The Girl on the Fridge: Stories by Etgar Keret Read Free Book Online

everything. None of it means anything, none of it. You know how it feels when you’re someplace and you ask yourself, Why am I here? That’s how it is with me all the time. I can’t wait to leave. To go from wherever I am to some other place. It never ends. I swear, I’d have killed myself a long time ago if I wasn’t such a pussy.”
    “Cut it out,” Eitan tried. “That isn’t you talking, it’s the beer. Tomorrow you’re going to wake up feeling like hell and you’ll tell yourself you were talking some serious bullshit. Then you’ll decide to quit smoking.”
    Uzi didn’t laugh. “I know,” he muttered. “I know it’s the beer. Tomorrow I’ll sound different. I thought that was the whole point.”
    They took a cab home. The first stop was Uzi’s.
    “Take care of yourself, okay?” Eitan said and gave him a hug before he got out of the cab. “Don’t do anything retarded.”
    “Don’t worry.” Uzi smiled. “I’m not going to kill myself or anything. I don’t have the balls. If I did, I’d have done it a long time ago.”
    Next, the cab dropped Eitan at his place, and he went upstairs. He had a gun in the drawer. He’d bought it with sporting-goods coupons he’d received when he was an officer. Not that he was trigger-happy or anything, but it was either that or signing for an M16 every time he went on leave. Eitan took the gun out of his underwear drawer and cocked it. He held it up to his chin. Someone had told him once that if you shoot from underneath, it wipes out your brain stem. When you shoot at the temple, the slug could go right through and you’d wind up a vegetable. He released the safety.
    “If I want to, I can shoot,” he said out loud. He ordered his brain to pull the trigger. His finger obeyed, but stopped halfway. He could do it, he wasn’t scared. He just had to make sure he wanted to. He thought about it for a few seconds. Maybe in the general scheme of things he couldn’t find any meaning to life, but on a smaller scale it was okay. Not always, but a lot of the time. He wanted to live, he really did. That’s all there was to it. Eitan gave his finger another order to make sure he wasn’t kidding himself. It still seemed prepared to do whatever he wanted. He put the gun on half cock and pushed the safety back in. If not for those four beers, he’d never even have tried it. He would have made up an excuse, said it was just a dumb test, that it didn’t mean anything. But like Uzi said, that was the whole point. He put the gun back in the drawer and went into the bathroom to puke. Then he washed his face and soaked his head in the sink. Before drying himself, he took a look in the mirror. A skinny guy, wet hair, a little pale, like that runner on TV. He wasn’t jumping or yelling or anything, but he’d never felt this good.

Cramps
    That night I dreamed that I was a forty-year-old woman and my husband was a retired colonel. He was running a community center in a poor neighborhood, and his social skills were shit. His workers hated him because he kept yelling at them. They complained that he treated them like they were in basic training. Every morning I’d make him an omelet, and for supper a veal cutlet with mashed potatoes. When he was in a decent mood, he’d say the food tasted good. He never offered to clear the table. Once a month or so, he’d bring home a bouquet of dead flowers that immigrant kids used to sell at the intersection where the lights were really slow.
    That night I dreamed that I was a forty-year-old woman and that I was having cramps, and it’s nighttime, and suddenly I realize I’m all out of tampons, and I try to wake my husband, who’s a retired colonel, and ask him to go to the all-night pharmacy or to drive me there at least, because I don’t have a driver’s license, and even if I did, he still has an army car I’m not allowed to drive. I tell him it’s an emergency, but he won’t go, just keeps mumbling in his sleep, saying the meal