The Last Days of Video by Jeremy Hawkins

Author:Jeremy Hawkins [Hawkins, Jeremy]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781619025189
Publisher: Soft Skull Press

This is only a little break, laying my head on Jeff’s shoulder. A little break to think about what I really want. She was exhausted, after all, and in this state, could she really trust herself to know what she wanted? In the bedroom, after stepping out of her dress and before slipping on the tee shirt, she had caught a glimpse of herself naked in her huge oval mirror, and she had instinctively sucked in her belly, pushed out her tits, contorted her body into the mirage of her idealized self. But what the hell was she doing? This was wrong, to be ashamed. To fear what Jeff would think of her imperfect body. That was living through her perception of what others might/maybe/probably would think of her cellulitey legs. That wasn’t being true to herself. That wasn’t the new Alaura.

No, there was no freaking way she could hook up with Jeff. Out on the baseball field, she had felt a slap of doubt—for a moment she had been lost in blissful meditation, a moist warm breeze dashing her face, images of Jeff holding her, his tall frame over her, how they would laugh afterward and become true friends, though definitely not long-term lovers . . . then she had looked down and seen his leather sandals, with the ridiculous white socks beneath, and she had remembered Pierce, who was handsomer than Jeff and sexier and smarter and who had worn the exact same fucking sandals the day he’d broken up with her, and a thought had slipped in: What if Jeff falls in love with me? If I sleep with him, will it end up hurting him later? But I want this. This is what I want. Isn’t it?

They watched 2001 together. She’d never really understood the movie, though she wouldn’t admit that to anyone, because Kubrick was sacrosanct. As they watched, she muttered a few things to Jeff, a few trivia tidbits she’d picked up from Waring over the years, that the planets and moon aligned above the black monolith are apparently nowhere close to realistic proportions, and that Planet of the Apes, not 2001, had won a special Academy Award for makeup design that year, which was totally absurd, and that Arthur C. Clarke himself had theorized that the Academy must have thought Kubrick had employed actual simians instead of actors. Jeff listened and asked her questions, and she answered as best she could. He was a sponge for movie trivia, just like she had been long ago.

She made it through the “Dawn of Man” sequence, when the story jumps ahead to the distant future of the year 2001 and Tchaikovsky plays lightly while spaceships spin around like Barney Wheat’s carousels, and she felt her eyelids getting heavy.

She slipped easily into sleep, her head still pressed to Jeff’s shoulder.

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