OK, look even if I could get over the fact that my girlfriend is her own fucking greenhouse, there’s something else I haven’t mentioned yet: I think she uses the flowers as messages. They’re silent but packed with meaning—I’m sure of that.

For example, today is the day after Valentine’s Day. To mark the occasion, I tried to stretch my gift-giving skills a little. Besides not being into store-bought flowers, my girlfriend is allergic to chocolate, so I bought her a little teak gift box. She likes things made out of wood and thankfully, she doesn’t try to make her own. In the box, I put a story I wrote for her. It’s not great. But I wanted to give her something personal, something I made. The story is about a picture of a woman and about the photographer who took it even though for some reason, he can’t remember who the woman is or when he took her photo. He knows he has a connection to her, but that’s it. So he wakes up every morning hoping that he will one day remember who the woman is. The story is a metaphor for relationships. You’re with someone but you can’t know her—not really. But still you feel there’s a connection, so you spend your life waiting and hoping that you will know her one day. I don’t know. Maybe I’m over thinking it, which I’ve been known to do from time to time.

Which leads me back to my flower-making girlfriend.

Yesterday, she woke up and gave me the look. It’s this focused expression—almost like pain except it isn’t. She was about to bloom or spout or hatch a flower—I’m not sure which verb she likes best. I thought it was going to be a sunflower. Lately, sunflowers have been a favorite of hers. I like sunflowers and hers are especially big and yellow, which is nice. I’ll say this for her, she’s a craftswoman.

She told me once that she wanted to come up with something new. Something you couldn’t find in nature. She’s a creative, so it’s natural that she’s going to want to do her own thing eventually. But she didn’t mention it again, and I forgot about her comment until yesterday. I got up early right when she started hatching or sprouting and was wrapping her present when at some point, I smelled something so awful I thought I’d stepped in shit except that I was barefoot and hadn’t been outside yet. It wasn’t just putrid. It wasn’t just awful. It came in wave after wave, stubborn and…well, I thought I was going to puke to be honest. I looked around the kitchen. I thought something went off. Then I looked in the bathroom, thinking the sewage line backed up. But there was nothing wrong in the house. It was my girlfriend and her original flower from hell.

She walked up to me, plucked the thing out of her mouth like she always does, and then, with a little Ta-Dah, she put the flower in my hand and went to shower. She didn’t say anything else. She didn’t ask me my opinion, which I’m glad for. After she got dressed, we had breakfast—a very quiet breakfast. Then I gave her my story and the little box and she smiled, kissed me and went to work. That was it. That was our Valentine’s Day morning.

Last night, she didn’t come home. She said she had go see her sister—I think her sister’s boyfriend broke things off or something. I was a little distracted when she called, so I’m hazy on the details. To be honest, I was still looking at her ugly flower and wondering what I was going to do with it. I wanted to throw it away, but that’s kind of rude. I decided to put it outside on the back stoop, but even so, the smell is strong.

Look, if it was just a bad present, that’d be ok. Who knows? Maybe my girlfriend doesn’t really like my story and maybe she thinks the little teak box I gave her was useless. It’s pretty small now that I think of it. What can you do with a tiny teak box, anyway? But at least it doesn’t seem like a symbol for anything—other than a boyfriend’s lame attempt to be original. An ugly shit-smelling flower—that, on the other hand, has a lot of potential symbol power, and I can’t see how the symbol could be very good.

A flower is never just a flower, right? There’s a reason she gave it to me. There has to be.

His name was Lars, though his family was from the Philippines—a product of globalization. Her name was Julia; she was from Sweden, but her family was Jewish—a product of Jewishness. They met at a Starbucks on the Upper West Side. He was coming back from a shoot. She was stuck there because her flight was cancelled. They wouldn’t have met if things worked out as they were supposed to.  Their relationship, for lack of a better word, was a product of Hollywood.

Julia was a writer most days.  The day she met Lars, she should’ve been on her way to Los Angeles to talk to someone about selling a script she’d written. For his part, Lars, who wasn’t an actor as often he thought he should be, had just come off the set of a pilot that was going to go straight to the web. It told the story of an elite squad of border patrol agents with the twist that the border in question was not between countries but between dimensions—“Cosmic Illegals,” the show was called.  “Heady stuff,” was how Lars described it to his roommate earlier that morning.

After getting his skinny, tall latte that was not skinny, nor tall, he took the seat next to Julia and asked her if she and the star of the pilot were one and the same. He hadn’t worn his glasses to the shoot, but from what he could tell, they looked similar.

“You’re asking me if I am an actress?” Julia said, a little surprised to be pulled away from her Twittering. “Is that a line?”

“No. You just looked like an actress I worked with earlier today.”

“OK, so now you’re trying to impress me by the fact that you’re an actor?”

Lars blushed slightly, which made the brown of his skin glow, giving him what some might call, star power. “I was an extra on a pilot. Not really that impressive,” he managed through the glow.

Julia moved her water bottle and her three spent cups of espresso over and made room for Lars. “What was it about, the pilot?”

It was at this point that Lars used the word, “heady” for a second time that day though unlike when he used it earlier with his roommate, who probably knew little and was, by nature, disinterested in most things, Julia seemed smart and asked questions.  In fact, as Julia asked him about his heady experience, he wondered if he actually knew what the word meant.

Of course, he’d already committed himself, so he told her why he was there in front of her and not still on the shoot.

As it turned out, a supporting character, one of the star’s fellow border patrol officers, kept ruining a scene on purpose. In the show, the border patrol agents came up on a pile of dead “cosmic immigrants” in a field.  “Someone,” Lars explained, “was taking justice into his own hands and murdering them.” The scene was supposed to be simple enough. The star was supposed to look at the carnage with a mixture of disgust and sympathy and that was it.  The problem was that the woman who played the star’s second-in-command kept dropping to the ground and putting herself among the stack of bodies before the director yelled cut. “At the time, no one was sure why she kept doing this,” Lars told Julia. “But it came out later that the actress was Latina and she felt a kind of solidarity with the cosmic immigrants. She was fired on the spot, and we were all sent home with pay.”

“They just fired her? Just like that?” Julia asked with a kind of emphatic quality that made both her anger and accent obvious.”

“Where are you from?” Lars asked.

“Another dimension,” Julia joked when her phone rang.  “Sorry. I have to take this.” And with that, she started in on a phone conversation in a language that Lars could not understand but that he recognized immediately.  Julia was speaking Swedish. Lars had grown up hearing the language. His parents, raised in Manilla were both film buffs—lovers of Swedish cinema mainly. The language had always annoyed Lars. He didn’t know why, but the mixture of glottal harshness and cutesy sing-songy delivery bothered him, and it was all he could do not to get up and walk away from Julia, who aside from the whole Swedish thing, was attractive.

“Sorry about that,” Julia said after getting off the phone. “That was my papa. He’s worried.” Julia stopped talking, realizing that Lars was somewhere else. “What’s your name, by the way? I didn’t get that?”

When Lars told her his name, Julia let a beat pass as she looked at him carefully. “I hope you don’t mind me saying this, but you don’t really look like you belong to my tribe.”

“Just the first name. My last name is Trujillo.”

“Ah. But are you Latin?”

“Latino, I think, is the preferred nomenclature,” Lars said without trying to be ironic. “Latin is a language.”

“Ah,” Julia said a second time. “I told you I was from another dimension.”

“Right. Sweden. That is different,” Lars said, again not trying to be ironic.

At this, Julia bobbed her head, not being able to guess Lars’ relationship to her mother tongue.  Eventually, Lars started doing the same, but only because he felt awkward at having insulted a woman he didn’t know without her seeming to realize it. For a full minute, they bobbed along to the new song by Seal that was playing on the speaker and to each other.

“So what do you think will happen to the actress?” Julia asked. “Will she get work again?”

“I don’t know. I’m new to the Hollywood thing.”

“Hollywood doesn’t like heady stuff,” Julia said.

“No,” Lars answered, his head starting to bob again though less aggressively now that Norah Jones was playing, “then again, Hollywood is another dimension, so she might have a chance.”

the final page...for now

Matthew loved life. There were some hiccups early on, but as soon as his parents made enough money to buy him his film crew, things really couldn’t have gone better. Gabe, Masa, and Michael, his producer, director and DP respectively were amazing at what they did. They always seemed to catch Matthew at his best. They knew where to turn the cameras for best effect, when to angle the lighting to make Matthew seem like the good- looking hero he considered himself to be.

Of course, it was Mohammad, Matthew’s life-editor, who was most responsible for how Matthew’s story turned out day-to-day. No matter how good his crew was, there were always those times when the medium of film was just a little too honest for Matthew’s taste.  That’s when Mohammad had to do his magic.  Even when Matthew was distant with his kids or a bit selfish with Sharon, his first wife, he knew he could count on Mohammad to look for the best takes, and if no good takes existed on any given day, then Matthew knew Mohammad would splice in other scenes from his life when he wasn’t the bad guy.

So Matthew lived out his days with his crew at his side, happy and at peace until the day that it became clear that an ending was necessary. Mohammad, ever the editor, had been asking Matthew for years how he wanted to end his story—“just give me an idea, so I can start arcing the narrative in that direction,” Mohammad said countless times, but his pleas fell on deaf ears.  Matthew didn’t want to think of endings. He wanted everything to be open-ended. He’d always made Masa shoot him that way.  When, years before, Matthew’s first wife left him and asked for a divorce—a pretty final moment if there ever was one—Matthew made Masa cut all the footage he’d ever shot with Sharon and replace it with footage of Sarah, a smiling blond who liked the idea of being with someone who was rich enough to have his own life-crew. When Mohammad asked about the change-up, Matthew said that it was like an episode of Law & Order–his wives being like one of the ADA’s. “They come and go.  Who cares as long as someone is there to fill the position?”  The same was true of Matthew’s parents. When his mom died, Matthew had Mohammad cut the funeral stuff out and replace it with some footage showing Matthew at a séance speaking into a smoky mirror as if it were his mother. There were to be no endings in Matthew’s life-movie until, unfortunately, there had to be.

“Six months,” is what Dr. Song gave him—“give or take a few days,” the doctor said looking into the camera, all soap opera dramatic. Matthew turned on Michael and asked him leave, but Dr. Song told Matthew there was no way around this and that he should use the footage to set up a strong final scene. “You’ve lived an interesting life, so far,” Dr. Song said looking right into the camera.  “Why not end things in the same way?”

For his part, Matthew put on a brave face, but by the time he got home, he was contemplating suicide. In the end, he decided suicide was too sad a way to end his otherwise happy life, though. He thought he could let his disease take its course.  That was pretty tragic, too, and it sounded painful to boot.  But it was an honest, and honesty, Matthew thought, was good—at least he thought this until Michael pointed out that honesty didn’t always film well.

There had to be another way, Matthew told himself. An honest way but with drama mixed in, and it had to be something that didn’t take too much effort. After only a month of getting the news from Dr. Song, Matthew was already feeling light-headed, and then there was the nausea and the pot that helped him get through the nausea, all of which didn’t make an action-filled ending very believable.

Matthew spent the next month having meetings with his crew and having Masa draw up storyboard after storyboard, but nothing was right.  By the end of month two, Matthew couldn’t believe that he’d wasted so much time trying to build up to a final act worthy of his life story with nothing to show for it.

If this had happened earlier in Matthew’s life, he would’ve yelled, thrown fits and things. But the impending ending of his life-movie made Matthew softer, more generous.  In fact, by month three, he started thanking his crew publicly, which he’d never done before.

By month four, in moments of clarity between the hours of fevered hallucinations, he asked Michael’s camera how his crew had managed to live with him all that time? How did they manage to keep up the quality after all those years? Why didn’t they have their own crews?

On moth five, in quiet, well-lit moments, Matthew asked his crew about themselves, about their families and whether or not they were missed at home since they were always with him, always filming him. He realized it must have been difficult. His crew must have sacrificed so much. How was it, Matthew asked, that he’d never realized that before?

During his last month, he kept asking himself and the camera if he was a good man, and most times, waited to see if there was an answer. He kept repeating this question until he couldn’t.

The crew assumed the movie would end there, but then a twist to the plot occurred.  After hours of shivering silence, Matthew asked the camera and his still-smiling wife a different question: “Did you get the popcorn? Well did you,” he asked. And with that, Matthew’s life-movie was finally over.

Before the accident, before Henry saw the old man for the first time, if you would have asked him why he didn’t just run on the street or in one of the parks that are everywhere in town, he would’ve shrugged a bony shoulder and said he only felt like he was getting somewhere when running in circles. People who knew Henry knew he liked to speak in puzzles, so they left it at that even though they were still curious.  Since the accident, they are not so curious. They don’t ask him anything—about running or anything else.

Not that Henry minds. He prefers it this way. More time to think about things that need to be thought about.

Tonight, Henry runs in circles alongside questions that are almost as disciplined as he is. The first thought has to do with his wife, Liv, and his mother-in-law—a woman who never liked him very much but who had gotten sick, and who before she died, could no longer remember why this was so. She didn’t remember much about anything, in fact, which is why Liv went to visit her to bring her back. He wonders if he should’ve gone, too?

            He also wonders if when the plane began to plunge toward the Pacific, if while the rest of the passengers lost their minds, his mother-in-law found hers somehow and was granted a second’s worth of memory, a moment to whisper a good-bye to the daughter sitting next to her who she’d all but forgotten. Or, Henry wonders, had she gone down the way she’d been living for years—oblivious to oblivion?

Tonight, as Henry runs lap after lap, that thought gives up the chase, and lets him run in peace, or almost in peace.  There is another thought, more persistent, more present. It has to do with the old man who watches him make his laps.

Henry saw him on the night of the accident. He’d noticed the old man standing in the inner circle of the track and just as he was about to pass him, the old man took a step into his lane and blew a silver whistle he was holding. It was the whistle that made Henry stop and hear what the old man had to say: “You should go home,” the old man said. “Your boy will need you tonight when the news comes.”

Henry was about to ignore the old man, thinking him crazy, but the old man blew his whistle a second time and repeated himself.  It was the whistle combined with the seriousness of the old man’s voice that made Henry stop his run early and make his way home. By the time he had made dinner for his son, his wife and his mother-in-law, along with one hundred other strangers, had been scattered across a one-mile radius of the north Pacific.

Tonight, Henry is back at the track.  His mother is now living with him and helping out with the boy who is finally starting to sleep again. As his mother sings his son to sleep, Henry thinks and runs his laps. His running shoes are as stiff with time and old sweat as his muscles are. He wants to stop, call it quits. He wants to concentrate on the memory of his wife’s face without being distracted by motion or by stiff shoes and muscles. But every time he is about to stop, he hears a whistle blow. There in the bleachers is the old man in the same gray hoodie he’d wore months before.  The old man is there to make sure Henry will get where he needs to go, running in circles until his heart breaks into pieces like the hull of a plane, and he is with his wife once again.