PETER MATTEI
The Deep Whatsis
Table of Contents
1.1
The intern from the edit house is so drunk she is trying to take her skin off. At least that’s what it looks like. She is already half-naked and is grabbing at her flesh trying to find the edge of the Threadless T-shirt that she lost half an hour ago. I don’t remember her name.
“What are you doing?” I ask her as she pulls at her body, but it is no use, she can’t hear me and if she can she doesn’t understand.
Certain people when they drink too much they get an idea in their head and then it forms a kind of feedback loop in which the thought just repeats itself over and over, as if their brain is trying to grip on to something, anything, for dear life, because all of reality is slipping into the void. Megan? Morgan? Caitlin? Finally she speaks and her answer is she wants to take her T-shirt off because she likes to sleep naked, she’s going to sleep now, it’s one of the checkboxes of her still-forming self, sleeping in the nude, it’s who she is, she sleeps in the nude in her sleeping bag even in winter, that’s what she is saying to me over and over out of nowhere in the dark, so I just say good night and turn the lights off. She keeps babbling and looking at me with such a confused sense of joy that I want to laugh, so I do laugh.
Then I go into the bedroom and get a pillow and go into the bathroom and get the little trash-biny thing. I slide the pillow under her head and I put the trash-biny thing next to her and I tap her shoulder and point to the thing and explain to her that if she needs to barf she should barf in that and not on the floor, if possible, especially not on the pillow—it’s Icelandic eiderdown.
She looks up at me and smiles and then she passes out.
1.2
Intern is extremely cute, alright, granted, her face at least, no question, it’s like God smiling on sunshine, and she’s cool, she quote unquote gets it, but still I plan that after this morning’s pretend-awkward good-bye, which hopefully will happen in a mere couple of hours, to never see her again. For the moment however she is totally crashed and it’s around 6 AM and I’m not really tired, which may have something to do with the stimulants we were ingesting at the bar where we met.
“What’s up?” she said as I turned around, spun really, why I’m not sure, sloshing a double Rittenhouse rocks in my right hand. I was meeting this friend of mine, Seth Krallman, playwright turned pot dealer turned yoga guru, but he was blowing me off, what a surprise.
“Don’t I know you?” she said.
“No,” I said, never having seen the girl in my life.
“Yes, yes I do know you,” she said. “You got the tuna.” And then she told me it was she who brought the big sashimi platters into the editing session for us at lunchtime, the Viva Paper Towel editing session at the edit house where she worked, and she remembered me because I requested the Oma Blue Fin, rarest and most expensive of fish. It was like ninety dollars a roll and I barely touched the thing.
“I thought it was pretty lame,” she said. “For the price.”
“That’s cool,” I said. “Do you always eat people’s leftovers?”
“Do you always waste really expensive food that is a) on the endangered list and b) caught by slave labor?” she asked, cocking her head to the earnest side and waiting for an answer.
“Um, I’m looking for a friend of mine,” I said.
“No you’re not,” she said.
“No?”
“No, you’re buying me a drink, aren’t you?”
Maggie