Tofu
One in a series of bedtime stories told to K.
There was once a man who went on a long flight into space. He had no reason for doing this, other than that he was bored, and sadly he was even more bored in space, which consists mainly of nothing.
One day he noticed a nice little planet and decided to get out and stretch his legs. A group of half-naked human-like creatures ran through the fields eating nuts and berries and cavorting like they were at a sixties rock festival.
Some of the women were cute, and he figured he might see some action, given that he was an interstellar traveler with a slick-looking space ship. However, as he approached the group, he noticed that the women all smelled like left-over tofu buried for months in the back of a refrigerator.
Last Request
For several months I’ve been badgering K about something I need her to do when I’m dead. It’s my last request – my only request, post-death – and it’s simple: If there’s a memorial for me, I want everyone who speaks to say at least one significant thing they couldn’t stand about me. (I actually wrote about this nine and half years ago.)
I’ve been hounding K about this because I’m certain that if she doesn’t enforce the rule, my friends will either ignore it or turn it into a running gag, as if to collectively say, “Fuck him, he’s dead and he was a controlling fucker anyway.”
Each time I bring it up, K claims that she won’t let this happen, except she says it in the sort of voice one uses with an impossible child, someone you’ll say anything to in order to get him to leave you alone.
I did leave her alone for a time, but then we spent New Year’s weekend in Connecticut with three close friends, and over breakfast on the last day I described the problem to the group. In short order my request was cast as an attempt to control what gets said at an event which, while it would be about me, wouldn’t actually be for me since I would be dead. K nodded the whole time.
I chose to mention it at this breakfast in large part because Andrew was there, and I long ago pegged him as a likely saboteur. However he surprised me by responding in a way that only someone who knows my heart ever could.
“I don’t think it’s a big deal,” he said. “It’s a minimal ask that challenges folks to skip the bullshit. You’re asking to be remembered.”
It was Lucy, though, who had the best line: “Can we start now?”
Helicopter
One in a series of bedtime stories told to K.
There once was a helicopter who was different from all the other helicopters. Unlike them, he wasn’t conscious when he was on.
The moment the other helicopters were turned on, it was as though they would wake from hibernation, from oblivion. And then when they were turned off, they would enter a state of zero consciousness, as though they were dead.
But this particular helicopter had no awareness of being turned on, no awareness of his propellers spinning, of rising through the air and flying over the city. Instead he would come to life at the moment he was turned off.
So he would be on top of a particular building for a long time, and then someone would climb inside him and suddenly everything would go blank, and then, in what seemed like the next moment, he would be in a completely different place, with no idea how he had gotten there. Because of course he had no way of knowing that he was a helicopter, and that he could fly, and that he did fly, and that this was how he had come to be where he was.