Indecision (32 page)
Authors: Benjamin Kunkel
“Both,” Bridge was saying. “Both these good lives.” She looked at me and laughed at us. “Very likely, don’t you think?”
She stood up naked and walked away toward the dam in this very classical-seeming, moonlight-marbled, statue-come-to-life sort of way. I got up stepping out of my clothes and followed her, watching from behind as she balanced on the concrete ledge of the dam and then sprang from her toes, diving into the water and going invisible except for the clear globes of breath that peeled away and broke on the surface in a wake of wet sparks. Her head popped up slick as a seal’s, and she beckoned me in with a sweeping arm. So I dived or dove in after her, and plunged hard in the form-fitting cold.
When I came to the surface Brigid had swum off to the other side of the water. So I followed her there doing the butterfly stroke until, wanting to savor my approach, I instead took up the dog paddle and dawdled through the water.
Sitting on the reedy bank she kicked a splash at me. “Je t’aime, Dwight. Vraiment—c’est vrai. C’est absurde mais . . .”
I hauled myself onto the shore and finding myself on bended knee I said, “Will you marry me then? I want to marry you. Seriously. There’s a place in town that sells rings.”
She smiled a smile rigged up with mockery and delight.
“Listen,” I said. “If you don’t know what to want you’ll never get it.”
“What logic! I like it.”
“Then follow the logic. Come on.”
“No—I always like your logic because I cannot. Dwight, we have to think of what we will do with ourselves.”
“We’ll become professional revolutionaries.”
“But this was the great mistake of the Third International.”
“True,” I supposed. “Don’t want to repeat that shit again.”
“We need to make our own mistakes.”
“So marry me then.”
Sad and delighted, skeptical and full of longing, and just generally very Brigid—that was how she looked when she said, “I’d like to. But not now. Maybe not ever. Really I don’t know.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The phrases “Philosophizing ultimately means nothing other than being a beginner” and “existence’s alert awareness of itself,” attributed here to the philosopher Otto Knittel, are in fact the property of Martin Heidegger. As for the fictional band Nurse and Soldier, the author is grateful to Erica Fletcher and Rob Thacher for allowing him to make use of the name of their real band.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
B
ENJAMIN
K
UNKEL
grew up in Colorado. He has written for
Dissent, The Nation,
and
The New York Review of Books,
and is a founding editor of
n+1
magazine. This is his first book.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2005 by Benjamin Kunkel
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
R
ANDOM
H
OUSE
and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Kunkel, Benjamin.
Indecision : a novel / Benjamin Kunkel.
p. cm.
eISBN 1-58836-485-2
1. Young men—Fiction. 2. Americans—Ecuador—Fiction. 3. Decision making—Fiction. 4. Unemployed—Fiction. 5. Travelers—Fiction. 6. Jungles—Fiction. 7. Ecuador—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3611.U54I53 2005
813′.6—dc22 2004062894
Random House website address:
www.atrandom.com
v1.0
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