Modern Fables by Mikka Jacobsen

Author:Mikka Jacobsen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Freehand Books
Published: 2022-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

I hadn’t even remembered the dick jokes in Slaughterhouse-Five when I was out with the comedian, likely because Kabir was so insultingly unfunny. But they’re all I can think about now as I sit rigidly on a blanket in Riley Park with Vlad. It must be a nervous reflex. I ruefully must tell you that Vlad has turned up looking nothing like his Tinder profile. He has wrap-around sunglasses, a sharp and alien-looking Adam’s apple, and an Eastern European accent.

The lack of resemblance, he assures me, is not what I’m thinking. He, Vlad, is a psychotherapist. One so irresistible a client became enamoured. When he told her nothing must happen between them, she created a fake (!) Tinder profile and lured him into a drawn-out online romance. Until Vlad discovered the truth and almost died over the ethical implications. This is the reason for the fake photographs.

“The lengths people will go,” he says.

I suspect he’s married.

Forever careful to protect a man’s feelings, I decide to stay for a polite-but-not-misleading amount of time. I’m still curious about Vonnegut, though none of my dates seem interested in talking about him. I’d thought I was on to something, an uncovered coincidence that might, if properly pursued, lead to love. Perhaps I don’t need to tell you that I’m partial to this kind of fatalistic thinking, synchronicity and signs in the firmament. But I now wonder if favouring Vonnegut isn’t just more empty social-media signalling. A counterculture writer, somewhat literary, someone you remember reading once in high school and whose hipness, by your naming, might rub off on you. Rub off! Plus all those dick jokes! Slaughterhouse-Five literally opens with a man-from-Nantucket style limerick, and contains, I am afraid to say, the line, Billy Pilgrim “had a tremendous wang.”

Vlad doesn’t mention the dick jokes. All he wants to talk about is Anaïs Nin.

Sadly, by this point, I can’t rise to the occasion.

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