After the breakup but before the divorce, we went through with a
vacation. Maybe it was force of habit. To follow through on the sort of
ostentatiously capricious plans we loved to make (hot-air balloons, darts
and globes, you know the drill), we had learned to turn aside last-minute
doubts as a matter of course. This one, comparatively, was a piece of
cake.
    The itinerary didn't have much sparkle this time, it's true. She had
work to do in Germany with or without me, so we charted a trip that got
her to Koln in time with as many cathedrals as possible along the way.
    For three days we fought and howled, which was to be expected. On the
fourth day the clouds parted, which perhaps was not.

    At a secondhand bookstore, while the miniature Swede behind the
counter cursed at a webpage endlessly reloading itself, we stumbled on
the wreckage of someone else's relationship. Dozens of books, unsorted on
a table (new arrivals?), most of them inscribed from Lennart to Britta or
vice versa.
    Some of the jabs might have been playful. "I'm sure I will love you at
least twice this long," said the interior of 30 Days To A New Body. A
guide to Madagascar read only: "Perhaps the lemurs will eat you." (Was
that when we started laughing?) But Lennart was prone to summarizing the
state of the romance in long paragraphs with obvious venom, even as he
claimed that each gift betokened his sincere devotion. To judge by the
dates, Britta learned it from him, but she learned well. Captivated and I
suppose gleeful, we translated the dedications to one another, piecing the
story together.
    "At least we'll do better than this," said Britta inside Othello. She
had admitted by then to taking a lover, but Lennart had other concerns.
"You can't remember anything about me anymore," he wrote; "I think you
know less about me than you did when we met."
    At least we'll do better than this, neither of us said.
    One frontispiece in an older book bore a portrait of a youngish woman,
traced over in pen to add a shoulder tattoo and a backpack with a univer-
sity insignia. "She's pretty," Didi said to me as she handed the book to
me. "Maybe you should give her a call."
    "It would never work out," I said. "Listen to this one..."

    It did turn out that Britta had been in my field, or at least owned
the right textbooks. I bought her copy of a Springer-Verlag book on fast
Fourier algorithms--not a gift, so no inscription, but a grocery list in
Lennart's handwriting did flutter out as I thumbed it.
    "You know, some people do this for real," Didi said. "Old manuscripts.
Papyrus. The shape of the lowercase H. Carbon dating."
    "That doesn't sound like any fun at all," I said, looking her in the
eye as I pulled the torn drawing of Britta from my back pocket and kissed
it.

    Koln brought us back down to earth. Didi had things to tend to, and I
largely rotted in the hotel room, anxious and bored. The phrasebook I
swore to master before going out read like a retarded catechism, or occa-
sionally some sort of personal attack directed at me:

- Ist er krank?
- Er ist nur faul.

    When we got home, I quit my job and changed coasts. I wanted to get
out fast enough that we could miss each other, and I think we did a
little.

written for myke cuthbert in the upstairs room 8/12/08

Nearly two full hours on this one, if you count Wikipedia research time at the beginning. At this rate, people will start asking for their money back!

According to Wikipedia, Madagascar has all sorts of fascinating intrigue surrounding its autonomous provinces (faritany mizakatena) and counties and communes, some of which I gather may be slated for dissolution soon. But if I had tried to write that story I suspect it would have ended up like this, which is wonderful but I didn't want to do it again right now. Same with the temptation to make the whole thing a catechism.

The mistakes I find most interesting to mention are also the ones most easily removed in editing, so they don't really matter, but at any rate this story has several. I think I made a face when I realized both my leads were still nameless at the point where the two book-people's names were introduced, for example. And I think the parenthetical "(new arrivals?)" might be way too obvious; when I wrote it I still wasn't sure the books would be the whole story. Moreover: it occurred to me when picking a destination city that I shouldn't use one whose name required a character not found on my typewriter, and then I did it anyway.

I would also guess the Fourier transforms stick out like a sore thumb, though there's less to be done about that. All in all, not such a bad way to have lost a little sleep.

- everything is by Aaron Mandel; please ask first if you're about to steal something -

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