BRIDGET BROWN EYES

I knew Bridget Brown Eyes. She was different people. She was a paternal orphan. She studied organic chemistry. She worked at Tower Records. She got a bikini wax. She never thought, I am so unappreciated. She was secretly hated by her girlfriends. She needed no medications. She respected secrets. On social media sites, she described herself as a Neoplatonist, but it was a private joke. She didn’t care what it meant. She was, again, a scientist. She was a compensated volunteer for a psychological study on campus. One of her professors called psychology a “pseudoscience” and she thought about it for a while. She liked easy money. She was, again, an orphan.

We went on two dates. We hated each other over dinner on the first. It was a Belgian restaurant, for fuck’s sake, and after four Chimays, the conversation felt like it might turn to violence. I paid.

We agreed to another date because, if we could get around each other’s awful personalities, we would have liked to sleep together. On the second date, she suggested a film about Francis Bacon, which was full of viscera and artsy misery. I said, “What in the world was that about?” She said, “I was trying to be nice.”

Our blind lust could not muster the energy for a third date, but there is an epilogue. I knew Rosie Red Eyes. This odd gift?—It was sad all around. I said, yeah, no.

Still, I think of Bridget Brown Eyes fondly. Our loathing for each other was so instant, so instinctual, so genetic, that there must be a deep, primeval history between us. She’s a professor now, and that class humiliated me as an undergrad. But I can see the ancient battlefields where we have met. The windswept savannas. The lentic, sexy depths.

ROSIE RED EYES

I knew Rosie Red Eyes. She exploited the vulnerabilities of virtual machines. She made big beats on Pro Tools for dance floors in Berlin. She never went to Berlin. She named her father “Cotton Balls” in her phone. She had no career. She beat skin cancer while enrolled in Obamacare. She understood cryptocurrencies, but did not have access to capital. She thought she was more interesting than she was, despite all of this. She had advanced gingivitis and bad breath. She believed her purpose with a capital P was to collect data for a self-organizing cosmos. We went on two dates.

On the first date, she placed a digital recorder on the table, but didn’t explain until I asked, something about her “brain distortion.” The restaurant was loud. I told her I choreographed firework shows for a living—not a true statement at all. She said that she believed she was married. I continued to lie about my hobbies and romantic history. The kitchen must have used peanut oil, because here comes my vomitous allergies, so I left before the entrees. My throat swells and I break out in hives. The restaurant was called The Uncanny Valley.

On the second date—I apologized, she apologized— she prepared dinner at her apartment. She said, “I don’t find you threatening at all. Please come over.” On the kitchen counter, there was one tomato, two cloves of garlic, and three sprigs of basil. She made a simple pasta dish, but the nausea returned and I was gasping for breath.

We never went on a third date. It was the opposite of animal magnetism. Even her text messages made me dizzy. They said, “Where’d you go?” and “I get it.” But I also knew Suzy Sunflower Eyes—this is all one event.

Rosie Red Eyes’s eyes were red because at eleven she was possessed by those enemies from North of the World, Gog and Magog. Though exorcized in 1996, the effects of their diabolical influence do remain.