Das Unheimliche

Girl with red hat

JACK DEMCHAK

He drops a few coins into the tip jar after picking up his drink from the bar. Something foamy made with alternative milk that “shouldn’t be steamed over 140, okay?” Said with a smile, though his mouth looked like it was never taught how to, but instead had learned how to mimic one from late night advertisements; like he’s trying to sell something but doesn’t know what exactly. Maybe himself. It felt almost like a dog walking on its hind legs. He sports a designer hoodie underneath his thrifted turquoise puffer jacket. He has a lot of tight, white-gold hoops; on his fingers, his nose, his ears.

Clear glasses and a beanie hat that is rolled up too high.

An outfit meant to minimally mimic the aesthetic of poverty, yet is too expensive to have been acquired without financial support from someone who doesn’t check their bank account before grocery shopping. Who can get the chocolate-covered almonds without thinking twice about the fact they’re fucking eight dollars.

He makes a lot of eye contact with me as he tells me about his classes, about how annoyed he is with having to read Plato’s

The Republic for the third time in his life. I can feel him looking at himself in the reflection the white of my eyes provide. “It’s not like we didn’t all read it in high school. I mean, c’mon, right?” I catch him almost about to snort from laughing at his own joke, but he catches himself and looks away for a moment. I almost wish I was the person who, in his youth, had made fun of him for it to cause him to be prepared to suppress the action.

My brain hurts as I do my best impression of a bobblehead to make sure he knows I’m listening while I sip my drink, make sure he knows I care, that I, too, am capable of performing the same kind of emotional labor that I imagine his mother once did, or rather continues to do. I enjoy, a little too much, being a very fuckable, unpaid makeshift therapist. I’m sort of astounded by the fact that he has been chewing gum this whole time, and loudly at that, even while nursing his coffee. I imagine he is someone that has some pretentious belief they would half-jokingly share a party that since gum is something that is meant to be chewed, to do so softly would be an insult to its existence. He continually crosses and uncrosses his thin legs under the table, and doesn’t think I notice. He reminds me of those inverted knee birds who stand on the back of a crocodile amid the marsh, acting like this means they, too, have the gnashing teeth of an apex predator. What are they

called again? I make a mental note to consider buying uppers and not downers, as if this will provide access to previously unnoticed knowledge.

“So where’re you from? Let me guess, someone else from New York?” He rolls his eyes as he says it, as if him being from LA is really all that different, as if he didn’t have every available option that a mega city provides, as if he also isn’t from somewhere kids like me imagined they’d run away to someday. He is from the destination. I almost say this, but then remember that he doesn’t actually want conversation, but to merely be two people talking at each other across a table, each doing their best attempt to sell themselves. A brief interaction of exchange, transactional at its core; he knows nothing else but what he can provide, but this. I tell him I’m not from New York, but a town in a flyover state, from a house at the end of the street with no outlet that drinks gas station, full calorie beer with abandon. I imagine he would call the stories of me being 14 and having to scheme sixpacks from the GetGo two streets over “Cute!” with the exclamation point being especially pronounced in a way that hurts my ears.

“Yeah I haven’t really heard of that place, sorry.” He laughs to fill the empty space between us after he says it. Even with the coffee he’s drinking, his teeth are so white they look blue.

“That’s okay, I wouldn’t expect you to.” For some reason this gives me a shadow of a smile that I have to turn away to hide. I know he wouldn’t like me smiling like I know something he doesn’t. That I am capable of things outside of his sphere of possibility and influence. He thinks he has a monopoly on being alternative, on being queer, on being unloved by his parents. There is nothing that I have experienced that he can’t relate to, no story I can tell that he can’t talk over. His last girlfriend apparently didn’t really get him. Wanted too much from him. Was unreasonable. But hot, don’t forget that she was hot!

“A little much.”

He’s the kind of queer man who has only ever dated women, a soft boy who likes hard girls, but has been with a few men in between. Like rest stops on his journey to selfactualization. His bisexuality is part of the brand, of the sell, the reason he’s different, special; his favorite accessory. He has strong upper arms covered in teeny tattoos drawn without much detail, as if in the style of a child. My annoyingly twisted head can almost picture him purchasing the arms at a store, from an indie “environmentally friendly and ethically sourced” boutique body part shop, somewhere in LA, that you had to know someone who knows someone to hear about, the kind that might also sell quinoa and smoothies advertised to make you shit your brains out. He has an antique bike in a calming color that he tells everyone he got from his grandparents, though we all know he found it from an online seller, yet no one admits to seeing through the lie. It is easier to believe. To simply get on your knees, look up, and treat him like he’s someone important enough to ask forgiveness from.

Sitting next to him I feel big and wide and flat. I try to imagine him pity masturbating to the ideas of Kant to make me feel better, or maybe even him beating it to the fantasy getting to choke Gloria Steinem during sex, which he would hope makes him a feminist via osmosis. Or maybe he believes that by destroying the thing, he becomes it. Seems like a male line of reasoning, which feels hypocritical to critique, though perhaps throwing stones in a glass house is too familiar a past time. I worry this boy is so unnerving because he could be me. In another life. In an alternate dimension, where the holes in space aren’t black but white, a place where maybe I don’t feel the need to cover my stomach with a pillow when I sit down on a couch, where my parents had settled somewhere where the dreams having bigger tits, and are more familiar with coke nosebleeds than kickbacks in someone’s backyard; getting ditchweed from your cousin’s boyfriend who hit her that at that party “but listens to Sarah Barellis, so like he can’t be that bad. One time mistake.” He also once had geometry with your brother, where they’d sit in the back and talk about how they wanted to “slam dunk” on their cold and unfeeling, but disturbingly sensual teacher’s “freezer burn pussy.” In this other place removed from reality, I don’t spend the summers laying flat on a friend’s backyard brick pathway that is warmed by the lazy sun, where we grate bottlepops with our front teeth and talk about how we’re incapable of love and utterly ambitionless. In this world, I am more excited about the alarmingly rising heat of the planet, because it means more opportunities to display my body that is partly a genetic lottery win but also was purchased with generational wealth due to societal peer pressure. A Powerpuff Girl style alchemical concoction of influence that pairs well with benzos and SSRIs, that tastes like saccharine children’s medicine. The kind that’s pink and tarlike, but your tongue has learned to identify as almost “strawberry.”

He begins to tell me about the game he wants to design, an inhabitable open world game set in a future that you create. He tells me it doesn’t have a name yet but that doesn’t really matter to him. The goal is to make a utopia, where there will be an algorithm that scores the NPCs of your fantasy’s happiness levels. The desired outcome is to make everyone as happy and fulfilled as possible, to create the perfect place using anything you can imagine. It can be as detailed or unfocused and free-reigning as you would want it to be. An ambitious project that feels vaguely like a philosophical take on The Sims, perhaps formed from a half-baked thought that emerged during his local indie boy trust fund circle jerk.

“Are you religious?”

His eyes, colorless but very alive, squint at me. I cross and uncross my legs under the table. I worry how good it will feel to fuck someone with a God complex; if, like him, by destroying something, I will become it.

Jack Demchak is a Pittsburgh native currently studying as a junior at the University of Chicago, where he studies Creative Writing, Comparative Human Development, and Theatre and Performance Studies, focusing on the oddities of everyday life, and the science and storytelling of how scary it can be to simply be a person. In his spare time, he’s a barista, a bartender, a wearer of funky sweaters, and an avid fan of reality television.