The theme of the class this semester is love, and the kids have been – most of the kids have been – diligently studying philosophy and law and sociology in order to write their research papers, but there’s a story I always have to tell toward the end of the year. It’s a true story, which means the kids tend to buy it, or I tend to trust it more, but I like to trot it out when students start looking for shortcuts, or start trying to do calculus with their grade percentage, or start trying to find the easy way out. The story goes like this.
When I was a boy I hated to brush my teeth. My mother would tell me to brush my teeth and I would walk into the bathroom and walk back out again. You weren’t in there long enough, my mother would say, so I would walk into the bathroom and count to 100, and walk back out again. I didn’t hear the water, my mother would say, so I would walk into the bathroom and turn on the water and count to 100 and turn off the water and walk back out again. The toothbrush isn’t wet, she’d say. So I’d walk into the bathroom and turn on the water and put the toothbrush under the water and count to 100–
“When you were a kid you didn’t brush your teeth?” says one guy in the back. Kaden. I could murder Kaden, not just today but most days. “Shut up, Kaden,” says Tina, and I try not to smile. Tina’s my barometer. Big and beautiful, she sits right up front and has the remarkable ability to allow every emotion she’s ever had to pass completely across her face. If something lands, Tina’s expression lets me know. And if it doesn’t, her scrunched up nose tells me I’ve got to go back, or run ahead, but for god’s sake don’t stay where I am.
Tina gives Kaden the stinkface and turns back around to me and waits for the coupe de grâce. The moral of my toothbrushing story. So, I give it.
After I’m done grading what I’m sure will be Tina’s just fine paper about the five love languages and Kaden’s profoundly incompetent paper about the benefits of polyamory, I’ll have the summer to finish my book. I plan on calling it Prostate Meridian, or something like that, and I won’t bore you with all the details, but suffice to say it’s about a man whose wife has left him for some schmo and he chases them both into Mexico. The guy spends the entire story trying to find his wife and when he does, at the end, it’s obvious that her life has fallen apart. The man she ran away with has left her. She’s broke, she’s homeless, and she’s sick with malaria. Our protagonist finally catches up with her in a hospital in Oaxaca, and when he walks into her room she, with obvious effort, rolls over in her bed, and shows him her back.
I told this story to my now ex-wife and she nodded, which surprised me, but shouldn’t have, I suppose. Anyway, at the very end of the book, in the final pages, as the protagonist takes his quiet wife home to Arkansas or wherever it is they’re from (I haven’t decided), they stop for the night and sit on the beach, and they find themselves talking about love.
“Love,” the man says, “is a decision you make every day to live that day in accordance with someone else. The infinite pieces of that day derive their meaning from that decision, and that meaning is agreed upon, and is therefore identical for both parties involved.”
“Love,” the woman says, “is the fire you can’t put out. It’s the pressure in your chest that keeps you awake. It’s what makes you cry when you’re driving to work. It’s the taste in your mouth when you look at the leaves.”
The man doesn’t say anything for a minute. He looks out at the stars and he listens to the waves and then he turns to his wife and he says, “But they can be the same thing. Don’t you see that if we just work hard every day we can make it the same thing?” “But that’s just it,” the woman says back to him. “It’s not supposed to be work. Or rather,” she says, “it’s work not to do it. What’s really hard work,” she says, “what’s really hard work,” I would have her say, “is to do absolutely nothing at all.”
And then the man would pick up the woman’s hand from where it was lying next to him in the sand. He would reach for it suddenly, as though he were drowning, or were suddenly aware he was drowning and had in fact been drowning for quite some time, and he’d look at that hand, a hand that he knows better than his own, just as much as he knows her eyes better than he knows his own, and he’d raise the hand to his mouth, and as he did so the woman would turn those eyes away, and drop that hand back to the sand.
Cameron MacKenzie’s work has appeared in Plume, Salmagundi, and The Michigan Quarterly Review, among other places. His novel The Beginning of His Excellent and Eventful Career, about the Mexican Revolution, was published in 2018. His collection of short fiction, River Weather, appeared in 2021. His flash fiction collection Theories of Love is forthcoming from Alternating Current Press.
Lost Balloon 