(no subject)
this is the short story i turned in to my creative writing class. i didnt edit anything from how i turned it into them, so the things that i should fix have not actually been fixed. its long as hell, so i dont expect it to actually be read, but, its here anyway, for posterity.
A bell rang as I opened the door to the dry cleaner’s. It was cleverly named “We’ll Dry Clean It.” The place was empty except for the attendant, who was giving me a glare like I’d made the same offensive joke at his expense one too many times. Feeling a lump under my shoe I looked down to see a trail of gum spots from the door way to my right foot, with spindly strands running to and from each spot. Though the clues were all too blindingly apparent, I picked my foot up and inspected my shoe just to make sure I was the culprit, only to confirm that I had, in fact, tracked gum into this man’s store, which he had named “We’ll Dry Clean It.”
“I must have stepped on it outside.” Bashfully stating the obvious, because its not at all commonplace for dry cleaning attendants to leave spider webs trails of gum across their carpet.
“Are you the guy here about the jacket?” he asked. I nodded in response, still blushing.
“I couldn’t get the blood out. Do you want it anyway?”
A store calling themselves “We’ll Dry Clean It” couldn’t get her blood out of my coat. Confused at the incongruity, I walked out of his store, making sure that I stepped back into every gum spot, so as not to spread it further around the carpet. “Maybe you’ll have better luck getting the gum out,” I said. I was trying to be clever but I don’t think he appreciated the humor. He was screaming something in a foreign language into the back of the room when the bell announced my departure. It bugs the shit out of me that this place couldn’t get blood out of my coat. I’m not sure if I was aggravated because her blood ruined it, or if it reminded me of her.
I was supposed to meet Danny at a bar three blocks from here at five o’clock. I’d make it without being late and still have time to stroll. It was a pretty day and the city strolled with me. Glancing at passers by, as I have a tendency to do out of simple curiosity, I saw a girl who made me lose my breath. She looked like my ex-girlfriend, or at least how I remembered her.
I recalled the morbidly foreboding phone call I’d received from my girlfriend, and the my hasty dash over to her apartment. After two years we still weren’t living together. As I walked inside she was sitting at her dining room table behind a gun and two envelopes. She looked at me and read me the letter inside the envelope labeled with my name, tears running down her face like rain on a wind shield. She ended the letter on a spitefully sour note, looked into my eyes, and said, “You ruined my life.” The gun went to her head and she pulled the trigger, tears still beading up on her cheeks.
It happened like a movie. If I’d had popcorn, I probably would have been eating it during her finals words, drowning them out ever so slightly with the crunching sound of kernels from that place inside my head. The sudden fluctuation of pressure from the shot and the high pitched ring in my ears pulled me back into her apartment, away from my movie distance. Being new to a situation like this, I automatically grabbed the envelopes and the gun and ran out of her apartment. I took the parcel titled ‘Dad’ to her father at his coffee shop. He was my boss. Having no idea how to act, I gently placed the envelope on the counter, and turned my back on him, walking away without a backward glance and never making eye contact. I’m not sure what I could have said, but it might have kept him from firing me half an hour later via a message on my voicemail mixed equally with sobs and screams.
Shuddering at the rush of memories, I kept heading towards the bar. I put my hands into my deep khaki pockets and felt the gun there. I stopped looking at people and walked in a straight line towards my destination, the whole time fingering notches and grooves in the pistol to distract myself. If it weren’t for the vomit stained squares outside the bar, I would have trudged on two or three more blocks. I stepped inside and left my memory on the curb to wait.
The place was typically a fraternity hangout, but as I walked in the only inhabitants were the poor dregs of the city with nothing better to do than get drunk before the sun went down. Danny and I picked a spot in the corner, and sat down with a beer each. I told him about the dry cleaner’s but he didn’t seem interested. Instead he sat with an intense look on his face, sipping his beer, and finally said, “So how were the two months you spent alone?”
“Well, obviously depressed. I mean, I wasn’t taking visitors, or phone calls. I pretty much sat alone the entire time trying to put things into perspective,” I said, wondering if I’d actually put things into perspective or not.
“Well did you put things into perspective yet, or did you just wander out of your depression and into this bar the same way you went in,” he asked, putting an unclear emphasis on ‘depression.’
Sensing an insult, or at least some glib remark, I decided to chance the following subject: I compared my time alone as equal to falling in a refrigerator where I was cold and stuck, completely detached from the outside world. He interrupted me, “Look, will you please stick with me in reality here. I don’t want to talk about your filthy refrigerator.”
I conceded, and started to rehash the past, which is what he wanted. I referred to the last couple of weeks before she shot herself.
“We used to go to shows, man. I used to save the measly amounts of money I would make working forty hours a week for her father to pay for tickets and drinks. I compromised my musical tastes to go to shows she wanted to see, and I hate compromising my tastes. You’d think she did the same when went to see the bands that I liked, but she had no taste, so that obviously couldn’t have been the case. We really just weren’t on the same page.” I know its in poor taste to speak poorly about the recently deceased, but something in me just didn’t care to be tactful and considerate.
He seemed slightly more interested, and I stress ‘slightly.’ A person would think that his best friend would show a little more interest in the last two months of his closest pal’s life, even if it was shrouded in obscurity and figurative language. When your best friend views the explanation of how you spend your life as an absurdist fairy tale, completely disregarding your creative obligations as a narrator, it might be time to find more artistic company. Either way, I continued.
“When I lay down to sleep on my honeyed ham mattress . . .” at which Danny stood up and walked to the bar, ordering another round. I still had a full beer beside my first and half finished one.
“Oh I’m sorry. Am I boring you?” I asked, trying to sound hurt and offended.
“No, you’re just being ridiculous. I’m really not sure if you’re denying this whole thing or if it actually doesn’t effect you. When my dog died I wasted a week crying over it. I went out and bought whiskey and sat and drank alone.”
“Yeah, I remember.”
“And now that’s why we’re here. To try and get you drunk so maybe you’ll wanna stop talking about fucking refrigerators and processed meat. This is a much bigger deal than the death of Chalky, may he rest in peace, and I think you need to deal with it.”
“Look, I’m here right? The last time I dreamt, this is what I remembered: ‘What do you mean you’re not coming to the show tonight?’ That was you, remember, and a sharp edge was growing behind your voice. I explained to you how it wasn’t an ambiguous statement. ‘You haven’t been out in weeks. They’re not even coming back to the state on this tour.’ The edge in your was voice growing sharper, and more poignant. I told you I had their album. I’m pretty sure you recall all of this.” His nod was a sip of beer, a gesture that meant ‘continue.’
“I remember you saying, ‘You already bought a ticket. Just get dressed and I’ll pick you up in an hour. Come on, drinks are on me.’ And the blade in your voice was tucked away inside your jacket pocket, or maybe behind your back. I said that I wasn’t in the state of mind to be drinking that I didn’t have any clean clothes.
“‘Don’t call me until you wash your fucking clothes. Don’t call me until you’re ready to have a few drinks and talk about this. In the mean time, fuck off,’ you said. And right then you pulled the knife out of your jacket pocket, or maybe from behind your back, and slid it neatly between my ribs, like that’s where it belonged. That’s the last conversation I had with you. Now here I am, clean clothes, drinking beer,” I raised the half full one, “and we’re talking.” I decided this would be a bad time to tell him about the drunken incident involving me singing the Oscar Meyer Weiner song to a package of Ball Park Franks. It was probably my lowest moment anyway.
Whenever I remember things like that, I end up watching myself, not really having the conversation. Some part of splits off me like in asexual reproduction, and the part of me that began the whole thing is no longer a part of it. I’ve been cursed with this for ever. This will be my downfall.
Danny looked impressed with the psychotic accuracy of my memory. He prepared to speak by staring at the gnarled wooden bar table. He sipped at his beer again, drawing his preparation out that much longer, his eyes never leaving the table.
“We’ve been friends for a long time, so don’t take anything I say the wrong way. Your girlfriend shot herself in front of you. You dated her two years, and she shot herself in the head, right in front of you. Her dad thinks its your fault and fires you. You have no job. . .” he kept talking but I sort of stopped listening. I know my girlfriend of two years shot herself. I was there. She ruined my favorite coat. The dry cleaners couldn’t the get blood out.
I tuned back in to what Danny was saying. “. . . and then you call me saying you wanna hang out, and then show up like nothing’s wrong, talking about refrigerators. I think something is wrong. I‘ve always known to you be emotionally reserved but this is something else, this is a different level. Either your head is all kinds of fucked up over this or you honestly don’t care. So, man, which is it?”
I never liked ultimatums. Danny was throwing one at me just like she used to. When I tried to explain to her how they were a logical fallacy, she would just get more angry and say I was being dodgy . I don’t think it would work with Danny either. I guess it’d be better just to come out with it.
“I stayed at home for two months. I didn’t talk to anyone or even leave my apartment. The entire time I wondered that exact same question. Sometimes I felt like I was pretending to be depressed, and other times I would cry all day, with out being sure if it was because of her or not.” As soon as I finished saying ‘not’ the door opened up puking white sunlight into our corner of the dark and smoky bar. Trailing the sunlight inside were the deafening screeches and cackles of blonde sirens in flip flops and pink shirts.
This seemed like our cue to leave. I quickly finished my second beer and Danny downed his third or fourth. Outside, we tried to continue our conversation but the blondes and the sunlight had thrown us off track.
“Please figure out if you actually do care about her death. Ok? Go and see her father. If nothing else it should give you some sense of finality.” Danny seemed really concerned about me settling this whole ordeal.
“Well, that’s what I’ve been trying to do for the last two months. I’m still not sure. I finally figured that I wasn’t resolving anything at home, so I might as well see if something out here would help me out. Also, I ran out of food.”
“Even ramen?” he asked, slightly amazed.
“Yeah, even the ramen.”
Danny deliberated for a few moments, shading his eyes from the sun. He suggested, again, that I go and see her father. He suggested maybe that would inspire feelings in me. He said that seeing the pain and suffering of someone closer to her than I was might cause me to finally be affected. He told me that if nothing else I could tell him how I felt. All the time he was saying these things, he was staring into the sun to look me in the eyes. I moved in front of him so that I was blocking the bright light burning holes into his retinas.
“Thank you. Thank you for everything,” I said. He nodded and cast his eyes down like a finished cigarette, then walked away. I watched him go for a moment, the put my hands into the deep pockets of my khaki pants, feeling a pack of smokes and a lighter in one, and the gun she used to shoot herself in the other. There were five bullets in it now, instead of six. I decided to take Danny’s advice and go to see her father.
I opened my pack of cigarettes and laughed to myself when I saw there were five left, instead of twenty. I put one to my mouth and turned around to face the sun, trying to figure out which way her father’s store was. Lighter fire in nothing in comparison to the sun. Having gathered my bearings, I walked with my head low, one hand twitching at the cigarette, the other one twitching at the gun.
I tried to figure out what I’d do or say after I walked in the door to his coffee shop, which he cleverly, and coincidentally named ‘Coffee At Fifth.’ My only goal now is to show him how I feel, and I think I’ll need to gun to pull that off. Running some imaginary conversations through my head, still twitching at the cigarette, I realized that this was going to be an ugly exchange of words and emotions. There was no point in planning out what I’d say, or anticipating what he’d say. These things don’t happen in a predicable manner. There’s no map to guide you along the right path and safely to the buried treasure at the end. I was going to have to play it by ear.
Seeing Fourth Street at the next corner, I took my last drag and dropped the cigarette onto the sidewalk. While deliberating about whether or not to smoke another one, a police car drove past. Since smoking downtown was against city ordinance, the decision was made for me, so I proceeded to the corner.
The street had somehow cleared out by the time I reached his shop, like the masses anticipated the immanent disaster. It was Wednesday, which meant white chocolate mochas were half off. Hiding around the corner, I took deep breaths in anticipation, wishing there was a gnarled wooden table somewhere to aid my preparation. The store had two customers, both wearing headphones and typing at laptops. They were drinking white chocolate mochas. Her father was behind the counter with his back turned to me. It sounded like he was steaming milk but there really isn’t a way to be sure. I couldn’t bring myself to move until he acknowledged my arrival. After all, he might have a gun too, and if he did I wanted to be as close to the door as possible.
He turned around and looked right at me. This was the first time I’d seen his eyes since she shot herself. What was, in reality, half a second of eye contact seemed long enough to have broken world records. He screamed, simultaneously hurling whatever he was holding right at me. Fearing scalding hot milk or some stainless steel utensil, I ducked and moved toward the closest table in one fluidly awkward motion. Glass didn’t break behind me, so he must have thrown steaming milk. I guess there was a way to be sure. I stood up, trying to gain my composure and appear as if that was exactly what I had expected. Being at a loss of words, I decided to let him have the first few, but quickly abandoned this plan when he picked up a stapler and wound up again, all the time walking towards me.
“Wait!” I said wanting very much to not be hit with a stapler.
He waited on the stapler heaving, but continued to approach me, coming out from behind to counter.
“What,” he screamed. “What could you say to me that would bring her back or make me feel better?”
“I didn’t come here to bring her back. I came here to get a sense of finality. I want you to understand how I feel. It‘s pretty obvious how you feel,” I said glancing at the still scalding puddle of milk.
“I don’t care how you feel. I want you to know how I feel. I want you to understand how it feels to have someone you love die by their own hand, because you don’t seem to know. How much more final can you get than a bullet in the head?” Even though he was screaming, the patrons, with their white chocolate mochas, hadn’t heard a single word over the music in their headphones. He raised the stapler again.
Looking into his eyes when he said he wanted to me to understand how it felt to have some one you loved die, it hit me like an anvil dropping onto the coyote in desperate pursuit of the roadrunner. I hadn’t spent two months alone in my apartment because I watched my girl friend shoot herself. I spent two months alone in my apartment because I watched someone shoot themselves in the head. It didn’t matter that it was my girl friend, some one I’d spent two years of life intimately involved with. I just had to deal with witnessing a suicide. There was not a single part of me that felt affected in a personal way by the death of my girl friend, this man’s daughter.
Running out the door would not establish the finality I wanted. I’ve discovered how I feel and he has to know. Being completely at a loss of how to react to his rapid, stapler wielding approach, I pulled the gun out of my pocket and put it to my head. Judging by his expression, this was the last thing he thought I was going to do. It looked like he would have sooner expected me implode like a red dwarf star. He stopped where he was, six feet away from me, and he put the stapler on a table, a look of satisfaction welling up in his eyes like tears.
“Do you have any idea what it’s like to watch some one kill themselves? Do you have any idea what it feels like to watch a person disappear into a lump on the floor?” I smiled, knowing his answer. But he smiled back, more interested in what I was going to do and not what I was going to say. “I sat at home alone for two months, never leaving, trying to figure out if the death of your daughter meant anything to me. If I cared about her at all, or if she was just someone I’d become accustomed to. I realize now that she was like a car, or a coat. Something that you park in the garage or hang up in the closet.”
At this point something else hit me, this time like a chandelier landing on one of the Three Stooges. Shooting myself would make him know what it felt like to watch some one commit suicide, but it wouldn’t make him understand how I feel. Right here in his coffee shop, pointing a loaded gun to my head expressed only a fraction of what I feel. On the verge death I still feel nothing. To shoot myself now in a desperate attempt to communicate, in some artistically self destructive form of expression, he would not understand what I was trying to relate. How does anyone express the absence of emotion? How does a person make some one else feel absolutely nothing?
I went cold upon comprehending the one way to make some one feel no emotion, the only way to make some one feel nothing. I moved the gun away from my head, and pointed it at his. His face changed from that satisfied but hidden smirk into a perfect, utterly magnificent, representation of how I felt. His eyes stopped glowing the way a flashlight dies. His jaw went slack like lovers after an orgasm. His eye brows lost their furrow the way a camera lens is twisted out of focus. I could almost see his final breath flee from his lungs like rats from a sinking ship.
Standing there, pointing a gun at my dead girlfriend’s father, I snapped into a third person perspective and saw it like a movie. I watched myself prepare to kill a man in order to express how I felt, to make some one understand, entirely, what its actually like to not feel anything. It was at this moment that the third and final epiphany hit me: this isn’t about making him understand. This is a test I’m giving myself to see if I can feel anything. To pass I’d have to shoot him, because shooting him would mean that I felt something deeply enough to kill for, namely, the urge to be understood. To fail I’d have to put the gun down, go outside, and use the fifth cigarette in my pack, instead of the fifth bullet. Failing would mean that I was incapable of feeling anything deeply enough to act on. I’m throwing ultimatums at myself just like she used to. I guess I could tell myself ultimatums are logical fallacies, but it would just be dodgy.
I yelled, “Bang!” and the word echoed against the panes of glass on all but one side of us The customers didn’t look up from their laptops. They just continued sipping white chocolate mochas, nodding or twitching to the music playing in that place inside their heads. Her father fell to the floor in sheer terror. He looked the same way she did when she died; a lump of body on the ground. The only difference was that her father didn’t have a hole in his head.
I set the gun down on the table next to the stapler, went outside, and opened my pack of smokes. There were five cigarettes left in it. There were five bullets left in the gun. Maybe there were also five staples left in the stapler. Sitting on the curb, I thought about what I’d do now. Perhaps I could put my soullessness to good use and go to law school. Figuring Danny wouldn’t mind hearing about the exchange, I stood up and walked across the street to use the payphone. I hadn’t paid my cell phone bill in two months. In hindsight it was a really bad move.
Dropping precious change into the phone, I dialed Danny’s number, the only one I remember aside from my own, and hoped he’d made it home already.
“Hello.” He had
“Hey man, it’s me.”
“How’d it go? Did anyone die?” I’d save the altercation for a later date, and simply said no.
“It’s been resolved,” I assured him.
I was absentmindedly picking at gum that had assimilated itself quite nicely into a brick wall when I heard tires screech behind me. Somewhere amidst the roar of car horns and violent screams of cabbies, I heard my name. Looking over my shoulder I saw her father striding across the street holding something shiny that caught the sun in a real menacing fashion.
“Jonathon!” he screamed again, halfway across the street now, that thing still shimmering in his hand.
“Danny, I’ve gotta go.”
A bell rang as I opened the door to the dry cleaner’s. It was cleverly named “We’ll Dry Clean It.” The place was empty except for the attendant, who was giving me a glare like I’d made the same offensive joke at his expense one too many times. Feeling a lump under my shoe I looked down to see a trail of gum spots from the door way to my right foot, with spindly strands running to and from each spot. Though the clues were all too blindingly apparent, I picked my foot up and inspected my shoe just to make sure I was the culprit, only to confirm that I had, in fact, tracked gum into this man’s store, which he had named “We’ll Dry Clean It.”
“I must have stepped on it outside.” Bashfully stating the obvious, because its not at all commonplace for dry cleaning attendants to leave spider webs trails of gum across their carpet.
“Are you the guy here about the jacket?” he asked. I nodded in response, still blushing.
“I couldn’t get the blood out. Do you want it anyway?”
A store calling themselves “We’ll Dry Clean It” couldn’t get her blood out of my coat. Confused at the incongruity, I walked out of his store, making sure that I stepped back into every gum spot, so as not to spread it further around the carpet. “Maybe you’ll have better luck getting the gum out,” I said. I was trying to be clever but I don’t think he appreciated the humor. He was screaming something in a foreign language into the back of the room when the bell announced my departure. It bugs the shit out of me that this place couldn’t get blood out of my coat. I’m not sure if I was aggravated because her blood ruined it, or if it reminded me of her.
I was supposed to meet Danny at a bar three blocks from here at five o’clock. I’d make it without being late and still have time to stroll. It was a pretty day and the city strolled with me. Glancing at passers by, as I have a tendency to do out of simple curiosity, I saw a girl who made me lose my breath. She looked like my ex-girlfriend, or at least how I remembered her.
I recalled the morbidly foreboding phone call I’d received from my girlfriend, and the my hasty dash over to her apartment. After two years we still weren’t living together. As I walked inside she was sitting at her dining room table behind a gun and two envelopes. She looked at me and read me the letter inside the envelope labeled with my name, tears running down her face like rain on a wind shield. She ended the letter on a spitefully sour note, looked into my eyes, and said, “You ruined my life.” The gun went to her head and she pulled the trigger, tears still beading up on her cheeks.
It happened like a movie. If I’d had popcorn, I probably would have been eating it during her finals words, drowning them out ever so slightly with the crunching sound of kernels from that place inside my head. The sudden fluctuation of pressure from the shot and the high pitched ring in my ears pulled me back into her apartment, away from my movie distance. Being new to a situation like this, I automatically grabbed the envelopes and the gun and ran out of her apartment. I took the parcel titled ‘Dad’ to her father at his coffee shop. He was my boss. Having no idea how to act, I gently placed the envelope on the counter, and turned my back on him, walking away without a backward glance and never making eye contact. I’m not sure what I could have said, but it might have kept him from firing me half an hour later via a message on my voicemail mixed equally with sobs and screams.
Shuddering at the rush of memories, I kept heading towards the bar. I put my hands into my deep khaki pockets and felt the gun there. I stopped looking at people and walked in a straight line towards my destination, the whole time fingering notches and grooves in the pistol to distract myself. If it weren’t for the vomit stained squares outside the bar, I would have trudged on two or three more blocks. I stepped inside and left my memory on the curb to wait.
The place was typically a fraternity hangout, but as I walked in the only inhabitants were the poor dregs of the city with nothing better to do than get drunk before the sun went down. Danny and I picked a spot in the corner, and sat down with a beer each. I told him about the dry cleaner’s but he didn’t seem interested. Instead he sat with an intense look on his face, sipping his beer, and finally said, “So how were the two months you spent alone?”
“Well, obviously depressed. I mean, I wasn’t taking visitors, or phone calls. I pretty much sat alone the entire time trying to put things into perspective,” I said, wondering if I’d actually put things into perspective or not.
“Well did you put things into perspective yet, or did you just wander out of your depression and into this bar the same way you went in,” he asked, putting an unclear emphasis on ‘depression.’
Sensing an insult, or at least some glib remark, I decided to chance the following subject: I compared my time alone as equal to falling in a refrigerator where I was cold and stuck, completely detached from the outside world. He interrupted me, “Look, will you please stick with me in reality here. I don’t want to talk about your filthy refrigerator.”
I conceded, and started to rehash the past, which is what he wanted. I referred to the last couple of weeks before she shot herself.
“We used to go to shows, man. I used to save the measly amounts of money I would make working forty hours a week for her father to pay for tickets and drinks. I compromised my musical tastes to go to shows she wanted to see, and I hate compromising my tastes. You’d think she did the same when went to see the bands that I liked, but she had no taste, so that obviously couldn’t have been the case. We really just weren’t on the same page.” I know its in poor taste to speak poorly about the recently deceased, but something in me just didn’t care to be tactful and considerate.
He seemed slightly more interested, and I stress ‘slightly.’ A person would think that his best friend would show a little more interest in the last two months of his closest pal’s life, even if it was shrouded in obscurity and figurative language. When your best friend views the explanation of how you spend your life as an absurdist fairy tale, completely disregarding your creative obligations as a narrator, it might be time to find more artistic company. Either way, I continued.
“When I lay down to sleep on my honeyed ham mattress . . .” at which Danny stood up and walked to the bar, ordering another round. I still had a full beer beside my first and half finished one.
“Oh I’m sorry. Am I boring you?” I asked, trying to sound hurt and offended.
“No, you’re just being ridiculous. I’m really not sure if you’re denying this whole thing or if it actually doesn’t effect you. When my dog died I wasted a week crying over it. I went out and bought whiskey and sat and drank alone.”
“Yeah, I remember.”
“And now that’s why we’re here. To try and get you drunk so maybe you’ll wanna stop talking about fucking refrigerators and processed meat. This is a much bigger deal than the death of Chalky, may he rest in peace, and I think you need to deal with it.”
“Look, I’m here right? The last time I dreamt, this is what I remembered: ‘What do you mean you’re not coming to the show tonight?’ That was you, remember, and a sharp edge was growing behind your voice. I explained to you how it wasn’t an ambiguous statement. ‘You haven’t been out in weeks. They’re not even coming back to the state on this tour.’ The edge in your was voice growing sharper, and more poignant. I told you I had their album. I’m pretty sure you recall all of this.” His nod was a sip of beer, a gesture that meant ‘continue.’
“I remember you saying, ‘You already bought a ticket. Just get dressed and I’ll pick you up in an hour. Come on, drinks are on me.’ And the blade in your voice was tucked away inside your jacket pocket, or maybe behind your back. I said that I wasn’t in the state of mind to be drinking that I didn’t have any clean clothes.
“‘Don’t call me until you wash your fucking clothes. Don’t call me until you’re ready to have a few drinks and talk about this. In the mean time, fuck off,’ you said. And right then you pulled the knife out of your jacket pocket, or maybe from behind your back, and slid it neatly between my ribs, like that’s where it belonged. That’s the last conversation I had with you. Now here I am, clean clothes, drinking beer,” I raised the half full one, “and we’re talking.” I decided this would be a bad time to tell him about the drunken incident involving me singing the Oscar Meyer Weiner song to a package of Ball Park Franks. It was probably my lowest moment anyway.
Whenever I remember things like that, I end up watching myself, not really having the conversation. Some part of splits off me like in asexual reproduction, and the part of me that began the whole thing is no longer a part of it. I’ve been cursed with this for ever. This will be my downfall.
Danny looked impressed with the psychotic accuracy of my memory. He prepared to speak by staring at the gnarled wooden bar table. He sipped at his beer again, drawing his preparation out that much longer, his eyes never leaving the table.
“We’ve been friends for a long time, so don’t take anything I say the wrong way. Your girlfriend shot herself in front of you. You dated her two years, and she shot herself in the head, right in front of you. Her dad thinks its your fault and fires you. You have no job. . .” he kept talking but I sort of stopped listening. I know my girlfriend of two years shot herself. I was there. She ruined my favorite coat. The dry cleaners couldn’t the get blood out.
I tuned back in to what Danny was saying. “. . . and then you call me saying you wanna hang out, and then show up like nothing’s wrong, talking about refrigerators. I think something is wrong. I‘ve always known to you be emotionally reserved but this is something else, this is a different level. Either your head is all kinds of fucked up over this or you honestly don’t care. So, man, which is it?”
I never liked ultimatums. Danny was throwing one at me just like she used to. When I tried to explain to her how they were a logical fallacy, she would just get more angry and say I was being dodgy . I don’t think it would work with Danny either. I guess it’d be better just to come out with it.
“I stayed at home for two months. I didn’t talk to anyone or even leave my apartment. The entire time I wondered that exact same question. Sometimes I felt like I was pretending to be depressed, and other times I would cry all day, with out being sure if it was because of her or not.” As soon as I finished saying ‘not’ the door opened up puking white sunlight into our corner of the dark and smoky bar. Trailing the sunlight inside were the deafening screeches and cackles of blonde sirens in flip flops and pink shirts.
This seemed like our cue to leave. I quickly finished my second beer and Danny downed his third or fourth. Outside, we tried to continue our conversation but the blondes and the sunlight had thrown us off track.
“Please figure out if you actually do care about her death. Ok? Go and see her father. If nothing else it should give you some sense of finality.” Danny seemed really concerned about me settling this whole ordeal.
“Well, that’s what I’ve been trying to do for the last two months. I’m still not sure. I finally figured that I wasn’t resolving anything at home, so I might as well see if something out here would help me out. Also, I ran out of food.”
“Even ramen?” he asked, slightly amazed.
“Yeah, even the ramen.”
Danny deliberated for a few moments, shading his eyes from the sun. He suggested, again, that I go and see her father. He suggested maybe that would inspire feelings in me. He said that seeing the pain and suffering of someone closer to her than I was might cause me to finally be affected. He told me that if nothing else I could tell him how I felt. All the time he was saying these things, he was staring into the sun to look me in the eyes. I moved in front of him so that I was blocking the bright light burning holes into his retinas.
“Thank you. Thank you for everything,” I said. He nodded and cast his eyes down like a finished cigarette, then walked away. I watched him go for a moment, the put my hands into the deep pockets of my khaki pants, feeling a pack of smokes and a lighter in one, and the gun she used to shoot herself in the other. There were five bullets in it now, instead of six. I decided to take Danny’s advice and go to see her father.
I opened my pack of cigarettes and laughed to myself when I saw there were five left, instead of twenty. I put one to my mouth and turned around to face the sun, trying to figure out which way her father’s store was. Lighter fire in nothing in comparison to the sun. Having gathered my bearings, I walked with my head low, one hand twitching at the cigarette, the other one twitching at the gun.
I tried to figure out what I’d do or say after I walked in the door to his coffee shop, which he cleverly, and coincidentally named ‘Coffee At Fifth.’ My only goal now is to show him how I feel, and I think I’ll need to gun to pull that off. Running some imaginary conversations through my head, still twitching at the cigarette, I realized that this was going to be an ugly exchange of words and emotions. There was no point in planning out what I’d say, or anticipating what he’d say. These things don’t happen in a predicable manner. There’s no map to guide you along the right path and safely to the buried treasure at the end. I was going to have to play it by ear.
Seeing Fourth Street at the next corner, I took my last drag and dropped the cigarette onto the sidewalk. While deliberating about whether or not to smoke another one, a police car drove past. Since smoking downtown was against city ordinance, the decision was made for me, so I proceeded to the corner.
The street had somehow cleared out by the time I reached his shop, like the masses anticipated the immanent disaster. It was Wednesday, which meant white chocolate mochas were half off. Hiding around the corner, I took deep breaths in anticipation, wishing there was a gnarled wooden table somewhere to aid my preparation. The store had two customers, both wearing headphones and typing at laptops. They were drinking white chocolate mochas. Her father was behind the counter with his back turned to me. It sounded like he was steaming milk but there really isn’t a way to be sure. I couldn’t bring myself to move until he acknowledged my arrival. After all, he might have a gun too, and if he did I wanted to be as close to the door as possible.
He turned around and looked right at me. This was the first time I’d seen his eyes since she shot herself. What was, in reality, half a second of eye contact seemed long enough to have broken world records. He screamed, simultaneously hurling whatever he was holding right at me. Fearing scalding hot milk or some stainless steel utensil, I ducked and moved toward the closest table in one fluidly awkward motion. Glass didn’t break behind me, so he must have thrown steaming milk. I guess there was a way to be sure. I stood up, trying to gain my composure and appear as if that was exactly what I had expected. Being at a loss of words, I decided to let him have the first few, but quickly abandoned this plan when he picked up a stapler and wound up again, all the time walking towards me.
“Wait!” I said wanting very much to not be hit with a stapler.
He waited on the stapler heaving, but continued to approach me, coming out from behind to counter.
“What,” he screamed. “What could you say to me that would bring her back or make me feel better?”
“I didn’t come here to bring her back. I came here to get a sense of finality. I want you to understand how I feel. It‘s pretty obvious how you feel,” I said glancing at the still scalding puddle of milk.
“I don’t care how you feel. I want you to know how I feel. I want you to understand how it feels to have someone you love die by their own hand, because you don’t seem to know. How much more final can you get than a bullet in the head?” Even though he was screaming, the patrons, with their white chocolate mochas, hadn’t heard a single word over the music in their headphones. He raised the stapler again.
Looking into his eyes when he said he wanted to me to understand how it felt to have some one you loved die, it hit me like an anvil dropping onto the coyote in desperate pursuit of the roadrunner. I hadn’t spent two months alone in my apartment because I watched my girl friend shoot herself. I spent two months alone in my apartment because I watched someone shoot themselves in the head. It didn’t matter that it was my girl friend, some one I’d spent two years of life intimately involved with. I just had to deal with witnessing a suicide. There was not a single part of me that felt affected in a personal way by the death of my girl friend, this man’s daughter.
Running out the door would not establish the finality I wanted. I’ve discovered how I feel and he has to know. Being completely at a loss of how to react to his rapid, stapler wielding approach, I pulled the gun out of my pocket and put it to my head. Judging by his expression, this was the last thing he thought I was going to do. It looked like he would have sooner expected me implode like a red dwarf star. He stopped where he was, six feet away from me, and he put the stapler on a table, a look of satisfaction welling up in his eyes like tears.
“Do you have any idea what it’s like to watch some one kill themselves? Do you have any idea what it feels like to watch a person disappear into a lump on the floor?” I smiled, knowing his answer. But he smiled back, more interested in what I was going to do and not what I was going to say. “I sat at home alone for two months, never leaving, trying to figure out if the death of your daughter meant anything to me. If I cared about her at all, or if she was just someone I’d become accustomed to. I realize now that she was like a car, or a coat. Something that you park in the garage or hang up in the closet.”
At this point something else hit me, this time like a chandelier landing on one of the Three Stooges. Shooting myself would make him know what it felt like to watch some one commit suicide, but it wouldn’t make him understand how I feel. Right here in his coffee shop, pointing a loaded gun to my head expressed only a fraction of what I feel. On the verge death I still feel nothing. To shoot myself now in a desperate attempt to communicate, in some artistically self destructive form of expression, he would not understand what I was trying to relate. How does anyone express the absence of emotion? How does a person make some one else feel absolutely nothing?
I went cold upon comprehending the one way to make some one feel no emotion, the only way to make some one feel nothing. I moved the gun away from my head, and pointed it at his. His face changed from that satisfied but hidden smirk into a perfect, utterly magnificent, representation of how I felt. His eyes stopped glowing the way a flashlight dies. His jaw went slack like lovers after an orgasm. His eye brows lost their furrow the way a camera lens is twisted out of focus. I could almost see his final breath flee from his lungs like rats from a sinking ship.
Standing there, pointing a gun at my dead girlfriend’s father, I snapped into a third person perspective and saw it like a movie. I watched myself prepare to kill a man in order to express how I felt, to make some one understand, entirely, what its actually like to not feel anything. It was at this moment that the third and final epiphany hit me: this isn’t about making him understand. This is a test I’m giving myself to see if I can feel anything. To pass I’d have to shoot him, because shooting him would mean that I felt something deeply enough to kill for, namely, the urge to be understood. To fail I’d have to put the gun down, go outside, and use the fifth cigarette in my pack, instead of the fifth bullet. Failing would mean that I was incapable of feeling anything deeply enough to act on. I’m throwing ultimatums at myself just like she used to. I guess I could tell myself ultimatums are logical fallacies, but it would just be dodgy.
I yelled, “Bang!” and the word echoed against the panes of glass on all but one side of us The customers didn’t look up from their laptops. They just continued sipping white chocolate mochas, nodding or twitching to the music playing in that place inside their heads. Her father fell to the floor in sheer terror. He looked the same way she did when she died; a lump of body on the ground. The only difference was that her father didn’t have a hole in his head.
I set the gun down on the table next to the stapler, went outside, and opened my pack of smokes. There were five cigarettes left in it. There were five bullets left in the gun. Maybe there were also five staples left in the stapler. Sitting on the curb, I thought about what I’d do now. Perhaps I could put my soullessness to good use and go to law school. Figuring Danny wouldn’t mind hearing about the exchange, I stood up and walked across the street to use the payphone. I hadn’t paid my cell phone bill in two months. In hindsight it was a really bad move.
Dropping precious change into the phone, I dialed Danny’s number, the only one I remember aside from my own, and hoped he’d made it home already.
“Hello.” He had
“Hey man, it’s me.”
“How’d it go? Did anyone die?” I’d save the altercation for a later date, and simply said no.
“It’s been resolved,” I assured him.
I was absentmindedly picking at gum that had assimilated itself quite nicely into a brick wall when I heard tires screech behind me. Somewhere amidst the roar of car horns and violent screams of cabbies, I heard my name. Looking over my shoulder I saw her father striding across the street holding something shiny that caught the sun in a real menacing fashion.
“Jonathon!” he screamed again, halfway across the street now, that thing still shimmering in his hand.
“Danny, I’ve gotta go.”