Jack Pendarvis

Blue Christmas

Note: The following is an excerpt from the novel Awesome. The narrator is a giant in the Paul Bunyan mode. He seems to have a few superhuman abilities. He is on a scavenger hunt of some import. He piles each item that he finds into the bed of his legendary wagon, “Ol’ Tuffy.” At this point in the story, he has become distracted by a dalliance with a normal-sized psychiatrist named Dottie Flambeau.

Dottie set up a kind of clinic where I breathed on people’s backs and gave them orgasms. Each person was observed to exhibit some kind of material improvement.

Gertrude sang in a lovely contralto.

Annabel became an expert in medieval Russian iconography.

Haley displayed a knack for ventriloquism bordering on the uncanny.

David’s cholesterol was lowered by thirty-two points.

Betty spoke perfect Portuguese.

Jon produced a series of scathing political cartoons.

Kim excelled in ballroom dancing.

Angel Sue took up the timbales.

Michelle could tell what animals were thinking.

Phillip made a jukebox play by striking it with the palm of his hand.

Dottie took copious notes on my technique, although she refused to undergo a second orgasm, which she felt might subvert her scientific objectivity. She wrote up her findings in a well-received article entitled “Harnessing the Psychic Power of the Orgasm Through Non-Tactile Pineal Massage,” published in the winter issue of Labia: The Johns Hopkins Journal of Sexiness.

In the evening, after a day of hard work at the clinic, Dottie Flambeau and I would return to her comfortable home and have dinner with her husband Charlie, who was very dull in a nice way. Often I would remark to him, You know, Charlie, it’s a real blessing to be like you.

Charlie, at great expense to himself, and as a birthday gift to his wife, had had the roof of their home removed by a construction crew so that Dottie and I could feel closer to one another and share our secrets and build our relationship through long conversations, and so I could watch her as she slept or took a bath.

I sat in their backyard, on the crushed remains of Charlie’s tool shed, where he had formerly liked to go tinker with lawn mowers. When it stormed I hunkered over the little family and kept them dry. In fact, I tended to loom at all times and it made Charlie adorably self-conscious. Many a time as he sat on the toilet I would explain to him how to lighten up and enjoy what life offered.

Charlie worked on an oilrig and was gone a lot. Even when at home he retired early, leaving Dottie and myself to cozy up on the couch. Extending my index and middle fingers as if they were legs, I would cause my right hand to “sit” on the couch in the posture of a person. Sometimes I would “cross” my “legs” in a cute manner, which was always a big hit. Then there was the time Dottie tried to manicure my nails with a power sander and Charlie came in and took over because it was “man’s work.” Oh, Charlie. How simpleminded you were, and I mean that in an awesome way. Dottie had quite a time pretending my hand was a lover against whom she could rub her socked feet in an absentminded way as we watched hour after hour of Project Runway. Sometimes I stuck out my thumb and she nestled in the whorl of my fingerprint.

I recall one night in particular when we were sated, full of biscuits, high-end boutique-style root beer, and pea soup, and Charlie was snoring quite loudly in the other room (I could look down and see him there all in a tangle of sheets) and I was smoking an antique pipe with a very long stem and wearing a monocle for laughs and Dottie was drinking rosehip tea of exquisite quality and Dottie’s feet were rubbing my finger a mile a minute and a fire snapped its bright fingers at us from the fireplace and the fish were doing their thing in the fish tank, which put the most quizzical expression on the new puppy’s face.

Maybe this is what it’s all about, I said. Not just running around finding stuff and piling it in my wagon.

Maybe you’re right at that, said Dottie.

I must admit that I sank into a kind of routine with Dottie Flambeau and good old Charlie, the salt of the earth. I felt bad about sitting on his tool shed, so I showed him how to pursue a new hobby by setting up an apiary in the capacious bed of Ol’ Tuffy. He was allergic to bees and spent a year hovering near death but everything turned out all right and later I ribbed him about it.

Charlie, why didn’t you mention you were allergic to bees?

I thought an apiary is where you kept apes, he said.

Oh, Charlie, you wonderful hick.

*

The time came for another round of tests on Dottie’s subjects, and another set of orgasms. The results were not encouraging.

Haley had double vision.

Annabel developed Tourette’s syndrome.

Gertrude hallucinated all the time.

Philip experienced bedwetting and significant memory loss.

Michelle complained of feminine itching.

Angel Sue sat in the empty bathtub and nicked herself repeatedly with a box cutter.

Kim displayed signs of pyromania.

Jon suffered from night terrors.

Betty became cynical.

David wept blood and later died.

This called into question some of the findings in Dottie’s original article, which put her in academic disrepute.

And yet our subjects craved more. They were having trouble with their marriages and serious relationships. Normal human orgasms weren’t good enough for them anymore.

Can’t you see where this is heading? I asked. See, you got greedy. You lost sight of what was really important, like your loved ones, for example, not some magic orgasm that made you feel better than you ever felt in your life. The magic orgasm is inside your hearts, it’s whatever makes you special, it’s whatever you want it to be.

That blew their freaking minds. They were like, Thanks, you’re the best psychiatrist in the world.

Everybody went home to give it one last shot with their significant others. I watched them go with a certain expression on my face.

*

That night was a somber one in the Flambeau household. I barely picked at my crawfish etoufee. Charlie had made dinner, and he was ever so proud. He had even hired one of his construction worker friends to deliver it to my mouth in the scoop of a bulldozer. But I demurred.

What’s the matter, don’t you like it?

It’s fine, Charlie. I guess I just don’t have much of an appetite.

But it’s Christmas Eve, it is, guv’nuh. (Charlie always tried to lighten tough moments by pretending to be a Cockney foundling.)

I’ve been here almost six years, Charlie. I never said I could stay forever. What I said about orgasms today has really got me reevaluating my situation.

Charlie’s lip began to tremble. He was a weak man, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Charlie was the kind of guy who practically begged somebody to come along and make free and easy with his wife. It was his slouched demeanor, and the way his gut poked out in mournful resignation. And the pockmarks.

Meanwhile Dottie affected a crisp stoicism. Even the puppy, which by now had grown into a dog, displayed anthropomorphic sadness, tilting his head this way and that. I knew we were just ascribing human emotions to him, what the literary crowd call the pathetic fallacy, but gosh it was a solemn night, with the blue lights twinkling on the tree.

I’ll have a blue Christmas without you, guv’nuh, said Charlie, and we all burst into tears, including the dog, the bulldozer operator and, it seemed, the fish in the aquarium. In the garbage pail, the black eyes of the crawfish heads appeared to glisten with emotion.