I worry that reality doesn’t exist, or that time is built wrong. I know the definitions aren’t right but I can’t prove anything. Sometimes I don’t know what I’m afraid of and most of the time I feel like I’m carrying around a sack full of existential guilt. I try to explain myself to people that I know so that I will know how to explain myself. It doesn’t work, I keep finding hurdles built out of the gaps in our experiences and the absence of appropriate language. I stutter before I speak and my meanings come out jittered.
I cried for fully fifteen minutes today. I told Sarah I had smoke in my eye and went into the bathroom to look at myself. Once, I was reading Huxley in bed and I felt myself starting to cry, so I turned off the light and pretended to sleep. Sarah must have known because she spooned up to me and slid her arm under my neck. I spun into her, hiding my head against her chest and tried to be quiet. In the morning there was a face stain on Sarah’s singlet. I told her she makes me drool.
I’m trapped in this artificial bubble. I keep pointing at it and asking questions so everyone can shrug and tell me, it’s life. Sometimes I’ll stand right at the edge of a curb, the toes of my worn out converse poised on its precipice, and think about not being dead. I like the way I feel as the traffic slides by. When it’s something big like a truck or a bus I can feel the wind drive through me as it races to catch up. It makes my spine tingle. I’ll stand there until I know I can walk.
I draw the shades when appointed and lumber before sleep, where every night I cut my wrists and bleed into my imagination. There’s a war waged there I correspond to and fore. The me voice tells me things I don’t want to hear and his council of cuckoos mimic taunt me while I look for pieces of my argument. When I wake I die a little anyway. Early morning emptiness, embracing alms of broken bread with my parasitic cohorts and their slumber driven drivel rambling docile replays of last night’s torments. Daylight grants me recess and I listen less.
Even though the woman led, it was the man Sarah noticed first. Confidant in a bodily way, he moved through the room as though the room moved for him. They took a window booth and Sarah took them in. The woman wore her beauty the way a tree accepts its rings. The man smiled slowly and admired with careful eyes. They talked, he gestured and rummaged at the base of the woman’s stone countenance while she threw him withered looks like scraps. Sarah could tell there was no clue. It’s weird, she thought, normally it’s the guy who’s oblivious.
There are scientific methods for measuring glacial displacement. She says a lot of it relies on friction, so we shouldn’t have a problem. Then she presses the back of her hand to my cheek and asks if I can feel the ice running through her veins. I tell her ice doesn’t run until it’s warming on your tongue and she whaps my face with her hand, pouting as though she wanted honesty from her inquiry. I offer to make her melt but she tells me I’m lukewarm at best. Sometimes I wonder if tepid isn’t better than icy indignation.
I glance off her curves and come over kind of car sick. I have to take my eyes away but she follows them around to my side of the desk and perches on its mahogany lip. I pour myself a whiskey and watch her drain it. She lights a cigarette and asks me if I mind, her words blown through smoke rings like a Lewis Carroll chrysalis. Sure, I say, what she’s doing has to be illegal somewhere. Neither of us laugh, so I pour another shot and hand it to the fist of nerves clenched inside my stomach.
Mine was the last girl to come out. I was so nervous I couldn’t look at her face. She was wearing this blue sequined gown with a split that ran from the swell of her calves to the bottom of my imagination. I was wearing a borrowed three piece suit that itched my skin and clung to me with adolescent awkwardness. She took my hand, leading me onto the dance floor and we shifted in place while Some Kind of Blue slunk around the hall. I could feel her lips brushing against my ear as she whispered to me.
Carter was a shrewd and paranoid man. He took notes on everything and made records of all his dealings. A different kind of man would have done the opposite. Of course he kept it all hidden but that wasn’t much for a wife with too much time and more doubts. I’m sure he never expected me to find them. He had no idea I even knew they existed. When I found the contract I couldn’t believe it. Neither what it said or that’d he would hold on to something like that. Why would he pay to have himself killed?
It was raining halfheartedly and Julie stood there feeling appropriately soggy. The body of her husband inert and unreachable under the ground at her feet, while the constant drizzle turned the freshly filled plot into sludge. It was a miserable day, cold, damp, uncomfortable and seemed about right to Julie. It feels like its been raining all my life, she thought, why should it be any different now that he’s dead?
There was a hand on her shoulder.
‘Mrs. Jenkins?’ the hand said.
‘If you’ve come to say you’re sorry then don’t. I’m not sorry and I don’t care if you are.’ She turned to face the hand. There was a handsome looking man attached to it. She looked at him through tired eyes. ‘I thought you were someone else.’
‘That’s quite all right, Mrs. Jenkins,’ the man said, offering his hand.
It had been an exhausting week, arranging the burial of her husband. Julie never understood before how much work it took disposing of the dead. Her husband’s complicated life had extended itself into the grave, leaving her alone with two kids, streams of paperwork, a slew of family and friends and their unrelenting condolences. She found it hard to raise the energy for formality.
‘People just call me JJ,’
The man smiled delicately, with only the corners of his mouth. He was somewhere in his late thirties judging by the slight wrinkles around his eyes. There was a certain lonely look to him, but his voice was soft and kind as it tried on her name.
‘JJ, then. Please, call me Hemingway,’
Julie took the man’s hand and shook it briefly. ‘You knew my husband?’
‘Yes, in a way. Though I only met him twice. I worked for him in a small capacity for a good many years.’
Julie turned back to look at the muddied plot. ‘He never mentioned you.’
‘I can’t imagine he would have.’
The truth was that Carter had never talked to Julie about anything. He was as much of a mystery now as he had been in the beginning. She had loved that at first, there was something so reassuring about a man who acted without need for conversation or deliberation. Carter was a stone wall that she had built her life around.
Julie sighed over her dead husband. ‘It’s too late for him to say anything now.’
‘I’m sorry, JJ.’
‘So am I, but not for him.’
They stood together in the hush and patter of rain, coming to terms with their own thoughts. Hemingway spoke first, his voice, softened in the falling water. ‘JJ, there’s something I have to tell you that may not want to hear.’
Julie spun sharply and stumbled, her heel sinking into the damp soil. As she fell forward Hemingway stepped in, bracing her by the elbows. He steadied her on her feet, smiling apologetically as though for his own clumsiness. She looked at the man with a mixture of embarrassment and anger, silently daring him to speak.
Hemingway stuffed his hands into the pockets of his coat and let his eyes drop. ‘I need to tell you about the work I did for your husband.’
It was getting cold and Julie was soaked through. She ran a hand through her hair, leaving tracks in the wet blonde mess. It was done for now and so was she, he was in the ground. All she wanted now was to shower and sleep. She didn’t want to do this today but the man in front of her meant to say his piece. Better to get it over with.
‘If you want to tell me why you killed him,’ she said, ‘then I think we should go somewhere dry.’
I can hear her crying through the wall, the sound punching through like a cappella punctuation after each percussive beating. Sometimes I try to imagine she’s not real. We rode the lift together once, holding our corners like pacifist pugilists, pushed apart by the removal of space. Some diminishing quality in her made me feel increasingly large, as though I were being inflated deliberately. I worried that I might crush her if it continued. I found that I resented her for it and hated myself for that. Later, when she becomes imaginary, I worry that I couldn’t help it.
Watching myself in the mirror makes me feel like a voyeur and suddenly I want to feel her hurt me. I trace the line of my collarbone with my fingers, drawing her memories on my skin. Here a faded archipelago of bruises like markers on pirate parchment, there the shriveling scratches lingering like crime scene chalk. I press my palm to the reflection of my chest, watching the man there waste my tears. I wish that I could tell him something meaningful, something beautiful and kind. I can’t. I know that later I will restock his sorrow with selfishness.
I tell Wicks I’m not real and he pokes me with the end of his pencil the way a child might molest a dead thing. He smiles, satisfied, and pokes me again. I can see the lines of vintage dentistry running across his two front teeth, the consequence of some past violence. I try to imagine installing their absence myself. Wicks watches me thinking and asks me to elaborate. There’s a mortar and pestle feeling to our conversations that leave me feeling purposelessly milled, when I tell him this he shakes his head and asks me what I need.
When I think of him now its always the same. I see him sitting on that ledge, swinging his legs and watching the city. He always looked so peaceful, like the world never died. That’s what I loved most about him. I think everyone found what they needed in Shush. They took their answers from his silence and thanked him for it. I never thought much about the future back then, I let Shush think about it for us while I went out and fought. I never had time to wonder, I was busy surviving for both of us.
Even though I hate them I let Colt drag me to one of those estate parties. He tells me the point is to get found. So I hide myself away. It’s so dark that I start thinking I made myself up. I hold the whiskey bottle against my chest like an anchor and moor my shoulders into the corners of the closet. The door slides open and I can see the moon staring in over the shoulders of a shadow. I’m ready to give up but the silhouette slips in before I can speak, so I take another drink.
A Few Short Words 