"Cellular telephones give you brain cancer," she said. "I can feel it taking root already. Just this constant flow of radiation into my skull."
            Stephanie had a certain dramatic flair about her. She would soon become the fifth in a string of terribly short-lived relationships. I was already starting to feel an inkling of impending doom, of course when we met I swore up and down that she would be the one to turn the tide.
            "If you’re so worried, why don’t you call me from your house line?"
            "I get free minutes after six, if I don’t use them, I lose them."
            "If you lose them it’s like they were never there. What does it matter?"
            "It’s a matter of principle. I pay enough for service, it’s giving me cancer, I get these horrible headaches at night, at the very least I’m going to take advantage of my free minutes."
            "Of course, my dear. There’s nothing backwards about that at all."
            Before I met Stephanie, there was Cynthia. She was beautiful and we dated for two and a half weeks. Prior to her was Julia, who very suddenly came down with an unmanageable case of acrophobia, had to sublet her apartment downtown and move to a ground floor flat in the valley. It was a difficult breakup, she had very beautiful eyes. Georgia had been a stripper from the Russian state of the same name. Georgia was of course a stage name, her given name having far too many syllables to be of any real use in her dance routine. Finally there was Heidi, a pretty graduate student who was writing her thesis on the fall of the Mayan Empire. She shared her name with my parents’ golden retriever and after three weeks of casual dating, the implications of this coincidence became far too horrifying for any kind of healthy relationship to flourish.
            "I’ve done research on radiation," Stephanie told me. "It’s not the content of television that’s making Americans progressively stupider, but the steady stream of radiation, nearly indictable waves playing havoc on brain patterns, it’s all very fascinating in a dark and sinister way."
            Radiation.
            She was still talking about radiation.
            We met at a mutual friend’s twenty-third birthday party just under four weeks earlier and our relationship had digressed to the point where all we could talk about was radiation. Well, she did most of the talking. I was horribly afraid of making myself sound stupid. I found myself constantly on the lookout for some clever segue, to ease into a more familiar topic without arousing suspicion on her part. More often than not, this task proved fruitless, in most cases, it proved best to be blunt and quick about it, to catch her off guard. [read on]