The couch pillows were reproducing at an alarming rate. There were tens, dozens, now. It would only be a matter of time until Josh himself was edged off the couch completely, out of the condo, out of the city. He would wash up somewhere awful, like Long Island, and, when he was gone, it would just be the roommate, Ritz, and Julie. And those fucking pillows. And they’d do something, some mysterious sex thing that Josh could barely imagine —although he tried and tried.
Only an inch of temporary walling separated Josh and Julie’s “marital” bed from the roommate, Ritz, and given Ritz’s ambitious sexual activities, the barricade was destined to fail at any point. The couple’s own sex life had wilted in inverse proportion to the activities next door, as if it their bedroom was a sapling competing for a share of limited light. Julie started wearing flannel pajamas and reading books in bed, like wives do in movies. Most of their conversations centered around political issues neither of them understood, women chopping off their boobs and calling themselves men, male organs made of silicone found in the dishwasher. “Jesus, what’s happening over there,” Josh said. “Do you think she’ll move in with this one?”
“She’s just using her to get back at Tanya,” Julie said. “Although, honestly, I think she’s still in love with Kristy.”
“The Asian?”
“No, that’s Connie. Josh? Don’t start masturbating until I’m actually asleep. It takes me longer than ten minutes to fall asleep.” Seconds later, a hand pulled Josh’s hand under the covers and rubbed it against the outside of Julie’s underwear. Julie moved Josh’s fingers in a sort of circle. He wasn’t sure what he was supposed to do and moved the underwear to the side, slipped a finger under.
“Huh,” she said, in an inscrutable tone.
He continued the pattern but felt no progress. Then the pattern had gotten confused and was counterclockwise. He went from top to bottom, lingering and fumbling at the top. “Never mind,” Julie said. “Goodnight.” She was snoring in what seemed like seconds.
Josh retired to the office to watch amateur porn online, a woman named Bella who was everything his girlfriend was not: curvy, vocal, with pendulous and hideous bouncing breasts which commentators often referred to as watermelons or other food items. “Way to bounce those udders,” said a man whose photo was a thumbnail of a giant, erect penis. “You make me come every time,” commented another dick photo. Recently, Bella had started fucking black men while her husband filmed. Josh did not enjoy the black men. Their butts were bubbly, almost feminine. Their pumping motions were obvious and repetitive.
In the morning, Josh and his underachieving penis rode the train uptown do something incredibly boring involving Excel spreadsheets. He wasted his lunch break on a doctor’s appointment. Every three months, he went to a psychiatrist for a communicable disease he had caught from attending an arts college. “Did you bring your mood chart?” the doctor said.
“No. I still think those are stupid.”
On his walk over, two avenues, Josh had rehearsed his conversation with the doctor, explaining what had become of his life, the stress of living as a near cuckold with a spoiled rich girlfriend and her itinerant, sexually overachieving friend. How the meds, in addition to the estrogen, were shrinking his dick, how his dick might disappear if he was forced to eat one more soy product. They increase estrogen, right? Was that possibly a side effect of one of the medications? Was the lack of tone in his muscles, the fat in his middle-section woman-ish? The Roommate Ritz had tried to convince him that women were the default gender, that everyone had started as one. Perhaps he was turning back.
Sitting on the neutral couch in front of the neutral, Jewish doctor upon whose coffee table sat a wooden back massage device shaped like a moose, obviously a gift from a troubled patient, Josh sighed and asked for a sleeping pill that wouldn’t give him such a hangover. “If not,” Josh said, “I’ll stick with weed.”
Josh dutifully added the next appointment to his iPhone calendar, took the elevator to the roof, and didn’t jump.
+++