Read We Won't Feel a Thing Online
Authors: J.C. Lillis
We Won't Feel a Thing (9 page)
“He’s her best friend who makes cool things.”
“In Chapter 1, they’re under attack by a secret society of wizard sharks who—”
“—bite off mermaid tails and use them in potions. So one day they—”
“Wait. How does this end?” I said, because I always read ahead, always felt like a book had one up on me if I didn’t know the ending first.
He looked across the ocean. He squeezed my hand tighter.
“It doesn’t,” he said.
***
Rachel and Riley set the tablets face down. Riley looked up at the mermaid clock in the sandcastle dollhouse, tracing and retracing the heart-shaped curve of the king and queen. Rachel jumped up and turned the clock around, so Bob and Athena faced the castle wall.
There was a pause, and a quiet sniffle.
“So that happened,” said Riley.
“Nothing happened,” said Rachel.
“It’s—”
“—a coincidence.” She started rearranging the dollhouse furniture they had built together: the sand-dollar table, the clamshell couch. “It’s totally and completely expected that we wrote about the same thing; I mean the question was ridiculously specific and what else were we going to write about?”
Riley tensed. Rachel overused adverbs when she was nervous. “Are we supposed to feel like this?”
“Like what?”
“Like—closer, now.”
“It’s an illusion.”
“Okay.” Riley nodded. “Right.”
“We told a story. That’s all. We ran the truth through our sparkly little fiction machines.” She spun the clamshell couch on the popsicle-stick floor. “If this were a movie, we’d be screwed.”
“For real.” Riley hugged himself. “Like, we’d be all, ‘oh, wow, we share a brain.’”
“’Our destinies are intertwined.’”
“We’d be kissing by now.”
“In some awful gazebo.”
“In a summer rainstorm.”
Rachel turned around. They locked eyes for three long seconds. They felt the ocean breeze in their hair.
“Your attention.”
The console made them jump.
“Please.”
On the floor beside them, the WAVES console radiated red. From its side speaker crackled an automated voice that sounded very much like David A. Kerning:
Dear RACHEL ANNA SETON and RILEY EDWARD WOODLAWN: Your screening results are now available. Please retrieve them from the Delivery Slot.
The console made a sound like a child’s swing bearing a grownup’s weight. A secret door flipped up on the left side. Rachel darted over and plucked a white card from the Delivery Slot. She held it to her chest without looking and took a breath.
“Are we ready?” she said.
“No,” he said.
“Maybe it’s not so bad.”
“Just read it,” he said.
Rachel cleared her throat. Bob and Athena ticked guiltily, as if they knew they’d just played a critical role in making everything worse.
YOUR COMBINED SCORE: 3,814
THREAT LEVEL: Extremely high. Results indicate IMMINENT DANGER.
RECOMMENDED COURSE OF INTERVENTION: Steps 2, 3, and 4, administered at the strongest concentration, and as close together as possible.
EXPECT STEP TWO TOMORROW
Chapter Six
Dear Rachel and Riley,
I received your anxious email at nine thirty-six this morning, as I stood beside Tilly in an Oklahoma copy shop running off WAVES brochures and enduring a lecture about my “pop-culture snobbery.” Thank you for alerting me to the need for a Step One disclaimer. Friends, you were NOT to share your essays with each other! It’s no wonder you’re feeling depressingly intertwined now, particularly since those essays displayed a rather obnoxious degree of synchronicity. I know your high scores on the screener are causing you both concern, but don’t panic. Careful application of WAVES will soon provide relief.
Your sensory engineering starts now—with
Step Two: Olfactory Intervention.
You will need the console and both sets of nasal cannula (nose tubes) in Compartment 2. To maximize effectiveness, conduct this step in
the most romantic place you can think of.
(I know this seems counterintuitive. Just trust me.)
EXAMPLE:
On the latest leg of my tour shadowing Gannon’s DERT seminars, let’s say I take Tilly to a drive-in movie outside Tulsa. As you may know, drive-in movies were rated the number-one most romantic date activity by
Scintillate Magazine,
possibly because they are rare as handwritten letters and men with hankies. The film is something I know she will enjoy, one of those spunky romantic comedies where the heroine owns a bakery for dogs, has adorable OCD, and falls in perfectly imperfect love with a grouchy garbage man who cleans up well.
Imagine us parked in my WAVES van, sharing a tub of greasy popcorn and a box of revolting fruit-shaped candies called Jumbles. If you need a more detailed picture, say she’s wearing a yellow dress printed with lightning bolts and red sandals that show off her cute stubby toes. When I insert the tubes in my nasal passages (as shown in the attachment), she accepts my false explanation. Having toured with me for the better part of eight months, Tilly is used to my research intruding at all hours.
To begin, I plug the tubes into Port 2 and press the second black button on the console. (You will press it five times, as maximum dosage is recommended in your case.) For the next 98 minutes, as the movie drags on, let’s say I deceive myself. I pretend Tilly is mine and I am hers. I listen to her melodious laugh and rest my arm on the back of her seat. I engage her in playful yet rigorous debate about the deus ex machina, which involves a terrier wedding and a runaway garbage bin. I imagine that when the film chugs to a merciful close, I will take her back to the motel and unzip her lightning-bolt dress, feel the electric charge of her luminous skin as I murmur something like “Let me show you what a real man can do.”
As the evening progresses and these vile romantic thoughts reach certain “peaks,” they trigger the Lemnos Mechanism, which releases a uniquely odious smell into my nasal cavities. The Smell, a potent combination of fish heads, coffee breath, rotting fruit, and nineteen other foul emanations, has been specially developed by my team as a near-universal forbidden-love repellent. You will be pleased to know that in initial tests, this latest version of The Smell has significantly reduced feelings of attraction with just three blasts.
Happily, when the evening is up and I’ve safely squired my “date” back to her room at the Tip-Top Motel where she will no doubt phone Hitch and flood him with unearned cootchie-coos, I self-report a 24% decline in my romantic attraction to Tilly. I am left with only a mildly uncomfortable tingling in my left nostril that already begins to fade by bedtime. Step Two is a success.
Clear enough? Please contact me with any questions before you begin. Best of luck to you both; I will eagerly await your next update.
Rationally yours,
David A. Kerning
***
At 7:34 the following evening, having subjected their California essays to forty-seven strategic jokes and mockeries (“
‘It doesn’t?’
Oh, please.”), Rachel and Riley took a taxicab to the corner of Tibbitts and Main Street. The cab stopped underneath a lit-up sign shaped like the Eiffel Tower.
“I can’t believe we’re doing this,” said Riley.
“It’s Puckatoe.” Rachel paid the driver with nine dollars from their stash. “Our romantic options are limited.”
Rachel and Riley climbed out of the cab and regarded the sign with mild horror. This tower was not an authentic reproduction. Its designer had added large, flirtatious eyes; thick eyebrows that would wiggle if they could; and a thin curlicued mustache under a long and pointy nose. Underneath the tower, male and female figures in matching berets kissed in silhouette, standing on fancy black letters that said
L’Amour Food!
L’Amour Food! had opened eight weeks before on downtown Puckatoe’s main street, wedged between a hardware store and the pet shop where Mr. Woodlawn had once bought Riley an unauthorized hamster. Rachel and Riley had seen the full-page ads in
The Puckatoe Informer:
a sketch of a young couple smooching by candlelight, a sidebar of free-quiche coupons, and a tagline that identified L’Amour Food! as the “most romantic French restaurant in the U.S. of A.”
For the sake of their clinically sanctioned first date, Rachel and Riley hoped this was true. They had never set foot in the restaurant. Mrs. Woodlawn, who had spent three days in Paris as a teen and often made fruitless plans to move the family there, detested French things that were insufficiently French. Once she had heard that the chef used canned tomatoes in the
bouillabaisse
, family trips to L’Amour Food! had been expressly forbidden. But tonight she and Mr. Woodlawn were locked in the basement building a mystery with hammers and drills, and they hadn’t noticed when Rachel and Riley slipped away to meet the cab on the corner.
Rachel heaved the console onto her shoulder. It was zipped in a black duffel, swag from Mr. Woodlawn’s last taxidermy convention.
“I feel very optimistic about Step Two,” she said.
“Convince me,” said Riley.
“Smell is an extremely powerful sense. Remember when that guy farted horribly in Ice Cream Heaven and we couldn’t go back there for two months?” She examined the menu posted by the door. “This might be the last step we need.”
“Yeah, but David said we’d need Three and Four—”
“Are you going to accept that?”
“He’s the scientist.”
“We can totally beat this tonight, Ri. We could be completely normal, completely platonic friends by tomorrow.”
Riley considered this. “If we are, can we go fishing?”
“Yes.”
“And go to Skateland?”
“Of course.”
“I want to do fun stuff with you. Before we have to leave.”
“We’ll do
all
the fun stuff once this is over. Ready for our date?”
Riley straightened his shirt. “Ready. Yes.”
“How do we look? Datelike enough?”
They appraised each other. Rachel wore her red crown socks with black hightops, a black sleeveless turtleneck, a short red skirt with knife-sharp pleats, and the gold R necklace Riley had given her for her fourteenth birthday. Riley wore a stiff white dress shirt, jeans he’d ironed, and the silver watch Rachel had bought him at Jonah’s Junque for their fifth Us Day. Their special smells whispered louder than usual; Rachel had dabbed Poison Apple lotion on her pulse points, as a magazine in the dentist’s waiting room had once instructed, and Riley had washed three times with Tidal soap.
“Definitely datelike,” said Riley.
“Yeah?”
“
Comprehensively
datelike.”
“Are you mocking my adverbs?”
He shrugged. She punched his shoulder. Then Riley held out his arm, which Rachel took with careful formality, and they soldiered through the door to meet their fate.
At first glance, the interior of L’Amour Food! seemed unpromising. The lobby smelled of cream soup and antiseptic. A giant plaster replica of the Arc de Triomphe separated the empty waiting area from the dining room. The stand-up chalkboard presenting the specials had several rogue apostrophes and at least four too many exclamation points; Rachel killed them with her index finger while Riley studied the ceramic floor tiles, a red and blue checkerboard inlaid with white hearts.
Then a deep, lightly accented voice piped up in front of them:
“Cursed in love, o happy fate/Blind to beasts that lay in wait.”
Rachel and Riley looked up. Under the Arc de Triomphe was a short, stout man of about fifty-two, with pouchy blue eyes and frizzled hair the color of yams. He wore a red vest, a long-sleeved shirt with blue and white stripes, a white apron with large pockets, and a nametag that said BONJOUR! JE M’APPELLE PETER (PIERRE). He hugged a ragged spiral notebook to his chest.
“Ahhh. You’re
just
what I wanted tonight, yes yes
yes
,” said Peter (Pierre). “Page 27, sketched with truth and beauty, right before my eyes!”
Rachel and Riley swapped glances. Peter (Pierre) opened his notebook, titled MUSINGS OF A DROWNING MAN on a piece of masking tape. He flipped a few pages and continued, one stubby finger grazing his words:
“A bright young couple, freshly scrubbed and radiating health, sends my heart into spasms of joy and agony. I can at once taste my delirious youth and smell its advancing decay. I imagine myself enfolded by them, feeding on their vitality, the thought of their fierce inventive lovemaking restoring my bones to life.” He slapped the notebook shut and stuck it in his apron. “Party of two?”
Riley stared, slightly openmouthed. Rachel said, “Yes. We’d like your most private table, please.”
“Well, of course you would.”
“We have important
business,”
she said.
“Is that what you babies call it now?” Peter (Pierre) withdrew two menus from the holder on the wall. “So sad. Young love should be awash in poetry.”
“We’re awash,” said Riley.
“We’re drowning on our feet,” said Rachel.
“Please! No sarcasm,” said Peter (Pierre). “At L’Amour Food!, there is only…?” He pointed at them.
“Amour?” said Riley.
“Food,” said Rachel.
“You’re depressingly literal. We’ll work on that,
mes cheres
!”
Peter (Pierre) led Rachel and Riley under the Arc de Triomphe. They zigzagged behind him through the red and gold dining area, which smelled of rich sauces and cheap perfume and contained four other couples grasping hands by candlelight and whispering as if the world were about to end. Rachel and Riley followed their waiter to a blue velvet curtain hung between two plaster columns.
Peter (Pierre) drew the curtain aside and gestured grandly.
“This,
monsieur et mademoiselle
,” he said, “is a
private table.”
They examined the nook, which was clearly intended for engagements, anniversaries, and other sentimental occasions. The white wrought-iron chairs had heart-shaped backs and red velvet cushions. The table, draped in a blue cloth printed with flirty French unicyclists, displayed a fancy brass candelabra and a milk-glass vase filled with red and blue silk roses. On the walls were three black-and-white posters of couples kissing in the rain, plus a false window that gave them an impossible simultaneous view of several painted-on Parisian landmarks.