Free Indecision by Benjamin Kunkel

care. It’ll take like two whole seconds.”
    “Pick up the money, Dwight.”
    “You, Al.”
    “You’re such an idiot.”
    “No, that’s not it.” And with my new knowledge of myself—indecision was my problem—I turned on my heel. Alice did too, on her heel. I’d made it about halfway down the block before I turned around to see if she was following me—she wasn’t—or if the money’d been snatched up. It felt very distressing to leave forty dollars lying on the street and I considered running back for it, and then after Al. I mean the money was basically mine, and I also knew that in some way Alice still really liked me—even to the point of hopeless, because familial, love.
    Someone had come out of the pizza place on the corner and was bending down plucking something up off the sidewalk. Forty dollars! Gone! I turned and went on a few steps, then stopped to lurch and vomit up some acidulated and foodflecked Jiggy Juice. This made me feel temporarily better about everything. Yet in fairness I couldn’t expect a similar attitude from the thin fiftyish bald dude in clamdiggers, leather flip-flops, and one of those guayabera shirts, who had emerged onto what I have to presume was his own stoop while I was engaged in puking and retching. “What”—he practically shrieked it—“are you doing in my new trash can?”
    I looked up again at the guy. “I’m sorry—I have abulia.” Somehow this made me start laughing my head off. I felt sorry toward the victimized homeowner, but not excessively, and with occasional glances back over my shoulder I went running off in a crapulous zigzag down the sidewalk. I was glad to be on the road to recovery and felt like a convalescent should be granted some leeway.
    But I’d barely reached the next block, and stopped running, panting, before I was completely dismayed again by my somewhat preliminary life that I was constantly starting all over again. I felt very upset to have to wait between five and fourteen days before learning what I would decide about Pfizer, Vaneetha, and my living situation. Plus sad or bad moods employ a deductive method, and always look around for data to confirm them—so I couldn’t help noting, in terms of sad facts, that here today was Sunday, formerly the main family-togetherness day, and all four of us were apart from each other and probably from all other non-Wilmerding humans too. What solitary people my family were! It amazed me that two of its members had ever gotten together to produce the others. But then solitary people pretending not to be—that must be how many families start up, and how the race of the lonely has grown so numerous.

 
     
    FIVE
     
    My concern over Dan’s poor diet plus my liking to cook had recently combined into a tradition of shared Sunday dinners, and I’d just finished sautéing some spinach and mushrooms when Dan walked in the door. “You should be a Jewish mother,” he said. For an instant there flashed through my mind the possibility that under the influence of Abulinix I would have a sex change and then a bat mitzvah. Then I realized that despite Dan’s dry tone he was kidding; that I could never bear children; and that possibly I’d just endured a crazy person’s thought. But these were concerns which I folded without comment into the dough I was rolling on its way toward spinach pie.
    Later on we sat in the living room under the three splayed fingers of the ceiling fan and ate our food in the rosy/sooty light of 7 PM . “Nice pie,” Dan said between bites.
    “Thank you,” I said.
    “Dwight, would you let me know when you start feeling the effect? Because we should really start thinking about our living situation. I see my own options as follows: either we find a place together, or I look for a studio in deepest Brooklyn, or I move into NYU housing with the other geeks.”
    “Do you have a preference?”
    “Eh,” he said. “I live with you, I eat better. I live by myself, I live by