by Amy Clark

The hypotheticals started maybe six months into the relationship. My boyfriend and I were at the new square-shaped pizza place on Valencia when he swallowed his bite, cleared his throat, and asked, “What would you do if we walked in here and all your ex-boyfriends were sitting around a table together, staring at you?”

He held his Coke at his lips, his eyes on mine. “Would you cry?”

“I’d probably have a panic attack,” I said.

“Would you talk to them?”

“Why are you asking?”

“I’m just so curious about how people respond to weird situations,” he said. He had always been curious. It was something that had drawn me to him—he peppered our time together with open-ended questions, ones that gently shone a light on parts of my interior world I found too boring or shameful to share uninvited. But in this question, there was no gentle light, no reassuring touch of hand.

“I guess I’d probably still have a panic attack, and leave.”

“What if they weren’t sitting together? What would you do then?” he asked, leaning forward.

I looked away and changed the subject.

But the questions didn’t stop. In the morning, after our usual lazy kisses, he whispered, “What would you do if you woke up and your exes were just standing there, at the foot of your bed? And they were like, ‘we want to get back together.’”

“I’d be confused,” I said.

“Yeah, but what would you do?”

“I don’t know,” I mumbled, turning over.

I couldn’t escape. Over coffee: “What would you do if you were on an airplane and the safety video was your ex-boyfriends doing a cringey rap about you?”

Before I left for work: “What would you do if you get to work and your exes show you a petition they’ve signed to get your citizenship revoked, and when you ask them why, they say it’s because you’re so small?”

He was the kind of man who always brought me back a little pastry every time he went to get coffee, who could laugh off a missed bus or a dropped glass, something I’d never had before in a relationship. Everything else was good, so I felt I ought to just let him have his fun. I resolved to take the questions in stride, but each time he conjured one, I felt an unrelenting queasiness that could only be described as despair.

So I asked him to stop. We were on our way back from a new draft cold brew bar, cold brews in hand, and I said, “Hey, can we cool it on the hypotheticals about my ex boyfriends?”

He was silent, and I added, “I’m really happy, I just feel like—this one little thing between us is confusing me.”

“I guess,” he finally said, “I don’t see the harm in them. It’s not like this stuff is actually going to happen.”

“I know,” I said, trying to put the situation back together, “sorry. It’s just a weird thing for me.”

“Hmm.”

We sipped in silence. On the way home, I pointed out a colorful bird and he said nothing.

As we got into bed that night, he turned to me and said, “What would you—” and then he stopped. “Oh, sorry. I forgot I’m not allowed to do that anymore.”

“No,” I said, “You can ask.”

“Well, I was thinking. What would you do if aliens came down to earth and singled you out specifically to come aboard and be studied, and when you get on board the aliens point to these tanks and in the tanks are bodysuits, and they’re all your ex-boyfriends, and all your ex boyfriends it turns out were just aliens doing research on you?”

Before I could answer, I was crying. He sighed and turned back to his phone.

He stopped asking me anything else. Even when we were distracted, watching a movie, I could hear his thoughts churning, the world a theme park in which to install ex-boyfriend-themed rides. He sent relentless texts about aquariums and NBC sitcoms and jail, all featuring one or all of my exes, and sent follow up “?”s when I didn’t respond. When I said I didn’t want to answer he would just change the hypothetical. When I broke down, said I couldn’t do it anymore, said I felt like I really was going crazy, he put his toothbrush in a Ziploc bag and called himself an Uber. I talked him out of it, in the end. I apologized and he patted my head and agreed to let up on the questions.

And then one night, I stepped into a vegan ramen restaurant where he had asked to meet after work and saw them there: my ex-boyfriends. He was at the head of the table, beer in hand, and they sat around him, four of them, their arms draped over the backs of their chairs. He caught my eye and made a hook with his finger to beckon me.

I did indeed feel the sizzle of a burgeoning panic attack. It took effort to walk over to him, but I thought running away might be cowardly. He held my gaze, bottle at his lips.

Faltering, I took his beer from him and let it fall to the ground. It landed with a clunk and spun around, beer pooling out of its mouth. He continued to watch me.

I turned around and took off running. I ran up and up to the top of a hill and threw up on a tree, the wind and my blood howling in my ears. I wanted to go back inside and ask him a thousand questions: how he did it, what he’d told them, how long he’d planned it. But I knew there was no point, that he was done, that he already had his answer: this is what I would do, this is what I did.

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