Free Breakable You by Brian Morton

a chillier mission: the mission to remind us all that life ends in nothingness, and that there is no God, no beneficent universe, to confer meaning on our lives from the outside. She needed them to remind her that the meanings we assign to our lives are the only meanings they will finally have.
    She didn't want to endure any more awkward silences; she was talking about Seneca just to make some noise. But why was Samir being so withdrawn again? He was the one who'd bolted up at the end of their date last time and launched their make-out session; he was the one who'd called to suggest they get together again. She felt played with. He wasn't even looking at her. He was staring off at a family on a picnic—two kids and two parents, spread out on a blanket. He looked angry.

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Ten
    It was a beautiful warm afternoon, and the park was filled with families. Samir didn't notice the mothers, because he was too attracted to Maud to notice other women. And he didn't look at the children, because it would have hurt too much. So the only people he noticed were the fathers. Fathers pushing strollers; fathers wearing Snuglis; fathers leading children by the hand. Young fathers, distracted, because they had so much raw animal life in them that they couldn't give themselves over to the task of caring for their young. Older fathers: bearded, balding, considerate, attentive, somewhat emasculated midlife dads.
    Samir wanted to kill them all. He wanted to tear their scraggly little beards off, punch their teeth in, put his index fingers in their eyes and watch the retinal jelly pop out like pus.
    Maud was talking about philosophy, in the study of which she was absolutely and touchingly absorbed. He didn't know if he'd ever met anyone this pure, didn't know if he'd ever met anyone who lived more genuinely for ideas than she did. Even in their brief and limited and strange acquaintance, he had found this clear.
    Pure-minded woman.
    But what was the point of being here with her?
    "On the other hand," she said, "maybe Seneca himself enjoyed a Popsicle from time to time. In secret."
    "Do you think so?"
    "I wouldn't put it past him. He was always preaching indifference to worldly pleasures and worldly success, but when you read his biography it turns out that he did everything he could to ingratiate himself with whoever was ruling Rome at the time. He wanted to be with the in-crowd."
    "So he was just another hypocrite."
    "Yes," she said. "Probably. And some people conclude that that makes his ideas worthless. But I'm not sure. Does that really mean there's something wrong about the ideas themselves? Maybe an idea can be true and useful even if the person who thought of it can't quite put it into practice."
    A group of about twenty children, flanked by two beleaguered grown-ups, was converging on the ice-cream cart.
    If he were an honest man he would simply walk away. She claimed she didn't want children, but he didn't believe it. He knew that she did want children. She had to. She was a life-giver, a life-giver down to her bones; he could feel that. And so he was sure that he knew what she wanted, even if she herself didn't know it yet.
    If he were an honest man he'd walk away, because he had nothing to give her. She was drawn to him because of an illusion. If she could see him as he really was, she would find that he was not a human being at all. He was just a construction, a thing that kept itself going by means of little contraptions: he had a motor in his throat that started turning when he needed to talk; he had several tiny men working machines inside him to make sure that he smiled when he was supposed to smile; he retained the muscle memory to do his carpentry; but it was all shit, and he wasn't sure how anyone ever could miss it, could miss the obvious fact that he was through.
    As he looked at the children clustered around the ice-cream cart, all he could think was Zahra, Zahra, Zahra. None of them was Zahra. None of them was his dear one.