Blue Jeans and No Rosary

Because It Isn't Part 1

Do not panic, evacuate now. Do not panic, evacuate now. Do not panic. Do not panic.
Brian was evacuated to this planet at the same time the marijuana minute kicked in on the same day the country was celebrating its liberty.
He dangled for a moment, weaving like the dried leaf desperately fighting the wind’s persistant psuh, hanging on to those final moments where it was actually part of something, something greater, something alive. He bounced off the separate ledges of parents into a grade-school fight that led to Brian’s best friend being taken into the Chinese Box of institutions for the possession of a knife. When night set, he dreamed of the woman he’d marry. Her name changed many times but his feelings remained strong. She stopped running for shelter when his BS kicked him into an internship as assistant financial analyst for a fortune 500 company. The guy sitting in the back of the graffiti-fucked burger king two streets down made more money then he did, but when he considered that each connection he was gaining became an investment and future income, Brian blew that chump out of the water. Brian had a secret three month affair with his boss’s cousin as he planned the fastest route through the knotted network to his pot of gold. With a whisper, he was carried under the wing of his mentor to the city where his office awaited, along with the six-digit salary. Two million dollars later he was upgraded to the company of civilization at its finest. He was accepted.
Brian noticed the odd bend on the decorating palm tree as he sat down across from Jeffery. It reminded him of something unfamiliar. Then it began on cue. That fucking document error was attacked and shredded along with the secretary who couldn’t stop filling her fucking coffee. In the midst of all this battery, time was taken to glance at dresses, and thighs, and breasts, and sometimes ankles. Thoughts winded through the schema of work and Brian wondered whether he’d consider the current indiscretions with his assistant’s intern a real affair and the unspoken rules regarding affairs. So, if she was an affair, then is there a stated law against having two affairs at once? And if that’s the case then why can’t an affair be an affair of an affair, in which case you don’t have them at once.
“Does your wife know?” Jeffery asked while contorting his cheek to blow smoke swiftly through its gaps.
“About the intern?”
“Ha, no, your new found interest?”
Brian just looked down for a moment, his glass barely green, and then laughed a syllable.  Jefferey looked to the table and shook his head, whistling smoke. Brian’s interest wasn’t an interest so much as it was an accelerating addiction to cocaine but they were allowed to call it whatever they wanted outside of the office. Jeffery, Brian’s dealer, barely touched his product and was close to many important people of his craft. They sustained one of the smoothest dealer-druggy relationships possible since Brian had been upgraded to civilized. Then again, fifteen thousand dollars a month of wastable income does make for a good relationship with a vendor of any kind.
Cocaine wasn’t so much a growth defect in his stapled group of coworkers but rather a growth hormone. When Brian finalized his glamorized capital gains and graphed the diarrehia-grossing funds in front of the board for the first time he was awarded with a lap-dance and two grams of cocaine. No one denied that the forty-six flights of stairs leading to their conference room was crafted entirely out of amphetamine and coke.
Jefferey was hired two years after Brian and was unanimously accepted as their foreign diplomat. He wasn’t far in the way of build or even facial features that might cause a second thought in the motivations of any assailant. He was, however, the son of an alcohol couple who were evacuated from one non-afforded apartment to another, tossing him into a pile of dealers and jaded kids who eventually became his good friends: all the fights over a parking space and half a 40, his close friend getting stabbed in the throat in a Store 24 parking lot, and the constant redundant influx of drugs. Drugs. Drugs. As an adult, he reflected that his popularity may have been due to the fact that he didn’t use the drugs. He was trusted, not due to any sort of social or physical status, but by the simple fact that no one ever had to worry about giving him some of their drugs. For some reason, his mind could never relax under the influence of anything. Sometimes he thought that the liquor his father funneled down his seven-year old throat for kicks might have something to do with his distaste for alteration. Jefferey was awarded a scholariship to a prestigious university. It was never admitted, but his father’s alcoholism was the driving force behind his expensive education and relaxed adult life-style. Jefferey never lost touch with his closest friends, returning to work in the nicest parts of the same city he had once been the shit of. Long before Brian had considered the possibility of acceptance, Jefferey had constructed his own network, one that awarded his coworkers with an infinite supply of blow. The network’s only static came from a second-long hesitation that injected itself into Jefferey’s jugular, rapidly diffusing deep into the buried and forgotten nerve endings of humanity every time he resupplied his peers. Because he knew that this was inevitably going to kill at least one of them, but he didn’t want to let them down.
Jeffery stirred his drink: “Speaking of the intern, has she really lost her mind?”
“Who told you that?”
Jefferey laughed: “Just about everyone in the office.”
“Wonderful. That’s pleasant. No, she hasn’t lost her mind. And I’m sick of everyone asking me how she’s doing. I don’t know the poor girl. We slept together once, I never signed a fucking lease. She’ll be fine.”
Jefferey insincerely nodded: “You think you’ll ever tell Criss?”
Brian stared coolly and Jefferey lit a fresh cigarette: “Alright, look, all I’m saying is that shit like that will drive you insane. I dunno, I’ve heard stories, weird shit, like it gets into your mind, you start to think she’s cheating on you, and all of a sudden you’re chastising her for something you did.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“I dunno, cheating on someone can fuck you up, that’s all”
Brian sighed: “Look, it’s not like I’m making it a fucking habit. I rarely smoke crack, and when I do I can, well, let’s just say become a different person. In fact, I’d go so far as to say I never cheated on Chrissy.”
Jefferey paused, cigarette midway to his lips and Brian continued: “Yeah, I see it like this. I would never cheat on my wife. I love my wife, cheating is not something I, Brian Greeves, would ever do. Therefore, whoever cheated on her wasn’t me. I’m innocent.”
Jefferey took a deep, deep drag: “Wow. Just… wow.”
Chriss, Chrissy, Chrissmas, Christine, Nurse Chrissie, Honey, My Love: Brian never really considered marraige a possiblity before he met her. It wasn’t entirely his work that kept marraige from being even slightly an entertaining idea. It might have been fear of commitment, it might have had something to do with his father’s suicide, but Chriss liked to think that Brian’s consideration of marraige had been kept from him, by God or by fate, until he had finally her, the right one. Of the four people that had ever seen Brian’s bare tears of acute melancholy, only two had been the opposite of his pleading, desperate, chokes.

A Second Chance Part 4

Jess didn’t notice that the GPS-MP3 player had been replaced with Ben’s old CD player. As Ben slid the Richard Marx CD into its mouth Jess was finally awed with its presence and she still held her hair from her face even though the car’s body completely shielded her from the wind as if she were enthralled with her ability to finally control her hair. And when Jess saw Ben’s sheepish smile as Now and Forever began to play she realized why the CD player was there and where he was bringing her. She realized that they sat in the same spot in Ben’s driveway that they had sat after the concert and she recalled how her body had felt, like wax held over a flame, its core solid as its outside instantly turning to liquid, not even bothering to warm and soften before dripping into the fire. Ben was kissing her and the only thing that Jess could manipulate was her tongue as it found its niche next to Ben’s.
Ben saw the realization glaze Jess’s eyes and smiled because he knew that she would remember because he knew that he loved her and felt ashamed for being too proud to say it because he had never said it to another woman since he was five years old. Jess hadn’t given him those three words either but Ben knew that it was docked on the tip of her lips; long since surpassing the tip of her tongue on the way to his ears and that she was only waiting for him to say it to her first. And when Ben took Jess’s hand under acoustic guitar, he opened his mouth and Jess turned to him and said,
“I love you Ben.” Ben paused and then kissed her. It was of earnest passion but it was terse because Jess had stolen something sacred from Ben when she had said those words before he had a chance to and when Ben finally said ‘I love you’ for the first time in seventeen years a part of him knew that its repetition rendered it fraudulent.
There was a flower shop run by the same old woman every day and sometimes she looked like she had just woken up and it smelled more like cookies than flowers on occasion two blocks from the coffee shop. Ben thought that flowers were something that people get when they’re in the hospital recovering from some illness or accident. He thought that he would bring Jess flowers and that it might make her feel more like he was visiting her in the hospital and less like he was picking her up from an abortion clinic and he hoped that it might make up for the fact that he’d be incapable of telling her that he loved her.
As Ben crossed the street a bus passed behind him and the same wind that had once controlled Jess hair sent the bag containing her doughnut onto the sidewalk. And the groan of city transit caused Ben to realize that his decision had had nothing to do with financial concerns. He knew that there still remained steps to descend and that his life would have kept some semblance and stability even with a child. As the bag lay with its rolled top beginning to expand towards its original posture, Ben asked of himself to admit the truth; he demanded that he voice the real reason he couldn’t be a father and at least let the wind carry it to Jess. But he stood unable and he looked for the voice that had once told him his expression of love was fraudulent but it had gone someplace else and Ben hated it, envious that it was able to hate Jess and he wasn’t; envious because it could hate him. Ben slammed his foot onto the bag and it collapsed as though it were empty and he welcomed the acidic wave of guilt that began in his torso and eventually made even his hair ache. But it burnt through only himself and he remained without the strength of hate.
Roses were ten dollars a stem and when Ben asked for twenty the woman told him that only eight were left until noon and Ben looked at the stapler in her hand and wanted to cave her skull with it. He purchased the eight roses and had them wrapped in clear plastic paper traversed with pink lines.
As Ben returned to the hospital carrying only the flowers he thought the last thing his father had said to him, when the combination of morphine and incapacitating neuropathic pain equivocated waking and sleep to the point where even an EEG was unable to differentiate the two states of brain activity. Both asleep and awake, the man said,

“I’m afraid of seeing your mother.” It seemed like nonsense. Ben thought it was a dream, even though the man looked carefully at Ben, even through the weakness of death, the man still had the ability to look carefully at his son. But it wasn’t nonsense. It took years for Ben to finally realize that his father was terrified that the woman who broke his heart would be on the other side, waiting for him. Because his father never stopped following her. Since she left the two of them, leaving only a handful of flowers in a vase on the kitchen table, ‘leave be’ written on it’s taped side, his father had never excluded her a decision. Despite the fact that the two never spoke again, Ben’s father had factored in the possibility into every single move and was terrified that it had even been factored into his own death. The last thing that a person can do for themselves, perhaps, had been done for someone else. Ben finally understood the terror as he looked at the minimal bouquet in his hand and thought of the words ‘leave be.’

A bus was idling at the hospital’s stop carrying on the bus-driver, who looked down at Ben apathetically as he approached. As he looked at the man, he thought of all the lives the bus-driver has experienced vicariously, driving them from one spot to another in a connection that was as meaningless to him as it was to his passengers. And Ben thought about his father and he tried to fantasize the qualities of how an introduction between he and Jess might have gone. Ben looked at the long bus, an idling empty vessel that could easily be both a means of rape and a means of uniting lost brothers at the same time and he thought of his corvette and tried to picture the day that he had kissed Jess for the first time, ignoring the gear shift viciously prodding his ribcage, but all he could see was Jess sitting in the passenger seat with the same expression that she had carried with her, silently, on the way to the hospital and how awkward she always looked sitting in a seat that never fit the contours of her body and how sometimes it made Ben uncomfortable for reasons he never understood.
The old man that had stumbled earlier approached the bus from the opposite direction as Ben. He carried himself up the bus’s steps using the silver rail and Ben stopped when he was directly behind the gaunt man, hoping that the man might stumble again so that Ben could catch him. But the old man didn’t falter, but sat behind the driver with ease and contentment. The driver looked at Ben as he stood at the base of the steps and this time Ben could see the fatigue that crippled the elasticity of the man’s skin but he also saw the man’s pride and when the driver reached towards the lever controlling the bus’s folding doors, Ben stepped onto the bus.
There was a bus-stop only a block from Ben’s home and as he left the driver and the old man and their connection he saw his garage and a sense of relief actualized for the first time since Jess had announced her pregnancy.
There was an unprecedented stillness in Ben’s kitchen as he opened the cupboard above his oven, acquiring a green vase with longitudinal pink stripes. As he filled the vase at the kitchen’s tap, Ben looked at his watch. It had been forty-three minutes since Jess had departed. After placing the vase on the kitchen table, he unwrapped the flowers. A packet of nutrients tumbled from the stems and Ben added it to the vase before the roses. When Ben let go of the flowers, they pushed against each other and expanded to a mushroom over the vase’s lid.
As Ben shut off the kitchen light, he looked at the flowers sitting on the kitchen table and smiled softly, wondering if he could get into Arizona on one tank of gas and how much money he might be able to make as a car mechanic in New Hampshire. And as he merged onto the freeway with unusual ease, disregarding destination, his corvette was finally a car.

Second Chance Part 3

Jess’s appointment was for 7:30 and they arrived fifteen minutes early. The parking lot was almost as deserted as the street filling a mere five percent of its two-hundred-slot capacity. The small group of present vehicles was isolated to one corner of the lot and Ben parked away from them. Their destination was an annex to the left of the hospital.
As they approached the generic glass doorway, Ben finally took Jess’s hand but it was more subconscious than intentional, a habit as simple as the swinging of one’s arms while walking. Her fingers were algid and emotionless and they remained corpse-like as Ben slid his own between them. For the second time that day he considered praying. He just wanted someone to tell him what to do. Was he supposed to kiss her? If he told her that everything would be alright would she believe him? Could she trust him with such a task? He wished that he could get something from her face but whatever she was feeling had surpassed physical manifestation before even the stars had hidden behind the sun. He watched her shoulder in its stiff/confident/apathetic rhythm and anywhere else it would have fit on someone easing towards a convenience store and Ben wondered whether an achievement of apathy would require the sacrifice of everything she felt and that they were entering the building with something that now existed solely in the physical. And this thing that they were so eager to be rid of was now disdained because it was a reminder of something felt that had eventually brought them to this moment. Jess’s hair resembled an abstruse swaying curtain that had a voice in the breeze created by her passage that told Ben that he had lost her and that she’d never admit it and he’d be forever trapped in the desperation of a cozened life.
The automatic doors muttered robotically as they slid along their felted path, tripped by electrical currents. There was a thing black mat lining the pre-lobby chamber and Ben wiped his feet even though they weren’t soiled because he thought it might pass the time. It gave Jess’ hand a chance to escape and she found a seat against the wall. Ben greeted the receptionist and Jess watched him nervously lean against her desk while the stranger typed and when he turned to look at her and, despite the fact that a teary film blurred her vision, she could discern every detail in his face.  Jess saw the concern and the wisdom and the love impressively glued together with his passionate strength and she psychosomatically felt the fetus kick in panic because his gratitude and love were suffocating it and the growing tumor in her throat threatened to suffocate her at the same time. Despite her desire to mirror Ben’s comfort and to reassure him that nothing between them was changing, Jess remained completely still. She knew that showing a single feeling would be like attempting to let only some air out of a rubber balloon using a sewing needle and that everything else would escape and she would collapse. But after, after it was outside of her and after it had been buried in a red bin of medical waste and she could return, she would return to Ben and she would finally be able to weep at the beauty of his relief and they would share that passionate strength that glued everything together.
At 7:28, a nurse practitioner emerged from the double-doors to the right of the reception desk. She was short and wore glasses with thin black rims. She smiled with a generosity and comprehension that surprised Jess because she had forgotten that she was in a hospital and not the bathroom of her prom. As Jess responded to her softly timbred name, Ben was sure that she was going to walk through those doors without saying anything, without acknowledging that she was not alone and Ben felt a sudden urge to fill a gas tank. And for the first time since he had found Jess he wished that she had never existed. He resolved to find that apathy inside of himself. But Jess was only halfway across the room before she came to Ben and embraced him for the first time that morning.
“I love you,” Jess whispered and Ben choked, his villainous pride bursting forth through every exit, creating hundreds of new ones to accommodate the unprecedented exodus leaving him at the very floor of humility. Ben could only return,
“I didn’t know… I couldn’t see… Jess… I don’t know what can I…” She stilled his lips with a finger and said,
“Ben, you turned a stupid blind date into true love. No matter what.” And she returned to the patient nurse and Ben wanted to respond but he was paralyzed and so he watched the curtains sway and he fought the tenacity of his paralysis but was unable to recite the words that screamed in his head: ‘I will be right here when it’s over. Come back to me Jess.’
When the doors’ rubber linings whispered to each other and his girl and his baby had vanished Ben was finally released of his paralysis. The receptionist informed him that he was free to wait until the procedure was through; he would be led to Jess could sit with her until she was fit to leave. There were magazines, mostly designed for a female audience, which reminded Ben of how insignificant he was in this whole event, and there was another room where he could watch a ten minute documentary on preventative medicine and financially responsible operations that could prevent reproduction. But when Ben looked from the table of magazines to the receptionist, he could see his own eyes in her face and he could see Jess’s nose beneath them and his father’s ears to both sides and his mother’s mouth and Ben fled without a response.
As Ben was leaving the building he passed by a girl who looked like she was too young to purchase alcohol and was skinny enough to be an anorexic ten-year-old with a pillow. She walked with her head down and arms crossed but as they passed, her eyes met Ben’s and they demanded encouragement and compassion and answers. She walked rigid, like Jess, alone, and both of her wrists were wrapped in fresh white gauze and Ben felt an overwhelming impulse to fuck her in the back seat of Jess’s van. Thrusting his hands further into his coat pockets, Ben hastened past.
Even though it had been but ten minutes, the world seemed to have filled considerably. The parking lot had once again become a living organism with vesicles of people docking and undocking, surrounded by pedestrians that crossed the open spaces like nonspecific hormones. At the bus stop, people departed the vector in a curved line like DNA threading from an anchored phage. They carried dead facial expressions and dead briefcases made of dead skin containing dead trees and dead pigs wrapped in dead lettuce and dead wheat. Ben wondered how many of them had ever considered abortion. An elderly man stumbled and almost fell from the lowest step as he crossed from bus to pavement but no one seemed to care. It reminded Ben of a piece that he had recently watched on television about another stumbling old man. When his wife had succumbed to the fatality of Alzheimer’s disease, an eighty-year-old man decided that his retirement from forty years on the police force was no longer going to suffice. He carjacked a 2002 Solara with a gun that wasn’t loaded but in fact had been hastily detached from a plaque that read ‘for forty years of service and honor’ and if the driver had looked close enough he would’ve seen bits of wood still glued to its surface.
But instead of relinquishing his vehicle, the driver panicked and applied full power to the engine. The old man watched in both wonder and subtle sexual agitation as the Solara ran through a red light and was torn in two by an oncoming greyhound which subsequently rolled six times, spewing passengers like bits of undigested vomit. The simultaneous murder of thirteen people turned out to be just what the old man needed to be assured that he had outlived his wife for a reason.
As the old man caught his balance with the bus’s doorframe, Ben wondered how many of the people dispersing from that spot had ever considered homicide. And he wondered if they too had trouble understanding what it means when thirteen people die in order to sooth someone who doesn’t want to grow old. But Ben knew that they couldn’t know what it meant to fear old age because it was only the elderly who ever grew old.
It was the future within that any of these people fretted upon rather than the future without. What harried these people was whether they would ever catch up on rent, whether their father would succumb to his cancer, whether their car was going to make it to work on an empty tank of gas, wondering if the coincidental similarity between the reading of their odometer and their lottery picks was the sign that God had been preparing them for, whether the war in Israel foreshadowed the end of the world, whether old men were all going to start carrying guns because growing old wasn’t fair. And as Ben shuffled uphill against the crowd he was uncomfortably aware of the other whethers that existed within contemplating, dreaming, wishing, wanting, praying, needing, loving, growing, coping, and being. The whether a child would make them happier and the whether a permanent spiritual shift had occurred in that waiting room, and the whether love could survive anything that human beings could attack it with and if it would ever forgive them for it. The force of the unemotional downstream rapids almost caused Ben to change direction, to join their rapids and walk back towards the annex. Because he’d rather worry about whether the chilly air would cause his fresh shaven jaw to rash and if the graphs came out right on the poster at Kinkos than wonder if it was actually possible to love someone for an entire lifetime and if a father took it seriously when his son told him that he hated him for being grounded. And Ben was envious of all the people who never realized that love scarred much deeper than hate.
Ben walked two blocks to a coffee house. He ordered a black house blend and a maple frosted doughnut for Jess. The girl behind the counter accepted his order with a friendly smile and the only thing that Ben could offer in return was a five dollar bill. He sat next to a large window that’s view was largely taken up by a neighboring CD trade. It was the first time Ben had ever seen the store before 10 a.m. and it looked like an entirely different building without the teenagers lining the benches in front with coffee and cigarettes and headphones dangling from their napes.
Several months before he had become a father, Ben bought a used Richard Marx CD inside that store for two dollars and the store clerk was surprised to sell it because the store was having trouble selling CDs but Ben and Jess still listened to CDs the day they left the football game for their first concert and his dashboard CD player hadn’t yet been replaced by a GPS-MP3 player. That day he bought the used CD was no socially imposed event such as an anniversary of birth or love but rather a special event that existed because of itself. That morning Ben had woken next to Jess and the breeze through the open window was thickened with sunlight and it rippled the white sheet from her shoulder and the bone’s anterior bump was blended perfectly into her triceps and Ben looked at Jess and his heart began to choke him as it thrashed and wriggled, attempting to pump blood that fought to stay still and just watch.
The same breeze-born wind kept pestering Jess’s hair, blowing it around like a curtain lining an open window and every time she brushed it out of her face it was replenished fast enough to defeat her. Ben ran ahead to the Corvette because the trees above were waving frantically to him as if to say,
‘We’re not sure how long we can hold it together. Hurry up Ben.’

Second Chance Part 2

A week ago Jess had bought a home testing kit. It was positive and she buried it in her neighbor’s trash can. She didn’t tell Ben. She wanted to, but she didn’t know how.  And only because the kit’s manual told her to do so, she made the doctor’s appointment. A child didn’t compute into either of their lives. They were both in school and they both lived from one paycheck to the next. She was a music composition major and he was doing something that was related to cars. She didn’t have time to work and how do you raise a family on a gas station attendant’s salary? Aside from their school loans, they had limited options for financial help. Last year Ben’s father had passed away and his life insurance barely covered the funeral because Ben wanted to make it extravagant and his mother had left the two of them when he was five. Jess spoke with her own parents once a month if they were lucky. The relationship she shared with her family wasn’t the type where she could just call and ask them to take care of her child. ‘Her child;’ not quite a ring to it so much as a buzz, a broken doorbell.
And she wasn’t surprised when her doctor told her that she was pregnant and she wasn’t dismayed but rather just numbed. He said she was nine weeks pregnant and seemed to expect her to be enthralled with his ability to tell her the exact date of conception. She wanted to tell him that the fucking child was never conceived, the concept was too fucking ridiculous to consider conceiving. Pregnant, with child, bearing, rearing, knocked up, the physical manifestation of love inside of her, but still pregnant, pregnant, pregnant. He explained that her apprehension was normal. Normal to whom? Certainly not normal to someone who hadn’t planned on raising a family within the decade. Not even close to normal to someone whose goals gave her four hours of sleep a night and still failed to pay her bills.

Jess sat on the top (third) step of her stoop for over two hours, her elbows reddening her knees and he eyes pressed so deeply into her palms that even the checkered sprinkles had subsided and all she could see was the absence of light. Only when her hands were shifted gently by van der Waals force did her tears have a chance to escape down her arm and onto her green dress. Green almost like money but more like photosynthesis. For a moment she sat epistatic between her mind and the world as she recalled Ben saying something similar about her eyes, a year ago, in the back of his corvette turning maroon as the horizon slowly engulfed the sun. And Jess finally had a chance to inter-chuckle at the irony of her situation. She had stopped buying birth control because she couldn’t afford it.
Ben listened to the multiple messages that Jess had left on the answering machine when he returned but his temporal lobe was too distracted by the front cover of Time magazine lying on his coffee table to properly process her words. And he was too busy undressing and getting oil onto the doorknob as he headed into the shower because it would take at least two beers and one shower to get Ben back into the real world after a day’s work fixing oil lines and showing a woman that her headlights did in fact work but she had spilled coffee onto the switch and that’s why she couldn’t move it because it was stuck in place.
The phone rang while he was in the shower but he didn’t hear it. Ben whistled to himself while Jess sobbed on the other end of the telephone, stolidly listening to the ringing sequence replaced with his robotic voice mail greeting. She felt nauseous and her knees felt as if they were being pulled by invisible twine, giving her no positional respite but the sensation that relief could only come from sprinting down the street until she collapsed. She needed to speak with someone, but not her parents, and her roommate was out of town for two weeks and this was not something she was willing to tell her friends before she told her boyfriend.
The idea of having a child made Ben tremble the first instance he heard it. But after hanging up the phone, the idea began to excite him. He was completely in love; there wasn’t a doubt in his mind. A manifestation of that love was going to fuck up his entire life and he wasn’t sure if that bothered him.
Despite the initial adrenaline-burst of positive excitement, the idea of abortion was Ben’s. And it wasn’t really a pitch but rather a gentle toss like that of a father to son. Jess returned with a weak pitch for marraige. Ben thought about it and he thought about dropping out of school, getting married, and working full time fixing fuel lines and replacing worn pass-filters. And Jess wouldn’t think about it so he had to remind her that she’d have to drop out of school as well. But it’s funny how the mind immediately begins to comprehend something new. Like glancing up from a book, eyes frantically twisting focus, the reality is blurred but already your mind is trying to fill in the missing corners and details while your eyes protest for more time but undeterred, your mind begins to assign meaning to objects that may change in a millisecond when your eyes can tell you everything that your mind got wrong. And the idea of dropping out of school didn’t bother Jess because it was just a blank sheet of paper. School was simply school until she could discern that school was not simply school but that school was only the silhouette of her life. And she heard a violin that wasn’t actually there and a voice told her that she would never forgive her own child for giving it up. Because you never forgive someone for something like that. You think you do, still through the unfocused lens that subtle ire is almost transparent from distention. But years later, when that ire finally comes into focus and you push them to pursue that music which they robbed from you and that ire couples with jealousy as you see them succeeding and you push them even harder because you know that if you push them hard enough they’ll fail and maybe they’ll see how much they took from you and maybe you’ll be strong enough to forgive them.
Jess could sense that even her basal doubts and fears were sky to Ben’s. His eyes were so withdrawn when he spoke of dropping out of school. It was as though he were trying to recall some dream he had had the night before and could only come up with vague details that had no relation to his actual life. She wanted to believe that it was because of a passion for automotive technology that she didn’t understand. But the spiritual evacuation that stood before her had nothing to do with school. And it had nothing to do with his career. She knew that he was questioning whether he could see himself with her for the rest of his life and the thought made her momentarily forget about her own disquietudes and made her feel nauseous and she felt like the child was necessary evidence that Ben truly loved her as much as he averred. But what made her stomach acidically flutter was whether she could raise a child missing half of its limbs.
Neither of them slept that night and even though thousands of couples across the world were having identical internal debates and even though they shared the same bed while some of those couples cursed and beat each other, Ben and Jess knew that they were alone. Half of the bed’s surface area lay between their backs, almost as though it were being reserved for someone. Jess didn’t cry because she heard Ben sob once and knew that he was using every mite of self control to hold back tears that were far stronger than his will. It was the first time Jess had ever witnessed him cry. So much of her wanted to ask him what those tears fell for but she knew that she would never be able to forget the answer.

By morning, the two had both reached the same decision. Jess had a slight ken about the process that she had gotten from an hour of sex education in high school. Beyond that the only orientation she had received was through a few news articles describing ten dead and fifty three injured from a bomb that had blown up a Texas abortion clinic. She didn’t need to ask Ben because she knew that he had made this decision long before the sun had gone down and rather than circulate the thought that his idea of abortion came from his lack of love for her, Jess tried to get physically close to him. But lying on Ben’s chest, Jess felt uncomfortable in that space reserved. As he stroked her back she kept telling herself that it wasn’t a life she would be ending, but rather two lives she would be saving.

The only member of Jess’s family to ever step foot inside a church was her sister Julia. Julia was three years senior to Jess and had “discovered” religion during a degree in political philosophy at California Institute of Technology. Like most young adults, she had undergone a self-induced withdrawal from her values and interests as she progressed further from her parents. Entering college, both terrified and confused, people tend to direct those feelings within, reflecting that all their values had been instilled rather than developed; being a child they had been told what to believe and, to some extent, what to enjoy. And they realize that to overcome those negative feelings they must identify their own interests. Often, this will cause early undergraduate students to engage in activities involving radical political positions, shitty underground music and art, a complete reconstruction of outward appearance, and an entirely new system of beliefs. Julia had stuck with the latter, becoming a catholic, or in the terminology of her atheist parents, “a fucking nutcase.”
Jess experienced some belief reconstruction, but felt comfortable in her youthful agnosticism. Rather than abandon it, she followed it further into existentialism, extensively studying authors such as Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre. Jess was blessed with a positive outlook on both life and death and her existential sage’s reinforced this peace through their elegant mixture of light and dark. Despite her lack of hesitation when it came to death, Jess had never painted in abortion. Failing to find any wisdom from her predecessors, she was forced to see it in utilitarian terms, finally able to silence her internal debates.
Ben had never experienced a college-induced internal metamorphosis His anxiety was far less trenchant than most. But his ire was not, and he had abandoned his parent’s strict catholic beliefs while attending a private high school. The structural inconsistencies that he perceived in the religious faculty caused him to view devout Catholics as ignorant, intrusive, and vain, unwilling to extend a hand to those they considered out of the Church’s reach.
When they began dating, Jess had recommended a small list of existential works for Ben. The relationship was still immature and he wanted to impress her, so Ben read everything she suggested. While he didn’t agree with much of the things that Jess had found so important in these books, he found some truth and value in the movement and understood how it could make her happy. Regardless of inconsistency, confusion, and love, Ben never lost his belief in a supreme being. One that was omniscient and loving yet vengeful. It’s funny how quickly a child can abandon their belief in a giver of gifts but never abandon their belief in a giver of life.
Driving Jess to the clinic, the car radio was off but it was so quiet that Ben could almost hear the sounds of a DJ through the cheap receiver’s lack of insulation. He felt like he should pray. But he didn’t know why. He couldn’t think of anything he had ever gained from prayer yet the situation seemed to call for it. But he didn’t want to pray because he was afraid that it might bring him closer to something that might hold him accountable and so he thought about his life instead. He had a passion, he was in love, and he was alive. He was alive and he could prove it. Ben glimpsed confidence and was about to reach his right hand over to Jess because he could see her left hand on her thigh from the corner of her eye and had wanted to clutch it madly from the moment he started the ignition but was too afraid it would bring him closer to a person who might hold him accountable when, out of contention to his unspoken thoughts, her hand reached up and turned the radio on.
Jess watched the still trees passing through induced motion, glad that Ben wasn’t trying to hold her hand. The thought of human contact seemed blasphemous to the situation and knew that a situation is far easier to forget when experienced alone. And she could see Ben glance at her every couple minutes in the silhouette reflection on the surface of the window and she prayed that he was finding himself to be so resilient.
The streets were empty and as they traveled mainstreet, passing undispersed shops without a single car parked in front as though God had taken an early break, creating everything required for sentient life but finding himself too exhausted to birth man, Ben’s watch beeped at seven a.m. He waited at a light but went through the red because it was just another thing that had him waiting for someone who wasn’t going to come and he saw Jess shift her arm closer to his. He knew that she was asking him to hold her hand. But the idea of human contact seemed like a lie. He knew that she would never forget and feared Mnemosyne might see his hand. Inside, the trapped air shared between Ben and Jess remained stale and cold and the leather seats still sucked the heat from anything they touched. The car’s heater was active but seemed unwilling to do its job. Suddenly Ben could see a bit of himself in the cold air it gesticulated and he promise himself that he was going to do whatever it took to get them through this together.

The Book of Henry Part 1

*Been wanting to write this for a while, but could never figure out how. I still don’t know how but fuck it I’m doin it anyway.

When his only son was buried between the jagged silver spirals of a chain-link fence, taken apart by the momentum of an alcoholic motorcycle joyride and sharp steel, Henry woke with the knowledge. And across the world, hour by hour, the rest of us awoke with knowledge too. We awoke with a surety, so deep in our bones that it seems as though the very nucleii of our calcium held this undeniable truth, a statement that would dissassemble the very center of Descarte’s law, splitting it in two to inclue: we know it because we know. A singularity event stretched over 24 hours that, like all singularity events, both united and fractured every collection of every human being on the planet. While rain falls on us all, the arid man knows it far different than the chilly New-Englander bicyclist.
Henry’s wife had died a day after Henry’s son Josh was born. It wasn’t from childbirth, but rather it was because when she held her healthy son to her exhausted chest, felt his tiny heart and tiny lungs and saw life in his tiny eyes, something told her that her only job had been successfully completed and that she could leave. And she did, when her brain hemorraged, Josh allowed to slip quiety to her lap, where he didn’t cry, but rather slept peacefully.
I only asked Henry once. We were sitting in his cabin someplace lost in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, helecopters circling overhead that had become so commonplace even the wildlife had learned to ignore, and he didn’t look at me. Rather, he continued watching the living fireplace. I was behind him and I could see the flames dancing off the lenses of his thin, gold-rimmed glasses. And the only response I ever got when he sighed, removing his glasses, effectively extinguishing the flames existing in reflection. Rather than repeat myself, I sat next to him, picked up his brown cat with white feet, and enjoyed the warmth collected on its fur from the fireplace.
That was around the time that everyone was asking him that same question. When he hadn’t time to say anything within himself, but rather every thought had to be expelled before an international public that innocently sought his wisdom while humanely ravaging it with logic and opinion and oration. It was during those ten months when he was the single most important human being to our race. It was after the celebration had ended, when people realized that simply knowing that an answer existed was not enough, that it wasn’t necessarily for them to know, that perhaps those with the wisdom had reason to be selfish, to be cautious, to be human. Henry wasn’t mute, however. He was far from it. His love for literature was ever present on his lips, spicing every thought that passed by. And for a while, there was solace in what he would say. Questions of every sort were broadcast throughout every language and his answers were immediately taken to be absolute truth. Never claiming to know but one thing, he told them millions of things and they would only ever go on to doubt the one he was not so forthcoming with. Years after his death, when what had once united every human being inevitably died under the weight of progress and intuition, one answer was repeated throughout schools and muttered by parents in the early AM to children who were simply afraid because it was the only way their brains knew how to develope. Exhausted and irritable from his predictable obstinance finally dropped her carefully manicured hands to the side of her carefully ironed dress and simply asked,
“At least tell us, should we be afraid?” And Henry smiled, his head tilted, and said, “Of course not. No one should ever be afraid.”

Second Chance Part 1

Ben was at work when his girlfriend received the news. In his single-piece gray uniform that made him appear as though he had just escape from the local prison, crawling through the greased piping until he was able to lose sight in the sun’s brilliance, he pumped people’s gas and cleaned their windshields even if they weren’t dirty because it passed the time. And despite the name stitched into the single pocket overlaying his heart, he was commonly referred to with a pronoun and ‘sir’ only on sunny days. The oil stains covering most of the uniform had become so comfortable that it seemed as though it had been designed that way but they continued to emit a scent that reminded Ben of high school ease.

Most evenings Ben wore the uniform long after he had walked home from the gas station. A blue 1969 Stingray Corvette awaited him, sleeping underneath a silky green tarp which whispered as it was removed. Ben had spent almost a decade rebuilding it and now that it was fully functional he almost never drove it. It had become his child and like any caring parent he wanted to protect it from the rigorous world beyond his garage. And it matured like a child, as Ben found improvements and tested imported king pin bolts, idler arms, tie rods, and radius arm brackets taking the finished corvette far beyond its original design. Since the day he had driven it forty miles from Westborough to begin his college education in automotive technology it had only seen the road with Jess and Ben together.

Though Ben would tell anyone it was love at first sight, her face had passed him unremarkably under the lights of the Stranton University football field. The moderately competitive team that owed none of its pride to history attracted only several handfuls of students who tended to sit in one section, leaving the rest of the bleachers remarkably empty. Ben often walked over just after work because it reminded him of high school and Jess came to feel a part of and they always sat amid the crowd, protecting themselves from the knowledge that they were there alone.

The night that Jess’s face changed from a generic commonality of those football games into something that could flush Ben’s entire nervous system, it was the sewn name over his heart pocket that directed her to him. It was as though the patch itself could no longer accept the daily anonymity and it beamed unnaturally from the light’s reflection from a silver handrail, demanding to be read.

Jess hadn’t come to watch the game that evening. Instead, she was there to meet someone with whom her friends had set her up on a blind date. Jess was far from unattractive. In fact, she was the target of dozens of secret crushes and more than one stalker. However, she had grown up without a father and often had a difficult time understanding and eventually trusting the personalities and motivations of the male species. She had had many first dates and almost no seconds. Her freshman naivety had so far been the only thing that had given someone a route into her. She lost her virginity half drunk the other half hung over a bedroom one floor above a frat party because the only girl she had met since classes a month previously had told her to. But it hadn’t been enough time for Jess to learn that her friend was really just using her to fulfill her fetish of watching from a shadowed corner while her boyfriend cheated on her. In the year’s time between then and that blind date she had avoided all social encounters with any man. She had completely boarded herself in the house where her virginity had once lived.

Two Bens played a role that night. One stood in the shadow of his own first time while the other played in the shadow of his last. While the former scanned the bleachers, the other Ben donned his football uniform. Despite the plans that had been prepared, Ben glowing from a win that could ferry all avenues of conversation and relieve the awkwardness that Jess deemed inevitable, and the counsel her friends had given, anxiety refused a backseat to fact and Jess had forgotten all but his name. So when that nametag finally found a voice, she lost the chance of ever meeting her intended Ben, the one who passed a football only feet from her shoulder.

Jess looked at Ben and his attractiveness and the way his eyes searched the crowd told her that he was her blind date. But she wondered why he wasn’t dressed up. Was it normal to dress like that on a first date? Jess’s lack of experience, however, prevented her from discrediting Ben’s identity based on his attire. And maybe it was the slightly greased hair, or that fact that he had an even patch of scruff along his chin and cheeks that forced her to practically stare at him the way a painting may cause you to stop just after passing it and go back gaze no matter how much of a hurry you’re in. Ben was about to pass by to the opposite side of the crowd when Jess said,

“Hi… Be’n?” Her voice cracked from a minor case of social phobia halfway through his name. She had tried to sound sweet but her voice was so weak that it sounded as if she were inhaling the words rather than exhaling. Ben’s gaze left the home-team’s cheerleader number thirteen and his brown eyes met her green eyes a moment before their persons. Her eyes were shade of money but to Ben it was like the green of photosynthesis. At that moment, it wasn’t quite love that he felt, not yet. It was something about her face, the way her chin subtly came out at the end, or her left eyelid resting a nanometer lower than her right, or the small indentation in the middle of her nose and the way it seemed to make the tip of her nose rounder, like the side of a marble, that he found completely irresistible. Jess was smiling and Ben found himself smiling, like a newborn baby will smile at the smallest hint of a smirk on its mother’s face.

“Do I know you?” Ben replied, finding a tentative seat next to her. He knew that she was attracted to him; he could tell by the way her smile jutted upwards just at the tips and the way her eyes darted over his face, taking a few quick trips down and back up the rest of his body. The instant comfortability that came from the knowledge she wouldn’t have to be ‘won over’ boosted his attraction to her even more.

“I… I don’t know… maybe.” She stammered, wondering if her friends had given any thought to how awkward and uncomfortable this was going to be without them there to make the introductions. But they had; they planned on showing up during halftime and hanging out until the game ended when they could take her to him. But as she stuttered at this Ben, the game had only just begun.“My name’s Jess. If it isn’t you them I’m going to sound incredibly lame but I saw your nametag and I’m meeting someone here for a blind date and his name is Ben…so…” Ben didn’t reply and Jess wanted to run for her life, “… does any of this… ring a bell?”

Ben was too busy musing at the way she pronounced ‘inkcredibly’ and didn’t bother to think before nodding. It really was simply that one word that caused Ben to continue,

“Hi Jess… haha no, you don’t sound lame, you got the right guy. Nice to meet you.” He held out his hand and she took it gently, not quite allowing a real sense of physical contact and shook it. She glanced at the field because looking at him made her face heat to a thousand degrees and it gave Ben a chance to check out her body. She was wearing a gray wool sweater and jeans that had manufactured frays. Her thighs were small; she had the body of a seventeen-year-old. He could sense that her introduction had spent all initiative she had and so he took over, not sure what he was doing but sure that something had just been given to him and he would be a fool to hand it back,

“So what now? You want to stay and watch the game? Or, we could go down by the park. They’re having a free show down there tonight. Local band, they’re not bad if you’re into soft music, someone told me that they sound like Richard Marx… Honestly I’d prefer that over the game.”

Jess smiled and this time it was a much friendlier, more comfortable smile. The kind of smile you get right after a successful first kiss. What were the chances? She hated football. Among many other things, she had been stressing for the last hour that this guy was going to make small talk about a stupid football game all night for lack of any real conversation topic.

“Sure… I love Richard Marx” she whispered and Ben only heard ‘sure’ because her voice was retracting like a turtle into its shell. He held out his hand for the second time and she took it completely, curling her fingers in front of his palm and letting his wrap around them and the spark that came from that full contact practically knocked her unconscious.

When he dropped her off at the end of the night, Ben kissed Jess on her cheek. She pushed her lips to his for a brief moment before practically sprinted into her apartment. Ben whistled while he walked back home. He hadn’t whistled since he was in the seventh grade.

The Motions, an Echelon of Beauty Part 8

I woke for a second time and noticed that the sun had shifted its position. It hovered directly over my eyes but, as though it were partially eclipsed, staring into its absolute retinal stimulation was only as painful as a tender stroke after intimacy and like that stroke I knew the light was doing irreparable damage while causing no pain at all. I sat up quickly, licking my dry lips, and was painfully blinded by the blue ring temporarily etched into my sight, as though the sun was trying to remind me that some things are only felt after they are gone. As the blue ring faded and the sunlight once again began to irritate my eyes, I held an outstretched hand up in that universally imitatable physical make-shift shade, palm upward but not exactly perpendicular to the sky but rather at a forty-five degree angle, elbow bent as every time before, creating more of a salute than a protective position and perceived a blond-haired boy jogging towards me in what seemed to be the only sweat suit in this reality. As I watched the blue eyes bounce within the frame that carried them forward, I remarked to myself how similar the facial features appeared to be across every being in this particular universe. And I forgot to breath suddenly when his blue eyes locked on to mine. His body froze and I felt a rush of what could have been joy or panic, as the distinction between the two is often impossible as they are felt identically. My eyes asked his what was going on and they answered back in incomprehensible screams. Before I could speak, his eyes returned to the common glaze, the ground hardened beneath me, and the green tint returned. I wasn’t sure when it had left, but I didn’t notice that it had been absent until it was once again apparent. The smoking female alien-ghost that had lit her third cigarette and left the support of the bank’s wall passed before me, playing with a lighter, towards the inert jogger. For a second, I thought that she might be approaching him. He slowed, seeming to approach her cautiously but not reflecting a visual response yet other than that deceleration and I rapidly identified the striking similarities between every feature of their blank, lonely faces. How I distinguished the sexes became somewhat of a marvel as they suddenly looked precisely identical and not one more male or female than the other but rather something in between. And as the twins passed through each other, my mind skipped a beat. There was no shimmer, no light, no sound. It was as though they didn’t exist to each other. The boy reached my feet and I kicked through his waste. I started laughing with a growing ferocity. My consciousness was shutting down. I had trained it through years of trial and error to function in a reality that was no longer applicable. And as it realized its futility, all logical functions were abandoned, replaced with a heightening collection of basal survival instincts and fight or flight preparedness. It had become obsolete. My conscious had become obsolete.
On a whim, I decided to take a walk. I leapt in an attempt to float and was disappointed by the fact that I had failed to gain the power of levitation. Turning the corner, I noticed a naked, blond-haired infant walking unsteadily through some trees beside the road. As the child’s head emerged from the thickest trunk, it lost its balance and teetered to one side. This caused its head to vanish into a large branch and for a moment I was looking at a tree that had breathing, thumping human protruding from its base. Somehow the boy, evident through his nakedness, was able to shift his weight forward enough to steady its momentum. When he reached the raised sidewalk, the boy attempted to lift his tiny foot and finally lost his balance completely. His tender head passed through the final branch and thumped on the sidewalk. My ears prepared for the inevitable wailing but the boy remained silent. I walked to him, wondering if he had been hurt seriously, if pain, exlusively caused by the interaction of one object with another, one or both pain-perception capable, could even exist in a world where interactions seemed to be forbidden in the laws of physics. The boy was conscious, as conscious as any person could be in this universe, and stared straight into the sky. His eyes shared the same shade of blue as the sky, and by the pale white of his skin and unmistakable blond-hair I somehow knew that this boy would grow up to look exactly like the three I had seen before. It struck me that without social interaction and the passing of alleles and mutations, that every human being would look eerily similar. That without social interaction where we are often taught and teach how to assimilate, how to become like each other, like some schema of the average or maybe the perfect, somehow maybe a blend of the two, that interaction that helps us imitate and helps us to fit is the one thing that prevents us all from being clones. But how this or any other child could ever have possibly been conceived without social interaction evaded me and I decided to see if perhaps there did exist some parental being which might be trying to regain an interaction, maybe the only interaction. I walking quickly into the trees that the boy had passed through previously. Through the brush, I could see buildings that I had never seen before. I quickened my pace, habitually flinching every time I was about to slam my face into the trunk of a tree, only to pass through it seamlessly. I was approaching the last of the trees separating, at least visually, me from the small collection of houses when the green tint flickered and my shoulder collided with a skinny oak tree. The sudden painful but miraculous and fucking beautiful collision spun my entire body around. I fell onto a root, my back quivering with pain, and I saw a raven pass just above the trees around me. I watched it soar and before it had a chance to leave my field of vision, it vanished, along with the trees, grass, and everything that was or had ever been alive. The green tint returned to a world that had become a gigantic cluster of rock. I breathed a sigh of relief because I was finally blind, just like everyone else.

I woke up in the weeds beside the bench I had missed during my escape from the bus. Memories of my dream faded as quickly as my surroundings became discernable. But even as my mind metamorphosized into its new set of principles and conceptions, this new meaning of “open your eyes” remained.
An elderly man sat on the bench, completely still, his face covered by deep wrinkle-scars that were so tough they might remain like stone castings after his body faded into earth. An uncombed beard extended to the collar of his black t-shirt and his outnumbered brown hairs practically glistened from the oil. I sat beside the bench, propped up by my palms, and looked at this man who sat forward, his hands lightly tugging at his upper knees, staring deeply into the oily, cracked pavement, not noticing any passing vehicles, and wondered if the world truly was as ironic as it seemed. I wondered if this man was blind.
I joined him on the bench, the two of us taking up less than half the wooden sitting space. I felt a tight, unidentifiable stab of anxiety when he still offered my presence no response. After five minutes of no interaction, my curiosity accelerating towards its peak and staring into the pavement, I asked him,
“I was wondering if you could help me with something. I’ve been sitting for a decent wondering what it is that makes this world go around.”
When I received no response, I turned to face the old man. He had ceased his gaze into the earth and was focused directly on the center of my brain. His vision burrowed through the precise center of my retina and I panicked to burn every horrible thing I had ever done out of my mind because for the first time it had simply become a bare cluster of rocks and everything I had ever done lay scattered across its open, fully visible surface. But the panic faded as I followed those canyonous wrinkles to their origin, his eyes, yellowed from severe alcoholism, and began to think it wasn’t me that he was looking at in that way that demanded a justification for simple existence but my rather he was staring into the faces of my demons.
In a cough, his behavioral characteristics went from statue to human being and he responded,
“You do… two-ply“ in the calmest, most powerful deep voice I had ever heard. I could sense the aged wisdom in the timbre of his voice and wanted to know everything about this man, yet feared that he would in turn know everything about me. My mouth clenched. I had a feeling the old man may have buried a god in his lifetime too, but was too unsure of what that meant to ask. I wanted to dump everything I had buried in my lifetime into this man. I wanted to go back to the cemetery and dig up everything that signified the man I had buried earlier that day and to bury it into this one. I wondered if I could crush him with my sense of loss. I wondered whether his alcohol gave his bones that extra bit of strength required to carry the world.
The old man looked back at the pavement and I watched his wrinkles sink as the iron melted from his skin. A bus arrived. I got on and disappeared.

Ricky but Rick when he wants to Impress Part ??

Ricky did a lot of things that didn’t make sense. When we were freshman, he once discarded every bit of perishable and non-perishable food from his house, even going to the lengths of removing all spices, sauces, and even old pretzels and bits of potato chips in and behind the sofas. When I confronted him about it, he told me that he wanted to see what it was like to have every bit of food new, everything unopened and fresh. I asked him what it felt like and he said,
“It felt redundant, entirely redundant.”
Ricky collected baseball cards in middle school and he traded them with a peculaliar and adult-like purposefulness foreign to only the most successful traders and business owners allowing his collection to accumulate a wealth of rare and expensive cards without more than a few dollars from his pockets. It was like the world rested on the shoulders of his card collection. But what didn’t make sense was when he sold them at school. One day, he showed up with a giant box filled with cards that had been carefully sealed inside individual protective containers and he had carefully stenciled a price (he used plastic stencils to write the prices with permanent black marker) onto each card. There was no averaging with those stenciled prices. In fact, I recall one card reading 19 cents while another read 88 dollars and 20.5 cents. I asked him why the half-cent and he explained to me that he had to account for the days already passed in his monthly pricing guide. And for a week Ricky attempted to sell his entire collection of baseball cards. But, at three oclock friday afternoon, after five days of extensive peddling, he hadn’t managed to sell a single card. Ricky could talk you into buying anything. He had jargon you’d never heard before but somehow knew meant something staggering. But when the person would hold the baseball card in one hand and extend the required amount of cash in his other, Ricky would slowly, softly, retake the baseball card, explaining that that was the one card he couldn’t yet part with. It was as if he had no intention of exchanging his baseball cards for money or other goods, but had set out entirely to simply sell his baseball cards. To sell the cards worth half a cent, explaining to the buyer that a physical half of a penny would be required, and getting the buyer to physically cut the penny in half at home, returning the following morning only to find out that the card worth half a cent happened to have significant meaning to Ricky. Or perhaps Ricky set out to deny as many people as possible, to say no as many times as one could hope to say no in one week. Ricky discarded those baseball cards in a recycling bin saturday morning, shaking his head, mumbling about the frugality of his classmates.
But the things that really mattered, to me and to Ricky and to everyone else, involved or not, all made perfect sense. They made sense, at a cost, however. You had to believe they would make sense. You had to exchange that disbelief for the reality, the explanation, Ricky took your doubts and he gave you a reason. Not himself, but rather it was revealed to you.
The same day that Ricky’s girlfriend left him was the day he realized that he loved her. It was also the last day their child survived and it was the last day I ever saw either of them. I remember how cold the August rain was and how it reminded me of a song and some kind of anacronism. I remember walking towards his house and when I was only a block away the majority of his building was abscured by the trash piled out of the corner dumpster. It was soaking and wilted and serene and exhausted and I knew right away that the sofa and the desk and the bureau and clothes and computer and stereo were all Ricky’s. I never rang his doorbell that day. I just stopped walking as the rain weighted a shirt so that it slipped from a lamp and fell to the ground before the pile. It was a shirt that I had given him, or maybe it was a gift from his girlfriend. I couldn’t recall but only knew that it had been a gift.
I didn’t need to be told that Ricky had discarded every bit of personal property himself, while his parents were working, and hadn’t even left a note behind, because to leave a note would mean leaving behind something of his. In fact, despite his best efforts, he still left behind an empty room and if he could have devised a way to discard that, without creating an empty space, or a burnt structure, or even a memory, he would have. Ricky never came home. Because, he was home. The moment that he realized that he truely loved someone, someone whose mistrust stemmed from abandonment bullshit that she didn’t even remember, he realized that, not only to prove his feelings, not only to make room for her, not only to openly admit his feelings, not only to recognize and change and integrate those feelings, but more so because he required it of himself all of his past possessions and achievements were to be abandoned. Because he knew what love was and for those of us not too cold or busy or blind we got a glimpse of what that was and that knowledge prevented any of us from ever ringing his doorbell.
Ricky knew that love was the destination. He knew that everything he had to offer, everything he did for others, everything he gathered from others, were merely footsteps. And everything that Ricky had acquired during the first eighteen years of his life had merely been practice, filler, accumulation, and direction until he could finally find love. It was like an hourglass, coming to a single point in which only a single grain of sand can escape, leaving behind every other grain of sand, emerging from sand, becoming itself before returning to a new pile. One that waited for him and demanded him because if he failed to slip through that passageway then time would fail to continue.
I knew that my friendship and hatred for Ricky was over. And when I saw that shirt hit the soaking grass it finally made sense to me why he had bestowed all this wisdom on everyone around him. Why everything he did had meaning, even the things that didn’t make any sense. It was because he had hardly any time to get it all out before being reborn on the opposite side of the glass. He condensed into fifteen years what takes the average person thirty.
The only thing that remains a mystery is whatever became of Ricky, what the bottom of his hourglass resembled, what colors it was, if it even existed or rather the passageway just lead to a shattered opening and Ricky was lost. Because when he discarded everything, ready to present himself open and willing and honest to the only love of his life, he couldn’t find her. He looked, he called, he asked, he disassociated, but he was unable to find her. But like everything else in his life, her absense never surprised Ricky. It never really surprised any of us. Because really, in bare honesty, Ricky checked every place but where she was, the hospital, no mystery for someone that had found her appointment reminder within the mail. I think he knew she was there. I believe that is why he failed to check. I am certain that he looked not to find her but the same reason he sold those baseball cards. He looked because he owed it to himself, and he owed it to her, and he owed it to everyone else. But, unlike the rest of us, he saw reality and he accepted it. He had no internal debate. He simply was real. He simply thought real. He simply did real. And he knew that she was aborting their child and that she was not going to leave with him and so he looked in every place but where she was.

Adoration, sleep, and sense

I rang Eva when I returned with my smokes. Earlier that Saturday she had called. Instead of answering I silenced the phone. The voicemail was cute; she sounded tired, carrying bags at Macy’s, she was going to get lunch with a coworker, she loved me, I was so cute last night, call her. She was speaking her inner-voice, unadulterated. The tone reflected what each sentence meant to her, void of any misguiding disparities that fatten the day to day conversations I have with Sean and Pete (who had such a misleading tone of voice that one might think he was stoned at all times of the day; he sounded like a twenty-five year old dead-head). Eva left me messages that fell straight and uninhibited as if they rained from her consciousness. That kind of incredible vulnerability is reserved for very few out of the millions of people one encounters in their lifetime and to be on the receiving end always pressed my heart into my lungs. It’s the only time a human being is truly and absolutely adorable. To hear another human being so acutely vulnerable garners a deep sense of fear, sympathy, and most importantly, self acceptance. Such acquiescence causes the temptation, spitting from the pit of self that’s unworthy for any human interaction, to pervert that delivery into a vicious exercise of dominance. The fear of being so powerful reminds us how vulnerable we are to ourselves. A sense of sympathy and the realization that someone was so freely giving you control touches one because it suggests that maybe we can someday be that honest with yourself. Thus, is adoration.

—-

Sean dropped me off in front of my apartment at 2 am. My striped black and white work shirt was draped over my shoulder and I had a slight buzz. As I climbed the stairs, I recounted bits of the conversation at the restaurant. Though it was a Mexican restaurant, I ordered a cheeseburger with lettuce. Sean, of course, felt the need to point out the foolishness in placing such an order at a Mexican restaurant, to which I retorted that nothing on the goddamn menu is actually Mexican food so shut the fuck up. Eva made some comment, but due to the distance of the entire table separating us and the loud generic cha-cha over the PA I couldn’t discern what it was. I felt momentarily awkward, as the statement was obviously directed at me, and she paused afterwards, waiting for a response, to which I could only shrug my shoulders. Sean ordered a Manhattan and I asked him what was so Mexican about a Manhattan.
In my bedroom, I played spades until my buzz disintegrated into lethargy. After beginning the Simpsons third season DVD I lay on my side, holding a second pillow as if I were cuddling it. On some level that pillow was really a large black cat appropriately named Blackitty that I had bonded with as a child. Aside from the testy relationships I shared with my parents and siblings, this was the first true relationship that had been built from nothing. It was the first time I found myself undetachable from another living thing. Every night we slept in the same position: Both of us on our sides, facing the same direction, the soft back of his head against my chin, one arm above him, one arm running between his legs, up his belly, with fingers leisurely stroking his chin. He died the same day my father took us to Waterland, an amusement park themed around everything wet. It was the first time I had ever felt guilty for enjoying myself. I’ve had dozens of pets since Blackitty, but I’ve never held them in the same way I held him while we slept. It was the first time I made a lifelong dedication of love. I owed him a sleeping position. To date, the easiest way for me to calm myself to sleep was in that position, substituting blackitty with a pillow.

—-

Pete ordered us vodka and tonics. The club was only mildly full, some unknown tape played over the PA. It was soft enough to talk over but loud enough to be aggravating. The bar lined the back wall, next to the front booth. From our stools we could see the entire small club: the large open floor flanked on both sides by fenced platforms that housed six tables each, all of which was designed to provide adequate view to the stage which was at the far end of the room. There were two men in their own world on stage, screwing a microphone stand together and obsessively trying to place a cymbal at some specific angle from the lower snare. They were fat and pale and their facial hair was wet and curly and one of them was trying to have a conversation with a group of girls who were laughing when he looked away and his t-shirt had a band logo but it was long since too worn to tell which band he was advertising. The band, Trash, had attracted a decent crowd of teenage girls who hated their fathers, donning thick black eye-shadow and tight shirts designed to trap pedophiles into making some poor life decisions; their skirts competed for size and some of the more angry few wore black or red or blue fish-nets. There was an awful lot of metal jewelry in the club. Pete and I watched the crowd for the first few minutes after receiving our drinks. When the shitty music over the PA was too much to bear and the fat roadie’s pathetic “game” was finally spent I put my half empty drink behind me, turning to Pete,
“So… how’s it going with Kristina?”
“Things are good… hah… actually it’s funny, we came closer to breaking up than we ever have last night.” He finished his drink. I was intrigued to find out what a rational break-up that made sense could possibly spawn from.
“Oh yeah? What happened?” I was hoping he’d tell me that he beat her or threw her from a second story window or he had found her in bed with six high school boys or that he had gotten her pregnant and she refused to get the abortion he requested or even that she finally realized what kind of a fat empty personality whore he was.
“Well… we went home to her parents on Thursday. I honestly have no fucking clue how this came up but… like… when we going to bed, which I just want to aside that I really don’t feel comfortable sleeping with someone when their parents are on the other side of the wall…”
“Her parents don’t like you?”
“Nah… her parents actually love me.” Of course they loved him. Who wouldn’t love someone who made sense?
“Oh… I just… well then how come you feel so uncomfortable?” Pete shrugged, finishing the ice in his glass,
“Dunno… old fashion I guess?” That didn’t make sense to me but it must have made sense because Peter makes sense. I missed Eva but I didn’t want to miss her and I was doing my best to keep her out of my head. That made sense to me. At that moment, I realized that whatever shitty song was being shit out of the PA was about mini-trucks. I finished my drink.
“Is that why you almost broke up?” Seemed plausible to me. I had no idea what constituted a legitimate fight in the world that makes sense
“Oh… no. Anyway, somehow kids were brought up and she knows that I really don’t want to have kids so basically she wanted to push the issue again and I’ve honestly had it. I was like, ‘listen, if this is going to be a real problem for you then maybe we shouldn’t be together.’”
“Have you guys been getting along lately?”
“Yeah… yeah that was like the first time we’ve fought in two months, she…”
“Wait wait… so you were going to break up?”
“Well yeah, lately she’s just been kinda moody and it’s just getting really lame. I honestly don’t know if I’m going to keep putting up with it.”
“Uhhh… you guys have been together for three years… I thought you wanted to marry her and shit.”
“I do… I mean I love her… I can totally see myself married to Kristina but I just really don’t feel like dealing with someone being bitchy.”
“Wow… so you’re going to break up with her cause she got bitchy…”
“No I said we almost broke up. We didn’t. She woke me up crying and we talked and we’re good now.”
“Look… you might as well accept the fact that you’re going to have kids.”
“I really don’t see why having kids would make sense for us.” Suddenly the song about mini-trucks was more appealing than Pete’s soliloquy. I checked the clock, Trash was scheduled in ten minutes, the floor had filled considerably and I drifted from the conversation as I tried to decipher what silent threat was being passed between a juicer wearing a tennis visor and an extraordinarily fat teenage boy.
“You guys are going to get married and she wants kids and eventually you’re going to have kids… that’s what people do… you aren’t going to break up with her because you don’t want kids and she does… you guys are gonna get married and have kids… simple.” The conversation had become anticlimactic and Pete could sense that.
“Wow, it’s like a mall in here.” He said sipping a beer I hadn’t noticed him order.
“Yeah, I was just looking at that…”
“Oh man, there’s a girl over there that is right up your alley… like you’d die over this one…” he guided my sight to the right platform where a short brunette in tight black tshirt and skirt and long white socks was leaning against a support column, talking with a red-head with an equally intensively fit body.
“She’s all right. I like her friend better.”
“The red-head?”
“Yeah…”
“Sometimes your tastes make absolutely no sense to me.” Success. Trash filled the stage.

The Cook and The Change

Three years ago I didn’t have a girl in the war. I sweat for myself and felt complete. It was hard finding work and it had nothing to do with the economy. I was washing dishes at a small restaurant, walking home from work with open cuts from the sharp edges of industrial pans. These cuts never really closed on account of the strong sterilizer we used in the rinse. The upper layers of my finger nails had begun peeling. At the end of the night, when I was lightheaded from the fumes of floor soap and ammonia, I walked home feeling that I deserved a place to sleep, sweat through a t-shirt while brown leaves clung to my jeans in the night autumn wind. There is no gait like that of a man who has sated his appetite for work.
It was early October and I was walking under streetlights down the hill towards my street. The grill had closed two hours early and the time was not yet eleven. My skin was still sore from the hot dishwater from twenty-five minutes before. Behind me, sprinkling pepper on a steak and listening to a receiver held to her ear by a shoulder, the head cook was whispering. But she wasn’t whispering so much as she was choking on the air leaving her throat. Its contractions were lagging behind the rest of the vocal process and the final product was a cymbal crash without the initial crash. I was trying to decipher what she was saying but could only get the common words such as ‘the’ ‘why’ ‘my’ ‘him.’ Just as I thought she was speaking up, while I watched a waiter dump a handful of dirty silverware into a bucket, three important events occurred: I clearly heard Sherri say “loved” into the telephone, the receiver slipped from her shoulder, and in an effort to catch it she swiped the finished steak in front of her onto the floor. The ceramic plate didn’t break when it first hit the floor. Instead it bounced from its rim, spun 180 degrees on a tilt and landed face down in twenty pieces or so. The steak must have somehow held the plate together just long enough to give the impression that it wasn’t actually going to break. Immediately, I froze, slapped out of my bath-like ease, and watched a woman who, much like the plate, had until then appeared unbreakable, fall to unrecognizable pieces. Instead of her Polish curses, Sherri shook with an almost indetectable moan. Her body paralyzed in sobs and there was an uncomfortable delay between my confusion and feelings of concern. It was one of those moments that’s not meant for any witnesses. Unfortunately, by some chance of fate, I had no escape but to watch this coarse stone erode. Sherri was leaning down, halfway bent to the floor, holding the edge of the cool steel counter with her left hand. Her ferocious sobs were turning her to sand.   
My emotions tapped out briefly. The sudden contradiction smashed my schemas like two school-buses colliding. It is during that moment, when the grills finally meet, dozens of children who have yet to be given a real lecture on death screaming, the bus driver’s eyes squinted shut and the image of her husband that God isn’t sure what to do with the pieces; he isn’t sure where to put the six year old girl in the seat furthest back who was physically propelled upwards, or the giant sliver of glass spinning at neck-height from the back, or the billions of specks of glass and metal and paint and skin and blood. Caught off guard, he is forced to make a billion instantaneous desicions. More often than not, in his haste, he makes the wrong ones.
I had always held certain empathetic feelings for Sherri that were overlooked by most. When I started at the restaurant, I was warned about her fits of anger and impatience. It was explained to me that there has yet to be a dishwasher who hasn’t gotten into at least two verbal arguments with her in their first week. I expected a woman carved from limestone, eyes sunken and dark, filled with judgments that made the God of Judaism seem far too forgiving. But on my first day, I met a plain woman in her late fifties. Her hair held little color and had been brushed quickly, if at all. Her skin was exhausted and the sags below her eyes extended to the center of her cheeks. While cell cried fatigue there was a hint of life in everything about her. The stains in her shirt, the sagging flesh overlapping her elbows, the wrinkles and countless imperfections across the skin of her face all aided to invoke an unconscious awe to anyone who cared to look. Before me was everything a human being aspires to be. She embodied the walk home at the end of a hard-day’s work. Somewhere within the scarred, marked, and lazy skin her eyes were soft and overwhelmingly accepting.
Sherri was born in south Boston, created by two people who were never intended to reproduce. Her father, Jed, which was short for Josephonie, drank a half gallon of Skyy vodka every day and sang the theme songs to shows like Love Boat and Lassie. He started belting showtunes after he had been fired. Forced to stay at home with Sherri, it was these high pitched wailings that could help him ignore the screaming baby. By some miracle he was never physically abusive to either Sherri or her mother. However, along with his teddy-bear fists came a serpent’s tongue. He worked construction on the docks and spoke like most of the sailors he met. Sherry was reminded daily of all the many reasons that the world considered her useless and ugly. At first, She excelled at school, trying to become a classroom star to spite him and to convince herself that what he had taught her since she could first comprehend the words ‘stupid,’ ‘useless,’ and ‘wretched’ was all entirely or even partially untrue. Unfortunately, his tongue proved much stronger than her spite and when she couldn’t take her home, she dropped out of school, washing dishes to pay for an apartment in East Boston.
The woman I met, who cursed and rarely smiled, who verbally tore a person to pieces if he were to cross her path, had constructed an incredible wall that made her strong but irritable. The wall was ten layers of brick, each layer built to cover the graffiti on the previous one. Words like “cunt” and “useless” and “ugly” and “stupid” were hastily painted in white spray paint. Unable to paint over these marks, Sherri was forced to build another wall, not so much to strengthen its defense but to hide the one before. People often speak of breaking down these walls but never consider where these bricks might go. Those who can get through the walls are left with heaps of broken bricks and a landscape that is practically unwalkable. But there is always a hole they use to see through. And if you could cross the moat of insults, crawl under the barbed wire tongue, and traverse the flat desert, you could start to see those holes. If the tearing wind of fear and loneliness failed to brush you aside you could place your hands on the cool surface of her wall and put your own eyes to this quarter-sized hole. If you waited, and if you wanted it enough, you could see the Sherry God created: a beautiful woman with the inability to judge another human being. In tattered muddy rags, balled in the corner, hugging her knees, greasy long brown hair over her blackened face, a frail and skinny woman hid in her brick cube. And if you waited even longer she’d eventually look up, and you’d see that she was smiling.
When she crashed and that entire defense was swept up into a freak tornado, neither I nor the waiter beside me knew what to do. We looked at each other, stiffening our lower lip down and clenching our teeth. We were saved before we could make the situation any worse by the owner of the restaurant, who was entering the building from the back door, carrying some large boxes labeled Cisco. Immediately, he handed the boxes to me and I was temporarily blinded by the stack that stretched beyond my forehead. There wasn’t room to move or a surface to unload the boxes to, so I stood in front of the sink, holding four boxes of ice-berg lettuce, unable to see, dish-water running to my elbows.
It was rare to hear Sherri speak about her husband. Sometimes it was easy to forget she was married as she kept everyone at an aeon’s distance. But, I know she loved her husband. It became all to evident when his heart attack was enough to level her entire battlefield in a second. The owner guided the shaking stranger to the hospital and I dropped the boxes of lettuce.

——

The blues of boredom were not an uncommon feeling with a workless Monday afternoon. But this particular Monday brought a slightly darker blue. Caffeine was always enough to give me an hours worth of motivation at least, the falsified chemical drive to do something productive, before the true lull began. That morning, that artifial energy and alertness came, but with it no drive. At the time, I just attributed it to a bout of melancholy, correlated with nothing but a momentary biochemical backup somewhere in the center of my brain. I spent that afternoon on the couch, watching the television attempt to entertain me.
Every aspect of my life from that day on can be entirely attributed to the gray/green digital display on a white box revealing a caller’s identification. I had no answering machine; I never saw the point in leaving messages. Any other day, that ring would have gone unanswered. Instinctively, I glanced at the tiny screen. The call was from an area code foreign to me. Those three digits changed my life, providing me with the curiosity required for the first motivational force. I lifted the handset from its cradle, slowly bringing it to my ear, and had just enough motivation left to mutter,
“Hello?”
“Hey, is this Doug?” The voice sounded pink, small, vulnerable, warm.
“Yeah…” I coughed, “who’s this?” I thought it might be a girl I had given my number too some weeks back while at work. She was young. Her black eye shadow and tight skirt screamed “I hate my fucking father.” It was my achille’s heel and I thought, wouldn’t it be fun to bring home a dish-washer, sweaty, filthy, and completely unreliable. What a catch. I can see your seventeen-year-old soul and its wet tissue paper. Let me destroy you.
“Hey, this is Eva… Sean’s friend… you know, from last night?” Melancholy: what a line of bullshit. At that moment I was so lost I wanted to drop the phone and run.
“Hey, uh…. How’s it going?”
“I’m oka-aay” God, her voice was so fucking cute. She wasn’t okay but oka-aay, the a suspended before completion just a bit longer than expected. “I hope it’s not really weird that I’m calling, but I tried to get Sean to call, but he’s being an asshole and doesn’t want to talk while driving.”
“Nah, It’s good to hear from you. What’s up?”
“Cool… well anyway, we’re going to some place called Bison House or something…”
“Bison Grill.” Sean said, just audible in the background. I heard a horn.
“Yeah, Bison Grill. Sean wants to know if you want us to pick you up.”
Sean spoke under his breath. It wasn’t meant to be heard and how the cellular phone was able to pick up his voice and transmit it is a mystery. I shouldn’t have been able to hear him say,
“Yes, Sean wants to know.”
“Yeah that sounds cool… I’m just doin some work at home… you guys don’t mind picking me up?”
“No, we’re like… um… five minutes from your house, I think… we’re on um….” A long enough pause for my heart to miss three whole beats, “Mood Street. That’s close… right?”
“We’re not on Mood street, Jesus, just tell him I’m turning onto Chestnut now.” Sean again. I shouldn’t have been able to hear her give him the finger.
“Did you hear that?”
I gave a dry laugh, “yeah, I heard him. I’ll be down in a second.”
“kayy… cool… see you in a bit.”
I didn’t hang up. I waited for her end to click. It didn’t click right away, and seconds later she laughed uncomfortably, ‘okay bye’ and the call ended. The sheet, the childhood nightmares, the blues, the anhedonia that was quickly subsiding, spinning around a freshly dug hole I that I had never seen before. I had been completely baited by love at first sight. It had filled my subconscious with such stealth because I was wholly misinformed about the meaning of that term. I felt that truth deep within the soft tissue center of my bones. Being in Eva’s presence, even with such limited direct interaction or visual stimulation, had irreparably changed me. There was a hole so ancient and unfulfilled that I had grown to live comfortably with its presence. But the unconscious recognition of someone I was meant to love, two lives finally connecting, hiding its true purpose until the time was right, somehow filled that hole for the first time in my life. But it was a transative fix and the hole was once again unearthed when we parted. That morning, I was feeling that hole for the first time since I entered the world from my mother’s protective arms. It didn’t depend on aesthetic beauty, physical attraction, hormonal release, or the matching of two perfectly compatible personalities. Rather, it was simply the distance between us. Like two magnets unaffected until you bring them close together; indistinguishable from any other rock when apart. When our lives overlapped, briefly, carelessly, and on such a shallow level, it was as if she had curled into the fetal position, sliding comfortably into that egg-shaped hole causing something ancient in me to wake. It cracked and threatened to disintegrate as it became animated, but was eventually standing on its own. But it was unable to stand long, having not used its muscles for a lifetime. As the dusty, cobwebbed creature love stumbled back to its knees, unable to support its own weight any longer, I realized that there really was a colossal crater in my heart. Her lack of presence was felt in every fiber of motivation and joy. I had been forever altered by love at first sight.