Read The Mere Future for Free Online Page B

yearning for tenderness,” she said. “And that would be fulfilling.” Then she looked to see if I had written that down.
    “I’m recording it on my watch,” I assured her. And she didn’t know what to say.
    When the film ended, the lights came back on and she handed me a framed, paint-stained photo of a group of friends, all young, with their arms around each other. They all looked different. They were each wearing different clothes. It felt psychotic.
    “Where are they now?” That was Glick speaking.
    “Yeah, where are they?” That was me.
    “Mad at each other and me, or dead or stupid or boring or too depressed, too pathetic, or defeated, out of ideas, delusional, or bitter. Afraid.” Then she scrunched her forehead. “Wait! I just remembered. This one is rich and slick and therefore equally out of reach.”
    I looked at the face of the only one who made it. He knew the secret of straddling opposing universes. He was a winner. How did he do it?
    “I forgot I ever knew him,” she said. “Personally, I have never sold a piece.”
    That seemed impossible. Everyone wants to buy something.
    “Is it because you think it would be bourgeois?”
    This was a sentence I had picked up along the way. Over and over again we were reminded that the reason people were excluded was because they wanted to be. They looked down on those who were in. They thought it would be bourgeois to be recognized and happy, so they purposefully kept themselves from enjoying what the generous winners so wisely chose to enjoy. I had been told over and over in so many ways that people like Glick loved being alone.
    Glick looked confused and then laughed insanely.
    “Is that what THEY are telling you these days? That I chose obscurity?”
    “Yes.”
    “What a lie.” She gnashed her silly teeth. “No way.”
    “Really?”
    “No!” She couldn’t believe it. “I have never sold a piece because I have never figured out how to shmooze. I just always said whatever I thought was true. WHAT A MISTAKE ! Do you know how to shmooze? You’re young. Can you teach me? It might not be too late.”
    “You’ll never be able to do it,” I said, without thinking. It was so obvious. “You’re not user-friendly. You’re too needy. You have no social currency. You’re a freak. Without a normative side, you can’t get in. That’s it. Sorry.”
    I felt a special kind of satisfaction, because I was just about to be let into the world of the special, by Mr Harrison Bond. That’s how I knew for a fact that she never would.
    “But,” she whined. “I have a personal momentum of ideas.”
    “Like what?” I felt sorry for this dork. Being user-friendly had nothing to do with ideas. “I’ll try to squeeze them into eight words.”
    “Like the flesh and bone of cities.”
    All I could do was stare with astonishment at her ineptitude. Immediately, to protect myself, I assessed the differences between us so that that gap would never be bridged. Those differences would keep me from ever turning into That.
    Don’t get me wrong, I liked her paintings. In some ways they were overwhelming me with feeling, feeling so strong that I couldn’t get up and leave. But they were feelings about Loss, about the Irretrievable, and the Lack of Justice. Those feelings were not in demand. Forget about them.
    “Do you have a boyfriend?” I asked. Why did I ask that? To keep her even further away. I knew that she didn’t have a boyfriend, and I wanted to reinscribe her failure.
    “Oh,” she said, minisculely. “You know.”
    “No, huh?”
    “Well, while I do need to have sex to realize my passions, an actual relationship is ultimately too ephemeral for me. I’m too ambitious. I want my passions to last.”
    “Ambitious?”
    “My ambitions are greater than yours,” she glared, recovered. She started smoking and eating garlic.
    This startled me. Ambitions? No one with ambition would ever act, look, think, dress, speak, or smell this way. How could she