The first day he had trouble finishing a sentence, we touched our tongues. It was like pushing two warm bags of water together to try and find a pin—the right word. We went to Target to pick up matching outfits, a uniform for our love. We put our hands on the same changing room knob. We put our little bits of pressure together and pushed down at the same time.

The man who gives the numbers said no, we can’t do that, but we did anyway. We put on pairs of matching skirts. We thought this was funny. On our third pair, the man got angry and followed us. When he pushed the cracked door of the changing room open, our pants were halfway down our legs, our hot pink matching skirts beaming up at him from the floor. He stared at us, confused. He blushed a little and walked away without saying anything. After he was gone and we were dressed up again, we put our hands up each other’s skirt. After two minutes, the blushing man, annoyed at having to deal with us, yelled through the door, his voice cracking, asking if we were going to buy the skirts or just try them on. We weren’t sure, we said.

We loved pixie cuts too, so we went to the Target Salon and got matching haircuts. It took the stylist forty minutes to properly sculpt the base of our hair so we would both have that sexy tuft pointing down to our jawlines.

I licked his tuft a little and pinched it into a tiny Mohawk.

He licked my little tuft and pinched into a tiny Mohawk. 

 

*

 

Hours before that, we went to the doctor’s and he was diagnosed with an aggressive form of early-onset dementia. In a year, the doctor told us, there would be days where he wouldn’t remember me. In two, he probably wouldn’t remember his own name.

 

*

 

After Target, we went down the street to Luke’s Love Lodge wearing our freshly stolen skirts. Holding each other’s hands, we walked in. It was a smut store, but it was in a small college town in Alabama, so we shouldn’t have been surprised that the clerk looked like he smelled shit when he saw us twinned and wearing skirts. But we were, fuck him, so we decided to make it worse for him. We found a neon green strap-on dildo. He put it in his skirt, holding it up by lodging the shaft in the crevice of his thigh. “Two dicks for the price of one,” he said. “One dick where there was none,” I said, taking it from him and swinging it around just under the hem of my skirt.

We went into the changing room in the lingerie aisle and I tied the dildo loosely to his penis with a purple ribbon from my purse. We walked out and the dildo shifted down a little from all the movement. It was just peeking out of the bottom of his skirt, but the clerk was so busy squinting suspiciously at our faces that he didn’t see what was going on underneath. We named the dildo Mirth. When we got home, we took turns fucking each other in the ass with Mirth.

We held each other close, whispering about better ways to die than dementia.  

“What if Mirth was made of solid uranium and gave us colon cancer?”

“What if Mirth was made of starlight and sutured our insides together?”

“What if our insides turned into jewels from all the star-light sex and our jewel-guts leaked out of our stomachs like a teddy’s cut tummy?”

 

*

 

Three months later, he had a bad day. He had trouble remembering even one-syllable Greco-Roman words. We felt a little out of sync, too. We thought it might be our vision fading at different paces, making it hard for us to read dictionary entries with the same level of clarity, neither of us able to make out the little phonic pronunciation guides above the words without straining our eyes, so we went shopping together for new glasses. We both bought big bug-eyed B-shaped lenses with polka dot frames and stood together just outside the threshold of the store pretending to smoke. We licked each other’s lenses until the whole world looked a little foggy; we licked each other’s noses until it tickled and we had to sneeze. I thought I tasted apprehension in the salt of his snot. He said he saw Leo’s constellation in my freckles.

 

*

 

We were doing a crossword puzzle and talking out his mother’s childhood. He forgot the places she used to live.

Being military brats is how we first bonded. We knew his mom was born in a hospital in Tokyo and lives in Florida. We knew my mom was born in Germany and lives in Texas, but I couldn’t remember where they lived in between.

Then he didn’t know.

Then I didn’t know.

Then he didn’t know.

Then I didn’t know either.

Then we had an idea for a tattoo, so we called our moms and asked them to list all the countries they lived in chronological order. We spent hours talking to each one on speaker phone. We never talked about the increasing not remembering because we knew they didn’t want to remember it, and we didn’t want to think about what would be left over.

That night, we went out on the town in our skirts and glasses. We told the tattoo artist we wanted a map of the world drawn into an infinity sign. We marked every country our mothers lived in with big red dots, connected the countries with yellow dashes for his mother, green dashes for mine. Together, we were lovely like that. Assertive. We wanted our belly buttons to be the center of the world. When the tattoo artist only shaved a small patch of his stomach hairs, we told him to finish the job; we wanted our tummies to match. On the car ride home, he told me he was scared our tattoo will eventually feel random, that his stomach hair will grow back thicker, cover it up.

We had been listening to science fiction audiobooks about time travel at night. I told him a tattoo could be like a wormhole for time. It’ll swallow whatever you drop in it.  

 

*

 

We were always fans of martial arts, but we were too scared of injuries to start. My Dad always said “that’s how you get drain bramage.” Well, it was too late to worry about that kind of thing now, so we enrolled at Kobra Kai Muay Thai, a small, pizza-parlor sized dojo just on the outskirts of town. Our trainer, Rip Depeltzmo, wasn’t keen on us wearing our skirts over our shorts and cups, but after I explained the situation he made an exception.  

We started first with punching and techniques for the clinch.

The third day in the ring, I launched the corner of my elbow into his cheek. It left a bruise that looked like an antlion trap. We laughed and kissed each other’s shoulders. Rip wasn’t used to fighters kissing in the ring, either. We could see him blushing, so I blushed a little out of surprise. With all that adrenaline draining from our systems so quickly, we felt bare, exposed. We both remembered what Rip said when we signed up (“The ring ain’t no place for love”), and we stopped kissing. He launched an inside leg kick before I could even open my eyes again. Hit me clean, shin to thigh.

 When we got home and laid down, we were both a little sore. We felt uneven: gas in our tanks, but with nowhere to drive. With my back on the bed, my legs wrapped around his waist, he branded us the same again—dove in and elbowed me in the face. I snorted the blood into my nose so it didn’t stain the pillow.

Later that night, when I woke up to pee, I looked at him laying there like a goofy dog, his thighs wide open, sprawling out the covers. I kneeled over top of him for a few seconds just watching him sleep then I kneed him inside his thigh and left an even bigger mark than the one he left on mine.

“What a cheater,” he said, between moans, holding his reddening thigh on the bed, his eyes still closed.  

 

*

           

We were having a hard time keeping money coming in. He was having trouble with vocabulary at the office (chart for spreadsheets, future for projections, convincer for ads). His work told him to take a few weeks off. His manager mentioned trying to get him a severance package or trying to find him a job with “less pressure.” We needed a caretaker now for when he was particularly bad, but I hated the thought of him misrecognizing someone else.

The risk wasn’t so much that he’d burn the house down in confusion, but that it was more comfortable for someone to be with him when he got mixed up. Linda (he called her Lynne instead, his mother’s name) came in thirty minutes after I left and finished thirty minutes before I got home from my job so we would save a few dollars. I was having trouble putting my full spirit into the usual fifty at the non-profit law office helping lawyers help teenaged survivors of abuse to win custody over themselves.

We talked about how it was the only thing in the world I wanted to do when we met, to really help.

We talked about death all the time now that one of us was doing something definitive like that.

We developed a mantra to repeat together when he was too confused or I was too sad: “Death is real,” we’d say in unison, “which means so is life.”  

But it still felt bad to apply for paralegal jobs at Something and Something and Something law firms, even if the pay was higher and the hours shorter. He didn’t want me to do something I hated, but the tests at the neurologist, the dues for our training, and paying Linda was getting expensive.

 

*

           

The next day was the first time he forgot my name. We were always a little antsy lately, but that day our anxiety about money had turned into a rock in our stomachs. We went to Target again to look through the spring clothes lines—the happiest sartorial season. We tried on polos of bright cheery blues: robin’s egg, baby, turquoise, aquamarine. We tried on green-and-brown plaid skirts. Everything we tried was a size or two down because we were losing weight and wanted the clothes to be tight. We both needed a hug. The fabric clung to our diminishing stores of fat (from all Muay Thai and not eating out to save money), but it also gave us a feeling of emotional thinness that made us feel like we were really floating up to the ceiling. Or we were becoming the air and would someday blow back and forth, stuck in this store’s AC ducts. This time, no fondling or giggling. We were admiring each other’s fits, slightly soothed, slightly anxious, and always quiet. Just the same, it was only supposed to be one person to a changing room so the clerk knocked on the door as soon as he saw two shadows under the changing room door. There was a soft knock and a familiar cracked voice told us we couldn’t both be in there. Things had been hard for us, and we didn’t want to give him a hard time, so we hopped out of the changing room with a forced cheeriness and showed him our outfits.

Ta da!  We said.

He jumped back a little and looked at us. We stood in place and stared right into his eyes. He seemed to get shy. We felt a little too much air-conditioned wind on our butts and guessed why: our skirts were even smaller than we wanted. He kept his gaze fixed straight down on his feet to the point where it looked uncomfortable as he asked us to please put on the clothes we came in with, and said something about a family store. Though we were giggly at first, floating on our blue hues, he looked so bothered we decided to obey and changed and put the clothes back. We didn’t have the money to be buying new clothes anyway.

Still, we had a punch card from the Target hair salon: two for the price of one, and deals don’t often come when you need them, so we both got haircuts. This time, we got our heads shaved. Because it was such a simple cut the stylist gave us a discount on the cut we were paying for too. We didn’t talk at all, but the stylist hummed a nice song, and it was over soon.

While we were waiting for her to ring us up, I went to lick his eyebrow, but then I saw a spat of dandruff that looked like it would taste bitter on my tongue. I thought better of it. I rested my forehead on his and, with my eyes closed, I handed her the money.  

 

*

 

I came home from my third week at the new job at a for-profit law firm with my work pants wrinkled and a cut on my right arm.

When I got in the door, he looked at the blood soaking into the fabric of my sleeve making it a darker shade of brown. He asked if I fell off my bike again. I didn’t want him to panic so I said yes. I knew it was better for him, but I felt guilty lying. “No,” I admitted, “I got mugged on my way home. But you should see the mugger. I threw a perfect sweep kick and hyperextended his knee. I ran behind him as he fell and pulled him into a rear-naked chokehold. I had to put him to sleep because he wouldn’t tap. Before that, though, he got me swinging like a chicken with his head cut off, big random arcs with his dinky Swiss army knife. He grazed me under the arm when I rushed to get ahold of him. It was a long cut, but it wasn’t deep. Didn’t stop me from getting the TKO.”

“Well, I guess the surprise won’t work since your suit has a gash in it.”

I asked him what surprise.

He pointed mischievously with an eyebrow arch to a brown-and-purple pants suit sitting on the wicker chair in our living room, a perfect copy of the one I was wearing, aside from the cut and the blood.

I told him I still wanted to see him in it.

He put it on. When I went to hug him, I felt a searing pain in my arm so I took my shirt off to really look at the damage. The cut was deeper than I thought, but when he said we should go to the hospital, that I needed stitches, I wouldn’t have any of it. My new job paid well but had shitty insurance, so even with the extra income it wouldn’t be enough to cover the deductible.

He said he couldn’t imagine how a knife feels inside the skin so I cracked a small piece off the porcelain top of our toilet with a hammer and cut his arm through his suit exactly where I had been cut.   

We sat bleeding on each other in the bathtub. I told him how good it felt to win a knife fight with your bare hands like it was a lullaby. He talked about how he needed the cut. How he felt like he saw the porcelain shard entering his skin like watching a hawk’s claw slicing inside a river to catch a fish in one of those nature documentaries. He nodded off and fell asleep in my arms. I stayed up and watched our trails of blood stretch toward the drain until they were so thin they looked pink.

 

*

 

There had come a point where we were both frustrated beyond recovery: me with my new job helping rich assholes help richer assholes sweep things under the mat; him with watching cartoons and cooking shows to forget that he couldn’t explain stock portfolios, hazarding through the crosswords every morning, scoring lower and lower every month—the kind of scores he used to get as a ten-year-old.

He started making flash cards of important dates like when we first met, when his mother got her first picture published in a nature magazine, the date his father died. The problem was he still remembered some things with a little help from me or Linda, but he couldn’t choose what or when he remembered.

One time, when his mother called, he talked to her like he was eleven again going to the middle school dance. He asked her if she could drive him home. It was an hour before the dance even ended. He told her every single girl that he asked to dance that night rejected him. “I don’t do anything cool. I don’t like sports. I’ve never even tried a sip of beer,” he said.

He told me before that he was terrible to his mom that night, that he hated when she tried to comfort him, when she told him that he was smart and kind and it would take a while for girls to notice, but eventually they would, but he didn’t want to hear any of it. He was afraid that if he couldn’t concentrate hard enough, that resentment was the only thing about their relationship he’d remember.

She called again, a day later. It was a bad day. He was still fixated on it, trying to piece it together, but it wasn’t working, and I heard it happen I heard her start to cry over the line before he slammed the phone down, screaming “Liar! Liar!” You could hear that anger in the pauses in the next call too, crowding his mom out of her career in nature photography, blotting out his memories of her and that time she graciously drained the sebaceous cyst on his back that she named Twisted Cyster.

On more lucid days, he said he felt like that memory was a trap door for both of them: every time she called he’d try to get past it but she’d drop right into the driver’s seat of that silver Nissan minivan. Feeling alone and confused, he’d fall right into those ugly denim shorts and wool vests he wore in middle school, that trying-not-to-cry expression, those trying-not-to-hear ears, the ones that wanted to make sure he didn’t believe the loving things she said.  

 

*

When I told Rip we wouldn’t be able to come much longer because things at home were getting harder and more expensive, he started giving us lessons for free in exchange for a little bit of after-class mopping. He even gave us his instructional DVD so we could practice as much as we wanted at home for free.

We drilled one form every night following the exact patterns in the video six times in a row.

I thanked him.

He said it was nothing, that the form we were memorizing was meant to defend from danger coming at any angle.  

 

*

 

Six months after the diagnosis, we went to the zoo, the three of us. Him, his mother, Lynne, and I. She drove all the way down from the city just to meet us. It was a cool spring morning, and the sky was blue like an Easter egg. He started sucking in air in loud shallow breaths. I asked him if everything was alright.

“Every day’s air tastes different,” he said. “And today’s tastes like it’s melting.”

 

*

 

His medication had gotten more expensive too, because the “choice first” plan had a higher co-pay than my last plan and his doctor kept ramping his dosages up. We told the doctor we can’t afford it, asked for alternatives. The doctor said that his job is health, not costs, and suggested we ask for generics at the pharmacy.

On the drive back, I began to talk to talk out loud to myself about if it even made sense to keep up with everything we were doing, but as soon as the words started to leave my mouth I stopped.

Ever since I cut his arm like mine, we’d been feeling more wolfish than sheepish, and I started to feel happy that we were drowning in debt. “Death is real,” I whispered to myself, “which means so is life.”  

He asked me what I said and I asked him if he remembered watching Bonnie and Clyde. He did. “They did everything right, but they probably wouldn’t have got caught if they knew martial arts.”

He asked what I was getting at: “Let’s rob a bank.”

So we did.

I asked for a favor from a few of our friends and arranged the living room furniture so that the breakfast bar was a teller’s desk, the living room was the lobby, and the refrigerator was a vault.

We wore our skirts to the robbery.

I carried Mirth under a black blanket and pointed him into the faces of our friends. I poked them in the cheek and yelled “Put yer hands up, wiseguy!” Friend security guards rushed us, but we hadn’t told them we’d been training Muay Thai, so when they grabbed us we threw them over our backs onto our carpeted floor instinctively. They muttered about not being paid enough as we tapped their guts with our toes in victory.

While the tellers filled our bags with packs of crackers, bread and cheese, we yelled threateningly:

“Hurry up or Mirth will make jewels of your insides and we’ll wear ‘em as rings!”

“Be generous or Mirth will make you some more holes then suture them closed then open them again.”

“Yeah, Mirth shoots radioactive bullets that will irradiate your gut!”

“Be sure to screen for colon cancer!”

“Yeah! Hospitals suck!”

“No one wants to die in a waiting room!”
“Death is real, which means so is life.”

“Yeah! Are you really living, motherfuckers?”

 Then the real cops came (our friends asked some other friends to come over dressed in cop uniforms, but warned them about the martial arts). They brought bananas covered in tinfoil and pointed them at us from our front door.

We weren’t interested in playing hostage and we weren’t interested in being shot, so we raised our hands into the bright stream of the skylight and the two security guards on the ground jumped up, and tackled us down, pushed our heads on the floor a bit harder than I thought they would and cuffed us.   

“Damnit, they got us,” I said. “Those bastards were tougher than I thought, eh Clyde?”

“I was at least hoping you’d get away unscathed, Bonnie.”

 

*

 

After robbing a bank, getting caught, and surviving to tell the tale, nothing felt dangerous to us. He was so excited he forgot his name. For a second there, I forgot mine too. We needed to do something, so I said let’s celebrate. We shaved our legs and went to Target to look at their shoes, the most exciting kind of clothing. They help you stay in motion, after all. We tried on heels and trainers, tennis shoes and hiking boots, loafers and brogues. We pulled out box after box and box and left them on the floor. We mixed and matched the shoes and threaded our legs together as we looked in the ankle mirrors so even we wouldn’t know whose feet was whose. It got to the point where we had made something of a fort in the tennis shoe aisle, and that same employee with the crack in his voice told us we could try on as much as we wanted but we had to fix the boxes so that other customers could walk by.

We asked him how he was doing, that it had been a while, and he didn’t seem to remember us.  We said we would get rid a few boxes and we tossed back a few boxes to him that we were no longer using. The box for a pair of size 9 Doc Martens landed on his hand as he was reaching to pick up the other boxes of shoes we left there. He yelled at us annoyed, but we gave a smile and he grunted and left to put them away. We felt bad for a second, but then we felt okay because we had found what we had come for: two beautiful pairs of yellow, faux leather d’orsays. Even though we got caught at the bank, we thought, a pair of shoes is a much easier target (no pun intended), and besides the shoes were thin enough that we could bend them flat and put them right under my hoodie.

We decided to skip the haircut that time, for obvious reasons, and when we were ten feet away from the door, a security guard tapped us both on the shoulder and we knew the jig was up. Once in cuffs, we pushed our shoulders up like we were itching our cheeks to conceal our smiles.

After a while of talking and apologizing in the makeshift interrogation room, I convinced the officer not to charge us, that we were just blowing off steam from a year or two of increasingly bad news. We would be banned from all the local Targets, so they would need our pictures for the store’s permanent record. Right before the picture, I mussed my hair up by wrapping a curl around my fingers and rotating it in a circle, then I did that to his hair too.

We have to look good, I whispered, after all, these pictures are gonna last forever.