The Zinger

Paul and Stacy sat in the waiting room. Someone had scattered issues of Technology Today and Sailing Monthly, among other generic titles, across each of the three tables. Paul had thumbed through a few of them already and had moved on to twitching his leg up and down compulsively. Stacy kept busy going over various documents from her law office.

“Mr. and Mrs. Roper? Dr. Proley will see you now.”

Paul and Stacy exchanged glances as they stood: both hopeful but worried. Stacy rested her palm on Paul’s forearm, and it was enough to draw a smile as he squeezed back.

After being led down a narrow hall, they found themselves sitting in the doctor’s office. It smelled of leather and peroxide. Paul imagined that the sterile hospital smell he hated so much must completely settle into everything it touched, becoming part of it forever. Dr. Proley joined them after a few minutes of anxious waiting, and uncomfortable pleasantries were exchanged as each of them shook his hand. They sat.

“I’m very glad you two decided to come in. Assuming an active role is an excellent quality in future parents.”

Paul and Stacy smiled thinly as they held hands.

“Now, I see you came here today because you have been trying to conceive for several months now, to no avail.”

“Yes, doctor. We’ve paid very close attention to my cycle, been sure to… attempt conception” – Stacy blushed as Paul grinned wryly at her – “during the right times of the month. We weren’t entirely sure what we could be doing wrong.”

“Well, it’s very rare for a couple to ‘do something wrong,’” he said with a smile, “but I’ve got both good news and bad news. The good news is, after running some tests, we’ve been able to diagnose what is coming in the way of conception.”

Stacy squeezed Paul’s hand.

“And that is where the bad news comes in. I’m afraid your sperm count is incredibly low, Paul. More than likely, the problem originates from a lesion that appeared at a young age and has gone untreated for years.”

Dr. Proley swiveled in his chair and pulled the string of a rolled-up chart on the wall. It was a cross-section of the male genitals. Had Paul not felt so numb, the idea of a map of the US from grade school rolling down to reveal a penis instead would have made him chuckle.

Stacy peered into Paul’s glazed eyes. His hand, which felt so warm and comforting moments before, had turned cold around hers. She began to speak, wanting terribly to comfort her husband, but unsure of what she could say or do.

“Is there anything you can do, doctor?” she said.

Paul noticed Dr. Proley had a very nice, thick, white goatee. Why hadn’t he noticed that when he first walked in?

“Naturally? No, I’m afraid the damage has already been done. Now, there are alternative methods of conception…”

Paul drowned out the rest. He nodded when he was supposed to and thanked the doctor when he left.

Paul stood in the doorway of what was supposed to be his future son or daughter’s room. He was just a humble writer. A few good projects were on the horizon, but he did not kid himself, it was Stacy who brought home the money. Now in her late twenties, she had become a wildly successful lawyer at her firm. It was her job that allowed them to own a house like this.

As he leaned in the doorway, he turned a brown teddy bear over and over in his hands. He had won it for Stacy at a carnival on the night that he told her he was ready to have a baby. She had been hinting at it for a year. He told her they would start trying that very night, and that this stuffed animal would be the first gift for the little human being they would make together. She had cried.

He looked down at the bear. The threads of its left eye were coming loose.

“Baby?”

Stacy wrapped her arms around Paul from behind, resting her chin on his shoulder. Paul’s gaze remained fixed on the teddy bear.

“It’s going to be okay. You know that, right?”

“Yeah.”

“We have plenty of options outside of natural conception. With the places I’m going at work, money won’t be an issue. And even if all that fails, there are plenty of children in the world that need good parents, we could adopt.”

“Yeah.”

Stacy squeezed his shoulder but received no further response from her husband. She frowned and took her arm from around his neck. She went to get ready for bed.

Paul stepped into the room. It sapped any energy he had left in his bones just to cross the threshold. They had even bought a crib. He set the bear to rest where a child of his own never would.

* * *

“Could it be the same problem? The lesion?”

“I don’t know,” Paul said.

A week later, he lay in bed next to Stacy, staring straight at the ceiling. For the first time in his life, he couldn’t perform.

“We can call the doctor tomorrow. He didn’t say anything like this would happen. Do you want me to be with you when you call? I’ve got a meeting with clients until twelve, but I could come back home during my lunch hour to call with you.”

“No, I can call myself.”

Stacy clenched the sheet covering her naked body. The silence that followed seemed to stretch on forever.

“Is there anything you want to talk about?” she asked after a long while.

“I just want to go to sleep.”

Stacy reached for him, but he rolled over to the edge of the bed and closed his eyes.

The next day, Paul couldn’t stand the thought of spending another entire afternoon sitting in front of that infernal machine in his cramped office. Usually he and Stacy woke up early in the morning, had breakfast together, and he would see her off to work before settling down to write. Lately his nights had been long and restless in front of the typewriter, so he began sleeping later. She was gone by the time he woke up, so he just grabbed his car keys and headed for the mall.

He had a burger for lunch, rare. The juiciness of it pleased him.

After eating, he strolled around the stores aimlessly. Outside of an arcade, he saw a little boy riding in a fire truck with Big Bird. His mother and father were watching him from a bench and feeding quarters into the fire truck whenever it stopped rocking back and forth. Paul pretended to browse through the selection at a cell phone kiosk as he watched on from a distance.

He ended up in a sporting goods store, which he found ironic, having never played a sport in his life outside of golf once with Stacy’s father while he was courting her. He wasn’t sure you could call what he’d done on the course “playing” though.

He stopped at a row of baseball bats hung up on a shelf in one corner of the store. He had never played baseball before. He had bad asthma as a child, and when he grew out of it, the interest had passed. Right now, however, he felt like he wanted to hold one of these bats more than he’d ever wanted anything. He picked one up. The weight of it felt good. He turned it in his hands. Emblazoned on the side of the bat was The Zinger.

He didn’t have any cash on him, so he charged it. The lady at the register asked if he wanted a bag. He said no. He carried it to his car.

“Jason approached the door timidly extending his finger tips to touch the cold knob.”

Too wordy.

“Jason walked toward the door, scared. He reached for the cold knob.”

Too broken up.

“Jason walked toward the door, reaching for the cold knob, scared.”

Is Jason even a good name for this character?

Paul blew out an exasperated breath as he tore another page from the typewriter. He had been working at this damn thing for days. His laptop sat unused on the floor. This was an old trick he had learned just after college. When you have trouble getting into a story, change how you approach it. Whenever he was stuck, he would pull out his grandfather’s old typewriter. Something about the clicking of the keys and the smell of the ink on fresh paper usually got his creative juices flowing. Usually.

When he had visited the doctor, Paul was in the middle of a novel he had pitched to a publisher. They loved the idea, and he was contracted to finish it within the year. Such deals could be very rare, and the prospect of having a big hit had driven Paul to finish it as soon as possible. But now, writer’s block.

He laid his head back and spun around in the desk chair. His feet scraped against the discarded drafts and failed sentences littering the floor. The Zinger leaned against the side of his desk. He reached over and picked up the weighty wooden instrument. He kicked back from the desk and just sat, holding The Zinger and thinking.

After a while, the phone rang, and he took his time answering it.

“Hello?”

“Mr. Roper? Please hold for Dr. Proley.”

The doctor told him the problem he had should have no such side effects. Sterility, in his case, should have no relation to erectile dysfunction. Paul thanked him and clicked off the phone before he was done speaking. He rolled The Zinger around in his palms a moment, and then he propped it back up next to his desk.

“Jason tiptoed toward the door, clearly afraid, but nonetheless reached for the cold, brass knob.”

Better.

The next day, after another unproductive early afternoon at the typewriter, Paul felt like going out. He grabbed his car keys and got up from his desk, heading for the door. Then he thought better and grabbed The Zinger. He had grown accustomed to carrying it with him wherever he went, and why should that be limited to the house?

He drove around for a bit and ended up at the grocery store. The Zinger rolled back and forth in the passenger seat as he pulled into a parking spot. Nobody in the parking lot or the store gave him more than a glance – there could be all kinds of reasons for a man to be carrying a bat in a grocery store.

He wandered through the aisle with the shampoo and soaps, then through the bread aisle, finally to the snacks. He paused in front of a box of Oatmeal cream pies. He looked around, and then looked down at The Zinger.

Who’s gonna know?

He opened one of the boxes of cream pies and grabbed one of the individually wrapped confections, stuffing it in his pocket. He resealed the box and put it behind a new one.

Stepping out of the aisle, he pulled the cream pie out of his pocket and unwrapped it. He took huge bites, stuffing his face as he strolled into the produce aisle. Cantaloupes. That’s what Paul wanted, and that’s why he came here. He walked to the front of the store, grabbed a cart, and wheeled it back to the aisle with the melons. He dumped ten ripe, round cantaloupes into the cart and brought it to the pimply faced teenage kid at the check out counter.

“What are you going to do with all these melons, man?”

“I’m gonna smash each of them with this baseball bat in my back yard. What do you think I’m gonna do with them?”

The kid laughed, and so did Paul.

* * *

Stacy got home that night and found papers scattered all over the floor, spilling out of Paul’s office.

“Paul?” she called. No answer.

She opened the door and a small avalanche of crumpled up paper spilled through the crack. A chilling breeze wafted through the doorway – the door to the backyard must be open, she thought. The backyard was nothing special, just a cement stoop leading down from the door. The rest of the yard was just plain grass with one tree and a picket fence walling off the neighbors’ yards.

She stepped out onto the stoop and found Paul on the lawn mid-swing. It was freezing outside, but he seemed unfazed by it. He had pushed two concrete blocks together at the base of their willow tree. A pile of melons was lying beside the blocks. With a thick smack, the baseball bat in his hands crushed the melon. Seeds and juice burst all over the sterile concrete.

“Oh, hi honey,” Paul said.

“What are you doing?”

He began setting up another melon on the slab he had built under the skeleton branches of the willow tree.

“Oh, you know, nothing.”

He lifted the bat high overhead and brought it down again with the same results. The fruit shot everywhere: sticky clumps of it stuck to the concrete, to Paul, to the tree.

Paul hadn’t shaved in a few days. Stacy couldn’t tell if he’d been skipping showers too, but he’d been wearing the same clothes all week. She wondered if he’d change now that melon had been smattered up and down his shirt and pants.

“Sweetie, I know that what you’re going through is tough, but I –“

“You don’t know shit. Okay,” he breathed, “Sweetie?”

Paul didn’t turn around to say this, but he paused from his task long enough to glance over his shoulder. The look he gave her nearly knocked her down. Her throat clenched tight. Her chest swelled.

“This isn’t hard just on you, so don’t take it out on me, goddamn it!”

Paul stood calmly for an instant, shadows dancing across his face as the willow branches overhead rustled in the wind, and then he bent down to grab another melon. He placed it on the block and brought his bat down again. He did this two more times before Stacy stumbled inside, no longer able to hold back her tears.

As he reached for another melon, he heard the cawing of a crow overhead. A large black bird perched in the tree above him. He paused for just one moment to look up at it. It looked back down at him. He wouldn’t remember this later.

He slept at the desk in his office that night. He couldn’t stand the thought of sleeping in bed with that prying bitch. All he wanted was some peace and quiet. He just had to finish this novel, and his career would take off. Maybe enough that he wouldn’t even need her anymore. He just needed an ending. So close to finishing, but still no ending. He really thought he was getting somewhere in the yard, but then she went and interrupted his train of thought.

Support group, psychoanalytical, pussy, bullshit is what it is, he thought. If she really wanted to help him, she’d just pay the bills and leave him alone.

The next day, she went to work again without waking him. He opened his eyes and immediately began typing. Page after page was wasted and ripped from the typewriter, crumpled up, and thrown away. The piles on the floor were beginning to achieve true depth. The Zinger leaned against the side of the desk, mucked with red goop.

After a few hours of typing, Paul wandered out into the kitchen, commenting on what a fucking mess this place was becoming, and pulled the radio out its socket below the microwave. He holed himself back up in his office and plugged it in. Maybe some music would help stir the imagination. Amid the songs on the various stations, he heard a report of a blizzard coming that night. It was supposed to be pretty bad. Another shitty song came on after that, and he just turned the radio to a random station filled with static. It was oddly soothing. He closed his eyes and rubbed his temples, allowing the white noise to cleanse his troubled mind.

Stacy.

The phone rang. Eyes still pressed shut, he answered.

“What’s up, buddy?”

A shocked silence staggered the other end of the call.

“Is, ah, Paul there?”

“You got him. What do you want from him?”

“Paul, it’s Roger Klein, from Arklay Book Publishers. We haven’t heard from you for some time now. I was just calling to see how the book was coming along – I’m just trying to get some idea of when I’ll be able to start the editing process.”

“Oh, it’s coming just swell, Roger. Boy let me tell you, it’s a real hoot.”

“Paul, if this is some kind of joke, it’s not funny. The people writing your checks are getting antsy. What am I supposed to tell them?”

“Well, I tell you what, Roger. If you’re so anxious to have this book done, why don’t you come on down here and pick one of these endings I have lying around on my floor? It’ll be like those choose-your-own-fucking-adventure books from when we were kids!” Paul began grabbing the crumpled up papers from the floor, “Here’s one: Jason gets hooked on smack and gets HIV turning tricks in bus station bathrooms! Oh! Another good one: Jason picks up an electric guitar and plays lead for Jesus and the second coming. I’m a fan of that one, but if you don’t dig either of those, I could write up a new one for you. ‘Jason marches down to Arklay Book Publishers and shoves Paul’s king-sized typewriter right up Roger Klein’s gaping asshole.’ Do you like that one?”

The other party had hung up long before Paul finished speaking. He clicked off the phone and turned the static back up.

She found him in the backyard again when she got home from work. The sun was beginning to set, and the temperature was below freezing. He wore the same, sticky clothes he had worn the day before. He must have run out of melons, because new victims had been crushed on his altar below the willow. Among the broken pieces, Stacy could make out what looked like a lamp from the living room, the home phone, and Paul’s laptop. Next up on the block was Paul’s old typewriter.

“Roger Klein called me at work today and told me about your phone conversation. Are you crazy, Paul? He’s trying to help you! Your book is never going to see the light of day at this rate, if you even finish it. I told him I was sorry for what you said.”

“You are pretty sorry, aren’t you Stacy?” Paul said, turning around and resting both arms on the tip of the bat planted in the ground in front of him.

“Paul, why are you doing this? I expected the news from the doctor to get to you, but not like this. How could it change you like this? I know deep down, under all that pain and fear and anger, you’re still the man I love. The man that loves me.”

“You are so wrong!” Paul shouted. He punctuated each word with a swipe at the typewriter, bashing it to bits. Stacy screamed and winced at each strike, tears welling in her eyes.

“You’re scaring me, Paul!”

“Scaring you? I’m just taking out a little frustration on an inanimate object, honey. If I wanted to scare you, I’d do this.”

He reached back, poised to strike Stacy, but stopped at the last moment, laughing.

“Just kidding!”

Stacy stared wide-eyed at the man she once loved, horrified. She realized that the stuffed bear he had won for her at the carnival so long ago was among the pile of things he was planning to smash. She began to gag and turned to run inside.

“Come on!” he shouted after her, “Can’t you take a joke? Goddamn it!”

Paul stormed over to his pile and thrust the bear onto the concrete blocks. He lifted The Zinger high above his head and brought it down repeatedly on the stuffed animal. It just bounced around limply and then fell off the blocks onto the grass.

“Piece of shit,” he grunted, putting it back up onto the concrete amid the melons’ remains.

He brought the bat down again and again, but the bear wouldn’t break like the rest of the things Paul had done. He cursed and spat, and finally he picked up the bear and hurled it over the fence into the next yard. His face was covered in sweat and an ugly shade of purple. Chest heaving, he stumbled back into the house with The Zinger and collapsed into his chair, turning the static back on.

“Paul, I’m leaving. You need help. I can’t be around you like this. If you manage to become yourself again, maybe there will be enough of us left to salvage. Goodbye.”

Stacy stood in the doorway to Paul’s office, suitcase shaking in her hand. Paul was reclining in his office chair. The static coming from the radio was loud enough it almost drowned Stacy’s voice out completely. After a final sob, Stacy wiped at her nose and turned around, heading for the front door.

After she left the room, Paul leaned forward in his seat and clicked off the radio. He heard the front door open.

“Stacy! Wait! You’re right – I’m so sorry, baby, I do need help! Please don’t leave me here alone!” The panicked crack in his voice contrasted with the dead calmness of his face.

He listened, picturing her lingering in the foyer, unsure whether her husband’s words were sincere. She called his name, her voice trembling.

Paul stood up and began to whistle quietly to himself. He grabbed The Zinger from its place next to the desk and gave it a few good practice swings through the air in front of him. He patted the bat against his open palm and headed for the door leading to his wife, still whistling. The weight of it felt good.