Free Indecision by Benjamin Kunkel Page A

myself. Mr. R used to tell me, he used to say, ‘A young man wants three things in this life: he wants one good sports coat, one good pickup line, and a one-bedroom in New York.’ Of course, he meant a one-bedroom in Manhattan.”
    “Cool. Well I’ll just weigh my options until—until the Abulinix puts its finger on the scale in which I’m weighing them. Meanwhile I should do some research. On Vermont.”
    “I believe most researchers have found Vermont to be a state populated by hippies, yuppies and farmers.”
    Once the evening had drained all the way out of the room, Dan got up with our plates and placed them unrinsed in the sink while I went to my cubicle to check my email. Opening my inbox I found that upwards of twenty Formmates were sufficiently unembarrassed about checking their email on Sunday as to have written me regarding the reunion. Of course the correspondent who stood out, as in a certain way she always had, was Natasha, who said she might or might not go. Moreover in a postscript she seemed to be inviting me to visit her in Quito!
    Excitedly I lay down on my bed and then stood up again. What an opportunity of some kind this must be! Certainly there was no law saying I couldn’t go to Quito! (Unless this city or town happened to be in Cuba . . .)
    Suddenly—it was always so sudden—the phone rang. I picked it up and waited to hear who it was before committing myself. “Hello?” Alice was saying, “Hello?” and, once I acknowledged this was Dwight, telling me a) I was paranoid b) I was annoying and c) she was sorry to have talked harshly to me earlier that day.
    “It’s okay,” I said, pleased by this news of her contrition as well as by the exciting development regarding Natasha, which I related right away. “I mean maybe I should go. Nastaha’s such a nice, thoughtful person—”
    “With such a nice, thoughtful body—”
    “So? She also always seemed very wise. Didn’t she?”
    “I haven’t talked to her in ages.”
    “And it might be good to be with a potentially wise person in kind of a nonaligned country—Quito’s not in Cuba is it?—so that I could gain some kind of objectivity when I’m thinking about the decisions I’ll be making once the drug—I should tell you about the drug—once the drug kicks in.” It was then that I told Alice about abulia and the drug designed by careful scientists to treat and cure it.
    “You’re not serious. Can you really think that abulia even exists ?”
    “Oh yeah. Whatever else may not be real, abulia definitely is.”
    “Just like social phobia suddenly exists, even though it was created by the pharmaceuticals about four years ago. Like neurasthenia used to exist but now somehow it’s died out.”
    “Maybe the people who had it didn’t reproduce.”
    In Alice’s and my arguments she often played culture while I played nature, and though you would suppose nature to be the stronger force, I usually lost. It was hard not to when Alice was a trained anthropologist—whereas all I had for anthropology was introspection. Yet it was introspection above all that proved the reality of chronic indecision. “For instance I can’t decide whether or not to go.”
    “Then maybe exercise some caution.”
    “Maybe is the key word there.”
     
     
    The next few hours I spent alone in my room, paralyzed with the maybes. Then I received Alice’s second call. “You’re right, Dwight.” Apparently she’d been thinking about it. “You should go. It’s just like what you said—you should be in some neutral country when this ridiculous drug takes effect. God knows, if you’re in New York you might ask the first woman you see to marry you. You’ll see a cop on the street and you’ll enroll in the police academy. At least if you’re in Ecuador you can’t do anything rash. Natasha’s not going to marry you, and there are no jobs in a country like that.”
    “We don’t know about Natasha.”
    “So go find out then. Go to Ecuador,