Five beers and an empty bag of chips later, I felt sick and sweaty and overcome with guilt, which I blamed on the chips.
Back inside, the house was still and quiet and the bedroom door was still closed. I considered risking opening the door, but thought better of it. This was uncharted territory for me, and something about the way this had played out, something about our situation, or my own distractions, made this new development feel dire and irrevocable and exhausting. I sensed something large on the horizon, large and charging toward us, and this feeling that I should flee urged me out of the house and into the car and kept me driving until long after night had settled over Houston, and then farther still, until the engine stopped dead as I was pulling off the highway, leaving me only enough momentum to coast to a stop on the shoulder.
When we were kids in high school, Ralph and I bonded over the fact that we thought we were outcasts, even if we weren’t, and that we lived a reckless life, when in fact we were safely ensconced in our families’ suburban homes. We snuck out of the house not to drink or smoke or fuck, but to drive around back roads and listen to music and to pretend to race other cars in the lanes next to us whose drivers were oblivious to whatever games we were playing, which made it easy for us to win every time off the starting line. We would visit cemeteries, and we would tromp through creeks and what passed for woods. We perceived life and our movement through it as if we were still eleven or twelve and not sixteen or seventeen, but we reveled in this as if we had made a conscious decision to do this and hadn’t been somehow left behind.
One time we found ourselves moving slowly across an unexpected clearing, a patch of dirt and flattened grass and weeds we’d not come across before, which turned out to be a private landing strip. We found this out when a small airplane — a Cessna, maybe, or a Super Cub, neither of us knew, though we speculated for hours on it afterward — began its descent nearly on top of us, or so it seemed at the time, when in truth the plane was probably half a mile away and no real danger to us, and we ran screaming and hollering across that flat expanse as fast as we could and holding hands, as if this would protect us from being inevitably caught up in the plane’s propeller. When we cleared the landing strip, we fell and laughed and told each other how awesome we were, and afterward, for a week or two weeks, we retold that story, embellishing it to ridiculous and impractical heights.
We did things back then, is the point I’m trying to make. Not huge things, not important things, not life-changers, nothing so serious as that, but still. We had an impression of ourselves, of who we were, right or wrong, and we acted out our lives accordingly, and as I sat in my car I wondered when we had come to some reckoning of ourselves, some reappraisal of our personal narrative, when we had stopped thinking of ourselves as guys who did exciting, adventurous, childish things, and then through the basic laws of cause and effect stopped doing those things, or, rather, when I stopped doing those things, when I stopped believing in that story we told about ourselves, because, miserable or not, married to Melissa or not, Ralph was still doing things. Things, for the most part, I wouldn’t do. Things I had no interest in doing, but things, nonetheless, and he had eked out a life for himself that, though just a shadow of the lives we had imagined for ourselves, was at least closer to those lives than anything I had made for myself, and that had now brought him to a Chinaman with a unicorn to sell for cheap.
Without thinking or looking, I threw my car door open and pulled myself out of the driver’s seat, only to be honked at as another exiting car swerved around me. Then I slammed the car door, and then I opened it and slammed it again. Then I walked down the exit ramp and across the access road, and then I looked around to see where I was, which was less than an hour’s walk from Ralph’s house.
Ralph was there as he had been the night before, asleep and barely covered by his bathrobe. The unicorn turned to glance at me, but regarded me only a second before it turned its gaze back inward, or so I assumed, back to whatever it was unicorns thought of when trying to ignore their surroundings, the fact that they were trapped in a shed in a suburban hellhole outside of Houston.
Quietly, I opened the gate and I checked Ralph to make sure he was fully asleep. A bruise had begun to purple on his lips, which were beginning to swell, and one of his eyes looked like it would be seriously blackened by morning, and I wondered at what kind of marital strife had caused this, though I was pretty certain it had something to do with the unicorn. Then I checked the house to see if any windows were lit up, and satisfied that no one was awake and spying on me, I quietly, slowly, gently moved close to her, held my hand out to her, not sure if that’s what you were supposed to do, but figured it couldn’t hurt. She ignored my upturned palm, and feeling hesitant but desperate to touch her, I reached my fingers out to her pearlescent skin, to run my finger down the length of her throat and neck, which looked cool to the touch and soft.
I don’t know what I was expecting to happen when I touched her. An electric shock, maybe, or to feel an incredible warmth or stunning coldness, or to be flooded with memories, of the girls I’d loved, of their perfect faces, their soft lips, of my son’s birth, of my wife’s long, bony fingers, of the first time I’d had sex, or images of the future, my own or the world’s. But nothing happened. Nothing, that is, so drastic or dramatic as any of that. I raised my hand to her head and touched her lightly and then drew back, in anticipation of something, but then gently ran my fingers in a soft line down the length of her neck, the feel of which sent a shiver through me, and she shook her mane, and she made a sound or I made a sound, but whoever made the sound, it was loud enough to wake Ralph, or maybe he had been awake that whole time, awake and standing behind me, waiting for the perfect moment to interject, to say, “What have we got here, Mano?”
It was a strange and violent fight that followed. Strange because, in hindsight, it’s possible Ralph had had no intentions to fight when he saw me standing there, and strange, too, because we weren’t, neither of us, much for fighting. Ralph was short and overweight and strong but clumsy, and I had a suspicion he needed glasses but wouldn’t ever own up to it, a suspicion only cemented by how wildly he swung at me, how long it took for him to catch sight of me out of the corner of his eye whenever I moved to the left or the right of him. He said, “What have we got here, Mano?” and I wasted no time, swinging wildly around even before he hit the M of Mano. I hit him hard on the neck, though I’d been aiming for his face. This threw him off a bit and made him start coughing, made him grab his neck with both hands, and for a moment, I stopped, not a little upset to see him there in pain like that because of me. He took this opportunity to throw himself into me and slam me into the corner of the shed, hard, so that I felt the pain of that corner digging into my back all the way down to my feet. Then we proceeded to punch and kick at each other, to grapple and push, grunting and swearing, and at least once I landed a lucky punch right on his swelling lips, splitting the top lip open so that now we had some blood in the mix.