Free There's Something I Want You to Do by Charles Baxter Page B

it.

    “Then why are you here?” Benny waved his hand to indicate the coffee shop where they both sat. “If you’re so busy, why are you here?”
    “Have you slept with her again?” Elijah asked. “Have you two become lovers?” He waited. “I don’t mean to pry.” He smiled at his own hypocrisy.
    “Yes,” Benny said. “Yes, we have slept together again. And no, we have not become lovers. Not really.” He bunched up a paper napkin and threw it in the wastebasket. “At least she hasn’t. Because I told her that I was falling in love with her. I got out on a limb.”
    “And what did she say?”
    “She said, ‘Well, I can’t say the same.’ ”
    —
    Sometimes when Benny sat on the barren furniture in Sarah’s apartment, he could hear her in the bathroom, the door closed, practicing her comedy routine. She kept her voice down to a rushed murmuring followed by exclamations. She practiced her stage laugh, a prompt to the audience. When she eventually came out to the living room, he volunteered to listen to her monologue, but she always said no, she had to keep it to herself for a while.
    He didn’t know her after all, he decided. He lay awake staring at the ceiling while Sarah slept beside him. They had everything except intimacy. Maybe you could get along without that. She seemed to think so. All the same, he believed she loved him somehow. Earlier that day, she had called him up at work and in a breathless voice told him that she had made the greatest discovery—no one had thought of it before, but now she had. “Think of a dog,” she said. “Okay, now suppose you have a really smart dog. Let’s say you have a border collie. Dogs don’t get much smarter than that, do they? I don’t think so. A border collie can do anything a dog can do. They can herd sheep, they can recognize words, they can save children from storm drains during flood season. But suppose you try to explain the planet Mars to a border collie. The dog is smart, all right, but nothing in the dog brain can accommodate the idea of Mars, can it? No. The dog can never ever understand that there’s a planet beyond ours called Mars. Mars will never register in its cranium. A dog can’t think a single thought about Mars.” She waited for this aperçu to sink in. “It’s not the dog’s fault. Okay, so now suppose that we have limitations on our brains, like the limitation on a dog brain. And you know what we can’t get, ever?”

    “I don’t know,” Benny said at his drawing desk, blueprints spread out in front of him.
    “Exactly,” Sarah said with triumph. “ You don’t know . And you never will. But here’s what I believe: I believe that because of the way we’re all wired up, we’ll never know God, and that’s just for starters . Something is out there, but we’ll never have any concept of what it is. All we have are these dumb fairy tales about crucified guys with beards and dead people coming alive again and the book sealed with seven seals. Also, by the way, we’ll never know the actual structure of the universe. And there’s something else we’ll never know. Or, at least, you’ll never know it. And I’ll never know it.”

    “What’s that?” Benny asked.
    “You’ll never know me.” Sarah laughed. “And I’ll never know you.”
    Benny waited, his heart thumping in his chest, in a state of mind that he would describe as “desolate” the next time he saw Elijah, even though Elijah would try to shake him out of it by calling it a girl-word that only girls would use.
    “Is that so bad?” she asked. “I don’t think that’s so bad!” She paused, and when Benny said nothing, she said, “I’ve hurt your feelings, haven’t I?” Her voice sounded heartbreakingly cheerful. “We’re all planets,” she said, “and we’re all covered with clouds, Benny, which, in my opinion, in my dog brain, is what liberates us.”
    To Benny, she didn’t sound saved, but just then the sun emerged from behind a tree