works by w.pham

works by william pham, 2005-present

I am Shouting Loud Enough

The waiter (there was only one, the cafe was small) put my drink on the table. It was an iced mocha and the milk was still settling in a visible layer above the espresso, and the chocolate syrup snaked around and down, and I watched it for a while as the ice started to melt. Then ankle, then calf, then knee and skirt and shirt and small, economical breasts moved past my table, and then her face appeared and I turned away, half out of embarrassment and half out of disgust; what a great body, and then the face, cowish and smiling, stupidly -- she hadn't even noticed I was staring. She called out a name, and another woman came into view to sit at her table, and this one didn't even have the great body, so I started eating my salad, which the waiter had placed on my table in the interim.

It was a fifteen-dollar lunch and tasted worse than gas-station food but it was probably healthier so I kept on eating. I finished the salad then the pasta despite its gummy aftertaste. I wondered what it would be like to be seventy years old, to chew with false teeth every meal for the remainder of my life, and if it was anything like this meal I would rather die young, I would rather lose thirty years of regular chewing than live ten without it. I left the cafe and walked home, and on the way I passed a post office. I dropped off a letter I had been meaning to send for some time then continued home.

Dear ---,

The other week I traveled through time, into the future, five years. I wanted to go further, to see flying cars whose only emissions were little cloud-circles, to pay homage and swear fealty to our robot masters, to find the grave of Doc Brown, to be rejected for passage to a better place because of imperfect genes, to completely and utterly fail the Voigt-Kampff empathy test. But I missed the mark. And so the first thing that came to mind was to visit you, to say hello to your future self, and were we still together, I wondered, were we building a life in independent co-dependence, that is to say, we were still individuals but we were "we," a "we," did we introduce each other as boyfriend and girlfriend? Or were we still awkwardly missing a beat in the beginnings of conversations as we attempted to discern the state of our relationship in the span of fifteen seconds (which was impossible, because right now we haven't managed it in the span of two years)? Were we married? Did we have a child? I tried to imagine the timeline as I stood outside your door, which was our door, it is our door now but it was our door then, and five years seemed enough for one kid but not two.

When you opened the door I experienced in a brief moment of panic an electrical overcharge to the heart or the part of the brain that controls the heart -- a temporary arrhythmia -- because I expected to see another man. But you were there, and you smiled, confused. You were almost exactly the same as you are now, and I wondered, in a brief moment of relief, if you had decided to travel into the future, coincidentally, at the same time I did. But then you said, "It's been a while, hasn't it," and it wasn't a question requiring confirmation, it was a statement, and I thought that the sudden overwhelming pain in my chest felt similar to what the medical encyclopedia entries on lung collapse describe if following a traumatic injury such as a car accident or knife-stabbing; the term is atelectasis, and if you can imagine the tingling sensation of touching an electrical outlet with a wet finger, if you can imagine that feeling a thousandfold, tens of thousands of times magnified, centered in your chest, that is what I felt at that moment, when I heard a period at the end of the question-statement, instead of a question mark.

Certainly your future self conceived of it to some degree, because the confused, awkward smile became a frown of concern, and your future self invited me in for coffee, she said I looked like a ghost, like I had just stepped out of the past, so I laughed briefly and said with a wry smile that she was wrong with the first guess and right on the second try. "Why yes, I am from your past, five years ago when we were still together, why aren't we still together here, why, when I love your present self so much that the love is overflowing into the future, like a shower drain clogged with hair, which is the first thing that came into my head, but give me a few minutes and I'll think of something better --" and this is why my present self is an unsuccessful writer: I shouted all of this into my head, at her, like the time we, you and I, our present selves, threw rocks off a cliff into the forest and screamed wordlessly as a Viking funeral for the rocks we knew for only such a short time.

Now, in the real now, the present now, the now as I am writing this letter (and even though you prefer to read handwritten letters I decided to type this letter in Courier New font, eleven-point, for my own sake, and maybe as a bit of a spiteful gesture for the sake of your future self), now I am sitting in a cafe with my laptop computer and drinking this coffee and because I can't think of what else to do I am presenting you with a bullet-point summation of the reasons why you are going to leave me sometime in the next five years.

• You will become tired of trying to motivate me to push myself harder in pursuit of a career that I am passionate about. You will become tired of unfinished graduate school applications, phone calls to agents in which I hang up the phone before the agent or his or her secretary can answer, unfinished manuscripts, and mounting credit card bills.
• You will become tired of living a lifestyle beyond our combined means, in which you must overcompensate for my dead-end job at a kitschy used bookstore where only the elderly and/or the tired go to shop, and as all three groups of people (the elderly, the tired, and the elderly/tired) are simply waiting to die, you will hate the way I allow this prevailing attitude to affect me and our life together.
• You want a cat and I hate cats. You really, really want a cat and I really, really hate cats.

Your future self informed me that the third bullet-point is the precipitant for the argument where I unnecessarily throw out a spiteful remark about your future self (not the five-years-from-now future self, but a hypothetical thirty-years-from-now future self, whom I referred to as a "crazy cat lady with a bone-dry --" and I don't think I need to finish the remark since I want to keep this letter civil as opposed to the argument that ended the relationship between our future selves; we can at least do this thing better than them.) In this argument your future self discusses at length the first two bullet-points, in a calm and level voice, while I continue to throw out spiteful remarks accompanied by exponential increases in volume, until I am shouting loud enough "for the neighbors to hear."

We circle each other slowly like well-fed sharks and I see in your face the face I love to touch, I see in your neck the curve perfectly aligned to the shape of my mouth, and you say, "what is it you really want, for you, for us, because whatever it is, it seems like I can't give it to you or help you get it and whatever this inconceivable and invisible 'it' is, I have no idea," and I reply, "I have no idea either, but you should be able to figure it out, shouldn't you, you're the successful one," and you reply, "you know what, that has nothing to do with this, I don't even care, but you can figure out your fucked-up self and all your insecurities and complexes by yourself, because I am gone," and then we are staring at each other for about thirty seconds. And I am furious. And you are furious. But really I am waiting for you to be the first to break and instead of breaking you are victorious, you are Atalanta and I am Meleager, you turn around and you leave without slamming the door.

I don't want that to happen. I would rather not say those spiteful things to you; I am not a shark, I am not a tragic hero. I am glad that we have had our time together, despite the future, and despite the future, I am also glad I traveled forward through time.

Sincerely,
and with love,
and goodbye,
---

And instead of putting the envelope containing the letter into the mailbox, I sat on the curb in front of the post office. With the heels of my hands I pressed the envelope against my closed and burning eyes, and I wanted to push until I went blind so that I couldn't see the future, but that didn't work for Oedipus so it probably wouldn't work for me. What I really wanted was a Greek chorus to underscore my every action with its long-term significance; maybe then I could connect the dots. But I had nothing and she was moving away from me in two different time-frames, or I was moving inevitably toward acute atelectasis.

It was a long time before she touched my shoulder and I opened my eyes and she was leaning toward me with a thin smile and small, economical breasts. She proffered a hand to pull me up and I accepted, shifting too much of my weight in her direction to force a stumble, which made her laugh, which made me laugh.

If I should die from knives, at least I die by choice.