EUGENE LIM

Introduction: At one point I thought I was going to write a novel where an ambulance driver was witness to many people’s end-of-life confessions or life stories. From that impulse, here are three sketches that remain. 

-Eugene Lim

Fragments from AMBULANCE, an abandoned novel. 

The Ambulance Driver

Several minutes ago two sedans collided on a fast road behind the soccer stadium. When I arrived I ran up to the crash site, ignoring the spewed designs of glass and blood. The entanglement of now botched metal, inside of which you can see the deployed airbags sitting like flaccid jellyfish, enthrone two immediate victims. The driver of the domestic make is dead. The driver of the foreign model is nearly dead. I'm the ambulance driver.
            The woman who is nearly dead flutters and then opens her eyes. She says, “Even if loved ones hover about in a weepy way, or if tender words are exchanged with one’s one-and-only while kneading hands, I've always believed we each die alone, that even in those intimate scenes, and moreover certainly in the more common alienated ones, at the final moment of dying there's absolutely no one else to help us and we each walk through a death-door that is perfectly shaped just for us. And furthermore this is also true of life, and at each moment we're walking through a life-door that fits only us and by which we're estranged from all others. Yet even though I've always believed this, never did I imagine I'd die in a fucking car accident talking to -- sorry to say this -- such a stupid-looking ambulance driver.”
            I nodded and told her I knew I needed a haircut, that it was one of a string of very long nights and that I was a freelancer, a scab, picking up work while the city battled it out with the paramedic's union, who were currently on strike.
            She told me to shut up, grabbed my collar and said, “Listen. I’ve a confession to make.” I did as she commanded.

Piggy

You can’t be in two places at once. I’ve tried. I tried with a mistress and a wife, with being quick and being dead, living in LA and Shanghai, Shanghai and Cologne, Manhattan and Tokyo, Manhattan and Barcelona, being a lawyer and a poet, a dem and a publican, being liked and being pure power. I was never so greedy as to try to live in three places at once mind you—just two. End of pithy moral tale number one.

             This is the year after the year I thought I was finally recovered from the year my life fell apart. Divorced, fired. Broke from whoring and coke and booze. Caption: the monster quietly reflects on his crimes.

             Then so dead lonely in the city and so middle aged I’d attempted suicide just to see what would happen. I was lucky and walked away and no one was the wiser. (I’d half-assed it on unpurpose purpose.) Not so long after I met Cathy and thought it would get wrapped up in a third act but that’s just movies.

             If you’re rich American or Chinese, that is: tasteless, you drink expensive and dry vodka martinis, and you drink them quickly because your idea of pleasure is obliterating any idea of yourself. This is admirable because each of us is worse than a cockroach spazzing in shit, and we should want to be painlessly snapped out of consciousness. French wine and gin are for those who enjoy life, that is: the imbeciles and the vain. Experience speaking here.

             Reality TV is a three way with me, the wall-eyed college boy and the MILF. Viagra and MDMA and the emergency room for my unrelenting dick. You think that’s old. Try living with it on repeat.

             After not that long you get sick of yourself.

             I tried to introduce fresh flowers from the farmer’s market into the apartment. I took day trips by myself to the mountains or to the shore. I began running and lifting weights. Sometimes I so thought I was becoming someone different I jacked off just to my own feel.

             This was the year after the year after the year I thought I was recovered from the hell year.

             Then it just snaps and you’re old and lucky enough to be rich enough you can still buy pussy once in a while. But the thing is, you’re still fucking old.

The Comedian (and the flag)

I conceive of my afterlife thus: I am marooned on a small island with a comedian and a national flag. All day long the flag will wear a white apron, threaten with a wooden spoon, and browbeat the comedian. While the comedian, for her part, will grumble and carry out the domestic chores; she’ll mow the lawn, take out the trash, wash the dishes, and pin the underwear on the line. At night the comedian will dream of a nightclub wherein she’ll so mock the flag that it will finally admit its love. The flag will have the same dream. This afterlife will be a hell; I will be tortured by the idea that the island, the national flag, and the comedian symbolize things other than what they are. 

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Eugene Lim is the author of the novels Fog & Car, The Strangers, Dear Cyborgs and the forthcoming Search History (Coffee House Press, 2021). His writings have appeared in Granta, The Baffler, The Believer, Fence, Little Star, The Brooklyn Rail, and elsewhere. He is the librarian at Hunter College High School, runs Ellipsis Press, and lives in Queens, NY.