Never Go to Bed Alone

Treena Thibodeau

Drunk, Bradley purchased the molded silicone butt for two hundred dollars. Never go to bed alone again, the website promised. To pay for it, he used a credit card his parents had given him that was supposed to be for emergencies. He’d never used the card before, not even that time he fell down a flight of stairs, cracking an incisor but managing not to spill his drink, and when he hit PURCHASE, a barb of guilt snagged him in the searchlight of the monitor. Two hundred dollars was a lot of money.

Weeks passed, and Bradley’s purchase did not materialize. Maybe he had made an error, transposed two digits of his credit card number or failed to tick a box. Writing to the company was unthinkable; instead, he drafted a paper about how map is not territory and caught mono and fended off questions about how he planned to secure an internship for the spring and waited for the fall semester to be over, unsure of what came next. Everyone else seemed to know what they were doing after graduation and expected him to know, too.

By the time the butt arrived, it felt like a present someone else had purchased for him. One of his roommates left the box on the coffee table next to the bong and a Thermodynamics textbook. He took it to his room and split the packaging tape with the nib of a pen. The segment of female, modeled on Lizzy Lincoln, porn star and real person, was the color of cake batter and gave off a tire smell that made him nervous. Bradley opened the box and peered inside but went no further.

The butt lived inside Bradley’s closet, behind a suitcase that was too big to fit in the overhead compartment when he flew home to visit his parents. His room was not well-heated in the winter, and a sticky spring landed early that year, fogging his windows. Bradley worried about how the butt was weathering the change in seasons, but did not take it down to check.

Besides, he had a girlfriend. Everyone was always surprised to hear that. How’d you meet, people asked, in a way that made it clear they didn’t believe him.

He’d met Petra the normal way: mutual friends, shots, a conversation that beached them in a corner of someone’s greasy apartment, kissing. He knew, even before he met them, that her roommates would not like him.

His bedroom, in an off-campus apartment he shared with two guys both named Aydan (Bradley mentally taxonomied them Greater Aydan and Lesser Aydan), had no door. Sometimes when they were drunk, Bradley and the Aydans talked about making a door, but could never muster the initiative required to procure the lumber, purchase the necessary hardware, and calculate the distance for the hinges.

Bradley dreamed of doors. If he had a door, he might take down Lizzy Lincoln’s butt.

He kept promising Petra he would do something about the door situation, because they couldn’t spend the night at her place unless all her roommates happened to be staying with their respective boyfriends on the same night, and that was a slot machine that seldom paid out. In the meantime, he nailed an old sheet printed with cabbage roses in his doorway. The sheet wavered and was often in a heap on the floor by morning. Petra said he must have used the wrong kind of nails, but he did not know what other kinds there were.

One night, Bradley got drunk. But that is misleading, because most nights Bradley got drunk. Drunk seemed to strike without his participation. His cup was refilled by Lesser Aydan, who was wearing Bradley’s socks. As Bradley had no door, only a sheet full of nail holes, sometimes his possessions washed up in the rooms of the Aydans.

When they moved here, they had seen that there was no door to that room, and Bradley knew that this would be his room. Greater Aydan said, You could put a door on, no problem. Look how much light this room gets.

It was true that Bradley had two windows in his room. The window that faced east was cracked. He kept the blinds down to hide the damage, like it was his fault even though it had been broken before they signed the lease. The window that faced north looked out on the parking lot and a dumpster filled with rebar and frantic scraps of curly wiring.

The sound of someone throwing something small and hard into this dumpster woke Bradley up. The sun came in through the bent blinds like exit wounds. The sheet with the cabbage roses was slumped on the floor, and Bradley was in bed on top of his blanket, wearing nothing but the socks he must have wrestled back from Lesser Aydan.

Bradley’s body was viscous with lubricant, the hair on his belly slicked down like the pelt of some animal that had been caught in an environmental catastrophe. Beside him: the butt of Lizzy Lincoln, torn nearly in half.

He could hear Greater Aydan arguing with his girlfriend. She spoke softly, subdued by Greater Aydan’s confidence and charisma. Moments later, the woman fled past his room, vigorously toweling her hair. She reversed course for a second look. Bradley yanked at the blanket to cover himself, and the mutilated butt of Lizzy Lincoln bounced to the floor and Aydan’s girlfriend said, Oh, sorry, her pink face a medallion of disgust and amusement.

The Aydans would never let him hear the end of this. Bradley was catapulted into a future where he had a new nickname, where a cartoon ass adorned the bottom of every note and shopping list, where the coordinating conjunction but would always be an invitation to tell this story. Frantic for deniability, plausible or no, Bradley opened the northern window. It squealed on its track, and the air was clammy, his hands slippery. His aim was true, but the split ruins of the butt hit a broken two-by-four in the dumpster and bounced back out again into the parking lot, coming to rest in the shadow of a Subaru with two flat tires.

His phone buzzed: Petra, probably, on her way over.

But (but but but, the Aydans chanted) it wasn’t Petra. It was his father. Don’t use your credit card. We think someone stole the number. #Suspicious charge from a couple months ago. His father had just learned about hashtags and did not know how to use them correctly.

OK, Bradley texted back. He was already arranging his face: mystified innocence.

Some kind of mail-order thing. The police will find out what it was and where it was delivered to. #Don’t worry.

Petra texted: Omw. She rode a bike, her long hard legs propelling her up the hill. He did not remember that he had not brushed his teeth until after she had arrived and kissed him.

They had to pass through the parking lot on their way out. There was no other way to go.

Petra spotted the butt, decoupaged with bits of gravel, and her mouth, her face, her entire person, curled in disgust. “Gross. Who would buy something that disgusting?”

“Disgusting,” Bradley echoed, and doubled down. “No respect for women, or for themselves.”

He abandoned himself. He volunteered for the room with no door, and no one ever thanked him. He thought that someday, someone would notice the unfairness of this and come with a drill and some lumber, but no one did.

“It’s sick. A woman is not just a collection of convenient body parts,” he said, groping for the harbor of his girlfriend’s hand. At some point around Christmas, he had told Petra that he loved her, and now those were words they traded to end conversations. He thought about saying them now.

And then Greater Aydan’s girlfriend passed by on the way to her car, twirling her keys. When she saw the butt, her brows drew together. There was still time, Bradley thought, to think up an alibi, to distract the women, to calculate their distance from the row of frat houses beyond the fence and blame the date rapists. It might have worked if she’d been laughing, but she wasn’t. The women’s faces as he looked from one to the other were locked doors.

“You can’t just leave that there,” she said, pointing as if Lizzie Lincoln’s butt was a dog he had left by the side of the road, still trailing a leash.

Petra let go of his hand.

“It’s not mine,” he protested. “I’ve never seen that butt before, I would never—”

“We saw you passed out in it last night.” Aydan’s girlfriend pulled out her phone for the picture. “I don’t know how you don’t have a door. It’s disgusting. No one wants to see that.”

Petra looked at the photo, and then at him, and then stared at the butt the way people stand around a crime scene, waiting to see what would happen next. Bradley’s phone vibrated in his pocket, a throb of shame, his father following up about the credit card. The parking lot narrowed in a cringe.

He could transfer schools. Check out the Peace Corp, maybe. Take a gap year, go international. But he imagined the butt following him, mailed to his new college by the Aydans, turning up in the town square of villages with no running water, tumbling from the overhead compartment of a plane.

“Fine.”

The butt was warm from the sun. He brushed it off and tucked it under his arm. It felt all right there. The place where he and Petra had planned to go for eggs and hashbrowns, he remembered, had a bulletin board by the cash register: rewards posted for things gone missing, bands looking for bassists, handymen offering their services. He could pay someone to come hang a door. Use the credit card, fuck it.

“It’s mine,” Bradley said. “Now, who wants breakfast?”

No one did.

Bio

Treena Thibodeau's work has appeared or is forthcoming in Barrelhouse, The Rumpus, Pithead Chapel, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, and Atticus Review, and has received support from the Tin House Summer Conference, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Gullkistan Center. She holds an MFA from Columbia University and directs the virtual reading series, TGI (www.tgicast.com). Find her online @TreenaThibs.