We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves Read Online Free PDF Page B

He came at a run, in a clean shirt rolled to show his upper arms,
     his plunger brandished like a rapier. He looked about for Harlow, but it was a tiny
     place, no way to miss her unless she was gone. “Where’s your friend?” he asked. His
     name was Ezra Metzger, a name of considerable poetry. Obviously, his parents had had
     hopes.
    “Home with her boyfriend.” I was in no mood to soften this news. Besides, I’d been
     good to Ezra on other occasions. One time, two nondescript men had come to my door
     and asked questions about him. They said he’d applied for a job in the CIA, which
     struck me as a terrible idea no matter how you looked at it, and I still gave him
     the best recommendation I could make up on the spot. “I never see the guy,” I said,
     “unless he wants to be seen.”
    “The boyfriend. She told me about him.” Ezra looked at me. He had a habit of sucking
     on his teeth so his mustache furled and unfurled. I expect he did that for a while.
     Then he said, “Bad news there. You shouldn’t have let her go back.”
    “You shouldn’t have let her in. Without anyone here? Is that even legal?”
    Ezra had told me once that he didn’t think of himself as the manager of the apartment
     house so much as its beating heart. Life was a jungle, Ezra said, and there were those
     who’d like to bring him down. A cabal on the third floor. He knew them, but they didn’t
     know him, didn’t know who the fuck they were dealing with. They’d find out. Ezra saw
     conspiracies. He lived his life camped out on the grassy knoll.
    He also talked a lot about honor. Now I saw his mustache in full anguished quiver;
     if he could have committed seppuku with the plunger on the spot, he’d have done it.
     Mere moments later, he saw how he’d done nothing wrong. Anguish became outrage. “You
     know how many women are killed every year by their boyfriends?” he asked. “Pardon
     the shit out of me for trying to save your friend’s life.”
    We settled on a wintry silence. Fifteen minutes passed before he reeled in a tampon.
     It wasn’t mine.
    I tried to go back to bed, but there were long, dark hairs on my pillowcase and the
     smell of vanilla cologne on my sheets. I found Pixy Stix straws in the trash and fresh
     scratches in the gold-specked Formica where she’d cut something without a cutting
     board. Harlow was not a person who lived lightly on the land. The blueberry yogurt
     I’d planned for lunch was gone. Todd came slamming in, bad mood walking, made worse
     by the news that we’d been squatted on.
    Todd had a third-generation Irish-American father and a second-generation Japanese-American
     mother, who hated each other. As a kid, he’d spent summers with his dad, coming home
     with itemized lists of unexpected expenses his mother was expected to cover. Replacement
     of ripped
Star Wars
T-shirt—$17.60. New shoelaces—$1.95. It must be so great, Todd used to tell me, having
     a normal family like you.
    Once, he’d dreamed of experimental fusions, that he would be the one to merge folk
     harps with anime. Now he saw the incommensurability. In his own words: matter and
     antimatter. The end of the world.
    Ever since the Great Eejit Incident, Todd had reached into his Japanese heritage when
     he needed an insult.
Baka
(idiot).
O-baka-san
(honorable idiot).
Kisama
(jackass). “What kind of
kisama
does something like that?” he asked now. “Do we have to change the locks? Do you
     know how fucking much that’s going to cost?” He went to his bedroom to count his CDs
     and then went out again. I would have left myself, gotten a coffee downtown, but I
     needed to be home for the suitcase.
    No sign of it. At five of five, I called the airline number—800-FUCK-YOU—and was told
     I had to speak directly to lost luggage at the Sacramento Airport. No one answered
     in Sacramento, though my call was important to them.
    About seven p.m., the phone rang, but it was my mother checking to see I’d