A Case of You

Sam longs to be a writer, but is so afraid of being proven talentless that he writes nothing, so as to withhold the evidence—content for now in knowing himself to be as brilliant as he does not allow himself the chance of becoming. “Schrodinger’s writer,” Angie calls him; it sounds better than fraud. She, for her part, has only a list of things she doesn’t want to be: a lawyer; an engineer; a conservative; her parents; on bad days, herself.

            Both know themselves enough to want to know no more, so they choose instead to know each other. At this, it turns out, they both excel. And, when Angie asks Sam to move in with her, having known each other less than a month—“Just think of all the time you’d save,” she says, dissecting the corpse of a half-eaten croissant, “making your bad decisions with a little less planning”—he, tipsy on attention and feeling truly seen, agrees.

            “Who buys a couch like this?” Angie asks Sam now, as they wrestle the beige monstrosity—ugly in a way they hope will prove to be charming, but is, they will discover, just ugly—to their apartment, from a street corner two blocks away. The suburb is still undergoing its awkward gentrification pubescence; theirs is one of the first flimsy apartment buildings that will come sprouting like hairs in its wispy, unconvincing moustache. Sam turns to Angie and drops his side of the couch; it wobbles when they get it to the apartment. Angie props it up with a copy of Crime and Punishment she bought planning never to read, the point of Russian novels being, as she sees it, to forget them. Anna Karenina already holds up the lamp; Dostoevsky remains, as usual, in Tolstoy’s shadow.

            Later, now: Sam waits until he is inside, as a dog would, to shake his umbrella. He places it beside the doormat with a humbled sigh, and in the same sigh wipes his shoes. He walks through an alien’s lazy approximation of a human apartment: See here, the painting gifted by a friend, hanging in the hallway though its owners do not understand it; see here, the containers for tea and coffee, labelled: “Tea” and “Coffee”. Museum tour guide to no-one. No, not no-one: for there on the couch lies, in repose, his belle. “Why would you wait until you’re inside to shake your umbrella?” she asks; “I have known more considerate dogs.” Is he being compared to these dogs, or counted among them? We will never know: before he can ask, her lips are on his.

            Soon, this will fall apart. Both will feel it is the other’s fault; later, they will believe it to have been their own (it is Sam’s). Soon, their time together will be a wound; then a dream; then an anecdote, told in someone else’s arms, on another couch. Eventually, one of them will drive by the apartment—long torn down and replaced—a kid asleep in the backseat, having happened to be in the neighbourhood.

            But look, now: there they are, fumbling their way towards the couch without looking up from one another’s mouths to check where they will land, Sam bruising his shin; hear, now: Bob Dylan on a Bluetooth speaker, the decades-long death rattle of the sixties that still sounds in this apartment, in this self-consciously liberated city, where they are bewildered, amazed, at every touch, to find a body touching back.

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Shortlisted for the 2021 Peter Cowan Young Writers Prize