Indecision: A Novel - Softcover

Kunkel, Benjamin

 
9780812973754: Indecision: A Novel
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0812973755 ISBN 13: 9780812973754
Verlag: Random House Publishing Group, 2006

Inhaltsangabe

Dwight B. Wilmerding is only twenty-eight, but he’s having a midlife crisis. He lives a dissolute existence in a tiny apartment with three (sometimes four) slacker roommates, holds a mind-numbing job at the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, and has a chronic inability to make up his mind. Encouraged by one of his roommates to try an experimental drug meant to banish indecision, Dwight jumps at the chance (not without some vacillation about the hazards of jumping) and swallows the first fateful pill. And when all at once he is “pfired” by Pfizer and invited to a rendezvous in exotic Ecuador with the girl of his long-ago prep-school dreams, he finds himself on the brink of a new life. The trouble–well, one of the troubles–is that Dwight can’t decide if the pills are working. Deep in the jungles of the Amazon, in the foreign country of a changed outlook, his would-be romantic escape becomes a hilarious journey into unbidden responsibility and unwelcome knowledge–and an unexpected raison d’être.

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Benjamin Kunkel grew up in Colorado. He has written for Dissent, The Nation, and the The New York Review of Books, and is a founding editor of n+1 magazine.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

ONE


A week before Quito I was sitting up in bed in New York, the edges of my awareness lapped at by traffic. I was sitting there with one hand holding open the book I was reading, and the other hand placed above the head of sleeping Vaneetha. There I was, pinned in space and time like a specimen in a box.

Vaneetha had turned away and slid down the bed so that nothing of her was visible except for the dark disheveled Vaneethian hair from which the lamplight was extracting all these twisting strings of a greenish iridescence. I wouldn’t have figured that even the darkest hair could react to light in this way, and the discovery blinked in my mind as just the smallest, quietest symbol of the multiple discoveries that could still be made between us if we–unless it was mostly me–weren’t so ambivalent about making them.

Once a week had become more like two times, and on our nights together I was usually awake like this for an hour or so while Vaneetha slept and breathed beside me. Sometimes she’d twitch like a dreaming dog, and in part due to my intense feeling for dogs, shared by my entire family, this would induce a shiver of tenderness in me. Yet exactly because I experienced this tenderness I wondered if I shouldn’t stop showing it when we were both awake. It could lead to us feeling, harmfully, that we were together. And as our relationship was predicated on not wanting to be in a relationship yet, that seemed unlike the best idea. We were both in agreement that contemporary courtship was far too accelerated these days. That was how Vaneetha explained why she’d had so few partners, and how I explained why I’d had seventeen or more. Nevertheless it eventually became up-in-the-air and unspoken whether we were sleeping together brother-sister style and mostly refraining from outright sex except when drunk because a) we weren’t courting each other or
b) we were, only slowly, just as these things should be done and never are.

In any case it often seemed at night that I would make a better dog owner than boyfriend. It wasn’t apparent to me how best to treat Vaneetha, each woman being so different. Whereas every dog, in spite of the really incredible variety of the species, required more or less the same regimen of food and water, walks and affectionate pats on the head. However in the city it actually exacted a lot less responsibility to have a girlfriend than a dog. And I really wanted one or the other, since like any person, or dog, I too craved affection. Hmn.

It was almost a type of peace to arrive each night at the same mental impasse. Plus I felt at home in the quiet, like a local. I was sensitive and weirdly sympathetic to that moment when the refrigerator kicked in and began to hum. Then the groans of a garbage truck would as much confirm as interrupt the hush. And there was the bonus sensation of authority I got as the last one up, the presiding mind.

So I would return to certain issues like hands to a notch on the clock. It would always dawn on me, late at night, that life is made of days–and your life isn’t likely to pick up whatever your days pass by. Granted, this was really a postmortem analysis of the given day, carried out when it was already yesterday or tomorrow, depending on point of view. If it was one of the nights that Ford (roommate one) and his girlfriend Kat were spending downtown with us, they would have finished giving one another the business to the accompaniment of frightened bedsprings.

And if it was past two then Sanchez (roommate two) would have gotten up out of his humid sleep to shut off the TV he’d equipped with a hot cable box transmitting pirated pay-per-view sporting events, feature films, and porn in an endless jostling stream. And Dan (roommate three) might or might not be around, since more and more he moved very quietly through the world, subsisting on snacks and growing thin and spiritual and haunted-looking, and only occasionally briefing us between classes and lab at NYU med school on what he was learning there. Lately he’d expressed the opinion that general uremia must be the least painful way to go in the end, and had assured me and Sanch that there was little to no scientific evidence linking coffee, even my six cups daily, with cancer.

Sanch said, “Yeah man fucking Hugo Chávez drinks sixteen espressos a day. And that’s after his staff weaned him down from twenty-four.”

“Amazing!” I was really impressed with this man. “Who is Hugo Chávez?”

“He’s, like, a revolutionary.”

“Sounds like it,” I said.

Sometimes Dan could be found in his room poring over a textbook while listening through his headphones to terrifying music by Austro-Hungarian composers. But his whereabouts were erratic, or I couldn’t do the algorithm, and anyway he stayed with us only due to low rent. It wouldn’t have been so low if the walls to our rooms had gone all the way up to the ceiling. Instead we lived in pasteboard cubicles and weird dorm-style intimacy–which kind of enforced an obscurish connection between my home life and my days at Pfizer, where the cubicle was also the unit.

Anyway Ford, Sanch, Dan, me–that was Chambers St., and was going to be for five more weeks, until our lease ran out. Other friends lived scattered around the city in ones and twos, and this had allowed us four to provide, in the welcoming squalor of our living room, a kind of community center for the school-days diasporae. Poker was played, friends were entertained, TV got watched and color-commentated. Out of everybody we knew our immaturity was best-preserved, we dressed worst and succeeded least professionally–and at times I could get into feeling that for the old crowd to set foot on the scarred linoleum of our kitchen must be like entering this circling, slow eddy in the otherwise one-way flow of time. Outside was the streaming traffic, the money bazaar, the trash-distributing winds with their careerist velocities. And here inside Chambers St. was this cozy set of underachievers. We even had a fireplace, though it didn’t work, and housed the stereo instead. At times I gained control of the remote, and the drowned-sounding post-human electronica that was our usual aural wallpaper, making me feel like words might not apply to our condition, and freaking me out if I got stoned, was replaced by the bright fine stylings of the Grateful Dead, just as if Jerry’d never died.

But Jerry had died. And soon our lease would be up! And so would I end and die too! I tried not to be reminded of the eternal endingness of everything by Ground Zero down the street. I really preferred for the reminder to come, more gently, from philosopher Otto Knittel. In the months before Ecuador I was all about The Uses of Freedom–or Der Gebrauch der Freiheit if you’re German. Late at night I would look at the words of this very deathocentric book, and on that Saturday night with Vaneetha (which had so far failed to distinguish itself from many of the Saturday nights preceding it) I was looking again at the words, with one eye open and the other shut since I’d taken out my contacts and otherwise couldn’t focus on the lines. “Procrastination is our substitute for immortality,” went the first half of the sentence I was rereading; “we behave as if we have no shortage of time.” I read the book at maybe two pages an hour.

Yet I felt more slow than stupid, and suspected it had always been thus with me. Maybe my slow temporal metabolism wasn’t equipped for the efficient digestion of modern–or postmodern–life, as it had apparently already been for some time. Sometimes I felt like I’d never catch up with even the...

„Über diesen Titel“ kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Verlag
Random House Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2006
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0812973755
ISBN 13 
9780812973754
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
256
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Penguin Random House Verlagsgruppe GmbH
kundenservice@penguinrandomhouse.de

Neumarkter Straße 28
München
Bayern
81673
Deutschland