Here is a picture of me. It is from the future, but it is old. It’s old because the picture itself was taken at a time before the time at which the picture was given to me. It was thus given to me in the picture’s future.
I don’t know how it got to me, I just found the picture resting near me when I woke up one day. It was draped over the edge of my night side table, hanging like a limp and wet rag.
I picked it up. It had the unmistakably rough texture of linen. Linen is a miracle cloth, don’t you know? I’d just never seen anything printed on it. What a neat concept. Fuck canvas, right? Linen is the way to go. If I were to be painted, I’d say, “Hey, can you not use canvas… I prefer linen.” I’d emphasize linen with uncharacteristic coolness. The painter (she’s a young woman, by the way) would drop her brush and bend over. She’d say, “Oops, dropped my brush,” and then she’d pull her panties down so I could see right up her skirt. She wouldn’t have meat curtains, either. She’d have this perfectly contained vagina. I wouldn’t be subjected to the icky parts. Linen is a miracle cloth. I am not gay.
Everyone thinks that linen is plush, but really it’s like sandpaper for babies. I don’t mean to say that it is sandpaper when used on babies — that’s dark. I mean to say that, if I were to want to teach a baby to sand down some Spackle or even out the splinter-hazard edges of a birdhouse roof, I’d give them linen so they didn’t hurt themselves. They wouldn’t be doing much, I’ll admit. It’s not that much like sandpaper. But it would be neat to see a baby pretending to do carpentry stuff. How funny is that? Too fucking funny, I think.
I know that the picture is of me because it looks like me and on the back it says, “This is a picture of me.” Underneath, it read
“Best regards,
Me”
There was no doubt in my mind.
Every time I look at the picture, I age a little bit. Not too much. It’s actually unnoticeable, even if you’re looking right at me. Even if you sat there for a whole day while I aged, you wouldn’t be able to tell. You’d say, “Why, you’ve got a beautiful glow about you, like the youth I’ve craved since I hit my mid-twenties.”
But I’d brush it off and say, “Be careful what you wish for.”
I can’t stop staring at it all the time. I grow up to be such a handsome guy. I wonder if I’m charismatic. I wonder how many women I’ve married and divorced for the next.
I can’t see myself aging, but I can feel it. My back feels heavier like someone’s putting really small weights on it every day. I can feel wrinkles on my face where there are none. I have acquired a taste for flab on the inside of a woman’s thighs. I want to play golf, even though the last time I tried I was about eleven years old and it made me want to shove the head of a nine-iron deep into my anus until it was pushing against my heart from underneath.
I think about abortion and how I never had kids because I made my first wife abort about six potential kids how I regret my decision and her respect for my wishes. Not because it was murder or whatever people say, but because it would have been cool to watch a baby pretend to sand down a birdhouse or Spackle with a swatch of linen.
Armand, a dumb guy I know from college, called me the other day. He was really quiet over the phone.
“Speak up, motherfucker.”
“You haven’t changed,” he said. Then he did speak up. He said, “I know you got a picture too. Don’t look at it too long. It makes you have all the effects of being old without all the cool shit like crashing into someone from behind and them apologizing for braking too hard.”
I hung up the phone. Armand is an idiot. I am a handsome old guy. I bet you that he looks like shit by the time he’s fifty and that’s why he’s so mad.
I wake up the next day at around three in the morning to take a piss. I have Alzheimers and Cancer and Diabetes and one of my legs is really wobbly. I had only stared at the picture for eight hours yesterday. I put it in a purple frame so I could keep it on my desk and motivate myself to not commit suicide for the next few years while I rounded myself out.
Now I am rounded out. I am old without being old. I can’t steal something and act like an innocent, senile moron. I can’t say inappropriate things like, “I’ve always been afraid of the blacks.” I can’t ogle at young women and remember my younger days where I ogled at women the same age as me.
I go to sleep, wondering when I’m going to die.