"A Reality TV Producer Reflects on Greek Tragedy" by Aaron Berry Davis
Fiction
I read the play you like so much. The one you always told me to read. The one about the man who comes back from a dawdling, wasted war and everyone’s upset with him because he’s been gone so long, and all their sons died following him to nowhere. And he killed his daughter so the wind would start working again, and took that lover even though his wife was waiting for him to come back and crawl into bed. He doesn’t seem like a good listener, this guy, and his wife hates him so much it’s hard to imagine that she ever loved him. She took a lover, too, because why wait for what’s not there, what was maybe never there. In life, really, there is no in-between—just distance. She kills him at the end. Stabs him dead with a knife in the bathtub, which, as far as places for dying, is undignified but cozy. It’s the happiest you see her the whole play. My mother would say thank God we don’t get what we deserve.
What is it about tragedies that makes them tragedies again? I was at the diner reading and the waiter asked if tragedy meant somebody dies at the end. Is it that? That we know the ending? She said the dead should cry for us because we have to stay here. Did you know only thirty-two tragedies survived from Ancient Greece? And people use that word when they talk about them—surviving. Maybe we save what we can and time comes for the rest, or maybe we just don’t care for each other’s sad stories.
I know I’m supposed to stop telling you what you will or won’t love, but you’re going to love the new season. It’s all sex and no romance, in Fort Lauderdale. Twenty singles, bodies cut from diamonds, and they’re all liars. I don’t even know if they’re capable of love. One of them says he’s a pediatrician—he actually said kid doctor—but really he just got out of the Wakulla Correctional Institution for felony assault. He seduces this single mom of three, a tattoo artist, whose husband died on some desert road in Afghanistan. When she finds out, she throws a full wine bottle at him and it looks like splashing blood as it shatters across the wall. Then the single mom goes to spend a night in the Love Nest with this mulleted bassist from an all-white neo-funk band and tells him he’s the one God promised her. Turns out, she has a fiancé in Jacksonville who we flew in for the House Meeting the very next night. He calls off their engagement on camera. He almost hits the bassist. He demands her engagement ring. We bring in the cops to escort him out of the Villa. Everyone screaming, everyone crying. I think it might be my magnum opus. I think you’d be proud of me.
Lately, I need to be surrounded by life. I’ve been taking care of myself, and the mouse. A few days after you left, I stopped trying to kill him. I threw away the traps and the poison and started calling him Pierre. We live more peaceably now that we’re on a first-name basis. He still shits in the cabinets and drawers and scurries through the walls, joyously, triumphantly, but I’m glad to hear it. A man moved onto the sidewalk below our window. My window. He carries a cardboard sign that says, WHO WILL SURVIVE? WHAT WILL BE LEFT OF THEM? You would love him. He throws lemons at me as I walk to my car and pleads, saying there’s a cure for life. I want to tell him, Some lives don’t need a cure, if I only thought he’d listen. I’m happy to be alive. I really am. I say it like that to anyone who asks. I say, I’m happy to be alive. I really am. I turned your office into a second bedroom and got a new roommate. His name is Tyler. He’s sort of my best friend now. He played one season at O-line for the Detroit Lions and has CTE that lets him see ghosts. He says the apartment is one of the most haunted he’s ever seen, and keeps reminding me that the ghosts are not metaphors for loss or regret or Capitalism or anything like that. They’re just ghosts.
I keep trying to fall in love with the world again, to feel that serene desire which is the perfect absence of itself. I’ve been dating. Mainly Russian ex-pats that claim Romanov blood and can’t make up their minds about me. Women I won’t be able to save when the Revolution comes. They say there’s words for men like me in Russian, but won’t say what they are. It’s disquieting, to be unable to define oneself. In Russian or any Slavic language, really. But I’ve learned a lot. I’ve learned that there’s making love and there’s fucking and there’s also a third thing called puppy play. Puppy play is, basically, I wear a leash and get walked around like a dog, though they never have the decency to put me down. Instead, I have to live a full human life and die a full human death and only sometimes get to be a dog with all their willful unknowing. I don’t like puppy play.
I’ve been thinking a lot. I’ve been thinking about Agamemnon and I’ve been thinking about endings. I’ve been thinking that maybe I wasn’t a good listener, and I’ve been thinking that maybe you weren’t either. People are always trying to tell you who they are, but you have to listen. Life is long. Narrative consistency is hard. Still, I don’t like what my love for you reveals about me.
I’ve been thinking, I don’t know what kind of story this is. A comedy ends in a marriage, traditionally, so I guess this must be the other one. I’m always coming home to die in the bathtub, the same way every time. I tried to describe you to someone and you ended up looking like a Biblically accurate angel—shimmering, with all those million eyes and the wheels to take you away. Once you told me if I couldn’t be good, then at least I could try to be convincing. I wonder if we would lie to each other in Fort Lauderdale, or if maybe we’d introduce love like the Spanish colonists introduced the flu.
And I’ve been thinking about what you said, on that last night, when I asked if you could ever love me. Your breath sharpened like a kitchen knife. You said, Anything is possible, but most things will never be.
BIO:
Aaron Berry Davis is a writer from Cleveland who crash-landed in Los Angeles. His fiction has previously appeared in The Kenyon Review.
what if the greeks got to 32 and decided, “ENOUGH”