Fiction: Step Three

All great nights end with Chinese food. At least that’s what I heard once, from a college guy with beer on his breath and clutching a plastic bag bearing a yellow smiley face. I still don’t know why he chose to tell me this—I’d never seen the kid before in my life and all I was trying to do was get home from work—but the phrase really stuck with me. It was like some archaic, secret wisdom had been passed on to me by a mystical sprite in the form of some drunk kid I didn’t know who was there one moment and pissing in the street the next. It was like I needed to hear that—like it would be important somewhere down the line—and that I’d been chosen to hear such wisdom not by chance, but fate. Andrea thinks I’m insane.

In learning this tidbit of information I started becoming more select about when—and from where—I got my Chinese food fix. It started almost without my notice. If I was thinking about grabbing some Chinese, I wondered if it was a great enough night to eat it. I had to figure out what a great night constituted to me, so I developed a point system. Time to spend with my girl? That’s two points, but only one if she takes more than two hours to get ready and keeps me locked out of the bathroom for most of it. Poker night with the boys is another two points and it goes to three is Andrea doesn’t throw a fit when I show up after midnight smelling of beer, cigarettes, and hot wings. If I throw up that subtracts a point, and one time I found a twenty on the ground and realized that finding money is worth five points, even though it’s never happened again. If the night totaled five points or more, I got Chinese food. At least that was the plan, but I ended up assigning points pretty haphazardly, having such a good time I forgot to add them up, and eventually decided to just go with the Chinese based on my general feeling of the night; on whether or not it deserved such a divinely sanctioned ending.

“Why didn’t you just do that in the first place?” Andrea asked, glaring, after I told her the new plan. I guess she wasn’t as okay with tracking the points as she said she was.

Then there’s the fortune cookie, and here’s the most important part. When I first heard the part about great nights ending with Chinese food, I thought about it so much I ended up with a craving for General Tso’s chicken. So I ordered some and tried to figure out just what it was about this almost too sweet meat that was so deserving of acting as the capstone on a fantastic night. Where was the source of the significance I felt in that fated meeting, in that single sentence? I ate the chicken slowly, deliberately, and debated this. It wasn’t until the fortune cookie that I understood. It wasn’t about General Tso’s or any other military man’s chicken—it was about that little slip of paper at the end. These were going to reveal to me life’s lessons, wisdom, and ensure my great night would turn into a life full of fortune and longevity.

“It’s just a cookie,” Andrea said. “A brittle, stale, fucked-up shaped cookie.”

Truth be told, I don’t even like fortune cookies. They taste like sugar-covered Styrofoam with subtle papery tones, but it isn’t about liking them; it’s about their secrets. Hidden in each cookie is an obscure message waiting to be decoded, like those cryptograms I used to do when I was a kid with my grandma because my parents made me (and Grandma made amazing cookies). After several take-out meals I knew I was onto something. I was getting so many fortunes about all kinds of things—the interesting stranger I would meet, my friend that was an enemy in disguise, and the golden egg of opportunity that would fall into my lap last September, and they were all coming true. Every single one. I met this crazy guy who bummed a cigarette off me the day after the first fortune who told me all about his cat that could walk on its hind legs, which inspired me to create the cat food ad that got me out of the mailroom. After the second one I found out my buddy, Brandon, was the one who kept stealing my Cokes out of the work fridge. In September I was finally put on a marketing team to help develop the ad campaign for a new kitchen appliance to make eggs. It was incredible.

“That’s because those ‘fortunes,’ as you like to call them, are purposefully vague. So that people can take them any way they want,” Andrea said.

“But eggs? Really? Something weird is happening! I’m telling you…Seriously,” I said.

Andrea’s fortune the following Friday read: “Disbelief destroys the magic.”

“That means you!” I said. “You’re going to jinx me!”

She rolled her eye.

“I’m going to jinx myself,” she said. “You’re a believer so I’m sure you’re fine.”

“You’re going to ruin my magic.”

But she didn’t ruin my magic. That drunk college kid blessed me with the power to predict the future, provided I could interpret it correctly (sometimes I got it wrong and only knew what it actually meant once it manifested), and I was unstoppable. Although initially I was pleased to get my Chinese from anywhere that was open, one Friday a guy passing out leaflets by the subway station handed me an advertisement for a new Chinese place—Magic Wok. This was the real turning point in my prophetic powers. Magic Wok was a little out of the way—twenty minutes in the wrong direction—but it was worth it; a magic wok was certain to be more fruitful than an ordinary wok. That was step one.

Step two in my development came with simple logic and ingenuity. Frustrated that I couldn’t remember all the fortunes I was getting, and in order to better document their realizations to improve my accuracy of prediction rate, I bought a memo pad and clear Scotch tape specifically for my fortunes. The magic, I soon learned, had several requirements to work. The most important was what that kid had told me—it was only on great nights I could have Chinese food. Good, okay, and pleasant nights were no good for magic; bad nights were flat out. Second, I had to actually eat the cookie. That papery flavor in the cookie, I figured, was actually the fortune’s magic embedded into the food, and only through ingesting the magic could the fortune actually become applicable. Finally, in addition to having to eat the cookie, the order of consumption and reading was vital. The cookie had to be eaten first. It did no good to read the fortune and then decide whether or not you wanted it—magic was equal opportunity, and for the good things to happen you had to be willing to accept the bad as well. I documented all of this in my memo pad, taped in each new fortune with delicate care, and underneath wrote a detailed encounter of its manifestation in the world. After eight months of this process, I almost had it down to a science, though I was certain my method could never be scientifically proven. This was a magic beyond the understanding of the mortal world.

While steps one and two had been relatively easy to come across in my ability to read the fortune cookies, the third and final step in my development came a little later. In April, after an amazing night with Andrea, I ordered Chinese takeout to complete the night together despite Andrea’s insistence that she’d never eat Chinese with me again. After the meal, I got a fortune that told me, “Don’t just think. Act.” I realized that I had been thinking about what a great couple we were, and that maybe it was a good idea to move in together, but I’d been putting it off because Andrea was still in grad school and I was only making a modest salary after the client rejected our Egg-Tastic proposal with the golden chickens. I could have kept putting it off, but this was the magic of the fortune cookie, and I couldn’t deny that, so I asked her to move in with me there on the spot.

“Did your stupid fortune cookie tell you to ask me that?” she said and snatched the paper out of my hand.

“Be gentle with that!” I said.

She stared at the slip for a moment and then her scowl morphed almost piecemeal with a twitch of the lips here and there into a small grin. She did that weird thing with her mouth where she moves her jaw around a lot trying not to smile because she hates her smile, but I think it’s so cute when she makes those ugly faces I couldn’t help but grin myself.

“I don’t have to make anything pink, do I?” I asked.

“God, no,” she said.

So we moved in together, and nothing became pink, and we kept getting Chinese food after great nights. I even got a bonus after a client loved my last minute changes to the cat food ad that got me out of the mailroom. Then last Friday Andrea went out with a couple of her girlfriends and I went out drinking with the guys. I was in such a great mood that it felt like a Chinese night so I swung by the Magic Wok for some Kung Pao Shrimp. At the end of the meal I ate the fortune cookie while reading my lucky numbers and then flipped it over to read, “Ideas are like children; there are none so wonderful as your own.”

Children. Children? Children.

I didn’t know how to react, because I didn’t have any “children.” I wasn’t ready for “children.” We always used condoms, except for the few times I convinced her we didn’t need one, and she was on birth control anyway so there was absolutely no way she could be pregnant. Except, you know, for the fact the fortune cookie said she was.

But if she was she would have told me. Right? Unless she didn’t know. Unless I was the only one who did know, and then what? When she told me should I act surprised? Should I leave the fortune cookie out of it? I know how she hates it when I go on about them. Maybe that even wasn’t what it meant, but I spent the last nine months studying fortune cookies from Magic Wok and…Oh dear God, nine months studying fortune cookies! It was like I was the maker of my own destruction. I had incubated this pregnancy on my own for nine months through the fortune cookies and now that I’d hit the magic number it had somehow materialized beyond the condoms, beyond the birth control, and into a person in Andrea’s womb.

Where were we going to put the thing…kid…thing? We shared a one-bedroom apartment, and I know parents like to keep their babies in their room and all, but I just don’t like the idea of my kid watching me while I fuck its mom. Not that I really should be thinking about fucking Andrea or anything, since that’s how we got into this mess in the first place, but thinking about pregnancy kind of requires you to think about the stuff that led up to it. It’s like a prerequisite or something. So I fucked Andrea and now she was pregnant and we were both fucked.

What if she did know? What if she knew and she was afraid to tell me? What if she thought I’d be a bad dad, or a jackass, or leave her or something? Maybe I should buy her flowers. Or balloons. No, wait, I can’t do that. Then she’d know I knew, and she’d guess the fortune cookies told me, and then she’d know that I was still speculating my future based around something that she swore wasn’t even Chinese. I tried to tell her it wasn’t about it being Chinese, but about the magic, but that just frustrated her, and sure, she thought it was sweet when I wanted to move in together, but that’s because the cookie didn’t tell me to ask her; it just told me to act on what I was thinking about. She may have even let me tape the fortune on the refrigerator door instead of in my memo book because “good advice is always good advice, no matter where it comes from,” but this wasn’t even advice. The Magic Wok fortunes had become so incredible, so powerful they could tell me secrets so straight-forward there was no way they could be misinterpreted anymore. I had become my own cookie oracle.

I agonized over the fortune the entire way home. Andrea was already asleep by the time I got back and I thought it was best not to wake her, but I was so jazzed up after seeing her that I spent an hour trying to fall asleep without any luck. I needed to do something, needed to act, so I got up and paced the apartment trying to reorganize the whole thing in my head for the baby. When that didn’t work, I started moving furniture. I fell asleep in the middle of the living room floor with my forehead plastered on the coffee table—or at least I think I did, because that’s how I woke up Saturday morning. Andrea was already gone and left a note next to my face telling me I looked too adorably stupid to wake up and that she thought we’d get lunch after her appointment if I felt up to it.

Appointment. Now this was a word that normally filled me with dread as images of insane dentists and excruciatingly boring doctor’s offices (with their analogously excruciating soft rock radio or morning public television) danced through my head. But an appointment now? Now I just kept screaming “fortune cookie” (in my head—I hope), and damned myself for being touched by this blessed curse. It seemed like my friend, but was indeed my foe, but maybe it was my friend because I almost had a plan for redecorating the living room to accommodate my daughter—I think I’d probably like having a girl—last night before I passed out, and this preemptive strike was all thanks to the fortune cookie! I rejoiced and congratulated myself on my optimism, because a positive attitude was going to be vital in helping to convince Andrea I was more than prepared to do my part in getting through this together. After all, a light heart carries you through all hard times, or so Confucius might have said according to Magic Wok.

Andrea called me around 2:00.

“Hey, I just got out of the doctor’s,” she said and sniffed. “Did you get my note?”

“Yeah. Lunch, right?” I said. “Did you want to meet somewhere or just bring something back here?”

“I was thinking Roxy’s, if that’s fine by you.”

Roxy’s. So this was how she was going to play it. I steeled myself. Roxy’s was our special place, or at least it was before I discovered Magic Wok, and it would be kind of serendipitous to be at the diner where we had our first date when she announced the big news. A sense of glee filled my heart; my head felt overgrown with joy like a giant, swollen balloon. I agreed to meet her there and asked if there was anything she wanted me to bring.

“Just yourself…” she replied.

I wanted to tell her she had nothing to worry about because I wasn’t going to abandon her, and I was getting sort of used to the idea of Andrea being pregnant, even if it did kind of make my brain feel numb if I really thought about it in a horrific and terrifying sort of way. I would bring Kleenex even though she didn’t ask for it, hug her if she wanted, and allow her to abuse me in any way that made her feel better about the situation we were in.

I hopped in the shower long enough to wash the lingering scent of beer, tobacco, and body odor off of me, dressed, and headed out. I got to Roxy’s around 3; Andrea was already at a table in a corner by the window reading the menu she already knew by heart. She smiled when I took the seat across from her. My trepidation eased a little. Good. She didn’t seem that upset or worried so I might even make it out of there without getting smacked.

“Did I wake you when I called?” Andrea said.

“Nah. I was just unwashed, unshaven, and kind of gross,” I said.

She nodded and smirked. “So, basically, it was a regular Saturday afternoon.”

“Yeah. Basically.”

We caught up. She told me about her night out with the girls; asked me about my night out with the guys. I was surprised and a little alarmed to learn she had a little to drink.

“Should you really be doing that right now?” I asked.

I know I was trying to my awareness a secret, but that was little Jillian’s brain she was poisoning, and I hoped she could come to that realization on her own without me coming outright and saying it wasn’t okay with me. Andrea eyed me with the kind of suspicion she normally gives me when I say I like her mom’s cooking.

“I didn’t have to be anywhere early today, so I don’t see why not,” she said.

“Well, what about your appointment? You had that.”

“Yeah...”

“So there was somewhere you needed to be,” I said.

Andrea stared at me like she was trying to read my thoughts; I felt my face turn red.

“You’re acting weird,” she said. “Weirder than usual, I mean. What happened?”

She was a shrewd, clever, fantastic woman. Jillian was never going to get anything by her.

“Nothing. Why do think something happened?”

“You’re acting squirrely.”

“I’m not acting squirrely. Tell me about your appointment.”

Andrea paused; she licked her lips and looked out the window with her “I’m thinking” expression. The waitress came over while Andrea was still thinking so I ordered a coke and a burger, and she ordered the same, and then I swirled my straw around my complimentary water.

“Well I’m trying a new allergy med since the last one isn’t doing shit. So hopefully that gives me some relief, but you’re deflecting the conversation,” she said. “Whatever stupid thing you did, just tell me. I promise I won’t get mad. Did you break something? Is that what happened?”

“No, I didn’t break anything,” I said and frowned.

I was a little hurt at first, to be honest, that she didn’t just tell me the truth, but then it hit me. It was last week that Andrea said her allergies had been bothering her and that she was going to the school clinic for a checkup if they didn’t improve soon, and that meant she wasn’t lying. She had been to the doctor about her allergies, which meant only one thing. Andrea didn’t know she was pregnant and I was going to have to be the one to break it to her. I had to. If she found out and knew that I’d known all along and didn’t tell her, she’d kill me (or at least yell and tell me I was “unbelievable”).

But how do you tell your girlfriend she’s pregnant?

“You’re getting that squirrely look again,” she said.

“I was just thinking,” I said.

“Is that what you call it these days?”

“Listen…” I took a breath. “There’s something important I have to tell you, and I know this is going to sound crazy, but you’ve got to hear me out.”

“Okay, here we go,” she said. “What did you do?”

I took her hand across the table and hung my head.

“I think I knocked you up,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

I nodded to emphasize my apology. When I looked up Andrea stared back at me, jaw slack, like I had just told her I was communicating with Martians. Andrea appeared to be going through a spectrum of emotions—rubbing at her forehead, shaking her head, mumbling to herself, making jerky, sudden glances around Roxy’s and out the window—so I busied myself with drinking my water and waited.

“I know,” I said, once her mouth stopped twitching. “It came as a shock to me, too.”

“Are you out of your effing mind?” she said. “What in the world would make you think I was pregnant?”

With the kind of bravado I heretofore didn’t know I possessed, I slapped the fortune paper strip down on the paper between us and pointed at it.

“You see,” I said. “Children. And I haven’t been wrong yet.”

She picked up the paper and looked at it.

“Oh my…You…You are really something, you know that?” she said.

“I just want you to know, I’m here for you.”

“Honey, I want you to know I love you, and I appreciate the gesture, but I’m really not pregnant. You have to cool it with these fortunes. I’m starting to worry about you.”

“No,” I said. “I get it. You just don’t know yet, and that’s okay, but when you do find out, I’ll be here.”

“No, seriously. I just had to take a piss test for the meds. If I were pregnant, I’d know.”

Well, that wasn’t what I was expecting.

“But…but the fortune…”

“Is a fortune.”

“I’ve never been wrong. Ever.”

“Yes, you have.”

“They’ve always come true.”

Andrea sighed and passed the paper back to me.

“Well, then, maybe it’s not about children or something,” she said. “Maybe it’s about ideas. Maybe…Maybe—hey—maybe it’s about that pitch you have to give on Monday. Maybe your ideas are going to blow them away.”

Andrea nodded and patted my hand. I thought about it. The fortunes had never let me down before, and if it wasn’t about children…It could be about ideas. I guess. It had to be. Every fortune I’d ever gotten, except the one about Andrea moving in with me, had to do with work so maybe this was about work, too. Maybe that one about Andrea moving in with me was really about work, too, and those last minute changes to the cat food ad. Maybe fortune cookies couldn’t be used for personal relationships. Maybe that was against the rules or something. Maybe magic just didn’t work that way. Maybe that was the third step I needed to take to master the fortunes.

These days, I think Andrea’s almost a believer.