Seven Good Reasons Not to Be Good by John Gould Page A

disavowal of power. Women are valued, children are valued, hell, even
men
are valued, with their throwback bouts of anger and ego. Conflicts do crop up, but each is firmly and lovingly sorted out, the way schoolyard scraps are sorted out in conflict resolution videos. Planet Earth goes by the name of Gaia, and is spoken of with giddy intimacy, like a new lover who’s just slipped off to the loo. All the sex is Sapphic, and salacious in an adolescent kind of way, with many a “teasing tongue” and “dewy bud of love.” The hetero sex is all off-screen, but its fruits are constantly manifest in the form of ripe tummies, apple-cheeked tykes and toddlers.
    Like many utopias, this one is voice-overed by a visitor, a puzzled bloke who’s drifted in on a log (downed power pole—subtle, sweetheart) from what’s left of the city. He’s wry, hip, handsome (you’d want John Cusack for the part if you could get him), a bystander who never quite sinks into all the hereness and nowness on offer. She’s finest stroke of sophistication is that this narrator is unreliable. His vision of things is detectably cockeyed—you get that he never gets it. Hunched guiltily over the script there in Mariko’s study, Matt could see through the man’s cranky take on events, recognize his critical stance as self-defeating. As he reviews it all in his head today—his fever swinging to the sweaty end of the spectrum, the cursor blinking irritably at him from the hotel’s TV screen—he twigs for the first time to the fact that those objections would be
his
objections. Yep, he’s the clueless stranger. Mariko won’t have meant this, not consciously—that’s more Matt’s style—but still.
    Truly, Mariko, your script is terrific. It makes a few things clear to me, things I should have seen ages ago. Isn’t that the function of great art, to reveal what’s been latent in our lives all along? Or whatever. The point is that the world you want is one of connection, integration, harmony. It’s exactly what you should want of course, and of course there’s no room in it for the likes of me, the krabby kritik. Eunuch in a harem, right?
    That’s one thing I’ve figured out. Here’s another: I’ve read the two of us all wrong. Ever since we met I’ve conceived me as the intellectual-slash-creative one, you as the worldly one.
    Also not true. Matt started out conceiving things this way—that Mariko was the plodder, leaving him free to play the incorrigible genius—but the migraines have already forced him to rethink. Migraines, to Matt’s mind, are an upscale affliction, indicative of intensity and a too-fine intelligence. So
he
should get them. It was Mariko, though, who started up five years ago (about the time they moved from the city) with the “aura,” one of the condition’s most irksome affectations, the coruscating lights that signal the onset of the attack. Matt’s role is to rub Mariko’s feet, the only bit of her she can bear to have touched. Sometimes she’ll beg for a “blow job,” in which case Matt will take a couple of her toes into his mouth and suck—something about the shift in blood flow. Matt offers up these ministrations willingly, indeed adoringly. There’s a bit of him, though, that persists in believing he’s the one who should be prostrate.
He
should be blinded by the effulgence of his own brain, and Mariko should be bent shushingly over him, taking him into her mouth …
    The truth of course is the inverse, the reverse. You’re the brooding mastermind, I’m the competent drudge.
    Matt stands, strides around the room in an effort to siphon off a little of his agitation. He takes another shot of OJ, does a whisky-wince—all that citric acid is eating away at his mouth. He reseats himself, rereads his message. He backs over his words with the cursor, deleting right up to “I read She on the way here. I loved it.” To which he adds,
    Or anyway I will when I get back from the ashram, when this ego