Rob Bumble
The first date is tits. You want to lay your head on them and put your dick between them and suckle at them like the cherry in a Shirley Temple. You don’t mind that my nails aren’t long enough to scratch. I am a bad Turkish barber pawing at your scalp. You touch me like an expensive lit candle. You swear like a girl that you never do this in the beginning.
But it’s also articles by people we follow on Twitter, sexy sparring in that bar booth I only use for Bumbling purposes. It’s the Dead Dad Club. And two dozen memes. Then it’s flying to your place on the wings of a couple weak drinks. We pray to each other, at each other, then together, that morning won’t come. We watch YouTube videos of Turkish barbers. We discuss politics and why Pixar’s Ratatouille belongs in the Criterion Collection. We trace freckles like they’re Google Maps and when I take your glasses off, you say you’re sorry not to see me. You let me go through all your drawers, scattered with drawing pencils and animation software booklets. I go back for more time with the stack of old wedding invitations while you find me a toothbrush. What a sentimentalist you are, keeping them. I try not to think about weddings until the third date.
You toss me a shirt to sleep in, and I warn you it won’t fit over my aforementioned tits. We lay there in the not-so-silence of your window A/C unit trading dating app war stories. When we wake, you want to drive me home, but I insist that an Uber is fine. I wonder if the sun will make you disappear like lemonade in a weak Arnold Palmer. You say you’ll text me. You say you might be willing to try vegan ice cream. I say I’ll hold you to it while you hold me goodbye.
It’s not like this is the first great first date I’ve had, but it is the best great first date. You can’t imagine the number of times I’ve been forced to scrub my recent memory. I don’t want to scrub us. I don’t want to try anymore unless it’s at work. I want to see your apartment again. And you have a terrible apartment.
You ghost me all weekend, and for a moment, I wonder if I should add you to a log of former lovers, but those names make no sense next to yours, so I send a passive-aggressive text. You say it wasn’t ghosting and I say I disagree. You’re back, peace treaty signed, and I won’t draw up another. We work on a couple of memes. We lowercase lol back and forth. Then you die.
You really, actually died. At first I thought you were ghosting me again, and this after bestowing you the honor of mentioning you in therapy? My therapist and I accused you of sociopathy. Well, she refused to because she had not evaluated you in a clinical setting. But I had. I threatened to release your state secrets, but all I knew about you was what you would tell your therapist if you weren’t too repressed by growing up Catholic to go to therapy. All I knew were the piles of facts in each column, the ways I could convince myself to love you and the ways I could get out of it.
It would have all stopped there if I hadn’t forgiven you for not going to therapy. I only forgave you, by the way, because you had so many skincare products in your bathroom cabinet. This proved some sort of male goodwill.
It would have all stopped there if I hadn’t texted you the Wikipedia page for sociopath.
Rob Bumble 2m ago Hi there. I have to tell you that Rob has sadly passed away. On Monday he was biking home and was hit by a hydroplaning car. His helmet was apparently unbuckled and the brain bleed was just too severe. I’m his aunt, handling some things for the family. I thought you should know.
I thought about responding but didn’t. I wasn’t sure how I was saved in your phone. Maybe I wasn’t.
My friends tried to convince me this message was more evidence of your particular cocktail of personality disorders. They wanted to graduate you from sociopath to psychopath. They said the text must be from you because only psychopaths say “Hi there.” I say “Hi there.” They sent me TikToks about de-centering men and delusional women with acrylic nails shaped like coffins.
I googled your name. Again. There was your Instagram (private), your LinkedIn page, your company’s website, and a bare Facebook profile showing only a Seattle Housing group and a check-in for free WiFi at a Capitol Hill coffee shop. I learned your hometown sounds like a deodorant and that you went to Princeton. You never told me you went to Princeton. I knew from my research, of course, but you never told me, which impressed me more than your going to Princeton.
Then there were the articles about the accident off Aurora Avenue by Green Lake, just a couple blocks from my favorite fried not-chicken place. I read glowing obituaries freshly posted in your high school and college papers. There was a Facebook post from your mom. It made me cry. Your club lacrosse team—the Icebreakers—did a video tribute. I found it lacking in depth, even for sports people. A memorial would be held at the church you were baptized in.
I googled your family and found a short paragraph in the politics section of The Globe about your mom’s re-election to the bench and remembered you telling me she was a judge. I remembered asking if you had the Mass accent. I remembered wondering when you got your first blow job. Would I never know now?
I sent all this to my friends, and one said that it’s easy to create fake pages online. Another said I should call this so-called aunt. The third said to do nothing.
I did none of these things. You were already a list of one that had gained too much distance from the others. I bought a black dress and a Friday flight to Boston.
* * *
When I moved to Seattle, three years ago now, it was because exactly one company had gotten back to me about a paid internship. I had just graduated from not-Princeton, where I’d only made out with six boys, had sex with two, and half-loved one. All I knew about the city was from an internet forum about the show Grey’s Anatomy, which apparently put its love interest on the wrong ferry.
My first weeks were spent Ubering up and down 12th to fetch Facebook Marketplace floor mirrors and a curled-up calathea for my apartment. I ran around the reservoir filled with nothing in Volunteer Park. The only gray I ever saw was that track of sloped concrete like an empty swimming pool, and a ceramic vase I couldn’t afford downtown. I wrote in the Grey’s Anatomy forum under a surprisingly active thread about the Season 4 finale that the weather was inaccurate. Then fall came.
I dated a data scientist who whispered “You’re bad” in my ear so he could finish and a copywriter who sexted me from work. I dated hot and funny and bald and boorish. I dated orgasm givers and the ones who didn’t know what UTIs are. I dated because I didn’t know anyone in the city. I dated because I wasn’t getting any younger. I dated because I actually enjoyed wearing ripped tights while ripping napkins in plush bars, smiling my unearned knowingness and knowing earnestness, sipping attention through a disintegrating paper straw. I liked the idea of being full enough—of romance or something approximating it—to finally keel over. I resolved that, just once, my tires would split clean through instead of wearing down.
* * *
I booked an Airbnb by Fenway, a brownstone that had been emptied out into bare twin-bed rooms with a shared bathroom on each floor. The walls going up the staircase, ribbed and circular like a throat, were covered in framed ocean maps and photos of sailboats.
I figured out the trains to your neighborhood. I had purchased an information report on your mom for $3.99, so I knew your address. The internet is so scary, I thought, as crisp-shirted interns scuttled on and off the green line. I searched the Catholic churches in a two-mile radius and drew a constellation route between them. I pretended it was your zodiac sign. The internet didn’t like the combination of our signs. The internet’s been wrong before.
The first church had never heard of you. The second had, but your family weren’t members. The third clocked me as a Jew. The fourth showed me a plaque in honor of a donation from your family. The service was tomorrow. I asked the usher wearing Goodwill slacks why it wasn’t on Sunday. Wasn’t Mass on Sunday?
I found a gentrified coffee place nearby where I could google “Catholic death tradition.” You and I had agreed that getting coffee is about everything but coffee. How did your body get to Boston? Where was it now? What would happen to the wedding invitations in your drawer? I closed my eyes and felt your grunting laugh, at your own joke, pressing into my shoulder hard as cheese. I wanted you melting my plastic again.
* * *
My funeral dress needed pressing, so I let it hang in the shared bathroom with the sink and shower running. I forgot heels so I picked at the street plaque on the bottom of my sneakers. I knew I shouldn’t wear them but sometimes there’s not enough time to avoid sin.
The church was cold in the way all hard days feel cold when we remember them. Women were wearing soft cardigans and leather shoes. Your mom was surrounded by them like the penguins huddled together in the penguin documentaries. Her makeup was coming off from tears, but people kept handing her fresh tissues. Her lace sheath dress refused to wrinkle.
I sat in a pew in the back, surrounded by navy diamond floor tiles, and looked around for possible ex-girlfriends. Some of the younger ones might be cousins, I knew, but I scanned anyway, searching their faces for stale love. Results were annoyingly inconclusive. There’s only so much you can deduce about a woman from her claw clip.
The priest raised his arms and fabric poured out. Your mom shuttled to the front and garbled words poured out. Your father taught you how to ride a bike two decades ago. If you were here, we’d snicker at the cliche. My hands would shake as I held yours. You’d remind me to breathe. You were found with a photo of him and the hairline he gave you in your wallet, scattered a few feet from the scene, where spokes poked out from your thigh like acupuncture needles.
* * *
The week I met you, I had re-downloaded Bumble for the sixth time, deciding for the sixth time that I did ultimately want a relationship even if it meant using Bumble again. I preemptively forgot about gym selfies and sunk costs. Someone would sink with me. We matched on a Sunday, spoke on the phone on Tuesday, and had plans by Wednesday. I volleyed your voice messages without trying. I bought a poop-brown satin skirt. I put on a country playlist getting ready because I wanted to feel like someone else when I walked into the room. I put a book in my purse so we’d be forced to talk about books when I pretended to look for my wallet. It’s not right that this is how dating works, but this is how it works.
You paid while I was in the bathroom. I was adjusting the part of my hair by half an inch, thinking of our best parts, like when you showed me why a yawn is the most complicated expression to animate, and when you asked what my favorite onion was. The others had failed to ask, as if they didn’t care what my favorite onion was.
Then there was everything you excised from me: an undeserved parking ticket, three hours on the phone fighting with my insurance, and every website that tricked me into accepting cookies. You were the only part of my day Amazon played no part in. Everything was the goop of everything unless we were suspended in it together.
Maybe I only went home with you to see your bookshelf. Maybe I only liked you because of the algorithm and being tired. Maybe a lot of people get married because of the algorithm and being tired. But maybe I hadn’t picked at my hangnail all night. Maybe we were stuck-together shallots.
* * *
I like the red tree that takes up the whole window of your living room. I like your aunt. I find her greasy hair trustworthy when she opens the door for me. I tell her I am an old classmate from AP Computer Science. That’s when you first got into animation. Remember?
I like the egg salad, lingering sticky on my gums as I talk with a family friend about your ripped jeans, pseudo-intellectual indie music phase. I remember.
I like the floral runner on the stairs, where you heard her yells to not to scuff the banister, so many times she must have yelled it, your lacrosse stick leaned against the gold foil wallpaper. You remember.
I like going up there, as if with you, as if being shown upstairs on a Christmas trip home. I can see it and so can you. All that had happened and all that would happen are the only two things I know.
Did you ever draw me? That weekend, hungover at your desk, with the figure practice sketches taped up next to your laptop, did my face come back to you?
Could your software put us together as little stick figures up against nothing? Would the negative space fill us in?
What was once your bedroom is less sporty than I imagined. More shiny dark wood. Boxes filled with your mom’s office overflow. I close the door and breathe in your air. There’s your cum laude certificate. There’s photo evidence of ripped jeans. Knew it. There’s a pair of blue dice and a very old condom, tucked behind a box of retired Apple chargers faded to neon yellow.
I lay on the green flannel bedspread, where you dreamed of tits like mine, and let my fingers run across its static. I kick my sinful sneakers off and curl up higher, clutching a pillow shaped like a roly-poly.
When roly-polies have sex, they curl on top of each other. When I curled up into you, we were perfectly cylindrical isopods in perfectly damp dirt.
“There’s something here,” you said that night. I agreed. I knew where here could be. “There’s something here,” said the roly. “There’s something here,” the poly replied.
Would that something have been something enough? Would it have taken the form of a soft leather saddle for us to ride together to a different kind of moment like this one? Yes, I can see it. I can see past our beginning, past us. I can see it so hard I have to close my eyes to see.
Your hands finding the line of my tights around my waist, pushing beneath the polyester toward the deepest part of me only you understand—I can feel it. I can feel it so easily. I hold the pill bug pillow with my thighs and dip my fingers into me as if they are yours, and I am too.
* * *
The air smelled like freesia. No, someone smelled like freesia. When I turned my head away from the red tree window and opened my eyes, your mother was in the doorway. Her eyes were sour-sad.
“Who are you?” Her voice was weaker than before. It had been such a long day. “And why are you in my son’s bed?”
I slid my fingers up, between me and the pillow, hoping to Catholic God she didn’t notice.
“I’m—”
She leaned into her right leg like she might go down. The pointy toes of her heels had those little bows I’d been seeing online. She was a horned bison and someone had shot her.
“We were together.”
Everything that could happen between us would happen in those few seconds between her mouth opening and words arriving.
“Oh,” she said, like it was that easy. “Casey called you?”
Who was Casey?
“Yes.”
She nodded, out of it, out of the room. I stayed there, smelling like my own organs, holding my fingers in the perfumed air like a surgeon freshly scrubbed, just waiting to be gloved. I heard sirens in her steps.
Downstairs, all the faces were painted eggshell-blank. Your aunt, or someone, was collecting disparate plastic cups and piling them into a clear plastic bag. She’d stack one in another, introducing them, then just as purposelessly throw both away. Cups can’t face each other once they’re bound back to back, coming apart and knocking together in trash cans.
Your voice was in the air, but I couldn’t make out what it was saying. Were you behind me or before me? Was I sifting through your trash?
That was when I stopped remembering, when I started seeing you in the framed photos on the wall. There were so many of you, so many different faces. I hadn’t recognized you before.
Caitie Karasik (@caitieekk) is a writer and director from Los Angeles. Her satire has appeared in The New Yorker and McSweeney’s, among others. She is currently pursuing an MFA in film at Tisch School of the Arts in New York City.