Falling Dominoes: a short story
Once again, I find myself at a table in a restaurant sitting across from a gorgeous woman. And once again, she’s smart and funny and all of that. Okay, maybe I’m not being entirely fair to her. She really is something. In fact, she’s probably the best that Beth has managed to come up with since she first started trying to pair me up with her friends and friends-of-friends. And that’s saying something, because Beth is a good judge of character and she wants what’s best for her little brother. And her friends are great girls, all of them, so, yeah, I’m pretty lucky. But when it isn’t going to work out, it isn’t going to work out. I just don’t see myself in her future.
And that hurts. Because, seriously, this one is a catch. Gorgeous brunette, great smile. Fantastic body, too, and I heartily approve of what that dress is doing for it. And this girl, Amy, is going places. She’ll be a star. She’s really witty, so it’s a shame I’m not the best audience. She apologizes each time my laugh isn’t exactly what it should be.
“I’m funnier on stage,” she assures me. “Conversation, not so much.”
“If that’s true then you must be amazing,” I say, but I guess my sincerity doesn’t show. She thinks I’m bored. Okay, fair. I am a bit bored. But it’s not her conversation skills. It’s just that a lot of joy has gone out of the whole dating thing recently. You get to be our age and dating is really about looking for something, and I know neither of us is going to find it tonight.
She’s looking to find a nice guy that she can settle down with so that she can give up the small-time stand-up comedy scene and take a stab at the real world. Beth’s words, not hers. Either way, I know that’s not going to happen. An important agent will notice her and fall for her, and then the big gigs will really start. There will be a whole lot of buzz about this rising star who’s been setting the LA scene on fire, which will lead to national exposure when she gets a one-hour special on Comedy Central. From there it's all like a row of falling dominoes: The second special, then the third, then the album, then the spot on Saturday Night Live, then the short-lived but critically acclaimed sketch comedy show, then the hit sitcom based on her own life with her agent and their two kids, then Celebrity Big Brother to try to boost her flagging career, then the tabloid exposure of the affair with a has-been rap artist that she’ll meet there, then divorcing her former agent and marrying the rap artist, then marital bliss, then cancer. See? Dominoes.
But tonight is not one of those dominoes. Not for her, and not for me. I won’t find anything lasting here. I’m not even getting laid tonight. At least not by her.
And you know what, I’m fine with that. Over the past three years I’ve come to terms with the fact that just because I can see people’s futures doesn’t mean that I can do anything about it. There are some things you cannot change. For instance: anything. That is a thing you cannot change. It’s obnoxious. And sometimes more than that. Sometimes it keeps me up at night. Yesterday, in traffic, I heard a voice call out, “move it, asshole!” and just by hearing his voice for a second I knew that he was going to be stabbed next week. I wasn’t sure if he was going to come through it okay, but I wasn’t keen to find out and so I rolled up the window. If I don’t hear the voice, I don’t know a thing. Still felt bad for the guy.
But it isn’t always doom and gloom. Sometimes it’s just boring, knowing what’s going to happen before it does. Like now. “Are you ready to order?” The waitress doesn’t need to go any further, because some things take only a sentence. I know that she’s going to bring me a Caesar salad and it’s going to be wrong. I haven’t even decided what I want to order, but the fates have decreed for me that I’ll be getting a Caesar salad instead of whatever I order. But what if I order a Caesar salad? What then, fates? Have I contradicted you?
“I want a small Caesar salad,” I say. I feel a victorious thrill. Pathetic, I know, but let me have my fun. There’s no real victory in it, anyhow, because somehow it will work out like I saw it would, regardless of how I try to complicate it. Some sort of magic irony will fix it all.
“Anything else?” she asks. Oh, wow. Now I know that, unlike the reading I get from Amy, the reading from this chick says that she will be getting laid tonight. By me, maybe?
“Wha? Er, no. No thank you,” I say awkwardly. I don’t think she realized that I just turned down a sexual offer that she never really made.
This is one of the reasons why this whole dating thing is so unpleasant for me. I’m always distracted. I wasn’t even paying attention so I have no idea what Amy ordered. Which isn't really fair. I may have had the ending of this story spoiled for me, but Amy hasn't. It does suck that I know how it all turns out, but I owe it to her to at least maintain a facade of being involved and engaged. Beth, I mean. I owe it to Beth, not Amy. Well, I guess I actually owe it to Amy as well, but poor Beth, bless her, is the one who's always trying to help me out, get me out of the house, get me involved, and get those headphones out of my ears. She doesn't know about my problem. She doesn't know that what the headphones are for, that listening to music or talk radio or recordings is the only way I can get relief. Other than that, I can’t ever hear a human voice without being assaulted by increasingly specific visions of that person's personal future.
“So, Rick,” says Amy. Her eyes fail to excite me like they might. “Your sister said you're between jobs. Is that right?” As she speaks, the details of her future come more clearly into focus in my mind. For instance, the name of the rapper she'll marry. It's not someone I've heard of.
I try to ignore the images. “That's one way of putting it,” I say with a slight smirk.
“Unemployed, then,” Amy says. She’s a comedienne, and she knows it would have been out of line to comment on my status without first gauging my sense of humor on the topic. “What was it that you did before?”
“An artist, actually. An illustrator.”
“Freelance?” asked Amy. She'll have to wear a wig after the chemotherapy.
“Basically,” I said.
“So when you say between jobs, that's what you really mean. Between illustrating jobs.”
“Not really,” I say, after taking a sip of my drink. As I set the glass on the table, I try to decide how I should say this. I probably shouldn’t say it at all. But I do, for some reason. “I quit illustrating. I'm going to make some money in the stock market really soon.”
“Really?” Amy asks, clearly taken aback. “You sound certain.”
“I'm confident,” I say. Not that I can see my own future. Even when I see Beth's future or the future of someone else who's close to me, the details of my own future tend to come out fuzzy. But that doesn't stop me from picking up hot investment tips out of the futures of total strangers. Seeing the future does have a perk or two. “Anyway,” I say, “tell me about you. Where do you come from?”
“Oh, you know,” she says, clearly a bit uncomfortable with the question. “Around. I was born in Ohio, went to school there, and came out here immediately after. And then here I am.” Seems to me like a non-answer. Maybe she hates talking about her past. I hate mine. It was the only thing I had when I first started seeing the future. But there’s only so much of it, and it got boring fast. So I have this thing about liking to listen to other people discuss their own pasts. It’s the only thing they can really tell me about. And she doesn’t even realize it, but what little I’m hearing about her past is overshadowed by what I’m learning about the guilt she’ll feel over the difficulty her children will go through when she's separated from their father and slowly dying, which is why she won’t tell them about the cancer for months after she finds out.
“What did you major in?” I asked.
“Spanish, actually. Seemed like an interesting thing at the time, but as I later realized, there wasn't much chance I was going to want to teach or anything, and I didn't know what else to do, so I decided to come out here and try my luck. See what I could find.”
Her more immediate future begins to make itself apparent. later tonight she'll share a taxi with some guy. “Come on inside,” she’s going to say. “I want to show you something.” Is that some kind of line? No, a comedienne would think of something funny. There’s actually something that she’s going to want to show him. They're going to go inside and look through her vinyl collection. She and her companion will sit there for hours, late into the night, listening to her old records. They'll pick out the obscure ones that they both remember and get drunk and have an all-around good time together. The music they're listening to... those bands are some of my favorites. I think the guy she's going home with tonight is me. It must be.
Sometimes it works like this. The future is a complicated mess. I know I don’t have a future with this girl, and I know the sparks aren't exactly flying right now as we sip our respective drinks awkwardly. The connection between those two facts had seemed fairly straightforward until just now. The part that doesn't make sense is the fact that after we leave this restaurant we are apparently going to hit it off entirely. The shortest distance between two points is a straight line, but how a late night of music and booze and genuine affection manages to fall on that line, well, don't ask me. Yet.
When you're dwelling on moments that haven't happened yet, as I so often do these days, you'll find that you run into some problems with the one you're in. It makes it difficult to have a conversation. It's happening now. She's trailing off as if she thinks I'm not listening. But I am, in my way.
I change the subject. “Do you like music?” Just because I can’t rearrange the dominoes doesn't mean I can't push one over now and again.
“Yeah, who doesn't?” she asks, moving forward a bit in her chair. Is that one of those body language things? Does that mean I've interested her? Not that it really matters. But from there the conversation heats up and soon I know all sorts of things about her future. And then there's the food, then a cab, then her house, then music playing and then before I know it we’ve had a few too many drinks. Once again: dominoes.
It’s all a blur, in the worst, most cliché sense possible, and while we’re listening to an old record by some band that nobody remembers but us, I’m sitting there and something occurs to me. Am I really there at all, or am I still in the restaurant, having some sort of extra-intense vision of the future? I’m not even sure I’m really awake, because I don’t feel quite like I usually do. Something within me is at peace with the fact that the woman I’m with will never see me again and will die before her time, not only suffering but also surrounded by loved ones and crushed by the feeling that she is causing them to suffer as well. There’s a part of me that doesn’t care whether this is real or a fantasy or a vision or all three. I can’t even bring myself to care what was wrong with the Caesar salad. There had to have been something wrong with it. I could probably pore over the minute details and figure out just what it was. It might have been the dressing. Maybe it had chicken and I didn’t want any. Or it could have been the other way around. But I honestly don't care. Amy and I are lying on the couch together, taking in the music and enjoying the company.
After a while she speaks. “Rick,” she says. “Fix it.”
“What?” I ask. I can tell from her voice that something’s wrong.
“The record. It’s skipping,” she says, slurring the words.
“Not for me,” I mumble. I still can’t put my finger on it but there’s something very strange about her voice.
“Oh,” she says.
It takes that single syllable to realize what’s wrong: it’s singular. It’s a syllable that carries nothing with it but itself. Sound devoid of meaning. Like the repeating loop of the skipping record. The sound of her voice is literally like music to my ears. For this moment I hear her voice and there’s no cancer, no sitcom, no big break for her. There’s no future because time’s an illusion anyway. It’s like all of these connections are firing in my brain and I’m realizing things for the first time, and then—
It stops; it’s over.
Well, shit.
I get up and fix the needle. The song goes on. I know it by heart. “Listen, Amy,” I say. “I think I had better call it a night.”
She says some stuff and I say some stuff back but I don’t know what we say because my mouth is running on autopilot and I’m not hearing anything anymore, just seeing. I’m seeing the future again, the falling dominoes. I’m seeing her lying there and wondering why I left and why I’m not going to call her and why she can never see her kids graduate from high school and why her sitcom’s been canceled after what seemed like such a minor dip in the ratings. I wish I could give her an answer but somehow I doubt she’ll understand that it’s all because I wanted a small Caesar Salad and I got a large one instead.
copyright 2009 Thomas M Dickinson, Jr.
