The Unknowns Read Free

now. If the world would just freeze whenever I’m not around, I’d be less worried about missing something important.
    We make a kind of prelapsarian small talk.
    “Do you do this kind of thing a lot?” she asks me.
    “What
kind of thing
are you referring to?” I have my teasing face on.
    “Oh, going home with strange girls and taking Ecstasy,” she says.
    “Are you a strange girl, then?” It’s almost too easy.
    “I’ve done it three times,” she says. “And the first time I only took half, so it doesn’t count.”
    “So tonight you’ll have to take two to make up for it.”
    She laughs, like that’s preposterous. “No, to make up for it I’d only have to take one and a half.”
    “You’re not adjusting for inflation.”
    I’d be more anxious if we were about to have sex. It’s certain that the next few hours, at least, will be very pleasant. I’m greedy for it already, smiling hard and getting an anticipatory buzz, even though it’s only been five minutes and the drug has barely made it to my stomach lining. But I’m impatient, and I don’t want to be sitting in this wooden chair anymore. The apartment is tiny; I leave the kitchen and I’m in the bedroom. Sometimes you just have to accept these things.
    In the cab I had worried about her CD collection, and a close examination bears out my fears. It’s frustrating, because I’ve got my iPod right here, and if I had a Y-cable I could hook it into her little bookshelf stereo. (Then I’d have to reposition the speakers to achievea proper left-right spread.) For the fiftieth time I consider carrying a Y-cable around with me, and for the fiftieth time I realize how lame that would be, and I am momentarily paralyzed, stretched across the gulf between my life’s twin goals: experiencing uncompromised happiness and not being a loser. I sneeze.
    At some point I have become aware of my heart beating and my blood pumping, and I feel a twinge of admiration for my body, which somehow keeps functioning through everything, although I so rarely stop to enjoy it. And I realize I’m really glad the evening is going this way: I can’t think of a better outcome than making a new friend, a really nice girl, and getting to hang out with her and do Ecstasy.
    “You know what we should do?” I tell her. “We should take our shoes off.”
    “My shoes aren’t bothering me at all,” she says.
    “And yet once you take them off you will be astonished at how much comfort is available simply by removing your shoes.” I am sitting on the bed, hungrily removing my shoes.
    She is playing. “What if I’m more comfortable with my shoes on?”
    “I suppose there is the remote possibility that you are more comfortable with your shoes on,” I say, “although I don’t believe it for a second. But I seem to have acquired some kind of neurotic fixation on you experiencing the state of shoelessness right now, and so it wouldn’t be inaccurate to say that your shoes are making
me
uncomfortable.”
    “What a terrible situation!” she says, and for a moment it looks as if she really does think it’s a terrible situation. “Incompatible desires! What should we do?”
    “I will propose a solution,” I tell her. “It requires that you do me a small favor. You remove your shoes—no, you don’t even have to put in the legwork—
legwork
, ha! Anyway: I will remove your shoes for you. You will spend thirty seconds assessing the resultant sensation. If at the end of that trial period you wish to return to your previous shoe-clad state, I will gently replace the shoes, and my mindwill rest easy in the knowledge that you are enjoying your personal optimum comfort state as regards footwear. If, on the other hand, you decide that you prefer to go without shoes, I will do a little dance of vindication.”
    “That could work,” she says, sitting down next to me on the bed.
    “This way, neither of us will have to sacrifice comfort, physical or psychogenic, for more than an