He wanted to tell her to go to Hell, skipping Purgatory and Limbo in the fast lane to damnation like a drunken frat boy in a hurry to flunk out of his eighth sophomore semester; he wanted to make her pay life’s sad little fiddler with money from her own childhood piggy-bank, for the pathetic refrain that she had inspired in his bleak existence.
But all he could do was stare at the lush mountainous terrain that rolled gently from the nape of her neck to the hem of her skirt, irrigated by streams of sweat like perfumed rivers.
“Must you internalize everything, Max?” she sighed, sending his train of thoughts careening off of the tracks. “I thought you wanted to talk about Kevin…”
“Kevin Kurtweiler Kinsley is a racist bastard,” Max spat. “That pointed-headed little bigot wouldn’t dare cross me.”
Laura suckled at her cigarette holder with distracted infantilism. “Oh?” she quipped. “I thought you two had a history,” she cooed.
She didn’t know the half of it…not the part, the division, or the moiety, he thought to himself; she was just stoking the fire, adding comment after comment to kindle him into exploding like year-old dynamite.
“Come on, Max...admit it. It wasn’t the money, or the crass comments; you were jealous,” Laura giggled.
“Hah!” Max Hahed; “Kevin tried to bring me to my knees for months, but I wouldn’t stand for it. The last time I saw him he was running out of the Blue Room over on Ash and Hunter, white as a sheet. What do I have to be green over?”
And then it hit him like an allegorical frat-boy’s pre-owned Gremlin in the proverbial fast lane to metaphoric damnation: Laura…and Kevin…That was the second time she had two-timed him, and she did it with that double-crossing cross burner Kevin.
“Don’t you get it, Max?” Laura asked softly. “I needed something real, not just an ephemeral connection to another cliché motivated by a mutual lack of multidimensional experience. That’s no way to raise a child,” she sobbed dramatically.
“You’re not pregnant,” Max muttered perplexedly.
“I mean my inner child, you idiot! My inner child has been suffering under the oppression of your godless and nihilistic model of the universe; you don’t believe in love, in nobility, or even the inherent dignity of mankind!” Laura cried.
“You’re no saint, sister…”
“Oh, Max,” she gasped. “Just because I don’t personally practice any number of empirically circumspect modes of emotional interaction doesn’t mean that I don’t accept them as being true.”
Max frowned, his brow furrowing in the futility of the argument. He tried to tell himself that none of this was even real; nothing mattered, because nothing existed outside of the necessary delusions of the self that he created solely to represent amalgams of his own ever-shifting concepts of reality.
But this phantasm of unobtainable and altogether too infuriating femininity, he had at some point decided to manufacture with perfect breasts and eyes like blue dinner plates, and he couldn’t ignore the sympathy and lust that her shuddering provoked.
“Look, kid…it doesn’t have to be this way,” he admonished gently. “We can work things out; you’ll see, baby.”
He cradled her against his chest, her isolationistically folded arms digging into his ribs like cruel little reminders of the discomfort created by attempting to identify with anything outside of one’s own existence.
“Do you really think so, Max? Or is this just another of your carefully planned facades of human interaction designed to reinforce your self-identity as a sympathetic anti-hero?”
Max smiled and shook his head. “It’s legit, kid; I know this will work.”
“But how can you be so certain?” she asked, uncertain.
“Because I’m not an existentialist; I’m a solipsist,” he admitted. “I didn’t know how to break this to you, but I guess now is as good a time as any.”
“I don’t understand…if you don’t believe I exist, how can we be happy?” Laura asked quietly, beginning to sob again.
“Oh, baby…you do exist. You exist because I exist, and all this time I felt myself falling in love with you I never thought it would work. You’re a figment of my imagination…I’m a Methodist; it’s complicated. But now I can accept that if you are an inseparable part of my own egocentric experience you no longer have the burden of developing your own independent emotional character,” Max explained.
“But I’m the protagonist, Max!”
“Nonsense. Why do you think my internal monologue is always illustrated instead of yours? This isn’t a literary convention; we’re the same person. Sometimes, I think from chapter to chapter the core concept of self has shifted back and forth…”
“I knew it! That’s why Kevin has his own chapter!”
“Exactly,” Max cried. “Omniscient multiple third-person perspectives can only occur if we accept that all entities are expressions of one individual ego.”
Laura could feel the passion rekindle as he challenged her perception of reality and self; his manhood pulsed between them, and she felt herself flush with desire as she experienced his skin and her skin touch from both perspectives at once.
“Make love to myself,” she breathed.
“I’ll think about it,” Max acquiesced.
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