The Time Traveler's Wife
his shirt, sighing with relief as his nipple gulped every last drop.
“I have something to show you,” Stefan said.
He sounded secretive as if he’d been planning this day his whole life but if he had, if this were his crescendo, then tomorrow, this would all start over again.
“You’re gonna love this,” he said.
“If I had hands I’d make a fist and punch him,” John’s Nipple said.
John wondered for a moment if something unforeseen might actually occur, if he might feel as unexpected as many, many repetitions ago. He tried not to imagine what it could be, but it was so hard; he had spent a lifetime shaking parcels and flipping to the last pages to quell his feline curiosity. But still, there was hope tickling a the back of his mind, and on any other day he might have thought it was a tumor, but this evening, as he sat on his sofa, feeding his nipple pizza and coke, and pretending to hold his wife’s ghostlike intangible hand so as not to cause her or his guests much unneeded alarm.
“Girls” Stefan shouted.
He clapped his hands like the drunken ringmaster that he was, forcing his children to line side by side and wait for his merry command.
“The eldest,” he said, slurring his speech. “She’s been… She’s doing that…. They do this dance thing and she’s…. She’s gonna be a professional like Madonna or that other one you know, that thinks she’s British as well. Fuck it. Girls, do that… Do that thing you know?” he said, his head listing like a breached hull, his right arm waving around a limp wrist as if it were a broken limb on a squat, decrepit shrub.
The girls all looked awkward and embarrassed, as did Stefan’s wife and Tracy, who wore the same wretched ‘shit-eating-grins’, unable to stop the madness and unwilling to turn away.
“What happens next?” John’s Nipple asked.
“One of the girls trips,” John said. “The middle one, nobody notices except her; and she’s devastated. Stefan continues to egg on the eldest, throwing his clenched fists about in small commanding circles, as if he were racing a small pony down the home straight. The wives ogle the youngest and they use such expected terms as, ‘How cute’ and ‘Would you ever?” All the while, the middle child continues to muddle the timing and mix up her feet. Eventually, the performance finishes without much event. Stefan tells me it’s because of the angle or slant on the floor. Then he says I should really come over during the week to see it on an even floor. Then Tracy gets offended because she thinks a flat floor is a metaphor for being properly grounded and she assumes Stefan has made a crack at her, pushing forty; and still no children. It gets awkward so the kids go back out onto the porch. The eldest lights a cigarette and attempts to fan away the evidence whilst the youngest points an accusing finger. The middle girl sits on an empty straw basket and she draws her nail across the creases lines on her wrist.”
“You know it all so well.”
“I’ve seen it so many times. I know when I’m supposed to laugh and sigh and the place for every oooh and aaah. I just…. I can’t remember when I stopped laughing when I stopped being affected, and when it all just became so… Comfortable. ”
All of these things occurred. They acted out before John and his nipple in a foggy blur. Both watched on, neither entertained nor bored. Every now and then, to the delight of his nipple, John mouthed out some of the dialogue.
“My life,” John said, “is three hundred words.”
“What’s your favorite one?” John’s Nipple asked.
“Huh?” replied John.
“Nice. Can’t really think of any that I love per se. I guess I’d have to go with phallic. Makes me think of ancient Egyptians, like Xerxes or Ra or something. Come to think of it, you know with their bald heads and sturdy physique, they actually looked like giant penises so I guess it’s fitting. I hate the word pretentious though” John’s Nipple said, angrily.
“Why?”
“It’s not the word per se, as much as how it’s used and the type of person who uses it, you know? The word itself is beautiful on the ear and just as much to say. It feels like kissing a person’s moist and supple attention. It’s just, the word is like a gun backfiring. You know, it just seems like the type of person who would use it, wouldn’t normally use a word like that every day. Maybe that kind of person would be more likely to defame with a word like ‘assclown’ or ‘dickhead’, but for the sake of fighting monsters or whatever, they have to be just as swanky and hyperbolic to get their message across. I just feel that the use of the word pretentious is, in fact, pretentious. Hearing the average twit use this word, it shits me. It’s like seeing some pretty girl under the arm of some tattooed jerk.”
“You say per se a lot.”
“Does that bother you?”
“It just seems unnecessary is all, but it’s fine. I hate the word sorry. I hate the way it makes every problem go away and makes no-one responsible. I hate the way you can say words without actually feeling them and that people trade this currency as if its legal tender. I hate the way words like ‘I’m sorry’ and ‘I love you’ and ‘it won’t happen again’ are passed around like bonds or promissory notes, you know. The idea of communication is to say what you feel, not to leave it up to the other person to spark their own feeling. It’s like giving some kid a bag of balloons on his birthday and telling him or her to blow them up. The word is a vessel. It’s coding, that’s all. But there has to be something to code. There has to be some content; some substance. You can’t just say ‘I love’, ‘I’m sorry’, ‘it doesn’t matter’ or ‘there’s nothing wrong’. You can’t. I don’t hate words” John said. “I hate the lazy, conspicuous and ambiguous use of words.”
“I hate the word hip,” John’s Nipple said, spitting as it did. “It’s a god damned body part, not a way of life.”
“I hate hipsters,” John said.
“And hippies” replied John’s Nipple.
As they debated, Stefan was busy bruising his thumb, flicking through channels on the television, unsure which of the movies he had already seen a hundred times over, he wanted most to watch again.
“Oh, I love this one” Stefan shouted.
There was that word again; love. John looked over at Tracy. She was smiling, or so it seemed. It was hard to tell on account of her having no solid form. And though he probably knew exactly what she was saying, staring at her and hearing only her breath escaping from her mouth, he couldn’t tell if she was being cynical or enthusiastic, her two usual ways in how she felt about most things.
“The ending is fantastic. You never see it coming. It’s always a surprise, no matter how many times you see it. Let’s watch it.”
“Great idea,” his wife said.
Tracy agreed, saying exactly that, but her voice was mute so she looked almost as if she were mocking her friend. John laughed hysterically and everyone turned to him oddly.
“You ok buddy?” Stefan asked. “You’re acting a little weird.”
“Yeah,” John said, composing himself. “It was just something my nipple said.”
They watched the movie and when it was done, they watched one more. The whole time, Tracy leaned on John’s leg and talked about her touchy boss and the fact that she had killed every single plant she had tried to look after since she was a girl. She was convinced they were connected somehow. John always thought it was her way, though, of distracting herself through the seamless repetition of ordinary events in her life.
Stefan, on the other hand, was flexing his muscle, trying to impress the girls, John and himself, by showing how versed he was in the past, saying each line of dialogue a second before the actors on the screen did; annoying the hell out of John who at this point, was daydreaming about black holes and circular saws.
“Fuck it” John shouted, jumping from the seat and almost bowling over the children who looked thankful for any kind of distraction. “I can‘t watch this shit. Not again. You know what I wanna see?”
The others shook their heads.
“Where is i
t?” he said to himself, scouring through old video cassettes, hundreds of inane videos he had collected over the decades, looking for one in particular that he seen in even longer. “Here it is,” he said, pulling out an old cassette with a tattered black and white cover depicting an awful looking man with strange concerning hair.
“Is this what I think it is?” Stefan asked, slightly nervous.
John didn’t reply. He just sank into his chair, pulling his legs up against his chest and curling up into a ball like he always did when he was alone. He could see Tracy mouthing the words, ‘I hate this movie’, but it didn’t matter, not like she had supposed it would.
“Maybe we could do something else; Scrabble or something,” Stefan said.
“Shut the fuck up” John’s Nipple replied.
As the room flickered - a delusional-like black and white - John thought about how this movie had made him feel as a young man. It had since he was a boy, defined him. The mere mention of its title would cause looks of concern and idyllic wonder in others and a sense of purpose, direction and belonging in him. And it was a movie that he had spoken about more times that he had actually seen. Most people had; in the company that he kept of course.
He remembered it having an allure of the strange and the surreal; being both siren and obnoxious; patently obscure. And like Tracy, it was so uncommon and difficult to find and more so, to understand, amidst the