Girlfriend Remote Control

Few things resemble a tragedy staged as comedy quite like a lovesick nerd chasing a beauty he’s clearly never meant to have. He lives in his own world. He sends her walls of text messages that he considers masterpieces of eloquence, calls just to ask “how are you,” and posts tearful status updates hoping she’ll see them.

Over time, his lofty eloquence going unappreciated, the grand messages gradually shrink into curt epithets accusing the object of his affections of loose behavior. Yet even after this “final” chord, poems may arrive as apologies. And they’ll be genuinely good poems, perhaps even commissioned from some rhyming friend. In response, he might get a message like this: “Fuck off, you freak! You’ve driven me completely insane, you asshole.” And this response would most accurately—and honestly—express the true reasons they’re not together. Though in our tale, there will be no crude girls...

For Max, Katya was what a prime cut of tenderloin behind the deli glass is to a mongrel mutt—an unattainable dream about to go to someone else. Imagine for a moment the wordless thoughts of that wretched creature who will NEVER taste that delicious steak, doomed only to watch as someone else effortlessly claims his dream. Unfair? Pitiful? Now try to picture what the steak must be thinking (ladies, forgive the author for such a comparison), under the nagging stare of a mongrel who can’t even afford to pay for it, let alone steal it.

Max knew full well that his persistence deserved some choice words. He marveled at Katya’s restraint, assuming that either her upbringing or her conservatory training kept her from letting her inner harpy loose. She simply didn’t react to his drunk and crude messages. Katya was one of those women who didn’t need words to send someone packing. After all, each of her admirers was already there by default, until she herself deigned to rescue them.

Max, after years of youthful brooding over his place in the male social pyramid, decided that since he couldn’t rise above the foundation, it was best not to compete in this game at all. He didn’t retreat into the intellectual sphere by choice—he fled there, finding refuge among books. For a time, he managed to replace women with fantasies alone. But sooner or later, almost every nerd gets knocked out of his fantasy world by some very real woman.

Max’s first girlfriend was a moderately attractive divorcée from a dating site who tried to teach the young student the intricacies of sex. The sensation of a real vagina was a revelation to him. It didn’t, of course, match what he’d only dreamed of before, but it was far more pleasant than a defrosted and violated chicken. He wrote poems and gave chocolates to his first Dulcinea, until he learned she was teaching those same intricacies to more than just him. Then came a relationship with one plain colleague, the only one in the entire office who gave him nocturnal emissions. But when it actually came down to it, she just faked moans and gasps, trying to play the young Madonna in bed, which made everything dreary and dull. During sex, she kept repeating how much she wanted little “Maxies,” and eventually, Max fled, changing jobs. Then, for two years, not counting a couple of prostitutes, he masturbated miserably until he was caught by an attractive, plump girl who looked like Cheerful Hilda. It’s very difficult to refuse a woman sex without making an enemy if she’s the one who initiated. Max didn’t try. And he didn’t regret it. That woman fucked with talent. There are people with musical ears or a nose for money, and there are those who, just by being in bed, can make their partner shake with lust. She had smooth skin that always smelled good. Hilda’s only flaw was that she nagged him nonstop, as if trapped in perpetual PMS.

That, essentially, was the extent of his meager experience, until a former classmate invited him to a birthday party where, to Max’s astonishment, some thoroughly drunk girl started making out with him and even let him touch her breast once through her thick sweater. She did this, Max assumed, simply out of boredom and because it was dark. And all the better candidates for such games were already taken. That’s how he met Katya, who forced him once again to play by the rules of the male pyramid.

After that night, Max took her to movies, cafés, and even restaurants for several months. But throughout this entire time, Katya never again let him kiss her, except on the cheek. Long ago, a woman whose computer he’d been fixing at her place told him before slamming the door that the whole trouble with nerds isn’t that they don’t get any, but that they don’t take it.

After several months of courting Katya, already desperate, Max suggested they go to Egypt together and rent a luxury room for two. At his expense, naturally. He planned to take out a loan, because a fresh grad had about as much money as fur on a castrated Sphynx cat’s balls.

“Max, we’re just friends,” she said with condescending calm.

“We could do friendship there,” Max tried to be witty, his stomach knotting from desperation and humiliation.

“Max... I’ve started seeing someone.”

And yesterday’s would-be alpha male who had at least once, however briefly, had access to a female’s body became a keyboard-scratching philosopher with access only to his own hide and a bottle of valerian drops. In this world, some eat steaks and others only stare at them pitifully.

The very next day, having tucked his balls deep inside himself, he started calling friends to get a dose of reassurance: “She’s not worth it.” Or: “She’ll come crawling back on her knees soon enough.” But illusions are no less harmful than drugs. A week passed, then another, but for some reason, no one came crawling. Moreover, no one answered texts about a forgotten valuable classical music disc. Each time, hearing the long unanswered rings, Max’s heart pounded in panic, while his imagination painted scenarios that would shame the lead screenwriters from Private Media Group or even Vivid Entertainment. And Katya featured in these scenarios, but not at all with Max, which made them like obsessive neurotic films impossible to switch off.

His friends were already answering less often, trying to avoid conversations about his suffering. They thought the matter should have long been settled. Everything was clear: she’s a bitch, therefore nothing to worry about. And when Max had worn out all his friends with his dick-suffering confessions, he was left completely alone.

At that moment, Max asked himself whether he’d want to deal with someone like himself, and realized he’d be good as a drinking buddy to bitch about all the bastards in this world. Around that same time, he picked up a thematic hobby. Every evening after work, where he stayed late trying to distract himself from good and therefore agonizing memories, Max headed straight to some cheap bar. He’d get wasted, then go home to wake up with a brutal hangover, and then spend the agonizingly long workday trying to write code, for which he was paid at mid-level programmer rates.

He might have succeeded in flushing his kidneys down the toilet while wallowing in his emotional suffering, if one evening a strange guy hadn’t sat down next to melancholy Max at the bar. They got drunk together, and Max, following his usual script, poured out his soul to grateful ears.

“God... if only they’d invent a pill to cure heartbreak after a breakup,” Max finished and stared blankly into space past his companion, who until then had been mostly listening.

“There’s another remedy. A better one,” the stranger broke the silence after a minute.

And the stranger told him an intriguing story. He said he’d contacted a certain firm that guarantees one hundred percent results on all matters of love. According to him, after using their services, within a month, he’d gotten back his beautiful wife, who now doesn’t give a damn about money and fulfills all his wishes at the snap of his fingers.

“All wishes? Really?” Max asked with a drunken squint, waving away cigarette smoke.

“Absolutely all. Any wishes,” the stranger nodded matter-of-factly, returning to his beer.

Max shook his head, chalking it all up to the fantasies of a pseudo-macho born from beer bubbles. But then, as if to prove the stranger’s boastful story, a very beautiful girl ran up to them. Looking at the storyteller and paying no attention to Max, she started wailing: “Borya, there you are, you bastard! I’ve been looking everywhere for you. You don’t answer your phone, and I can’t find peace! Let’s go home, honey! I’ll make us dinner.” Borya looked lazily at his wife, who was smiling nervously into his eyes. “I’ll give you an erotic massage,” the girl added, playfully biting her lip.

Judging by her behavior, this woman was ready to perform an erotic massage, and not only that, right there in the bar, just so Borya would always remain HER Borya. Her eyes were pleading. And Borya, squeezing out a smirk, pushed a business card from that very firm toward Max, saying: “Call them, dude. And you’ll never again look like a deflated, shriveled dick that didn’t get any.” They left, and Max carried that card in his wallet for another week before finally deciding to call the number on it. That call began this whole story...