Love Short Story
Photo Credit: www.cepolina.com
“When you live your life right, there’s nothing to write about.” That was his verdict, which he wrote on the top of every page he wrote. His first publisher did not want that on the top of every page of his novel. They wanted the title of his book to be on the top of every other page, and his name on the top of the facing pages. So he changed the title of his book to When You Live Your Life Right, There’s Nothing To Write About, and changed his name legally and publicly to When You Live Your Life Right, There’s Nothing To Write About. His fellow writers were a little skeptical. They lived their lives right. They had plenty to write about.
He got his life on the right track. He met the right woman. She was a real winner. She was good news. She made sense. He swiftly forgot about the wrong women of the past and pushed the lever down on the toaster one morning with delicious English muffins in it, and after brief moments they popped up, and she spread butter on them as he poured for her a glass of orange juice, the best that he squeezed himself.
–
One night a thief broke into his apartment and stole her. Just took her by the hand and led her away. It was not a kidnapping. The thief already had her heart, but was still not convinced.
The thief also took his stereo.
The writer slept every night like it was his last, because he slept the sleep of the dead. When he woke up she was gone and his stereo was gone. The writer was a thief too, and more determined. He had something to write, he thought. “My life is going down a dark path, so I have to write.”
“So you say you own the Mona Lisa…” [read it, it makes the story make more sense] he wrote across the top of the page, hoping the thief was a lover of well-made creations. He signed his name, which was also the epigraph of the story, in the top margin, and mailed the completed story, the life lesson, to his publisher, who told him that he needed more short stories to make the collection.
Little did the thief know that he was just an anecdote, or material for publication. He had his own concerns, like where to store his new woman. Do women like high humidity or low humidity? What kind of lighting do they favor? He had her heart but really didn’t know anything about her body or mind. He looked up information about women on the Internet. It seemed that many of them didn’t wear clothing, but she had come clothed and he didn’t want to mess with her in case he broke something.
He set her down in the bed beside him, after hooking up the new stereo system, which was not so new but was new to him at least, and played some of his vague 1990s music. He felt that she was warm and felt her heart beating, and so formed the conjecture that she had a heart, like his, and reasoned analogically that she was an animal like him, and he started to listen to her vocalizations and realized they were human speech, and formed an inductive chain of reasoning that figured that she thought, and felt, just as he did, and then he was scared stiff. “She’s a thief too.” No doubt about it.
The writer wanted her back. But he wanted to write more, so he just wrote a story about wanting her back from the thief.
The thief was still looking on the Internet for information about women, but now he narrowed his search to “women thieves”. Apparently, female thieves might strip naked in order to escape justice, by stunning onlookers. The Internet said this very thing happened in India. He had to be aware of that possibility. He already thought she was stunning, with her clothes on. He spoke to her and told her that wearing clothes was beautiful, and thought of using a tactic of fear to convince her never to disrobe, but then realized that this very notion of fear might give her ideas — it was probably exactly what gave female thieves the power of nakedness.
The writer finally went down to the police station.
“Hello, I would like to report someone missing.”
“What’s your name?”
“When About.”
“Nguyen Aboudd” wrote the clerk.
“No, that’s not how it’s spelled.”
“Oh, I’m sorry, how is it spelled?”
“W-H-E-N A-B-O-U-T”
“Okay, well, who went missing?”
“My wife. She disappeared one night.”
“When?”
“Yes?”
“No, when did she go missing?”
“About a month ago.”
“That’s a long time ago. Why didn’t you report this sooner?”
“I just… had a lot on my mind.” He realized this sounded really bad, but he was even more afraid of telling the truth, that he had preferred writing to doing.
“Really? You mean it wasn’t important to you to tell the police?”
He thought fast. “I’m kind of embarrassed to go to the police because I don’t trust the police. They beat people.”
“They also arrest murderers.” (Zing.)
“Yes, that’s true.”
“Okay, well, fill out this form.”
“Okay.”
Back to writing.
The thief decided to take his woman out of doors. She was looking wilted, and complained of being shut up, and if he really loved her he wouldn’t mind appearing with her in public. He certainly didn’t love her, that’s just part of what he said to steal her heart, and knew that at the moment he took her out he would be in a vulnerable position. He needed to make sure she didn’t steal his heart when they were out walking, and run away with it, and leave him with just a stereo back at home and some vague 1990s music. Thieves don’t let thieves get away with thievery.
When had to finish his collection of stories. As he was writing, yet again, about the lostness of the damned, it struck him, in the fashion of a non sequitur, that maybe if his stories became famous, the thief would read about the nature of thievery, and about how much he loved his good news woman, and perhaps have his damned conscience awakened, and get new eyes, and see that he had to bring back the woman he had kidnapped, back to the City She Could Call Her Own and to her husband, who bitterly cursed himself for not being, after all, so much good news for her. So he worked with renewed vigor, and ran out of ideas every night and thrashed his keyboard trying to overcome writer’s block.
The thief took his woman out to the restaurants and parks, with a careful cage around his heart. She stunned him with her looks, but he never met her eyes, so she did not stun him at all with her looks. He listened to her talk and imagined her as a skeleton, with death’s wheezy wind rattling her sinuses. He imagined this until it began to amuse him. Amusement, even ironic amusement, is the beginning of sincere appreciation, as any lapsed hipster knows. He knew he must keep in focus; she could tell if he was unfocused, and then she would get her heart back, and wander away, leaving him with nothing but his stereo and vague 1990s music. As he thought this he thought: “can you steal someone’s heart if you value it? But isn’t the very act of stealing something the beginning of loving it?” Such reflections occupied his mind, in such a way that he looked particularly thoughtful, to hear of how she ran her life And how she got along. And where she was born, in Arizona. And how much she loved Gothic music, even the vague 1990s Gothic music. And how she flew kites and was a babysitter and got her GED and worked her way to the top of the Happy Burger Land in her town in Arizona, setting the record for most Giggly Burgers served in a day. And on and on.
She might have gone to college. She was financially independent and responsible and street-wise. She had a taste for adventure, and apparently, bald-faced lies, his only chance, because as a thief the thief was merely a stereo burglar, not even good enough to get a cat out of an apartment without smothering it to stifle its cries. One thing he had on his conscience was a dead cat.
But such reflections could only protect him so long, until they tormented him. So he began to write them down, to get them out of his head. That’s how writing always begins. When You Live Your Life Right, There’s Nothing To Write About. He wrote many stories of all the bizarre things women wanted, based on his Internet researches and on the snatches of conversation he picked up listening to her in between his reveries and being stunned by her looks, (but not her looks). He posted these stories to the Internet, under an anonymous account, in public libraries. He developed a following. People found his stories when they searched for information about women on the Internet.
The writer, When, was a reviewer of writers. He studied the works of Internet writers to see if the form of Internet writing had its own neglected critical features. Verily it was so. His friend came across the thief’s writings and noted the striking similarities between the thief’s woman and the writer’s wife. The friend got on her bicycle and rode through the rain, her phone ruined by the rain, and wishing to convey her suspicions in person for the purpose of assistance, but got caught in Mission Valley during an episode of flooding. She got sick from that incident, delirious, unable to communicate rationally to the writer. This was unfortunate. Eventually and independently, he came across the thief’s writing, and noted the striking similarities between the thief’s woman and his missing wife. Later on, the writer was struck by the irony of the little aforementioned situation with his now recovered female friend, with whom he never had a sexual or romantic relationship, how this was just one of those brute facts of life, it just was, and put it in a story.
He told the police about the Internet writings, to get them off his back, and they duly examined these writings, and used the Patriot Act to check the library records, to determine when and where the thief was posting, and incidentally (the writer was interested in this) which books he checked out. If stealing a woman’s heart right out of her husband’s bed is not an instance of domestic terrorism, what is?
The thief woke up one night hearing a noise come from the room where he kept his woman. He opened the door and saw her, eyes open in the dark, sobbing and saying “When, When, When.” He was a bit frightened, and put his hand on her shoulder and asked her questions:
“When what?”
“When!”
“What are you talking about?”
“The edge of the ravine is full of glassy widows.”
He was relieved. She was merely talking in her sleep. But then, the thought occurred to him, every so often, that maybe the man lying next to her when he stole her was named Nguyen. He hadn’t particularly noted Vietnamese features on him, but it was dark, so who knows? Maybe the man was named Nguyen. He noted that she never mentioned the man when awake — not that he remembered, at least — and figured that was good, and not to be messed with. As with her clothes, he figured some things are best not messed with.
The police interrupted his train of thought. He heard from the news media that they were looking for the kidnapper, that after a month a man had reported his wife missing, and that things were looking good for their investigation. They said they had a lead, but wouldn’t say what it was. He became paranoid and moved out of his apartment, taking with him only some necessary supplies, his stack of vague 1990s CDs, a portable CD player, earbuds, and his woman. They got a ride with a Craigslist guy driving to Mojave; they set out to the high desert. The woman was reminded of her hometown in Arizona, happy at first, and happy to stand in the desert wind, and remember kites, but unhappy when the thief got paranoid again and had them uproot again, this time to Las Vegas.
He was on interesting legal grounds. From the police’s perspective, they were in their rights to call in the FBI: transporting a person across state lines for the commission of a crime. But he hadn’t kidnapped her. When you steal somebody’s heart, not a felony in any state, it becomes impossible for you to kidnap them, or at least much, much more difficult. So he thought he might be able to at least appeal his inevitable conviction on the grounds of some such legal detail. He did consider an expediency: try to dig up her memory of Nguyen, have her call him, tell him she was happy with a new man, but… but… maybe then her heart would return to Nguyen when her memories returned to her, and he couldn’t risk that. A thief doesn’t steal something just to let it slip from his grasp.
The writer cranked out the last of the stories needed for his collection. He sent them off to his publisher, who sat on the manuscripts for months, almost until they were completely irrelevant to this story.
Las Vegas was not kind to the woman. The desert around Las Vegas is different than the desert of California. It is dead desert. The color of the sand is different, and there are fences for no reason. The city exudes Creep, which allows more of the city to exude, the Creep being billboards of strip clubs and glut-buffets. The sand knows there is prostitution in the air, and so it shuts its eyes and plays dead, lying there unlike the California or Arizona sand, which is similarly inanimate, but much more observant. Nothing gives a little girl in the desert more validation than the audience of sand.
The thief noted his property wilting, at first unsure what could be afflicting her so — they were in the desert, in an urban area, right? She had plenty of water, she got a fair alternation of sun and shade, he fed her food, not really good food, but decent food. He locked her in his room and went alone to the university extension service, the medical extension, to see if they had any advice for taking care of a woman. He put it in terms they might understand and not pass judgment. They asked if she was well enough to come in. He brought her in and she checked out fine. Nothing medically wrong, it seemed. Yet he could see that she was wilting, in the moments in which he looked at her eyes when she was taking a break from stealing his heart.
He had to face the facts: fugitive life was bad for her. In Las Vegas, you can get caught on the side of the city without any life, where there’s nothing but Creep and little Vegaslings darting around, little embryonic Vegaslings pupating in the front lawns. She came to enjoy playing with these little residents, despite their ferocity. But still she wilted. Creep does that to some people.
His experiment in keeping a woman was failing. Thieves don’t steal things just for them to die, at least, not before they manage to sell them to somebody. He felt like he was at the end of the line, and the only thing to do with this stunning — he had to admit — work of art was to turn her over to better hands. He went to a library, no longer too paranoid, just tired, and posted a final story, about a man named Nguyen who was sending the police after him.
This one he also said was a true story.
The writer took it philosophically. Someday people would get his name right. The Las Vegas police, after a day or two, managed to track down the thief and the woman, and were on the point of arresting him, when the woman burst out:
“No! I went with him voluntarily.
There is no crime. He’s my lover.” This surprised the police, they asked the thief if this was true, to which he replied “I am not her lover,” she begged them not to arrest him, but he was still wanted for breaking and entering and theft, for having taken the stereo, of course, and so they took him away, and dragged her weeping along with them, all the way back to San Diego, America’s Finest City.
She didn’t want to go back to the writer. Who was he? The police had a lot of trouble with her. She couldn’t go to jail, and she didn’t have any place to stay, at least, not that she would accept while her love was incarcerated. Her heart was still stolen. The thief begged to talk to her, but they misunderstood. The police find malfeasance and manipulation and evil conspiracy more believable, more simple, Occam-wise, than redemption. It’s understandable. Salvation has less entropy, and will happen less and less often in a closed system. The thief still had her heart, and now he wanted to give it back to her. For once he wasn’t in love with her, he just loved her. He knew that her good man was not him, he was just bad news, she needed to go back to her husband. The thief thought he would be happy to see her thriving, even if he couldn’t possess her.
It came time for his trial, and the writer thought, well, life is a stream of stories, which is exactly why it must be painful and mistake-ridden. When You Live Your Life Right, There’s Nothing To Write About. He arranged to meet the thief after his conviction, to interview him. What exactly happened to his wife? Why did she have no memory of him? The thief had no answers, except to beg that she come see him so he could set things straight. The writer told him about his writing project to try to get her back, and they found they had much in common, as writers, a similar desperation of style. The writer asked:
“Why did you steal my wife?”
“I had her heart just as a matter of course. I didn’t want her when I broke into your room. I just wanted your stereo, but when I saw her there, I thought you were so rich, to have her and everything else, that I should take from you who were rich to give to the poor… thieves’ honor: take from the rich, give to the poor… And every thief is poor, otherwise why would we steal?”
The writer, using his skills at being sneaky and passive-aggressive, slipped a letter out from the thief and planted it among the mail of the woman. For this he had to break and enter her post office box; she had no home address, just distraction. The thief gave him tips.
It never occurred to him to mail it.
She read the letter, in which the thief confessed his undying love for her, and told her of a man named When, whom he was blackmailing to write his memoirs, and asked her please to be his thief for him, steal the writer’s heart, in order to keep him “under control.” She succeeded, they wed again, put the orange juice back in the fridge and wiped up the English muffin crumbs, the memoir was a smash hit, women not in this story were good strong role models for girls, Las Vegas improved, and San Diego remained America’s Finest City.
__END__
