There's Something I Want You to Do

He didn’t know her after all, he decided. He lay awake staring at the ceiling while Sarah slept beside him. They had everything except intimacy. Maybe you could get along without that. She seemed to think so. All the same, he believed she loved him somehow. Earlier that day, she had called him up at work and in a breathless voice told him that she had made the greatest discovery — no one had thought of it before, but now she had. “Think of a dog,” she said. “Okay, now suppose you have a really smart dog. Let’s say you have a border collie. Dogs don’t get much smarter than that, do they? I don’t think so. A border collie can do anything a dog can do. They can herd sheep, they can recognize words, they can save children from storm drains during flood season. But suppose you try to explain the planet Mars to a border collie. The dog is smart, all right, but nothing in the dog brain can accommodate the idea of Mars, can it? No. The dog can never ever understand that there’s a planet beyond ours called Mars. Mars will never register in its cranium. A dog can’t think a single thought about Mars.” She waited for this aperçu to sink in. “It’s not the dog’s fault. Okay, so now suppose that we have limitations on our brains, like the limitation on a dog brain. And you know what we can’t get, ever?”

“I don’t know,” Benny said at his drawing desk, blueprints spread out in front of him.

“Exactly,” Sarah said with triumph. “You don’t know. And you never will. But here’s what I believe: I believe that because of the way we’re all wired up, we’ll never know God, and that’s just for starters. Something is out there, but we’ll never have any concept of what it is. All we have are these dumb fairy tales about crucified guys with beards and dead people coming alive again and the book sealed with seven seals. Also, by the way, we’ll never know the actual structure of the universe. And there’s something else we’ll never know. Or, at least, you’ll never know it. And I’ll never know it.”

“What’s that?” Benny asked.

“You’ll never know me.” Sarah laughed. “And I’ll never know you.”

Benny waited, his heart thumping in his chest, in a state of mind that he would describe as “desolate” the next time he saw Elijah, even though Elijah would try to shake him out of it by calling it a girl-word that only girls would use.

“Is that so bad?” she asked. “I don’t think that’s so bad!” She paused, and when Benny said nothing, she said, “I’ve hurt your feelings, haven’t I?” Her voice sounded heartbreakingly cheerful. “We’re all planets,” she said, “and we’re all covered with clouds, Benny, which, in my opinion, in my dog brain, is what liberates us.”

To Benny, she didn’t sound saved, but just then the sun emerged from behind a tree outside his office window, and he remembered to say, “Sarah, I love you, and I have to go.”

—

On architectural paper he drew a Prairie-style house for her, then discarded it. (Too dark.) Then he tried out a post-Bauhaus horizontal-and-vertical glass house in the Philip Johnson style, but the windows made it too exposed to the gaze of the outdoors. She wouldn’t like that. He tried a monumental bunker that would call for poured concrete. How cold it seemed! Finally he drew a little A-frame cabin in the woods beside a lake, though he wondered whether such a home might be too isolated for her.

No one had ever asked him to design a house in which a human being might be happy. It was an architectural koan, he decided, meant to tie him into a comical knot.

—

On the way to the Longfellow Comedy Club, one month later, with Benny driving the car, Sarah showed no trace of jumpiness or excitement. She sat quietly settled on the passenger side. Benny didn’t know what the protocols were about talking to your girlfriend on the way to her comedy set, so he didn’t say much, worrying that if he did speak up, he would give away the miasmic dread that had gradually settled itself over him. “You look great,” he told her glumly, and she nodded. She had girled herself up and had applied a shellac of glamour: she’d worn her best punk T-shirt and jeans, her scuffed saddle shoes, and her red hair had been sprayed into a stylish disorder. Over the hair she wore a battered attitude hat tinted green like some ghastly Irish shrub. “Are you nervous?”

“Nervous? No.” She was texting someone on her phone and didn’t look up.

“I’d be nervous.”

“Yes, you would be.” She nodded, agreeing with herself. Autumn had arrived, and the streets swirled with fallen leaves, some of which stuck to the windshield. Before long, he thought, the snow will be in the air.

“The snow will be in the air soon,” Sarah said, giving voice to his thoughts in that eerie way she sometimes had.

“Remind me of when your set begins,” he said, although he already knew.

“Ten. By the way, Benny, if I mention you, don’t take it personally, okay?”

“Okay.”

“It’s just a comedy act.”

“Right.”

“Remember that.”

—