Our love was a tsunami that never found the shore. Our love surged the power grid and left everyone but us in darkness. Our love swelled the Nile and carried the pharoahs into the Mediterannean.

Our love sat on the couch with its head clamped between its hands and its little hooves dangling over the edge.

“Would you stop?” I said. “You’re upsetting it.”

“And you’re blameless?” you said.

“I didn’t say that. Listen . . . wait, where are you going?”

You walked out and closed the door behind you. Our love hopped off the couch and trotted over to the door. I put a hand on the door to keep it closed and said, “You don’t have to go. I mean, not if you don’t want to.”

It looked anxiously at the door and blinked its dark eyes.

“I don’t think she’s coming back. But you’ve still got me, right?”

Our love purred and scraped something dead from between its fangs. We were both shaken up, but I figured it was nothing a little TV couldn’t solve. Wolf Blitzer was talking to an analyst about the tidal waves that were rolling over Tokyo like it was a cluster of sandcastles by the water’s edge.

“What are the chances this geographilogical activity is the work of ecoterrorists?”

“I’d say about 65 to 75 per cent, Wolf.”

At the break our love went into the kitchen to get some food. When fifteen minutes passed and it didn’t come back I decided to go investigate. Ten minutes later I managed to get myself off the couch, across the room, and into the kitchen.

The fridge door was open. Actually it was more than open — it’d been torn off and lay on the tiled floor with puncture marks in it. The fridge was empty. All the cupboards were open. The garbage bin had been sucked clean. I looked out the open window and saw our love bouncing around inside a dumpster like a superball. I had to go down there and lure it out with promises of ham and brownies.

I wanted to go back up to the apartment and sleep but it was midday and I could see myself pulling a Rip van Winkle. I needed to distract myself. I took our love to the park and let it chase the kids around and spit fire at them. You never let us do that. When our love was worn out and the kids were rolling through the dirt to extinguish themselves I decided we could use a drink.

We ended up at a kegger in the Beaches.

“Man! Look at that thing go!” Our love could really put it away. “Where’d you get that thing?”

I told him.

“Oh . . . well I suppose that’s cool. Are you sure you wanna keep it around?”

“I don’t see why not. It’s not hurting anyone.”

He was too plastered to maintain the conversation beyond that. I caught up to him pretty fast and ended up in bed with a girl named Lucy or Lacey or something. You were gone and I didn’t care. C’est la vie and all that. Lucille was becoming increasingly friendly when our love jumped from beneath the sheets and attached itself to her leg.

Her laughter rose into a scream and she started overreacting. She looked at our love like it was a bug that needed killing. “What the hell is that?”

I told her. “Don’t worry, it doesn’t bite. Unless you ask it to.”

She kicked both of us out of the apartment. I hammered the door with my fist.

“Hey! I live here!”

She came out fully clothed and pushed passed us. While she thundered down the hall ugly little words leapt from her throat.

I looked down at our love and shrugged. “Some people are just strange.”

I started blowing off work to hang out with our love. They knew I had shit to cope with and my reputation was good enough that I could get away with it. We partied and drank and terrorized the neighbourhood kids. We started getting up in the afternoon and eating anything that would come directly to the door or had been constructed in laboratories with primarily glucose and/or fructose. I missed you. Sometimes I’d talk about you — your unbridled sarcasm, your sinister grin, the way you could always darken a room — and our love would start to whine and go to the door and wag its forked tail.

One afternoon I came into the living room and found our love tangled up like a pretzel on the floor. I woke it with a few taps of my foot.

“You wanna go throw the frisbee around?”

Our love clenched its eyes shut and shivered like a homeless guy in February.

“You all right? Want me to go pick up some brownies?”
It clawed at its knotted fur and whimpered.

“Well, I guess we’ll just take it easy today.”

 

The phone rang again. It felt like a drill burrowing for my brains. After the fourth ring I dragged the receiver to my ear.

“Hello?”

“Were you sleeping?”

“I think I still am. What can I do for you?”

“We’re having an intervention.”

“For who?”

“For you.”

“Since when do I need an intervention?”

“Since you started sleeping until 4:00.”

“Actually I sleep till 6:00. You woke me early.”

“Whatever. Put some clothes on. We’re coming over.”

“I’d really rather you didn’t —” He hung up.

I picked up some jeans and a shirt from the pile in the corner, smelled them, and pulled them on. My friends were at the door before I found clean socks.

I cracked the door open. “What’s up?”

“You want to come down to the pub for a little while?”

“I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“I can’t leave it alone for too long. It gets antsy and starts gnawing at the furniture.”

“Yeah, about that thing . . . can’t you deal with shit like a normal person?”

I looked away and scratched the back of my neck.

“Oh. I guess not, huh?”

“I’m doing my best here.”

“We’re sure you are . . . but you really need to get out of the apartment. You look like a bulemic marshmallow. Do you have any food in there?”

“I think there’s some cookies and half a carrot cake.”

“On a diet?”

“Yeah.”

“What happened to your job?”

“I took a leave of absence.”

“So they fired you?”

I coughed. “Yeah.”

“Mind if we come in?”

I was too tired to argue. They both came in and one of them flipped on the lights.

“Dude! What are you doing?”

“I’m turning the lights on. Is there a problem?”

“It doesn’t like the light.”

He frowned at me. “Where is that thing anyway?” He sniffed. “Wait — don’t tell me. I’ll just follow the stench.”

I stuck my hands into my pockets and followed them into my room. Our love sprawled on the bed on its back. Bile trickled across the bed and down onto the floor like the Niagara Falls fouled by industrial waste. Its skin had turned seaweed-green and was peeling away in places.

“You sleep in the same bed as that?”

“No, I’m sleeping on the couch now.”

“It doesn’t look so good.”

It didn’t look very good at all. I got my friends out of there. Then I put on some sandals and took our love to the emergency room. I had some trouble explaining my relationship with the patient to the receptionist, but eventually it got to see a doctor. I paced the waiting room. If I sat down they’d have to shoot something into my veins to wake me up.

The doctor called me into the examination room.

“I’m afraid there’s nothing we can do.”

My chest cramped up. “There has to be something. You have to try something.”

The doctor sighed. “Medicine can’t save this . . . thing. There might be one or two things you could do, however.”

“Like what?”

“Well, you could build a machine.”

“A machine?”

“Yes. A machine capable of traversing the temporal dimension. You must go back through time to that point when it didn’t take you two hours to coax yourself out of bed, when you bathed regularly, when you had direction and purpose. Once there you must slow the planets to a stop, lock down the sunbeams, settle the oceans until the earth looks like it’s sheathed in glass. You must single-handedly force the universe into dormancy and hold it there. Forever.”

“I think I can do that. I know a guy who —”

“I wasn’t offering that as a realistic solution.”

“Oh. Well what else can I do?”

He shrugged. “I only have the easy answers.”

“Thanks doctor. That’s really helpful.”

“Listen . . . it’s not often someone drags something like this into the waiting room, so let me give you some advice. It’s like you’re carrying around a cancer growth just because it makes you feel good. That’s fucked up.”

I wanted to punch him out, but couldn’t even tighten my hand into a fist. I made certain inferences about my relationship with his mother and got out of there.

When we got home I propped our love on the couch, turned on the TV and laid a box of crackers beside it. It just sat there, barely breathing. I didn’t know what to do. I called you.

“I don’t know what to do,” I said. “I’ve tried everything.”

“What have you done?”

“I took it to the hospital. Then I brought it home and put the TV on.”

“Typical.”

“What? You need to help me. It. Us.”

“I don’t think I can do anything.”

“I thought hearing your voice might help.”

“What would I say?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think it matters much. Read the phone book. Just say something.”

“I’m not going to do that.”

“Don’t you care?”

You paused. “No. I don’t.”

I clenched the phone to my ear. I wanted to sleep. I wanted to swallow the world so it wouldn’t swallow me. I wanted to live in a world where it’s enough to love someone.

“Listen, I don’t think this has anything to do with me anymore,” you said. “I have to get going. Take care of yourself.”

I dropped the receiver. I needed to sit down. The couch was at least five or six feet away. I looked around for something closer. Nothing. So I shuffled over to it, dropped myself over the armrest, and lay there. I closed my eyes but couldn’t sleep. I thought about ways to wipe out my conscious mind. I made a list. I worked out the different scenarios. I thought, if I was sleeping I wouldn’t be making lists. And that’d probably be a good thing.

Later that night I went into my room. Our love convulsed on the bed like a drug fiend aching for a fix. Its eyes stared at divergent points in space and it was hyperventilating. I sat on the edge of the bed.

“You’re going to be okay,” I said. I didn’t want to lie, but I wanted to be truthful even less. “You’ve got a lot of fight left in you. You’re a fiesty little thing, aren’t you? I love you, love.” Its claw swung wildly, found my arm, and dug in. Our love looked at me and winked. Then it stopped hyperventilating, took a few even breaths, and went still.

I sat there for about half an hour with pain pouring from my eyes and nose. Then I went back to the couch and lay there until morning.

I put our love into a duffel bag and carried it down to the corner. I hauled it onto a streetcar and found a seat at the back. We rode down to the waterfront. I carried it to an isolated stretch of beach and headed for the water. The duffel bag got so heavy I had to drop it to the sand and drag it. I gripped the bag with both hands and yanked it. The bag tore right off. I grabbed our love’s little hooves and pulled it to the water’s edge, like a slave heaving a granite block to the foot of a pyramid.

I dragged our love into the water and the waves took it up like a feather and started pulling it out to sea. My arms were useless and my legs weren’t much better so I lay back and let the waves roll over them. The sun swung over me and I let the sea change.

 

 

STEVE GOLD is studying journalism, but is no longer sure he'll pursue it when he leaves the education system. He's considering instead adventuring the wildest, most forbiding reaches of the world (searching for booty at the bottom of the ocean) or perhaps becoming a rock star (searching for booty at the bottom of a mosh-pit). He writes stories for the people.