Fiction: The Weirdo

When the Weirdo approaches you, just act cool. What’s cool to the Weirdo is you act just as weird while pretending it’s all normal.

Nobody can remember the first time they encountered the Weirdo. Not exactly. They can approximate the moment all the rules changed. Questions started coming. Not simple ones like, How was your day? What did you learn at school? What movie should we watch? No, more like, What are you doing with your life? Are you married yet? When do you guys plan on having children?

Mirna didn’t want children. Neither did I. We got that out of the way, right away. On our first date, sitting on a bistro patio, Mirna started a game where we guessed where passersby were going or where they had been.

“She’s a no-nonsense businesswoman on her way to cardio kickboxing.”

“Oh that guy’s definitely a serial killer stalking her.”

“He’s got no idea he’s messing with a kickboxer.”

We dated for two years, then I proposed. I loved her. Still do. But I often wonder if I actually wanted to marry her.

Or did the Weirdo make me do it.

The Weirdo cornered me at parties and asked me when I was going to marry her. I didn’t freak out. I mirrored the Weirdo’s energy. Smiling, touching, and then somber reflection when they shifted into more serious advice about their own marriage and how they made it work.

The Weirdo isn’t one person. It’s an entity. One that takes the form of someone you know so that it can get close and infect you with its insidious brand of normalcy. Which isn’t normal at all. Not to you.

The Weirdo showed up as some old uncle who vanished after that night and didn’t resurface until the wedding, then disappeared for good. The Weirdo was jubilant, splashing wine across the table, telling me, “Don’t let go of this one, she’s a keeper.”

I didn’t plan on letting her go. I also didn’t plan on conducting my love life like a warden. But the Weirdo makes you think weird things.

After the wedding, Mirna and I enjoyed marital bliss for about six months. Then one day at Target, she disappeared on me. I found her lingering near the strollers. She tried to play it off, but the next morning it happened.

“I want to have a baby.”

The Weirdo got to her.

I had made my coffee too strong that morning. It tasted like mud, but I was able to ignore that about it. Then I found out my wife was infected by the Weirdo and the mud became battery acid. “Say what now?”

“Oh, come on, don’t you think I’d be a great mother?” Classic Weirdo tactic. Redirect the focus. Make me the Weird One. As if we hadn’t been operating under the agreed upon terms of not having children since we first met. Our second date wouldn’t have happened if we hadn’t aligned on a very small number of non-negotiables. Not Republican. But also not vegetarian. And no kids.

The vegetarian thing had been more hers, but it sounded good. Mirna’s thing was that it limited where we could eat and making dinner for each other would become a constant compromise. I couldn’t argue with that. But now I wondered if having kids was the same for her, something that sounded good at the time, but not something she necessarily had a problem with. I remembered her being as emphatic about it as the vegetarian thing.

This is how the Weirdo gets inside you.

“Because I think you’d be a good father.”

That wasn’t the argument. I wasn’t foregoing procreation because I was worried I’d suck at it. Though, yes, I guess I had the same fears as every other father in the history of siring. I was doing it first and foremost because there were just too many people on the planet. I also had my artistic ambitions. I was just getting into galleries. Mirna was great about all the alone time I needed to paint, but having a kid would change that. And we didn’t want to struggle financially, and we wanted to travel as much as possible.

“But we’ve barely traveled anywhere. Not since our honeymoon. You’re always painting on the weekends.”

After Tika was born, I painted less. But I still painted. We didn’t travel, but Mirna made collages of all the places we’d take Tika. It sounded expensive, and I wouldn’t be having a lot of sex on these vacations I couldn’t afford.

But the kid was solid. Her big dough eyes hit me with a different kind of serotonin. I sounded like every other dad I’d ever tuned out, but I was doing it ironically. I was becoming more proud of her than my paintings and it took zero talent to create her.

That was weird.

I normally painted people I met around Paterson. I’d paint them doing an obvious pose. Around them, I’d paint a completely different scene, like a pub in full swing or construction workers going about their job or the corner of Lou’s bodega with commuters walking by. My subject posing in the middle of it all and nobody paying attention. It had become my thing and I sold a few for a good chunk of change.

Then one day I painted a cottage in a meadow during the golden hour. Just loosening up, trying something new. Gauzy light hit the pastels and created a sort of banal serenity, which lulled me into a warm haze. I imagined spa music playing gently in the background. Then the pitch black window I’d painted on the cottage captured me and I couldn’t pull away. It was sucking me in, like a black hole. The gentle spa music distorted into a low bass drone. My mind emptied of all thought.

Tika cried somewhere in our apartment and snapped me out of it. I zoomed out and saw what I’d done. I had painted a Thomas Kinkade scene.

That’ll spook the shit out of anyone.

So I took a long walk.

I stopped at Charlie’s for a pint. Manny behind the bar didn’t recognize me at first.

“I thought you moved away or something.”

“Had a kid.”

“Say no more,” he said, and poured a shot of bourbon on the house to go with my beer.

I talked with a few regulars and had another. It was the same as with Manny, they didn’t recognize me at first. Then they slowly warmed up to me. Still, there was an uneasy feeling. None of the exchanges felt real. They were just shining me on.

Except for a busker named Gus who played our wedding. We got to talking about music and I made a conscious decision not to bring up Tika. Then Gus mentioned a girl he was seeing. Things were getting serious and he seemed genuinely happy. I asked a question that was more of a reflex than a conscious desire to know, “So when are you gonna pop the question?” Gus laughed and looked for an exit. “Marriage and kids are the best thing that ever happened to me…”

I felt it before I finished talking, that black hole tugging me into its gravity. I fixed on a shadowy corner over Gus’s shoulder. The din of the crowd muffled and distorted into a drone—

Someone punched me in the arm.

“Why are you staring at the wall?”

It was Juno. She had posed for me like a statue of Aphrodite, sitting on her haunches, arranging her hair, on a landscaped median dividing Market Street. I smiled and shook off the black hole’s gravity. Wondered where Gus went or how long I’d been standing there. Before I had to answer her question, the hamster in her brain jumped wheels—

“Oh my God, I heard I sold. Am I like in some rich dude’s condo now?”

Juno squealed when I said it was in a rich woman’s brownstone. She asked what I was working on. I told her about the cottage during golden hour.

“What, like a Thomas Kinkade?”

She laughed and gave me a playful push. Then shrank when I didn’t laugh back. I was too busy dying inside. I tried to save the conversation by talking about my daughter. How amazing it was raising her. How special it was. Juno was cool about it. A little too cool. Then she politely excused herself to the bathroom. It reminded me of my own rules for engaging with the Weirdo.

When the Weirdo approaches you, just act cool. What’s cool to the Weirdo is you act just as weird while pretending it’s all normal.

The ground shifted underneath me and I gripped the bar. Nobody seemed to notice. Too much beer, they’d say, if they did. But that wasn’t it.

I looked into the mirror behind the bar and saw some sad bastard who made me feel better about myself. The desperate smile. The distant panic in the eyes. The cardigan.

Same cardigan as me.

Oh shit.

When did I start wearing cardigans? I tilted my head. The stranger tilted its head.

There I was.

The Weirdo.