Intricate Family Affairs

What will it be like when friendships are assigned?

The summons arrives on the first day of spring. You agree to meet on the first day of April. He is green and coiled when you arrive — on the stretch of gravel by the commuter rail line: his choice — and the conversation is simultaneously dull and serrated. You submit your timesheet with a turned-over stomach.

Next time, a week later, the rains have ballooned in, and you pick the location: a tea shop on the corner, inside a grocer’s — here, everyone knows you. Now he is more civilized. Indeed, he riffles his umbrella before setting foot inside. There is a flag patch — Norwegian — on his breast pocket and a satchel on his shoulder.

“Have you stayed in touch with your past government friends?” he asks.

“I don’t think of them that way. But yes, I’m in touch with most of them. Mavis over there,” you say, waving at the owner, “she and I were paired several years ago.”

“Why can’t I call you my government friend? I don’t know you. I mean, maybe they dug you up out of a cave where they store vats of radiation.”

What does that mean? Why were the two of you paired? — According to a questionnaire you consumed over last night’s goreng, your fatal flaw is a servile disposition. It’s not that I’m cruel, an ex once said to you. It’s that you’re weak.  

Naturally — it’s too soon for your new friend to wither you so. He cracks a gingersnap in half, criss-crosses his legs. “But here’s the thing,” he says. “It may be true that nobody makes friends in the West anymore. Nevertheless, you can’t order society to stop crumbling.”

“Isn’t that what every law is trying to effect?” you say.

To which he lets out a crisp laugh. Mavis comes over with a pot of tea and, pulling up a chair, reveals to him the manifold charms your friendship will afford him. His eyes roll back. As if — he’s been tranquilized.

“When I met my best friend, twenty years ago,” he says, “I was about your age. I’d thrown some coffee beans into the compost bin. Overnight the raccoons tipped the bin over and gorged themselves. They died — a whole family of them had heart attacks from the caffeine — they died right there on the street. A neighbor several doors down showed up at my door to tell me. He banged on the door at six in the morning. We’d never talked before. It was like he had been waiting for this moment. He had a shovel in his hands. He said we needed to get the dead raccoons out of the street or I would be arrested. Okay! — I’d just immigrated here. What did I know? I believed him. We took the raccoons to his garage, where he got to work — yes — taxidermying them. He didn’t care about rabies. No time to care, he said, we had work to do. When he died, decades later, I was the only person in his will.” 

Mavis’s eyebrows are up. “Really?” she says in French.

“I’m not going to get that from a government friend, now, am I?”

“But that friendship — that story — was a lie,” says Mavis. “Raccoons hate coffee.”

“That’s true. They do,” he says. “But I didn’t know that at the time.”

“And you would rather have a friendship based on a lie,” I say, “than a government friend?” Since I can tell how he’s going to answer, I supply the answer for him: What’s the difference?

“Are you in touch with any of your government friends?” Mavis asks him.

“Of course!” he says with a laugh. “I’m in touch with all of them. That first day of spring, when the summons comes, that’s the highlight of my year.” Then his face softens, it becomes as inviting as a holiday, and you realize, to your delight, that he is sincere. Later, when you submit your timesheet, you foster a morbid hope: you want — (why?) — you want desperately to appear in his will.