Bobby
story written for advanced fiction writing
still unpublished
“She’s a liar, I love her,” my mother said.
”Why do you still believe in those things?” My father answered.
”What?”
”That stuff like lies or love exist.”
”You believe in so many things.”
”I used to.”
These are the sort of conversations my mother and father had about people and ideas. They never mention any names, only she or he and they. They sound like they are pretending to be philosophers, but I can’t tell the difference between actual philosophy and gibberish anyways, so it sounds pretty beautiful to me anyway. The thing that bothers me most, however, is that they never talk about themselves.
These are snippets I have left of their dynamic I’ve found in cassette tapes they left behind. I don’t know why they used cassette tapes to record themselves, or why they chose to talk solely about abstract, silly ideas. Never anything about how to properly raise a child or a mortgage or anything of that sort.
The cassette tapes are all I listen to when I drive to work now. I now work as an inflatable costume entertainer. My name is Bobby, but when I go to work I am just called Bobb because the nametag at my job only fits a maximum of four letters. So my lovely colleague Analaksha is stuck with a horrific name at work and the little kids constantly whine: what does that mean, mommy? }
I used to work as some other things, but this feels like a good job for me for the time being. Today I’m tasked with dressing up as a Sumo Wrestler, which should be pretty fun. I drive a 2004 Toyota Highlander and the cassette player is barely hanging on for its life. I should probably get a new car: the miles on this one are almost completely spent, but I don’t really feel like buying new things.
I’m a sentimental person. I hold onto many things and people and ideas that I shouldn’t. For example, I used to really like math, and I used to be kind of good at it too. So I have Euler’s identity tattooed on my left buttock. This tattoo is right below a matching tattoo I got with my ex-girlfriend. Despite the fact that the ideas from both of these tattoos have long expired, to me they are still both beautiful reminders of where I was in past stages of my life and I wouldn’t want to let go of them, no matter what.
The mathematics tattoo unfortunately did not save me from flunking out of community college and becoming an exotic dancer for a sizable portion of my life. None of the facts that I just shared about myself comprise my proudest moments.
But I wouldn’t want it any other way. I’m doing pretty well for myself after considering many things. After many foster homes and a typical scrappy childhood, I managed to locate my parent’s cassette tapes, a nice little inheritance after some legal loopholes, and I’m basically cruising.
There’s no need for me to get a real job, actually, because the money from my dead father and mother that just came in along with these cassette tapes after a long legal battle that I don’t really know the details of can essentially sustain me for the rest of my life, given my current binge drinking and chain-smoking habits and sentimentality habits of wearing the same shoes for the past five years and the same underwear for the past ten. It doesn’t bother me that I won’t live so long, I think. It bothers me more that when I die all my belongings will be gifted or shipped away without my proper care. But it makes me quite happy and giddy inside to think that my tattoos will still be fresh looking in the mortuary when they embalm me. My only regret is the fact that I will never get to see my natural white hair because right now I have a frosty bleached buzzcut, and it looks pretty good. I’d want to do some side by side comparisons decades apart, but that’s a problem for later.
Back to mum and dad. They were both surgeons who had me through in-vitro fertilization. I’m almost positive that they never had sex based on my father’s journals. Actually, I’m almost positive my father died a virgin. This is incredible because he died at age 50. He is pretty similar to Newton or Tesla in this regard. My mother, on the other hand, was, judging by her medical records, a serial polygamist and did very well for herself in the selection of men and women, just like Marlene Dietrich or scandalous like Hannah Arendt. I’m almost positive that the combination of the two of them made me genetically predisposed as a laboratory experiment that should have gone through some regulatory checks, but was unfortunately passed without thorough introspection.
They had a kid who doesn’t turn out to be a very good one, but he was a bit fucked from the beginning.
From childhood, Manzhen, my father, identified as an ascetic. He needed not the introspective ponderings of a Siddhartha or religion to be certain resolutely of what he believed in. Most importantly, he was also not an atheist. He knew he believed in something, usually the thoughts of stinky historical men: either in science, devouring the lifestyles and asceticism of Newton and Spinoza, or in some philosophy, where he was usually partial to Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. But this one fact he knew: his nature was as unceasing and simple fact as was the fact of gravity.
Things like sex, new clothes, and girls didn’t interest him. He found it not a fact of moral righteousness but an indication that something was just intrinsically disturbed in his nature. Deep down he thought of himself as a loser. But this did not bother him so much. The way Manzhen made sense of life was along the lines that everyone else was as lost as he was, but whereas other people spent their lives living lies, covering themselves in silly perfumes and clothes to distract themselves from what really mattered, what passionate life force really sparked them alive, he at least he recognized this force in himself and did not deny or reject his true nature. People he could see through easily. All the time.
Manzhen spent all his days in the lab, studying anatomy and bodies. Occasionally he allowed himself the small pleasures of a video game or peek at pretty girls on his favorite subreddit. But this he only did after he set a strict limit for the day. Get through all of the endocrinology study packets. Study all of ABBA chemical structure. He knew and prided himself on his pleasure-pain system. It was really quite effective. Within a month, he had mastered all the fundamental principles and intricate concepts of organic chemistry, including reaction mechanisms, functional groups, and stereochemistry.
But everything came shattering down his second year of medical school. He met a woman, and as all conventional terms go, fell hard. It was a process harder than any examination, any report, and any PowerPoint presentation he ever encountered. It was a process in which he began to become skeptical of his nature as Fact and even gravity. He did not know it was possible for him to fall on his tailbone so hard and fast, so utterly and miserably and pathetically consumed.
He wouldn’t ever admit to himself that he was in love with Julia. First he justified his feelings by reckoning that he was in love with himself when he thought about her. Sure, she had all the qualities of a woman pleasing to the immediate eye. She was also not dumb and knew chemistry more intuitively than he did, though she lacked the discipline to truly understand it like he did. She looked a bit and sometimes better than the pretty girls he would look at in the recesses of his computer late at night after finishing his mechanics HW as his roommate snored on the top bunk above him. She looked a bit like Megan Fox. But only a bit: Megan was thinner and hotter than Julia. But Julia was still pretty fine.
What Manzhen was in awe of every time was how well conversation worked with Julia. He struggled in conversation with every single person in the past and knew he was seldom understood or heard. This fact did not bother him until he got to know Julia. Once experiencing the sensation of being understood and heard he craved it like nothing else. But with Julia everything he said took on a third dimension. It was like his thoughts were merely pre-historic and once synthesized through her thoughts they gained legs and a new head. Every conversation they had there was one line he kept going back and going back to, replaying in his head until he nearly went insane.
When they first met, they were sitting side by side in the same examination room. They were tasked with motor tests: folding a paper crane the size of one cm, folding a miniature sashimi, keeping their hands steady. Manzhen was confident: he had been detailing and scrutinizing over this exact same action for the past two decades of his life. This art of being still and exact in body and mind. Just like surgery. It was not a competition, though he treated the examination like one.
Manzhen surveyed the room, pushing the bridge of his steel-framed glasses up his nose with one middle finger as he did so. All the other students seemed entirely in their own worlds, fiddling with their hair or shaking their legs or obsessing over other unnecessary, self-preoccupied actions. Not much of a competition, he reckoned.
Then he looked to his right. The girl next to him was completely still and it bothered him before starting the test. Suddenly Manzhen was acutely aware that he could distantly hear his own heartbeat in his ear and that if he looked down he could see his nose quivering with each breath because the air in the room was too dry, and it seemed that the steel-framed glasses made him look unnecessarily industrial and performatively brutalist, like bad architecture. It was of the highest tragedy to Manzhen that his body constantly betrayed his mental state.
When it came to the sashimi portion, the girl’s fingers moved with a grace that both fascinated and frustrated Manzhen. He completed the section without a hassle, but the entire time he was wondering what made hands suddenly stiff and inarticulate. The exam ended sooner than he wanted to and he was less than pleased with the result of his cranes and miniature sushi when placed next to her’s.
After the exam, all medical students were invited to eat the creations they constructed. Combined, all the food barely amounted to one piece of sashimi. Manzhen picked up his first piece of sashimi with his chopsticks and chewed it thoughtfully, dipping the fish side into the soy sauce.
The girl next to him opted to use her hands and she dipped the entire sashimi, rice first, into the soy sauce.
"You're eating it wrong," he’d said, his words typically blunt and devoid of social grace.
The girl laughed. Manzhen was surprised at the sound she made: it was neither melodic nor particularly pleasant, but simply genuine.
”Show me," she challenged.
And he did. For hours following the sashimi, they worked side by side in the same residency. He didn’t actually ask her name until a month or two into working with each other and never bothered to look at name tags.
But then he did. And then he kept her name in his mind over and over.
“Juul. Lee. Ah.” He started repeating this name in his head.
What was wrong with him? He’d never liked Juul. Actually, he’d never tried it, and never would. He started saying random things and imagining wild things in his mind and couldn’t help himself.
Julia seemed to move through relationships like someone conducting experiments, never fully committing, always observing. Manzhen was interested in the fact that she seemed to have such a wide social network but retained a shy closeness with each person so it did not seem like she was trying so hard to be genuine but the quality of the relationship was already established by her presence. He did not know if she was calculating each interaction or how this was simply how she lived.
Manzhen wondered why this experience of being fully understood was so rare. He always told a person exactly what he thought they needed to hear. It was the truth and nothing else. He never understood why there was a need for anything else, or why people responded the way they did.
One time, when he was working in the lab, he and his partner successfully garnered results quicker than any other team and attained the most accurate, precise, measurements throughout the entire process.
“Way to go, man! You’re pretty incredible at this stuff, eh”
This was a blond American by the name of Bobby. This is a different Bobby than myself. I am still a bit repulsed by this component of my father’s journals and hope they did not intentionally name me after this Bobby, but my suspicions tell me that this Bobby is my namesake because of the pivotal role he is about to play in helping my father realize he is actually pathetically in love with Julia, my mother.
This Bobby always called Manzhen “man” without his permission. Every time this Bobby opened his mouth, Manzhen was reminded of a slobbering Labrador Retriever fetching his ball.
“I don’t believe in compliments.”
“Man, why not. We make such a good team.”
“Compliments make you soft.”
“As if you aren’t hard enough on yourself, man! Loosen up.”
“You could be harder on yourself.”
“What do you mean, man?”
“Look at your belt.”
Manzhen stared, then slowly pointed at this Bobby’s belt. The leather was peeling and the holes were straining at the edges of metal where this Bobby’s belly swelled then sagged. He was wearing a blue polo shirt and hadn’t washed it properly so lint balls built up on the hems near his belt.
“That’s an easy fix, or I’ll just go to Target tomorrow and get a new one, you know, no big deal, thought you were onto something serious for a sec,”
“I don’t mean your belt, Bobby. Your belly.” Manzhen pointed, then stared. The Chemistry professor stopped his lecture mid-sentence.
Manzhen did not anticipate that this Bobby had a violent streak. Perhaps this is also where I get my violent streak. Well, I don’t quite have the muscles to warrant the word “violence,” but I will summarize my past crimes with the fact that I have so many eviction notices and broken window complaints that I have resorted to renting apartments solely off of Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace. They are both fairly effective websites, however.
Getting back to my father. On reflection in the hospital bed, Manzhen realized that he had said belly much louder than he intended, and that he was not as fast on his feet as he once was. He could have ducked as this Bobby swung the test tube filled with chloroform towards his chest. He could have done many things, but he simply kept staring at the peeling leather and bulging fat and thinking about softness and hardness as a blush swept over his face, as a familiar female face kept coming into his vision, and everything turned dark.
When Manzhen opened his eyes a day later, he let out a small chuckle. He’d been scheduled to shadow a doctor in this same hospital ward at what he assumed should be the same time.
He turned his head and squinted at the time. He couldn’t see anything, they’d taken off his glasses. He couldn’t move his hands, he realized. He tried to open his mouth. No sound.
In this moment he had nothing but pure consciousness of the hospital tiles above him and the faint buzzing sound around his ears. He closed his eyes. He was always good at being still. It was in fact a bit nice, a bit meditative. He just wished it was silent. He went back to sleep.
He woke up again. A nurse had come by to explain the situation. It didn’t interest him medically enough because he didn’t care about himself enough, he realized. He was thinking about other chemicals. Methylcyclopentadienyl was a good one to analyze. What was its chemical formula again? He couldn’t remember. He would get better within half a week.
“Expecting any visitors?”
The nurse was trying too hard to be kind and it irked him. He didn’t need her maternal presence, and more so he didn’t need to be asked questions. This was always the question throughout his life. Is anyone coming? Even when he was an elementary school boy and had fallen ill in the playground and had to go to the nurse and she asked him, can your parents pick you up? No, his parents never picked him up. And that had always been the case. Always.
He shook his head slightly.
The nurse pitied him. He stopped caring and went to sleep.
He stopped caring. Always. Well, he pretended to stop caring. He started to put on fronts. Julia visited him later that night and he pretended to be more apathetic than he really was. Really, he was overjoyed. He hoped he managed to hide it, but really grew more and more pathetic as time went on.
Manzhen spent the rest of his residency confused and lost, like wading through a dark sea. Through his previous life he knew his nature as a fact. Now his nature was no longer fact but a subjective state depending on the forces surrounding him. He could no longer be honest with himself, because he no longer knew himself.
Julia was always honest, even about her lies.
Manzhen remembers one conversation that he keeps replaying in his mind, at the end of their residency.
Julia starts:
“Often I’ll tell a lie just to keep the conversation going. You can probably tell.”
“I see no problem with that.”
“Because you’re in love with me.”
“You got me.”
He gave Julia time. He watched as she went out with boyfriend after boyfriend, girlfriend after girlfriend. Time after time he knew she would never settle down and if she did it was highly unlikely that it would be with him. He graduated residency and didn’t hear a single word from Julia for five years.
Deep down his heart was in pieces.
Manzhen became a successful surgeon like he’d always intended to. It came as no surprise or celebration of hard work for him. It was a fact in his nature already and each day proceeded with a smooth numbness that made it effortless for the years to slip by his fingers. He maintained the same mindset before he met Julia. It was simply his nature after all.
Ten years after they first meet, Julia asks Manzhen for a big favor. She’s forty years old and doesn’t have much time left to have a child. She tells him things are “complicated” with her third husband and her relationships in general so she never saw through having a kid at this point.
“Why me?”
They meet again at a coffee shop near the original hospital. The interaction is forced and anticlimactic though they of course knew that would be the case. And of course she knew he saved her number. No matter what.
“You’re not so bad looking. I’ve always thought that. You’re not too short, pretty smart, pretty autistic, but I like all of those things, after everything I’ve been through.”
“Everything you’ve been through,” Manzhen repeats solemnly.
“You don’t really want to know,” Julia replies.
She’s grown even more beautiful, he thinks. He stops making childish comparisons and starts to drink in the sunset and the coffee and the view of seeing this old familiar face, one that he’s known since recognizing how still she could be compared to him at the first surgery exam. He starts to care again.
Julia clears her throat. “In-vitro is an option.”
Manzhen thinks about the other option.
“You don’t want to try it with me?” Julia reads him.
“It’s too late. Let’s do the first option.” Manzhen is surprised at how steady his voice is now that he’s grown into middle age.
Manzhen and Julia have one more interaction, when I am born. He cuts the umbilical cord and then is scheduled for another surgery in the same hospital. I have never met this man in my life, I think, besides this one time.
Julia moves away across the country with her husband, who seems to be many decades older than her.
Manzhen continues to send child support payments to Julia.
He keeps his surgery practice.
He dies a happy man.
Actually, I’m not sure about that bit. I wrote that because it sounds poetic. But knowing my tendencies, I’m sure he thought he was happy.
After my shift as Bobb the Sumo Wrestler, I drive back home to my Craigslist shoebox I share with my roommate. On my drive back, I pop in another cassette tape.
“Well, that was alright," my mother begins.
“Well, yeah, but I–”
“That surgery was beautiful, stop it.”
“I don’t believe in compliments.”
“Why don’t you? You believe in so many things,” she laughs.
“You’re trying too hard.”
“You rather I wouldn’t?”
“Yeah. Every time I hear you laugh, every time I hear you talk, it sounds like you’re forcing someone to feel something.”
“You don’t realize what you said, do you?”
“What?”
“That was a compliment.”
“Are you trying to be stupid?”
“No. If I made you feel something, I think that’s a compliment.”
“I generally avoid talking about feelings. It’s something you can’t prove right or wrong. And if you think I feel something from your work, you might not want to hear it.”
“Let’s hear it.”
“It’s like you're trying so hard to be something great. But then you come off as a crude imitation of a better surgeon. You can’t just be yourself.”
“You’re so painfully obvious,” she says.
“What?”
“You care so much.”
The tape is silent for a bit, and then Manzhen says:
“I could stop today.”
“And I wouldn’t care,” she says.
“You wouldn’t care.” He repeats her words slowly.
“Do you believe me?”
“I don't know what you're talking about.”
“You do.”
“One second you’re talking about compliments, then feelings, then caring. We don’t even need to be talking so much. We don’t even need to be working so much. We don’t need all this…”
“I know that.”
“Then why–”
“I like seeing you struggle.”
“You like–?
“You’re so perfect when you work. You’re so helpless in anything else.”
“I–”
“I can help you with that.”
My mother’s voice always has a beautiful sotto tone. She should have been an opera singer, not a surgeon.
I have a few cassette tapes left. I want to save them, I think. Tomorrow I am scheduled to work as an inflatable astronaut. I should have fun drifting away.
After work, lying in the bathtub, I light another cigarette and sip on some Dr. Pepper. The fire alarm goes off in the building but it’s cold so I stay inside.
Please exit the building. A fire has been detected in the building.
The voice is sweet and has a British accent for some reason. It sounds a bit like my mother. Sweet and singing.
At this moment I am so unbearably happy. I close my eyes and think about Euler’s theorem, my left buttock, and other beautiful things.
