My War

She’s smoking a cigarette she started at age 14 in Brooklyn.

“You ever wonder what you’d be like if you never did drugs? I mean, never touched anything?”

We’re in a restaurant that borders the Chicago River. We’re here to discuss our plan for world domination.

“You’d be a different person,” I say.

“Exactly. Don’t you wonder who you’d be?”

“No, I mean you’d have to be a different person before the not doing of the drugs. You can’t be anyone else than who you are,” I say, “the drugs don’t matter.”

She looks at me quizzically.

I explain. “In order not to have done the drugs, you’d have to be a different sort of person before the taking of them. Understand?”

She doesn’t.

“Look,” I say, “In order to take drugs you have to be the sort of person who would take drugs, right? So it’s a foregone conclusion that you will take them and you’ll turn out who you are.”

“I understand that,” Andrea says, “but you could have done less or none.”

“No, no you couldn’t have,” I say. “You’re the type of person who would take just as many drugs as you have taken—there was no way out of it. You did what you’ll do and you are who you’re supposed to be...”

Andrea smiles and tamps down her smoke. The place is full of seafood-eating athletes—guys with receding hairlines and Mercedes cars and the women who love them.

“Anyway,” she says, “we’re getting off the topic.”

We’re here because we have business to discuss, not potential realities. We’re here because we want to blow up the world.

“Take her,” Andrea says, nodding towards a mass-produced marionette. “I don’t know what I’d say to her. I’d have nothing to talk about... She’s why I’m here.”

I’m here for reasons like this too.

I’m here for the 24-hour news that “never stops.” I’m here for the expressways clogged with treadmill rats. I’m here for the discarded computer monitors piled into trash-mountains slowly emitting chemical waste. I’m here for the life-sucking workweek, the Disneyfied game show of life in these United States. Here for the perfect wedding and the perfect children of this imperfect world. I’m here for the goddamn senselessness of it all.

“So when did you first experience these feelings?” Andrea says, lighting another cigarette off of mine (hers).

“Feelings?” I say. “What are those?” and we laugh over that. And order more coffee.

For a blind date, this is going amazingly well. Our lists of famous people we’d like to eliminate match almost perfectly.

It turns out we both have The Weather Channel wall calendars at home, this being the only sort of TV we can stand.

What does Phoebe’s affair with Roger have in drama that a F4 tornado does not?

What it comes down to is not love, but a desire to blow shit up.

We have both brought a secret pill for the other to take.

As directed.

We curl the pills into each other’s hands and take them unseen with water.

And smile.

In Death We Trust.

Outside we trade cars and guns.

Tonight we are going places.