The Year of Yes Read Online Free PDF

night discussing the meaning of life. Who did this but people who were meant to fall in love? When we both fell hard for Denis Johnson’s difficult, gorgeous novel Already Dead, it was confirmed. We were meant to spend the rest of eternity together. Victoria did not think that this was true. She circled the edges of our friendship, justifiably declaring us pretentious, but jealous of our communion. She’d been my best friend in New York until Zak had moved in.
    It was fitting that the only time they’d really gotten along had been the day that our toilet had mysteriously exploded. The two of them (I had blessedly not been home) had been forced to fight the toilet monster together, and had, after two and a half hours of fierce plunging, slain their enemy. By the time I’d come home from work, they’d been sitting together at the kitchen table, drinking beers, and recounting choice moments from their war. The next day, Vic had gifted Zak with a Star Wars pillowcase, as a reward for his courage in the face of her repulsion. Their camaraderie had, unfortunately, lasted only as long as it took for the mops to dry, and then they’d gone back to mutual irritation, which was constantly aggravated by our too-small apartment.
    Victoria had won the bedroom lottery, as a result of her disregard for the enormous power cables that ran inches from her window. Her room had space for a dresser, a queen-size futon, and hell, even a Shetland pony, had she so desired. Zak was paranoid about electricity too close to his brain, and hadn’t even tried to claim the room, but this didn’t keep him from feeling bitter about the fact that his own room was four by six feet, just large enough for amattress, a television, and a significant collection of comic books and pornography.
    I had needed their rent checks too desperately to challenge either one of them, and had therefore ended up with the only space left: a single mattress in the corner of the living room, inside a rickety hut I’d constructed of a neighbor’s pruned tree branches and some brown paper grocery sacks. This was a bummer, of course: no privacy, no escape from the noise of the television, no door to shut against the nocturnal malfeasance of Big White Cat, who liked to sneak up and drool into my sleeping ear. I generally tried to pretend that my hut was a yurt, and that I was living a romantic, vagabond adventure. I’d pull shut the doorway drape I’d engineered out of half a skirt, and imagine myself in a cloud of mosquito netting, on my way to a secret assignation with my lover, something like Ondaatje’s The English Patient, minus, of course, the dying in a desert cave.
    AS I MADE MY WAY into the kitchen, Zak raised his enormous coffee mug to me in weary salute, then sighed heavily and put his head down. Clearly, the night had not been kind to him, either.
    “Too much vodka,” he muttered. “I tripped over my arm and rolled down a flight of stairs, in front of Brittany and all her friends.”
    He turned his head to display a rug burn on his cheek.
    “How exactly did you trip over your arm?” Not that I was surprised. Zak and I were both left-handed, and we theorized that the difficulties of living in a right-handedworld had made us prone to bizarre injury. We were thinking of investing our meager funds in Band-Aid stock.
    “Caveman lapse. Thought I was upright. Wasn’t. Massive humiliation.”
    “Are you okay?”
    “Severe emotional damage,” he said. “But I, my friend, am a survivor. Who called?”
    “I just got an offer to make out to NPR,” I replied.
    “I told you to stop answering the phone. You complain about every guy who calls.”
    I collapsed dramatically onto the third-hand coffee table we pretended was a couch.
    “I’m changing my ways,” I informed him. “The intellectuals aren’t doing it for me, and I’ve rejected everyone else. I’m gonna start saying yes, to everyone. Who am I to judge who’s appropriate? Just because a guy might be