Larry’s Left Hand

Beatriz Seelaender

Ever since Larry died, I’ve been watching things from the corners. The world’s a touch out of view; or maybe it is my eyes that are wrong and out of frame. I suppose everyone here wants to throw me away, but keeps hoping someone else will do it.

Because I’m like a limb of Larry’s running around, except I don’t rot and I don’t smell, so they have no good excuse to throw me out. I keep fantasizing about someone picking me up, but I’m afraid that when it happens I’ll be even more miserable, because only then will Larry’s death hit me for real.

You may tell me I’m not a real person; I’m just a dummy. I don’t really have feelings. I do know about feelings, though. And knowing about them is already half the deal. If you don’t have the vocabulary to express how you feel, what’s the use of feeling it at all? “Oh, I’m vexed,” you might say—good for you, that you have the luxury of expressing such an elitist feeling. Most people are just pissed off, or angry, and the cultural middle may be frustrated. They’re not allowed vexation.

Isn’t there a bunch of research about kids not being afraid of the dark until people push into their heads that kids are afraid of the dark? Does that mean they aren’t really scared? Try telling them, “This fear of yours; it’s just socially conditioned.” Problem over!

As much as we may manipulate words to define our feelings, though, we end up saturating some particular connotations over others in our word choices, and conditioning ourselves to fit into the specificity of that definition- and convincing ourselves, too. It is a cycle: 2×2=4, 4/2=2.

The words one uses define one almost as much as one defines them.

It is, in my philosophical vocabulary, called an assertion of meaning—a constant confirmation of itself. How I became such an erudite dummy is as troubling a question to me as it is to you; I suspect that I absorbed it from Larry. Larry used to be some sort of Wunderkind, until one day he flipped.

He bought me in a garage sale in the late eighties. The new tenants of old Louis’s house had found me in the basement, all dusty and missing an eye, and they were understandably creeped out. I think they would have just given me away, so striking are my horror movie looks.

Still Larry bought me, for five cents. I know it is hypocritical coming from me, but I don’t really trust people who are interested in ventriloquism—as a sport, hobby, or profession. The exception, of course, being children. When Larry got me he was six years old. Finally my polluted mind was able to reach for innocence! Before him, old Louis had passed on to me some habits—nothing perverted like others before him, but he wasn’t a particularly sophisticated guy, old Louis, and I admit my vocabulary back then had been reduced to a couple of swear words. He loved picking me up in between burps and making me say stuff like “pull my finger” or yell at his friends for being motherfucking pussies, etc. He also had this bit where he would pretend to choke me to death while his friends spit out their beers laughing. It was okay most of the time, actually—it just sucked when he accidentally sat on me, or spilled beer on me, or let the dog attack me for a couple of minutes before he decided that was enough. Back then, my name was Yuppie Dick, and I spoke in a ridiculously girlish voice—which incidentally made the swear words funnier. Sometimes old Louis would give me an accent, but most of the time he was too drunk to remember. That is part of the reason why I felt so inconsistent, and empty, and unsatisfied. Of course, Yuppie Dick would only ever be able to say that he was pissed off.

When I met Larry, everything changed—that was the youngest I’d ever been. His parents had not at first been excited about having me in their home. Because Larry wasn’t a particularly talkative child, though, and I helped him express his emotions, they let him keep me. They were always saying, “There’s something wrong with Larry.” I remember going to a doctor’s office with him, a couple of months after my arrival, and the doctor asking him a ton of questions about himself—whether he liked people, whether he understood people, why I was the only toy that interested him, why he felt the need to answer all of the questions through me, etc.

Then he gave Larry a test, which Larry did all by himself—and scored pretty high on, too. The other test I answered for him—we were given pictures of people smiling, crying, yelling, etc. The doctor would show us the pictures and ask us to describe the people’s feelings. “Happy, sad, angry,” I was going to say, but instead I went, “overjoyed, miserable, revolted”.

Then the doctor told Amelia and Connor—Larry’s parents—that there was absolutely nothing wrong with Larry; he was just a ridiculously smart kid who craved intellectual stimulation. Larry’s parents were sort of offended by that, once they understood what it meant.

Still, I was the only person with whom Larry could actually have an engaging conversation—granted, he was the one putting words in my mouth, but it was still somewhat of an interaction.

See, he would purposely make me disagree with him on every single subject—that way he could bounce ideas off of me. The name he gave me was Sebastian—though unusual, I liked this name better than Dick.

“So, what you’re saying,” Larry’s dad was saying, “is that we should let him keep the doll?”

“I am not a doll!” I protested.

“Whatever, the dummy.”

“It is fundamental that you keep him. You should also start treating him as if he were…well, not a person, but something with a personality. Like a pet.”

“It’s a doll!” said Amelia. She was very upset she did not get to show off her kid like her arch-frenemy Martha Meyer—especially now that she realized Larry would never quite grow out of himself.

“I’m a dummy. And I have a name!” I screamed in response to her comment, which seems like it was made a long time ago, but that is only because I took some time to talk about Martha and that broke the dialogical flow. Now, this explanation has broken it again—still, keep in mind: this all happened really fast.

“For God’s sake, Larry! Take this seriously!” yelled Connor.

Then Larry started bawling his eyes out. Amelia tried to pull me out of his hand, but I fought back. I tried to bite her hand, and when that didn’t work, given my lack of actual teeth, I started screaming.

Now, this whole scene got the doctor really pissed—not angry, not vexed, just really pissed.

“Mrs. Stubbler, stop that! You’re taking the kid’s main line of communication away from him! Sit down! Everyone, sit down!”

“Everyone shut the fuck up!” I yelled. My voice back then was much higher than it became after Larry hit puberty. Only Larry had not made me say it.

Before, this had happened a couple times—for instance, when old Louis had tried to make me say something particularly gross to a nice lady at the bar, and I’d told him to stop being such a piece of human garbage. Of course, on that occasion he was so drunk he thought he’d been imagining things—it must have knocked some sense into him anyhow, because he went straight—or, rather, waywardly—back home, even if the lady ended up finding the trick rather funny.

This was, nonetheless, a completely different situation—both because Larry had just told these three adults to shut up, and because no one would believe him if he said I’d done it. He would have to account for what I had done.

No matter how wrong saying that was, however, it did get them quiet. I could see Connor wanted to kindly strangle Larry as a teachable moment that would eventually help him in life, though the doctor’s presence constrained him from doing so.

“Larry—I mean, Sebastian—why did you say that?”

“I don’t know,” said Larry through me.

“Do you feel…angry?”

“Larry doesn’t like people yelling at each other,” he said, once again through me.

“I don’t know why… It just clutters my mind,” Larry said in his own voice.

“Very well. Is that why you said that bad word?”

“I didn’t say it,” Larry said.

“That’s true,” I said. “It’s not his fault.”

Amelia started sobbing when I said that: “He’s crazy! My son is crazy!” she cried.

“Now, calm down,” said the doctor, who also seemed bothered by the amount of noise these people were making. “This is behaviour all children are known to engage in—lots of young kids break things and then tell their parents their twin brother did it, or their imaginary friend. This isn’t all that different. It’s good—he’s trying to differentiate himself from others.”

“Well, Doctor, I have seven younger brothers, and I can guarantee you none of them did that.”

“Really? You don’t think they blamed each other to get out of a scolding? Just because you never found out doesn’t mean it never happened.”

“All right, Doctor, I think you, after spending fifty minutes with us, know my family better than me. What a relief, I can step aside now!”

“Amelia, stop making a scene out of everything,” Connor said.

“I’m his mother! That’s gotta count for something!”

Then she started sobbing again, so Connor gestured towards the doctor apologetically and took his wife outside for some fresh air. Meanwhile, we stayed with the doctor.

“Sometimes I think they’re just acting from a script,” Larry said, which startled the doctor. “Like they don’t actually feel this stuff. They just watched some movies where the parents have an odd child and react this way.”

“Is that how you feel?” the doctor asked, carefully.

“I feel like I didn’t read the script, or I forgot the lines or something. I know everybody thinks I’m distant, but I feel a lot closer than them.”

“Closer to what?”

“I don’t know. Whatever’s actually happening around us that’s inevitable and true.”

The doctor stared at Larry for a moment.

“Give them some time, my boy,” he said. “They are only ordinary. One day you’ll get to leave and do the things you want to. Till then, do your homework and behave—and that goes for you too, Sebastian!”

That made Larry smile. Larry wasn’t a smiling person. At least not like in a sincere, happy smile sort of way. He had his cynical smiles, and his empathetic smiles, and his “I want to show that the irony is not lost on me” smiles. Not the kid one, though. Not the one you get from talking to a friend whose opinion you respect—I mean, if you don’t count me. But most people wouldn’t anyway.

A couple of years later, when Larry and I first went to school, he borrowed a book from the library and diagnosed himself with Asperger’s Syndrome. We took the bus and went to see that same doctor, and he said Larry probably didn’t have it because he was able to interpret facial expressions and highly figurative speech. After debating for a long time whether a person with Asperger’s could be able to fully understand people without necessarily connecting to them, Larry’s parents arrived to pick him up, pissed that he’d taken the bus by himself.

“But he was with me!” I said, at which Larry smiled and Connor laughed.

*

On the first day of school, Larry would not let go of me. His mother was eternally jealous of me—she didn’t even say good morning unless Larry asked her to, although, to be fair, she might just have wanted to get a word out of her kid and known “refusing to indulge” him was the way to do it.

Mr. Stubbler was more courteous—not only had he started to greet me, but he also tried to have conversations with me, asking about my day and my colour preferences and my favourite foods and whatnot.

Of course, my favourite foods were always Larry’s least favourites.

The only problem with Connor having more frequent interactions with us was that he would sometimes break character, and act like it was all an elaborate play. What would happen was, he’d talk to us at length about sports or whatever, and we’d all be having a merry good time, until I said something like, “God isn’t real,” or “But it was the Soviet Union that beat Hitler,” and he’d just look at Larry and tell him to knock it off.

“But I’m not saying anything!” Larry would say. And he was right about that—I am allowed to have opinions, too! Of course, Larry was the one who ascribed them to me, but they were still mine! I know that for a fact, given that Larry had once told me he thought Churchill had defeated Hitler, not the Soviets.

When Connor wrote me off like that, then, it really hurt me.

He was, nonetheless, a kindred spirit. As soon as Amelia told him that Larry wouldn’t go to school without me, he scheduled a meeting with the principal and explained the situation to her. She then passed it on to the teacher, Miss Benson, who let me share a desk with Larry.

“You did what?” Amelia was screaming at Connor. “He’s never gonna grow up if you keep enabling him!”

But she came around eventually. The other kids picked on Larry, though not as much as his parents thought they would, and they all liked me. Whenever they picked on him, I’d tell them not to, and they’d listen. Everyone loved having me around, including Miss Benson. She even included my name on the roll-call sheet.

I was worried that Larry would fail the first grade because he always did my homework and completed my tests before doing his. My tests and his always differed—handwriting and all. He would sometimes make me get a question wrong on purpose just so he got a higher score. We would fight about it in the car on our way back home.

“You know very well I need you to write my answers down!” I’d tell him.

“Lucky you,” he’d laugh, “I’m the one who studied with you and taught you! You never shut up in class.”

“No, you never shut up!”

Then we’d break down laughing at our witticisms.

I had figured something out by then: Larry was doing that same thing all these other children I’d been spending time with did all the time—they wanted an audience. It wasn’t ever enough to play alone; an adult must be watching, gravely paying attention, telling them who they were and why based on their performances. I watched the adults watch without emotion, gritting their teeth at flawed skateboard manoeuvres, figuring out magic tricks their kids had spent days working on. Oh, look, Mommy, look! No, but are you paying attention? Are you looking?

And you have to look; otherwise they’ll grow up to be gratuitous. Look, Mommy, look at what I’m doing! After all, if no one saw it, did it really happen? Does it make a difference?

Well, I saw it, always.

Larry did this with movies as well—he’d really wanted both his parents to sit and watch Indiana Jones, but somehow Amelia fell asleep halfway through the second movie. We had to rewind the VHS all the way to the beginning. I like VHSs. They remind me of that childhood of mine.

*

“I’m not great at talking, you know,” said Larry. “I’m great at thinking. But what good is it, thinking, if you can’t find the words to describe it? I’m afraid one’s only as smart as the clarity with which he is able to translate his thoughts from abstractions to the real world. It is the fraction of the thought that gets through intact that determines one’s true intellect.”

I nodded, baffled by his true intellect, because I was his, and that was how he wanted me to respond. At the time of this particular conversation, I believe he was ten.

“Sometimes I don’t feel real, Sebastian,” he said.

“You don’t feel real?” he made me say. “I’m made of rotten cloth!”

“You are always present. In the moment. I can never find the moment. It’s like there’s a thick layer of fog between myself and the world I inhabit.”

“You old sucker,” I said. “You like it on your little island of fog. You wouldn’t trade it for the world.”

He loved to make me confront him.

“Not this world, no,” he laughed.

“Pompous kid! Pedantic, privileged, pompous pile of presumptions!” he made me yell at him theatrically—if I’d had it in me I’m sure I would have accidentally soaked him in spit while saying this preposterous alliteration. “You think you’re so clever, all of your identity depends on it.”

“That’s not true—my identity depends on you. At least where other people are concerned; how they view me. Why can’t I just talk to people, Sebastian?”

“You can talk to me.”

“You’re not a person.”

“Fuck you.”

He laughed.

“I should’ve outgrown you by now,” he told me.

“Yep.”

“But it’s… the only way.”

“What?”

“Out,” he said, as if that were deeply philosophical.

“That is quite metaphysical of you,” he made me mock him. Then he laughed at my comment.

“I’m actually serious,” he said, which prompted me to wink slyly. In all honesty, though, I felt rotten inside. Sometimes I felt like Larry was using me as some inside joke, and we weren’t really buddies.

*

Amelia wanted another, more normal kid.

“But we already have two!” Connor would tell her. It always pissed her off, but he just kept on telling the joke.

“How can you say this?” she’d yell.

“She doesn’t think you’re their kid,” Larry would explain.

“Are you sure they’re not talking about you?” I’d answer.

I never called them Mom and Dad, Connor and Amelia, but they were probably the closest I’ve ever had to parental figures. Well, Connor more than Amelia.

“Larry,” she would say. “Could you just, for one moment, cut it out?!”

“Cut what out?”

Larry had always tried to get his mom to like me—to the point that I was starting to feel like a kiss-ass: Mommy, Sebastian made you cookies! Hey, Mommy, Sebastian cleaned your room. Tell him thanks, Mommy. You can’t not say thanks. It’s impolite.

Only one time did she say, “Thanks, Sebastian,” and she was crying, and she sounded so exhausted it sounded more depressing than triumphant. She wasn’t crying scandalously or anything. Oftentimes I would tell Larry that his mom was a drama queen with abusive patterns of behaviour, but she was just really stressed out. Larry was right: she really was just playing her part.

Amelia gave birth to Genevieve in ’95 and virtually forgot about Larry. Then she gave birth to Kit in ’97 and forgot about Genevieve—she’d always wanted a boy. I guess Larry and I were always sort of a two-piece Pinocchio, body and soul, but soul and body don’t mix naturally (something about chemical polarity), and no one has figured out a way to forge them together at a high temperature just yet. I guess Amelia wanted the whole package.

Those new additions to the family, though, made us all the happier, I think: Larry used to say that as long as he was an only child, he was the one chance his mom would get, but now she had plenty of kids to get right in case one of them didn’t turn out great. Never did I understand the rationale behind treating one’s kids as lotto tickets, although Larry tried explaining to me that adults were such sad, miserable people that they wished for bad things not to happen, as opposed to good things to happen.

“You’d think they’d want their all their kids to be successful, but what they want is for at least one of them not to be a screw-up,” he said.

“You’re not a screw-up.”

“I’m not. But I’m difficult. I’m strange; people think I’m creepy.”

“People think I’m creepy.”

“You are—but whatever. We’re not Christmas card material.”

At the time, we were both sophomores at a “Gifted gids” boarding school. Larry didn’t want to go at first, because it meant actually having to pay attention to class, but we’d gotten to a point where our classmates no longer found me cool, or him for hanging with me. He had also failed all of his classes one time in ninth grade, just for kicks. That had been his expression: just for kicks.

We’d been cutting class, spending the day at the city library reading the Russians. Larry hated school the way only the smartest people hate school—violently, and justifiably.

“We’ve lost our humanistic values!” he’d complain. “It’s just Positivism. It’s all about selling and buying. No one cares about actually understanding anything. Knowledge is a commodity these days.”

“I know, Larry. But we need to graduate high school.”

“Why? So we can enter the system sooner?”

Teenagers.

Anyway, when he failed ninth grade, the school principal decided Larry was done doing time with the normal kids. Amelia was reluctant to send him to the “gifted” school at first, but frankly, I think she was glad to be rid of him—or me, as a matter of fact.

I, on the other hand, was panicking: what if Larry met people smart and interesting enough that he wouldn’t need my company anymore? I wasn’t ready to part ways with him just yet. Nonetheless, I suppose my feeling this way had something to do with him feeling this way. He was used to being the only clever chicken in the hatchet.

Once we got there, however, it was just like normal high school with slightly smarter students. There were some self-declared geniuses among the bunch—the ones whose parents made sure to showcase the kids’ Junior Mensa membership certificates—but most children were simply pimply wimpy kids who happened to enjoy studying. That last group irritated Larry to such a degree that he’d make a fist inside me, contorting my guts, every time one of them spoke. For that, I grew to hate them just as much.

Whereas Larry swore his dislike was owed to the fact that such kids only ever did well because they memorized the textbooks—even though they had no opinions of their own (which was true)—those kids held a fascinating feeling for him: an irresistible feeling not of jealousy or envy or even scorn, but a repressed mixture of all three—plus a hatred of himself for feeling it.

Life just seemed so smooth for them—their studying without learning, feeling without thinking, thinking without feeling, being without becoming, coming without going, hearing without listening, talking without saying anything. They, with their small talk and their pictures and their booze—why did they get to be happier? Why did they get to feel like natural humans?

“What’s so special about them?” Larry would complain.

“Nothing, they’re normal kids.”

“I don’t know why being normal is so important to everybody. Being normal is the same as being ordinary—and being ordinary is my greatest fear.”

“A fifteen-year-old speaking with an eloquence unrivalled!” he made me exclaim—I was growing more pompous by the second, and he knew it.

“Are you making fun of me or am I making fun of myself? Or maybe you’re being serious, and I should be making fun of the way you speak. Or is it a comment on the way I speak, using words like great, which have no business in our petty bourgeois individualism? Either way, I don’t think I have the wit to come up with an answer or a dig or whatever that needs. It’s seriously starting to worry me.”

“Stop overthinking things. If you stopped overthinking everything, you’d probably have a finer time living.”

I pitied Larry sometimes; the same times that he pitied himself—but he pitied only himself.

Everyone’s heard every story trying to get to the bottom of a screwed-up character’s psychological problems. But people aren’t that creative when it comes to having problems. Mommy issues, daddy issues, abandonment issues…

One version of that story is about people who always get what they want but never what they need. The protagonist is never as happy about the things that should make them happy, and they feel guilty about it, and this is treated like a huge character flaw, psychoanalysed to death.

Then, there are stories about the people who are happy in circumstances which call for sadness, and they feel terrible about that, and the fact that they feel terrible makes them feel better about having felt happy in the first place. They are presented as cynical people who, despite having a keen sense of injustice, decide to retire early from earthly faith, deciding that justice is, after all, just a human concept. That does not stop them from envying basically everyone around them.

Of course, there are also those who claim not to care about anything, whose deeper motive is: if you do not care you cannot fail. This being a feeling common to most, there is nothing particularly special about it. All I have to say about it is that not caring requires almost as much maintenance as caring; extreme unproductivity calls for extreme dedication. Larry did indeed dread mediocrity almost as much as he was tempted by it. One has no business, after all, fearing that which might not appeal to one’s deep-buried wants.

Larry wanted to be a free individual, as opposed to a happily carbonated copy of a social type. Because of that, he hated groups and crowds and conversations. That didn’t make him a bad person, he’d argue—just a peculiar one. Just like mediocrity, however, strangeness can very well be cultivated—in that sense, Larry was the most disciplined man of all.

The state of detachment this requires is difficult to achieve, and even more difficult to come back from.

Once you see how frivolous it all is, you don’t want to come back from it. I wanted to write something non-frivolous about frivolousness. I wish I’d used, instead of frivolous, the word superficial, because the argument for the latter’s paradoxical importance is that without a surface there would be no deeper meaning, there’d just be obvious—quite inelegant—direct truths.

Or, rather, truth would become superficial. And isn’t it, really, sometimes? I’m so sick of looking beyond the surface of things. There’s no point in digging through shallow ground to find the hollow. Beyond the surface, things are almost always the same—it is the ways in which they choose to hide that set them apart.

*

Some summer, or rather the last throes of summer—for we were there at school, after all, weren’t we—everyone went to the circus, which was in town for that night only. There were clowns and ballerinas and trapeze artists. There were no elephants or other exciting animals; they were no longer allowed in this sort of thing. When the clown showed, a kid began to wail desperately, hyperventilating and screaming and all. One of the teachers asked him why he was afraid of clowns, and I don’t know what they were expecting to hear—did they suspect that a clown had killed his parents? Had he gone through the unpleasant experience of having a red nose stuck on his face, having put it on against parental warnings of excruciating pain? Was his fear of clowns really a fear of red noses, red noses being the panoptical starry light in the sky symbolic of Rudolph, Santa’s tattle-tale reindeer? Who could tell?

As Larry and I pondered these options, some people behind us listened to our jokes and laughed along. Larry was very satisfied with himself, as though he’d been the one making funny remarks.

Anyway, after such a divisive incident, the circus ventriloquist came onstage—another thing that I don’t get: How can people fear clowns more than ventriloquist dummies? This is in no way self-deprecating; I speak from personal experience. The dummy in question was one of those with inflated cheeks; they made him look like he had the mumps.

This freckled mascot was in typical Bavarian dress, ergo his puppeteer made a ton of jokes at the expense of the Germans. His German accent not being any good, however (the trick for doing the German accent is to speak a whole octave lower, and make your Ds into Ts), the children started to disperse. The man, very angry and slightly embarrassed, decided to take the high road and have his dummy scold the kids. Now, that’s when someone yelled: Dummy’s Dummy does it better!

Dummy’s Dummy was, of course, Larry.

The protest suddenly became a chant, and before we knew it we were being dragged onstage by a multitude of well-meaning imbeciles. I swear, I thought Larry was going to collapse.

“Alright, boy, let’s see what you got with that puppet of yours,” said the circus professional, already annoyed enough.

“What a dirty piece of cloth,” said his puppet in the bad German accent. You could see the guy’s mouth move.

“Yep, that’s right,” I said. “But we still beat you in the war!”

Applause. It wasn’t really funny, but that is the go-to line when Germans and Americans are in confrontation.

“Stupidische Americanischenen!” exclaimed the puppet in made-up German.

“Was hast du gesagt? Because that ain’t real German! In my long life as a puppet, I’ve learned many a language from the brains of my masters. And you’re as fake as they come, Fritz! I mean, it’s okay that you lied, you wanted to be exotic… I get it. If I came from Kentucky, I’d lie about it too! But, what I don’t get is, why would you lie about being German?”

Now the crowd roared in approval of my legendary roast, as the circus ventriloquist stormed out of the stage.

“Oh, are you upset that a kid beat you at your own game? That even at the thing you’re best at, you suck?” I screamed after him.

There was a triumphant feeling within Larry, so powerful that I could feel it in full. Normally I only got an idea of what he felt, but now it needed expanding, passing around, like it was greater than any of us would ever be. He should have built on this moment. He couldn’t, though, not really. He didn’t know how.

Others might have some trouble seeing him thus, but Larry—Larry wore his heart on his sleeve (literally), and he realized that keeping a personality was as tenuous as keeping a jogging routine. It always took a few minutes for it to arrive—and, when it did, most people did not much care for it. Truth is, Larry was sort of a snob—who could blame him? He took to saying that he wouldn’t be a snob if only he’d been brought up surrounded by intelligent people—which prompted him to chuckle to himself, and made me hold in a laugh because it did not matching my reproachful look—but in the end, I always gave in and ended up chuckling just as much.

Anyhow, that is why he still needed me—the emergency protocol of Larry having to talk to other people only grew more grinding as he grew up. Every time he had an unscheduled conversation, I had to come to his rescue; prevent a natural disaster. It was like he just stopped working altogether, and fumes started coming out of his head.

“Well, I don’t know about you,” he’d make me say to whomever had spoken to him, “but my answer was letter B. So was Larry’s.”

Some of the normal kids were actually nice to us—they treated us like human beings and made an effort to talk to us and everything. That pissed Larry off, though, even more than the ones who came to straight up bully him.

“They think I’m a freak just as much as everybody else. They’re just pretending to be nice.”

“Pretending to whom?” I’d ask.

“To themselves. These people, they just want to feel better about themselves. They get off on helping people not because they care but because they get to pity them.”

“Someone’s a little resentful…”

“They act like they have everything figured out—well, they don’t; Blondie got fifty percent on the last Chemistry test. And she actually studied for it.”

“Yeah, well, she doesn’t have the personality of a rotten mango!”

“Are you trying to say that my personality sucks or that I have no personality? Because I have a feeling you were going for the latter, but a rotten mango is something particularly disgusting.”

“No, I’m saying you have to be less of an asshole!”

“I don’t know how to! I know that you think I envy their friendships and their parties and stuff like that; I don’t. I don’t want any of that. I want to want it. Or maybe I don’t, because I wouldn’t trade my brain for anything in the world—I certainly want to want to want it, though. The other day, remember, they had a party with the loudest music—if you’d care to call that music—and, for some reason, dry ice? Remember how fucking traumatic that was? I don’t know what was worse, being blinded or deafened! And before we came here, I could just tell myself, Well, maybe they feel the same about the Napoleonic Wars as you do about these things they enjoy. Everything was okay, because I was special. But here, everyone is said to be special, and even if fucking Blondie—”

“Her name’s Eleanor.”

“Even if fucking Eleanor got a shitty grade, she’s still in this school meant for the smartest kids in the country. They still think she’s gifted, so she gets to have both brains and people skills—where does that leave me? What’s my fucking excuse now? I’m just a teenager who can’t talk properly to people without a puppet.”

“Dummy.”

“Whatever. And, see, I’m still doing it. I’m still acting like you’re an actual part of this conversation. I’m still interrupting myself, like it’s all some sort of twisted performance and I’m just reciting lines from the script.”

“You’re not crazy,” I said.

“I don’t need you to tell me that.”

“Then why are you still listening to me?”

“I’m just so tired, that’s all.”

“You and me both, brother,” I said.

“See? I can’t stop! It’s like a second nature.”

“That’s exactly what it is.”

“It’s the Shakespearian need to make a performance out of the self.”

“God, shut up, Larry—you are so fucking pretentious.”

“Pretentious, moi? Sorry, that’s my reflex response.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“Sebastian…”

At this point I thought he was going to tell me we should probably drift apart as was expected of us, until someone sold me by mistake in a garage sale and, oh, they were very sorry but there’s probably nothing to be done about it now.

“I’m so fucking tired, that’s all.”

So we left.

*

Oh, Larry, Larry, Larry.

What the hell was wrong with you?

The need to make a performance out of the self…

It sounds so fake-deep. Fake-deep is a great word.

Larry took me to auditions, and we eventually got a job in a circus.

When he was a kid, he spoke to people. We were in it together. Then he just grew into himself and let me take over his hand and his arm and his neck and his vision and his hearing and his sensorial responses. He never wanted to go back to himself, he’d tell me. He couldn’t live up to his duties, his mission, his principles—he did not, however, specify what they were.

He started to beat me and blame me for everything bad that had ever happened to him—he’d sit on his hand for hours hoping he’d lose circulation to the point of gangrene—he probably remembered the whole fungus incident when we were in middle school. Amelia took us to the doctor because his hands were turning green. Turns out that my insides were full of it as well.

“Maybe it’s time to let go of the doll,” the doctor said.

Larry cried, as usual.

Weak, weak Larry, blaming me for his weaknesses—his mother threw me into a washing machine! Filled my insides with anti-fungal sprays after I’d been soaked and hanged to dry; threw me to the dogs for a while when no one was looking and said the scrapes on my face were from the washing machine going round, drowning me, killing me.

But I got back up from it. I have to; I’m not a real person. I’m made out of other people.

I’m running out of time, aren’t I? You are running out of patience. You asked for the truth and I’m giving you fallacies, shallows where the land falters.

But that’s how it feels: crazy. I felt it through him. Larry wasn’t in what one would call a sane state when he died.

“I’m going insane, Seb. I can’t. I have to finish it. It’s just a vicious cycle of nothing, like I inhabit nowhere; I’m already dead, only I’m walking around talking like a madman with a dummy.”

“Well, you always were,” I said.

“Shut up! Shut up! Why can’t you shut up!? Why can’t I make you shut up?!”

“You don’t want to!”

“That’s literally all I want!”

“I’m your lifeline.”

He knew that; he was speaking through me more than ever; he’d filled in the distance between our stances, and our hearts were merging together again, and he was ready to break them both. I’m rereading this passage now and it sounds like a bad romantic duel, but it was more like I was a dummy and he was my master, and we’d always been the same person, except now he wanted to cut me off. So he did, literally.

Why not just take me off, you ask. It was symbolic. Larry was big on symbolism—it was the only way, the only way to get rid of me. He’d turned our story into a horror film. I guess it is ironic, then, that I’m still here when he’s not. But he was never really here. My poor brother—he cut off the only connection he still had. Now he’s finally off the grid.

Even as he cut his hand off, he was having me scream, “What the fuck, Larry!? You stupid motherfucking moron! What the fuck?”

He was speaking for me until he’d successfully cut it all off. Then he looked at me and his amputated hand and told me to tell his parents he had to do it. I wanted to yell “How?!” at him, but I could no longer say anything. I was so, so mad, I was actually glad he was going to die. He was finally free, Larry—and I was free of him! I didn’t have to havoc through his weird thoughts, dig into his heart looking for truth; his pulse was gone now. I knew it because when it happened I felt a huge release, as if someone had given me medicine for pain I hadn’t even noticed existed.

All was brighter. They took the hand off me, took me to an evidence locker and then back to the circus. The clown put me in the washing machine, but I didn’t mind; I was stained from Larry’s blood. I say the clown, but he wasn’t the clown when he put me in there—not all people are themselves all the time. Sometimes they’re just doing chores.

As I saw it all through the round window of the washing machine, the water turning redder and redder, all sounds gone but the peaceful chirping of water through the damaged pipes of a random laundromat—I saw things the way Larry did. But it was so calm and beautiful, all of my pain fell through in an anaesthetic ode to repetition and laundry cycles, and the cycle of life, and whatever this life without death is.

I’m probably traumatized; yes, I’ll probably never speak of Larry again and always have nightmares about him and create false memories more terrifying than the original ones—and maybe I’ll block the actual amputation until it, too, becomes a false memory. Since that still hasn’t happened, though, I thought I’d tell you how it is, or how I think it is, and you can tell me what you think of it.

Now, out of the washing machine, with some extra fluffy fabric softener, I’m ready for the next great one.

© 2020 Beatriz Seelaender

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Brazilian author Beatriz Seelaender has had essays published by websites such as The Collapsar and The Manifest-Station, and her short stories can be found in AZURE, Cagibi Lit and others. Her story “A Kidney Caught in Quicksand,” published by Grub Street in 2017, earned recognition from the Columbia Scholastic Press Association in the categories of experimental fiction and humor writing. In 2019, Seelaender won Hidden River Arts’ Sandy Run Novella Award. You can check out her weekly column at maudlinhouse.net