is someone there?” I ask again.
Tapping, tapping. And the voice is saying:
I fling the door open and raise the flashlight in the air. The orange not-Bumptious cat flies off into the bushes mid-tap.
“Nevermore,” the voice says.
I shine the flashlight downward. A small tape recorder is lying on the ground. There is no way to get to this back door unless you go through the apartment or, say, skydive in.
“Nevermore” the voice repeats. The wheels of the tape turn in the light from the flashlight.
It is Brian’s voice.
“Nevermore.”
And I remember, one night in Mexico City, after we had made love and were lying in a pool of cum and sweat and whatever else it is that bonds two people together for a while until they go flying apart again, Brian said, “Nevermore.” Never more than this, he meant; I will never love you better than this, we could never be closer than this, we will never be more in love than this.
“Nevermore,” says Brian’s voice on the tape, “nevermore, nevermore.”
And now all his things have been removed, as all mine will be in just a few more days. The things that are left have spread themselves out all through the apartment as if in a pathetic attempt to re-fill it. I fill boxes with things only to find there are more things that need to be shut away into more boxes.
Sometimes the emptiness spooks me. I hear noises that are not the neighbors and not the street, not him typing away on the keyboard late at night. Objects in shadows look menacing.
I do not know why he chose to do what he did or if in fact he did it. You can leave a place and a person behind but your things come with you or, if you do not bring them, they show up again anyway, apparently.
I open up the closet door and out spill snapshots and postcards, cat dishes and necklaces made of shells, a vase we bought and broke, a copy of Memento Mori that he gave me, sweaters and shorts and caps that he gave me, birthday cards he gave me and birthday cards I gave him, a watch I thought I lost in Phuket, things I thought I had boxed up, things I thought I had long since thrown away.
by Kevin Walsh
