Jed watched her in the TV. He remembered something — his dad and LJ’s mom, one night in the front yard; she was on the grass, crying. He had forgotten. He thought of all the time since then — it seemed so long ago — and that LJ’s mom was still sad, even now. He pushed his blanket off his body and stood up. His dad and LJ were asleep on the floor. He looked at LJ’s mom. Outside, through the sliding glass door, the small, low moon was glowing bright and impressive, like something trying very hard — wanting, maybe, to be a real planet. “You can’t sleep?” Jed said. LJ’s mom was smiling at him. “Jed,” she whispered after a while. “Did you just say something?” She yawned and let her mouth go large and wide and her eyes get watery.
Jed watched that, then lay back down and pulled his blanket over his head, and closed his eyes. From somewhere far away, there was the tired, tortured noise of someone screaming, the human voice of it deadened and decentralized, but there — something of concern and procrastination, wretched and veering and through the throat. Jed felt very awake. His eyes beat lightly against his closed lids. They wouldn’t keep still, and as he concentrated on them, as he tried to stop their trembling, he began to feel that he was going to cry. He didn’t know why, but he was affected suddenly in this way. He was going to cry. But then he didn’t. He felt instead a bit out of breath, felt a kind of anxiety, a quickening, something hollow and neutral moving up through his chest. He felt excited, but in a rushed and terrible way. What he felt, it was less a feeling than a kind of knowledge; it was a subtle knowing, an almost knowing, that he was here — that he was once, and now, here — but that he would someday no longer be; and so here he was, then, leaving, all so fast and calm and without a fight, without a way to fight, but just this haze of departure, steady and always and all so like a dream, this leaving without having ever been there. It was as if he were already gone.
Insomnia for a Better Tomorrow
First week of February you began to suspect that, for the rest of your life, nothing might happen. This was one of those years. You mail-ordered a special mattress, and napped too much. In restaurants, people ordered the icecream cake, shoved their hands under their thighs, and talked loudly about death. On TV, politicians began to snack from Ziploc bags, like a provocation. Almonds, raisins. Sour Patch Kids.
Things, you felt, had changed.
There was a new foreboding to the room in which you slept. There was the fear, now, that all your anxieties and disconsolations might keep on escalating and never stop. There was the theoretical chance that if you threw a banana at a wall the banana might go through the wall.
“Oh well,” Brian said. He had begun to order two coffees at once, two different flavors. “Yeah,” he said. “I don’t care.”
His girlfriend Chrissy sat opposite him in a padded chair. They were in a coffee place and there was a table between them. This was Manhattan.
“The key to coffee is to not care anymore,” Brian said. “Tolerance and addiction are wrong. They’re just wrong. You drink one cup, two cups, ten. Whatever. You keep going. Maybe in the end you’re up to fifteen cups, but you always feel good, until you die.”
“You’re ignoring the financials of it,” Chrissy said. She had a muffin and an herbal tea side by side in front of her.
“No I’m not. It’s the same,” Brian said. “You keep going into debt, buying whatever. You owe a hundred million dollars. Finally you die.” He was feeling a bit nauseated today. “You can’t argue this,” he said.
“By going into debt,” Chrissy said. “You’re hurting other people.”
“Credit card people aren’t people,” Brian said. “They’re credit card people.”
Chrissy moved her muffin away from her herbal tea. “You think you’re so cool,” she said.
Was she being hostile? Brian couldn’t tell anymore. Their love had been spent. Brian had spent it. There had been a sale at the mall, and Brian had brought coupons. “Buy things; we’ll make her better,” the mall had said. Brian had looked around a bit carelessly, without focusing on any one thing, but just making a vague sweep of it all. “Well, okay,” he’d said.
“You think you’re so wise,” Chrissy said. “You think you know more about life than the Dalai Lama or whoever. You secretly think that.”
“What?” Brian said. “Stop it. I’m just saying things.” He scratched the back of his neck. He looked at the muffin on the table. He began to say something that took a long time to say, but he didn’t know what it was, and no one else heard anything of it. His mouth moved, but no sounds came out, which could sometimes happen — you could speak and no sounds would come out.
There was a rumor that year, that you might not be yourself. That you might actually be someone else. One of those people who refuse antidepressants, who can’t hold down a job, who ends up sleeping, finally, in a hole.
That might be you, was what the rumor said.
People talked. They said, “There’s this rumor.…” Then they pointed out something amusing that was happening in the distance. They shrugged. Itched their forearms. They were easily distracted. Later on, though, in the mouthy dens of their bathrooms, they looked in their mirrors, and they just were not sure. Someone was there; but was it them? And so they believed. They said things like, “What does it even matter. I might not even be myself.” Then they threw themselves off a bridge, or else drank a quart of ice coffee and watched Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.
One night, after sex, Brian had — instead of making the dash through the kitchen, to the bathroom — cleaned himself with paper towels, rolled over, and gone to sleep. Chrissy had shaken her head at that, had made an annoyed noise and then run through the kitchen and showered.
But soon after, she too began to use paper towels. And then when they ran out of paper towels, they started using toilet paper, and a couple of weeks after that they stopped having sex.
It had become, in too many ways, similar to going to the bathroom.
Now they hugged a lot but rarely kissed. They said things like, “Instead of saying ‘good night’ every night, let’s just assume that we want each other to have a good night. That way we don’t have to feel obligated to say it every night.” They looked into each other’s eyes, and they saw contact lenses — the seized UFOs of them, dumb and shunned as plates. They yawned. They yawned wantonly, without covering their mouths.
They were having a fight one morning in their kitchen, in Brooklyn. Chrissy had spilled orange juice on the floor and then tried to kick it under the refrigerator with her sandals. Brian had watched through the hinge-area of the bedroom door. Had then walked in asking Chrissy if she thought this was a farm. Had kept asking that.
“You’re like a cow,” Brian said. “Yeah you are. No, a boar. I mean a pig. You think this is a farm.”
“Brian,” Chrissy said. She tried to look languished and fading-away — something like a corpse sinking into a lake at night — but ended up looking trashy and depraved, like a hooker. “Hey,” she said. “You’ve never given me an orgasm.”
“What?” Brian said. “Listen to me. Same here.”
“What?”
“I never had an orgasm with you,” Brian said.
“You Brian — you idiot, I mean. I’ve seen evidence of it.”
“You believe everything you see? It’s my body and I’m telling you that I didn’t ever orgasm with you.” Brian turned and opened the refrigerator and stuck his head in.