Freeman's: Love. John Freeman
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be. I fold like cardboard on a daily basis, break silent-soft underfoot of people who don’t know me, who are supposed to know me most. Best? It’s because I’ve always been hiding and show like I’m open, like I’m willing to be vulnerable-open and honest. These are lies. Almost everything can be. I am vulnerable-open but for reasons they can’t see. I am dying. You are too. But I’ll never become a ghost because I’ve always been one. Something is going from me I have begun to early-mourn. Is it more years that I won’t have, because of the way I live my life? Do I deserve them, want them? It’s not that. I’ve known they would leave me for some time now. Leaning back against the wall of my mind, posture like I don’t give a shit because I do so much give a shit, I know not to show that I do, because of what people do with that, when you tell them you love them, when you give them what they want it’s exactly what they want and they want more. I’ll give it all away. I never wanted to keep it. I’ll put their hooks back in my sides. I’ll drag them if I have to. Where? To Guangzhou. Or to wherever we’re all going. Wherever all of what this is has always been going. I’m going too.
—Tommy Orange
Twice a week I play UNO with a gay Egyptian psychiatrist who, inevitably, without fail, calls me a rat-faced piece of cheating garbage in need of hospitalization before he offers to murder my dog.
“Just leave me a key,” he says. “See a movie,” he says. “I’ll take care of it.”
I consider my options and hit him with everything I’ve got, slow-like, deliberate-like, fuck-you-like: like a yellow three. Then I look him dead in his very kind eyes and say something a hate-crimer might say, or a rat-faced piece of cheating garbage in need of hospitalization might say, and then I say, “You can’t kill Seymour. He’s a good boy.”
“Is he, though?” he says and plays a yellow seven. “Is he really?”
“Oh,” I go and blink like a stunned idiot with no arms and dirt in his eyes. “This little dance again?”
“I’m sorry, miss,” he says and two-finger folds his ear at me. “What’s that?”
“I know what you’re doing,” I say.
“What am I doing?” he says.
“Psyops, bro. You’re doing mind games.”
“Am I?” he says in exactly the way that lets me know he is totally doing that. He’s asking me leading questions so that I will connect some dots in my brain and realize that Seymour is not only not a good boy, but is in fact an objectively terrible boy with one eye and no joy who wakes me up at five a.m. every morning by shitting in my kitchen and barking at it. I throw down a green seven and go, “Yeah, you are. What are you gonna ask next? Why there’s blood in his stool, knowing full well it’s because he has a polyp half-an-inch up his colon that the specialist texted me a photo of?” Then I hold up my phone and show him my wallpaper.
He shakes his head and Draw Twos me, then gestures to the pile of cards like it’s a cupcake he made and is proud of, but the only thing he actually half bakes are bullshit theories like that I rescued Seymour because I’m trying to save my father, and while I will acknowledge some similarities, my dad is meaner and has one leg instead of one eye and a touch more continence. Psh, I go. Pfffft. Then I pick up sixes—a red and a blue—and demand to know what lazy, fat-fingered amateur shuffled the deck.
“You did,” he says.
“Oh,” I say, and grimace my way through the quiet. Eventually he plays a green nine and I get the same idea I get every time he plays a nine, which is that maybe I can get away with playing a six, and then I think maybe I shouldn’t do it, but then I go ahead and do it: I play the red six on his green nine and hope he doesn’t notice, but he does notice because I try the same thing every game and he always notices. Then he says I’m disgusting. Then he says I should be ashamed. Then he says he is grossed out by me.
“Honest mistake,” I say, and pick up the five-card cheater penalty and thumb-point at Seymour on the couch looking like a gargoyle fucked a fruit bat with ulcerative colitis. “Let me guess. Next you’re gonna ask if he ever ruined a party by shitting on a lady.”
“Not at all,” he says.
“He did. He diarrhea-ed on Maggie Mull and I wet-wiped her legs. Sensually.”
“Let’s talk about your medication,” he says.
“Oh here we fuckin’ go,” I say and lean back in my chair. “Why? So you can segue into talking about Seymour’s? Because we have nothing to hide: Flagyl and Apoquel, phenobarbital and CBD, special eye drops for his eyeball, prescription low-fat dog food or else he gets pancreatitis and goes fugue and stares at the wall for a few days, and I mix canned pumpkin in there because it’s good for his turds.”
“Sounds expensive,” he says and runs a finger across his neck.
“You fuck,” I say. “You’re probably planning to ask how his seizures are and why his dick is yellow even though you already know the answers are real bad and because he likes to dip it in the pee puddle before he moves on.”
“I want to know—”
“If he ate a battery? Yeah. Nine-volt.”
“—if you’re taking your medication,” he says.
“How dare you,” I say. “The nerve,” I say. “Here’s the thing,” I say and tap my finger on the table a whole bunch. “No.”
Then I avoid eye contact by staring into the ashes in the ashtray for a while, and when I finally glance up he has his cards facedown and his hands steepled and he’s giving me this look like he’s sympathetically judging me so that I’ll question my own choices. But I don’t. Instead I look at him like he’s a spoon I’m trying to bend with my mind, by which I mean that I know that he knows I’m not taking my meds anymore because I can’t afford them because American medicine leverages your pain for your money and I spend all mine on fucked-up dogs that keep dying on me but—I’m gonna keep doing that.
“Why are you making that face,” he says.
“Oh,” I say. “Sorry. Your arm hair was bothering me.” Then I play a green seven and tell him to choke on it.
He doesn’t but Seymour does; he chokes and snorts and grunts because he is very itchy all of a sudden and starts berserking on the new couch—new because he destroyed the old couch when I left him home alone once for like twenty minutes—rubbing himself up it and down it before flipping onto his back with his little Frenchie legs straight up in the air like he’s dead except his eye is open and looking around. Eventually he attempts to get upright and rolls right off the edge and thumps onto the floor and shakes himself off like he’s wet even though he’s not wet, just stupid. Then he jumps back on the couch and stares at me.
“OK fine,” I say. “He’s the worst dog I’ve ever had.”
“Bingo,” the Doctor says.
“UNO?” I say.
“No,” he says, and holds up two cards.
“Make it four, you furry geek,” I say and mess up his whole deal with a blue Draw Two–blue six power-combo.
Dude doesn’t even flinch. He just picks up his cards and counters with a blue Reverse, a green Reverse, a Draw Four, says UNO, and wins on a red two.
“Are you fucking kidding me? I say and throw my cards down. “It’s a goddamn conspiracy. Seymour! Are you even seeing this right now?!” And right then the little lump starts stalking the potted ponytail palm on my coffee table and growling at it and I am like, yes, that is correct, fuck that plant. “You tell ’em, Seymour!” I say. “You tell ’em we ain’t taking this shit lyin’ down!”
Then I walk over and lie down on the couch with him and flip