Free The Deep Whatsis by Peter Mattei Page A

think you punched her,” Helen finally says, maybe 80 percent believing it. “She fell. Or something. And I’m sure it was consensual. My God. What am I doing? I can’t even think the thoughts I’m thinking right now.” She sits down and looks at the floor.
    “Well, she didn’t have a black eye, at least when I left her thismorning. She had a slight welt. Are you sure it was a black eye and not just some hip new makeupy Amy Winehousey thing?”
    “I saw it,” she says. “And it
is
a black eye. A bad one, too.”
    I stand and suddenly the blood leaves my head and goes directly into my stomach and sits there, all of it, pooling up like a superfund site. I feel like I’m going to barf so I sit back down.
    “She’s been hacking my e-mail,” I finally say, realizing this could be my best and only defense at this point.
    “What?”
    “She told me this morning as she was leaving. She’s admitted to stalking me. The whole thing is ugly. I think she may have caused the black eye herself. In fact, she may be insane.”
    “Oh great.”
    HR Lady looks out the window, staring at the glass curtain wall of a neighboring skyscraper, which at this time of day with the sun angling like that is just a reflection, revealing nothing. She’s probably wondering why it is that guys, some guys at least, are so drawn to Crazy Girls, think about it, there’s even a strip club named for them in LA, on La Brea, they go for Crazy Girls when there are good, honest, sane, all-American women sitting right in front of them. That’s what I’d be thinking if I were her. My half sister, raised Episcopalian like me, is now a Muslim and living in Cairo, married to an Egyptian taxi driver, and she doesn’t remember Mom being so nuts, but consider the source. My therapist, the one time I did go to a therapist, ended our one and only session by declaring that we as a family had some issues to work out in terms of our relationship to our manic-depressive matriarch, and I didn’t disagree, but still I never wentback, mostly because I was just telling him stories that weren’t really true so how would he know. My point is that it’s possible I am somehow attracted to women who are on the other side of tilt, without even knowing it, just by looking at them, one glance as it were, which is kind of how it happened that night at the bar when Intern looked at me and smiled her smile of abject joy. I felt something go wrong inside, like a glitch, or some data got hung up somewhere and never made it past the initial instruction to the OS, where I might have seen it, an error message that would have read “404: Stay Away.” Instead what I get is a kind of involuntary Come Hither, a wobbly twitch in the loins, and I do go hither and with haste. What can I say? Does it really make a difference, if one chooses to be with so-called Healthy Women or so-called Total Nutjobs? We’re all a little off if you ask me, it’s a spectrum, which is why I initially thought HR and I were talking about Juliette Chang and the difficult time she’s heading toward, thanks to me. Maybe if I spare her the karma thing, if I believed in it, that would help me out in other areas of my life; now fuck me I sound like Seth. But maybe my trouble with Intern is a sign; maybe we shouldn’t fire Juliette after all? Maybe we should reconsider the whole plan?
    Finally HR Lady looks back to me and says, “Well at any rate we have a situation here, we need to talk to Barry, Eric, you know that.”
    “You don’t believe me, do you?” I moan.
    “Believe you?”
    “About her being crazy and hacking into my e-mail.”
    She pauses for about a minute and then speaks. “No, I don’t really believe you. How could she do that? Is she a computer genius or something?”
    “I don’t know,” I say. “I don’t know anything about her, I didn’t even know her name. All I know is she’s smart as hell, I can tell you that much. She skipped two years of high school, she said, she had a