gimme shelter

A lot of things happened in not very much time. I was crashing at my bandmate's new place when my roommate called and told me that our house had been destroyed by a meteor. I thought I was being strong and calm and collected when I took her out to eat. We talked about trivialities and skirted around the subject. Then she asked me if I had a place to stay and I just--"I think I need to get some air." I remember walking outside. I remember my hands shaking, fumbling with my phone, walking. Then I remember sitting, trembling, on the front steps of the house of a friend I hadn't seen in years.

Her name was Alex. She was my only real friend for the longest time, by the strange standards I kept at the time. When I moved out east she stayed here, and when the roof started leaking in my place out there and I didn't think to move my roommates' books to safety, Alex was the only person to say "yeah, that's fucked up, I'd be pretty pissed at myself, too." Everyone else tried to tell me it was okay.

Later on I betrayed her trust and I couldn't take it when she forgave me, so I just stopped seeing her, except now I was on her front porch, waiting. I didn't really remember coming here. I could have fled. I probably should have. Instead I waited for her to come up the walk. She said my name, hesitantly, guardedly, and I said something like "It's been a while."

"Yeah." We embraced tentatively. Then she said, holding me at arm's length, "What are you doing here?"

The suspicion in her voice stung, mostly because I knew I'd earned it. "I think I need a place to crash for a few days," I said, trying to sound as unobtrusive as possible. "You won't even know I'm here."

The silence that followed seemed like it lasted for hours. Then, "I'll think about it. You can come in and have a beer, at least."

She led me inside, and we drank, and I was never sure, right up until she went to bed, whether she was going to let me stay. It wasn't very late when she finally got up and made her way into her bedroom. "Just leave the light on out there," she told me, and I thought, so this is how it's going to be? You'll let me stay on your couch but you won't even let me turn the light off?

As I lay down on the couch and put a pillow over my head I noticed her still standing in the doorway. "Well? Are you coming to bed?"

"Ah. I thought--nevermind. Be right there."

I turned the light off on my way in, because old habits die hard.

any questions?

More stuff from that thing.

There's this thing that's been bothering me recently. Whenever someone asks me if I have any questions, the answer is invariably "no." Opening a new bank account, orientation at a new job, moving in to a new apartment. It's always the same thing: "so, these are the basic facts," with the strong implication that the specific facts are available if only I ask the right questions. So then they smile at me and say "any questions?" and suddenly I'm on the spot.

I don't know what I'm supposed to ask. Everything they said makes sense, and if anything does come up that I don't know the answer to, I can just ask then. I don't really trust explanations, anyway. I don't trust words that aren't in stories. Stories are how you learn; explanations are there to obfuscate. It's just, somehow I don't think "do you have any stories about this place?" is the question they want to hear.

There was a time this girl emailed me after I tried to fill the room that had just opened up at her house, when I was back east. I got a tour of the place and spent hours with these people, who felt like old friends. We told stories. Then I got an email saying that I didn't seem interested in the community, whatever the fuck that means, so they'd gone with someone else. And I remember, after I'd been given the tour, the tour guide--my emailer, I think--said "so, do you have any questions?" and of course I pretended to think about it for a minute before saying "no, I'll just figure it out as I go."

And then, what reminded me of all this, I was opening a new bank account today, and after the lady went through all the details with me, she asked me if I had any questions. And I thought about it, and said, "no, it seems pretty straightforward!" and I swear her smile was almost pitying. Like she wanted to say, "you shouldn't be doing this, you don't have any idea what you're doing, you need to research your decisions before making them," but of course she wasn't allowed to. I tried to smile in a way that said: "I know that I'm making poorly considered decisions but I've chosen to trust my future to you, even though we've never met and will probably never meet again."

 Probably I'm imagining it. Probably she wasn't thinking anything at all, and that point in the conversation is just when her smile starts getting strained. Maybe it was even relief that I hadn't gone off the script. But I remember weirdly hostile emails from future roommates that never happened, and I wonder.

discord

This is from something I'm working on, sort of.

 I helped my bandmate move his old couch into his new apartment this afternoon--the couch that used to occupy the attic we used to hang out in all the time back in high school. That couch was old. That couch had stories to tell.

Once we'd finished he offered some beer and we sat on the new couch--the spoils of victory--and my friend put on some Radiohead.

"Man, this takes me back," he said. "I remember the first time you came here and introduced me to Radiohead. I was hooked from that weird wind at the start of Planet Telex."

"Except, I didn't bring that album. I brought OK Computer."

"Are you sure?"

"Does it matter?"

He shrugged and said, "I guess not."

Of course, it did matter. That had been the day my friend got it in his head that we should be in a band, and talked me into talking my parents into getting me guitar lessons. The actual band didn't materialize until I'd come back from college, of course, but it was a big day, and one of us didn't actually remember it, which meant that in all probability neither of us did. How many times had we told that story? How much had it warped in the telling, until our memories were just of the stories we'd been telling?

The vision came to me then: the two of us in high school, working on some homework or other. I dig around in my bag for my math book and find the CD I picked up earlier and say something like "You want to put on some music?" and we do, and we probably even enjoy it. But there is no big moment. The album is incidental to the question he asks me later: "Wouldn't it be cool if we were, like, a rock band?"

We shared stories for the rest of the evening, but I found myself doubting all of them, his and mine both, and no amount of alcohol would shake this nagging doubt.

street lamps

There's a street light outside your house I keep mistaking for the moon. It's the right color and shape, and it's in the right place in the sky. Every time I leave at night I see it hanging there and for a brief moment I'm ready to smile, to feel as if the moon is guiding me home. I always identify it soon enough, of course, and it could never guide me any further than the street.

Tonight I found myself wondering if you were to blame, as if you had set this up to punish me for my wanderings. Perhaps if I didn't slip away once you were asleep, this false moon wouldn't be here to mock me. Or maybe you set it up to keep me here. Did you hope I would circle it like a moth, captivated by its soft cold light? Does it worry you that I have never woken up next to you, that I leave you alone in the dark to find my way home?

But tonight the false moon was not false. The street light hung in the air above me even after I had walked past it, as if you had planted a real moon there--and it must have been you, right? Who else could have, and who else would have? I was so startled I considered running back and waking you up, asking whether you were trying to send me away or guide me home. But as I stood and stared at this strange new moon, I realized the distinction was largely semantic. Either way my path was laid out before me, and my steps would take me back home.

bleach

I spilled bleach cleaning the house the other day, and it seemed to drain the color from the little patch of floor where I spilled it. I tried mopping it up with a sponge but it seemed to just spread, until a whole corner of the kitchen was paler than it used to be. I put the garbage can over it and hoped nobody would notice. I had a reputation to maintain. Not that I entertained anymore.

I slept easily, woke up, and got ready for work the next morning, only to find that the metal stopper in the sink was curiously pale. And I thought that was odd, but what could I do? Maybe metal just turned pale sometimes. It wasn't as if it looked bad. Then I noticed that the shower curtain had faded as well, and then I started to worry.

As I made my way to the bus stop I noticed that everything was losing its color. The grass, the trees, the houses and buildings, all had this horrible fade about them. Like I'd spilled bleach on them, too, trying to clean up after you. By the time the bus faded I couldn't tell what color it used to be. What color is a city bus meant to be? Are the seats really that sickly pale green color?

At work I spent about thirty minutes working before it was too much. I told my boss I was feeling ill and spent the day hiding in the clean white sterility of the bathroom. Eventually the automatic lights turned off, and I curled up in the dark and slept uneasily, dreaming alien dreams of color.

casting shadows

There was a trash can on fire outside of your apartment this afternoon. I'd been walking through the streets in a haze, staring at the sky, wondering if it was always so empty, if the clouds of winter were doing us a favor by hiding that vast expanse of shapeless blue. There was no one to be seen anywhere in this city. If the sun wasn't at my back casting my shadow, I wouldn't even have believed that I was out there.

I stood there and watched it burn, red flames licking out of the black metal, warping the air above it, spitting a little cloud of black smoke. The flames focused my mind--it felt like weeks since I've had any sort of mental clarity--on the message I knew you must be sending. What else could it mean? No one else walked under this empty sky. But the signal was anything but clear. I hoped you wanted to leave this world in flames with me, but when I finally walked in you gave no sign.

The thought of this message gave me purpose under this empty sky. I searched for patterns in your speech when you greeted me, in how you would look at me or not look at me, how you touched me and kissed me and undressed me, but there was nothing. That night, as I watched you sleep, listening for patterns in your breathing that might betray your message, your intentions, I was struck with the certainty that there was no message. You had intended nothing for me. And so my purpose faded, my mind adrift once more.

I went outside to smoke a cigarette, and the sudden impulse struck me to throw the burning cigarette into the same trash can. It didn't catch, and I was alone in the dark. The streets, the sky were still empty as they'd ever been, and there was nothing to focus my mind anymore--just the dull buzz of the streetlights, casting my shadow across the sidewalk. I stepped behind a tree, shielded from its light, and closed my eyes and let the dark empty streets swallow me.

an eternity till april

Is it spring where you are? I waited all winter.

The first day of spring always makes me think of you--the day you stop wearing jackets and scarves and start wearing summer clothes, and remind me how beautiful you are in a whole different way. Even now, even since you're long gone. The chaos of the changing seasons is on us now, and yesterday the sky was clear and the temperature was perfect for jackets and scarves, and I found myself in the park with the sun on my face and I said, "I'd be happy if spring never comes, if it just stays like this forever." It was a prayer to the sky, and the sky said nothing in return.

But that night I slept and I dreamt that my words had stilled the change of the seasons, that I had forever solidified the weather of that day. Every day will be perfect for jackets and scarves, the streets bright with cherry blossoms and the promise of leaves that will never come. There will be no spring, no burning summer sun, no dying autumn leaves, no bitter winter winds. Just today, that perfect day before spring. And you will be banished from my thoughts like a ghost.

I woke feeling refreshed and alive and hopeful, but the wind today felt dead, and the rustling of the wind seemed to have the taint of the grave about it. The sun shone wanly in a sky of a dull and listless blue. I sat in the park and watched the clouds, and I swear I saw your silhouette, just for a moment, before the wind picked up and blew all the clouds into fingers pointing south.

Did you end up going south when you left? Will you bring the springtime if I come and find you? Because I recant. I will not invoke the sky again. I want to see you smiling in the perfect endless light of the summer sun, to see you play in a pile of freshly raked autumn leaves or make sculptures from snowdrifts blown by the winter winds. And I will wait for April, if I must, if you return the spring to me.

a conversation, provided with minimal context

With apologies to A____, who deserved and hopefully received better.

I got the feeling she was presenting me to him, which is odd because he wasn't her boyfriend--that was someone else. He'd introduced us. "He's walking me home," she announced. She told him we were both drunk off our asses. I grabbed my coat and left my bag behind.

We both knew that this was not about walking home. This was about the cool March air, and all the various places we could think of to put our lips. But we danced around the subject as we walked aimlessly. She accused me of being a cynic. "It wouldn't kill you to actually like something for once," she said, taunting me. She sat down on a tree stump.

"Are you saying I don't like anything? I like some things." I pretended to be affronted. It took some doing, because all I could think of was kissing her--but we'd been dancing around the subject for so long, taking the direct approach seemed unthinkable. Not that we were being subtle at this point. I could read everything in her eyes, her expression, her tone. I have no doubt I was just as much of an open book.

"Prove it." This was not a challenge, but a request, a plea: stop this dance.

"How am I supposed to prove that?" A flimsy pretense.

"You know how."

I did. Most of what followed didn't count as much of a conversation, but pretenses were dropped now. She told me she had a boyfriend, and I said I knew. "But you don't give a fuck," she told me, and I suppose I must have shaken my head. I had other things on my mind.

She invited me back to her place. We were against the hood of someone's car--God knows whose--and I hesitated. I made up some excuse about needing to get my bag, or maybe I just said we probably shouldn't. I finished walking her home, then hoped I could apologize without words. Then she was gone and I walked back to the party alone and waited in the wings like a ghost.

small town charm

I think the first thing you ever told me is that my hometown was ugly. We hadn't met yet, and it was the way you said it--that tone of genuine surprise, that bright smile--that made me think you were just fascinating. I drank too much and you stayed up with me, telling me stories about a life that seemed so much richer than life in this ugly little town. We walked through the empty streets that night and I said something like "it's beautiful here at night," offhand. I don't remember much else that happened that night, but I remember that clearly.

When I finally moved to the city we kept running into each other. We talked about small towns, and about how glad we were to be rid of them forever. You had changed and so had I, but your smile was still the same, and I still found myself fascinated by your words. It was probably a year before we actually started dating. We just sort of happened. You liked saying that. Like the universe, we were a series of impossible events that became something amazing.

Then it was several years on and we were older and no longer as enamored with the city as we were before. It was full of fleeting contacts and superficial connections, and nothing makes you feel isolated like being in a crowd of people and realizing none of them care in the slightest that you exist. So you used words like 'jaded' and 'ennui' and complained about that isolation. Some days I felt like our joie de vivre would never return. Some days I tried to recover it. And you smiled at my efforts, and that almost made it all worthwhile.

One of us--or maybe both of us--came up with the idea to take a trip across the country, stopping in all the small towns along the way, eating in their diners, drinking their coffee. And I thought of the day we met and you told me the small town I lived in was ugly, and here we were romanticizing these little towns, these places that people like you and me try so hard to get away from.

The towns we visited were quiet, peaceful, free of our city affectations, with so many more stars in the sky. And so long as we kept moving we left our troubles behind us, gathering stories as we went. Everyone we met was polite, curious, friendly, and we never stayed long enough to learn any other side to them. And you told me you thought it was refreshing, meeting so many friendly people from so many places, how connected this trip made you feel with the world. And I told you that I'd never felt more alone, but that sometimes a little loneliness is all you need to put things in perspective.

After the trip, we fell apart much like we fell together. I left the city, found a quiet place in a quiet town and lived there, and maybe I was even happy. I made no meaningful connections here, but I made a lot less meaningless ones. I'm hiding, I know, but I don't see what choice I have. Please don't come and find me.

laugh at me

He is young and the sort of stupid that thinks he ought to be taken seriously, and he is quite taken with a girl who is smart enough to know that there is nothing so serious you can't laugh at it. She has a smile and a joke for everything, and sometimes, when she is feeling existential, wonders if she is missing the point, if the world isn't a joke. And he holds her tight and takes it all very seriously, even the jokes. Especially the jokes. There is nothing more serious than human laughter.

She often wonders if he doesn't get the jokes. He often wonders if she is laughing at him, because although he is very serious, he is not so stupid as to think that laughter only means someone is happy. And she laughs at his solemn promises of devotion, his earnest declarations of love, his sincere praises. He pours out his heart and she laughs and tells him he's all right, or a reasonable facsimile thereof. And he feels patronized.

When he talks to her, she can't keep from feeling that he doesn't think of her as an actual person. He is very serious and has a very serious story that he wants to tell. He doesn't understand her laughter or her jokes. He doesn't understand that humans are not meant to be serious. Sometimes she thinks she would not mind being a prop in someone's fantasies, so long as those fantasies had room for laughter. His do not. So she laughs at him, and finds it funny, because the alternative is too depressing to contemplate.

Eventually he decides that she is not behaving like someone to whom he has sung such solemn, earnest, sincere songs of praise. And what right does she have? Is this what she does with his love? He begins to tell her, subtly but certainly, that she is unworthy of the devotion he has given her. The implication is that she should be grateful.

Of course she only laughs at this. What did he expect? She laughs, and tells him he should't take himself so seriously. And then she is gone, and he is left with those words. One day he will understand, and if he is very lucky, he will laugh.

rage and despair

I heard a drunk girl screaming bloody murder the other night, and went outside to make sure she was okay. I couldn't quite piece together the scene--she was in an incoherent rage, not sure whether she wanted to attack the boys trying to calm her down or flee the scene. I watched long enough to decide that she wasn't in any danger--or at least, not the sort of danger I could help with. Eventually one of her companions saw me watching and told me to fuck off. I smiled at him and walked back inside.

Watching this scene put me in a bad way. I felt claustrophobic, felt like I should have done something instead of making an assumption based on incomplete evidence that everything was all right. What right do I have to define if something is all right? This woman, surrounded by friends whose interest in calming her down ranged from the genuine-seeming "shh, it's okay" to the annoyed and patronizing "shut the fuck up, Amy," was about as alone as I'd ever seen anyone.

And she represented everything I'm afraid of about the city. It is so much easier to be alone when you are surrounded by millions of people--and that isolation is so much more crushing than the isolation of the wilderness. I have sworn that if I am able I will help people in need--not because I am a good man but because I refuse to be less than human. But how can I help someone expressing rage and despair I could never hope to understand?

Her friends, if that's even the right word, frog-marched her off down a different street. I sat on the porch for a long time with a cigarette and listened, really listened, to the city. I imagined that everyone I saw walking down our street was involved with this scene somehow, talking or laughing about it. And I cursed the selfish desire to help, to prove to myself that we aren't alone in the city, or that if I ever break down there would be someone there to catch me.

whispering apocalypses

I'm remembering a frozen New Year's day in the northeast, drinking far too much absinthe with a girl I knew--an old friend I'd just met. She was so much more alive than most people, and certainly more than me. We kissed at midnight and made our way back to the subway in single-digit temperatures, the warm clarity of wormwood and fennel staving off the chill as we laughed our way through the wind and snow.

She told me that night, waiting for the train, that she wished she wasn't real. I didn't tell her I wished that I was. It baffled me then--did she really wish that she was a ghost like me? Then the train rolled in and there was no more time to ask for clarification. We stumbled aboard and sat in the back, leaning against each other, as the train rumbled on to our destination.

Then the train stopped, and went dark, and she whispered apocalypses in my ear. "This will be the year everything freezes and dies," she said. "Starting with this train." The conductor led us off the train, and we escaped into the transit tunnels. I imagined that I was a real, living person, going on the sort of adventures real, living people went on, while she dreamt she was a ghost, flitting through the shadows, lost and alone in the tunnels beneath our city. We sat in secret places and watched the trains rumble by and whispered apocalypses to each other, as the clarity of absinthe faded and the clarity of the new year settled in.

this year

I. February sometime, the best show I've ever seen, flirting with the girl next to me: passing notes, brushing against one another on accident. I never hear her voice, and lose her at the counter where I checked my bag. I bike home in perfect weather, my ears ringing.

II. October. New teeth. I walk home smiling, unaware that my mouth is full of blood.

III. Finally, a windfall. A new bike, wizard blue.

IV. No spring. Every year I identify the first day of spring as that day when suddenly everyone is done wearing winter clothes. Everyone is so beautiful on the first day of spring, and the gloom of winter seems gone forever. But this year we get no spring.

V. New Year's Day. I start the year bleeding and broken, drinking whiskey through shattered teeth, or trying, watching movies about the adrift and purposeless. "Where are you going?" I wish I knew.

VI. A spontaneous wrestling match. I lose.

VII. What the fuck happened to my arm?

VIII. My sister is coming home.

IX. "You're always smiling. Are you happy?" That question, that statement. It's hounded me for years. It reminds me of the most important thing anyone has ever told me. I do not know the answer.

X. I walked away. I kept going. That is enough.

XI. I laugh at the wrong things. I am afraid of the wrong things.

XII.The worst has happened and I'm still here. You have no idea the calm that brings.

XIII. Summer came late.

XIV. I never knew how much you bothered me until I saw you walking out the door and I could not keep from smiling.

XV. Caught on the Hill in a snowstorm.

XVI. I would forgive you, but I can never forgive myself.

XVII. Trying to rebuild my self. Patient, calm, content, at ease. In order to do this I am impatient, restless, unsatisfied, uneasy.

XVIII. I miss you.

XIX. I am leaving 2011 behind me. There are no expectations, no plans, no resolutions. I am taking 2012 on its own terms. Happy New Year.

a horoscope

A life unfolded in the stars:

She will not have a happy childhood, but who does? Children are meant to be unhappy. She will make decisions that her peers will laugh at, because at a young age we are taught to fear the Other. She will not fear the Other. She will play with toy cars and wear her hair short and scrape her knees and laugh and cry. When she experiences the soul-shattering hardship of losing her father she will become withdrawn, but she will determine to be strong from that day on.

Though for many children, the mockery of their peers might convince them to conform, maybe even to mock the Other that once they were, she will not. She will take the pain and make it hers. As she grows older she will have close friends, but not many of them--she will alienate many, because her standards will be impossible. And while she will be quick to forgive others, she will never forgive herself.

This regret will haunt her through her teens. Everyone she gets close to will remind her of someone else that she pushed away. The idea of closeness, the idea of friendship, will become too much for her to bear. Perhaps a close friend will survive her forced distance, but just as likely, she will be alone, surrounded by people for whom she feels no genuine warmth or affection. The artifice of it all will make her furious, but she will learn true self-reliance before she is finished with high school.

College is always said to be a time for experimentation, for reinventing oneself, but if there is one thing she will already have by then, it is a self. A real, solid self. This is a treasure she will cling to as she submits to the pressures that surround her, and the reason she never loses control. She will date someone without that solid sense of self, or maybe even several someones. That someone will cling to her sense of self. She will leave them adrift without an anchor, like a religious person suddenly stripped of their god.

She will have no time for religion. She has no time for people who are certain of anything. She will question everything. She will continue to alienate people with the conviction she has in her self, with her inability to forgive herself, with her refusal to be patient with those who don't meet her standards.

Sometimes she will wish that she had learned to rely on someone else, or wonder if she would have been better served learning to be happy rather than learning to survive. But, as they say, call no man happy till he dies--and she can go to her rest knowing exactly who she was.

administrative note

[This blog has been silent lately because I'm working on a new project, Vaudeville Ghosts (And Other Haunted Tales). Updates here will probably resume soon, but in the meanwhile, why not check out Vaudeville Ghosts and let me know what you think? -the author.]

wormwood, pt. 38

I might need to tangle myself in the degenerate plant of a strange little vine.

Meanwhile, in the subway tunnels, Rosalind and Nicole drank. At first the sound of the meteors impacting the city above worried them, but the warm glow of the absinthe soon took what fear they had away. They drank until the world made sense--at least, as much sense as it can when viewed through a filter of wormwood.

"This," Rosalind declared at length, "is stupid."

"I wasn't planning on getting smart, Rose."

"Not that. Though that too." Rose sighed. "Plans and apocalypses. The world is over no matter what we do. So we're just running around like, like--"

"Chickens with our heads cut off?"

"Like chicks with our heads cut off. Except prettier, in your case. But the point is, what's the point?"

"Not having our heads cut off, maybe?"

"You are making making a point very difficult, Nicole."

"Sorry, Rose."

"My point is, uh." Rosalind frowned. "What was my point, Nicole?"

There was a long pause before Nicole responded. "Less hiding, less running around, less planning. The end is here and we are fucked and it is time to make the rest of our time the best fucking time we can make it. Your point is you are too wonderful to waste all your time thinking of a way out of this when there is no way out of this."

"Yeah, that." Pause. "Do you want to wait it out here, or should we follow the rails and see where that goes?"

"Sometimes I don't think you listen to your ideas very much."

"Hey, bite me. It's hard to pay attention to my ideas when you're the one telling me what they are."

forget about me

You never told me your secrets, so I guess they stayed safe with me.

It's a funny thing when an evening of seething misanthropy ends with that odd reminiscing over old times and opportunities I couldn't have missed because I never even had them. A girl across the ocean who never quite confessed her secrets, who loved the words that I wrote in a way that most people didn't, who loved my ironies. Everything always comes back to the same things in the end, even if we forget about them for years.

But there were always oceans in the way, so there were just words--important words, perhaps, words that stayed in my subconscious, but just words. Words, stories, fables, and the curious comfort of a definite answer to a 'what if?' And then one day there was nothing at all. And I wondered, but there's no good wondering.

But nobody else was able to grasp those things I was too afraid to actually express. So I hid and I obfuscated and everyone else just assumed I was saying something profound. I never was, of course, and I'll never forget the woman who called me out on it.

why i'm lonely

I. She worries that it is too soon to call. Is it too soon to call? Is there even such a thing anymore in these days when we all have our cell phones with us all the time? She decides that she will call him after she finishes her beer.

II. A pen and ink. Some paper. A written apology. She deserves nothing less. The words come quickly:

We both said some hurtful things tonight. I lost my temper. I'm sorry. But I have spent so much time in my life being something less than sincere, apologizing for telling the truth, and I am done with that. I could have phrased it more delicately, but I want you to know that there is no excuse for what you have done, and just as I cannot apologize for calling you out, I cannot forgive you for it.

I know I cannot send this letter. I know that I have to finish it.

III. She laughs at my jokes, sincerely. In a world of polite laughter she finds me genuinely funny. So much happened tonight, but at the Port Authority bus terminal late that night, as the haze of cheap wine fades and I wait for a 3 am bus home, I can still hear her laughter.

IV. She opens another beer and decides to start watching some French film on Netflix. After that, perhaps. There's always after that.

V. We are drunk together and kissing in the street--on the hoods of cars, in the abandoned park. I am ostensibly walking her home. "My boyfriend is out of town," she says, and I feel guilty that I don't feel guilty, and then feel guilty for declining her invitation to come inside.

VI. Another movie, another beer, and now it's fast approaching midnight. Nobody actually goes to bed before midnight anymore, but you can't call people that late. And now she's missed the window, she is certain, and she can never call him now.

VII. Am I depressed, or just afraid of everything? Does it matter?

VIII. We had a beautiful thing for a very short period of time, and then it faded like city snow. Now it is over, I try to convince myself that, like snow, this was meant for the country, to cover the hills of New England for months, until something green and beautiful and alive springs from under it. We could have made the rivers flood, if only the city hadn't been in our way.

IX. In order to become a patientsincere man, I have lost all patience. I will not be conciliatory when I should be fighting. I will not apologize when I should be demanding apology. I will not compromise my values to make someone else happy. Tonight I have no company but a bottle of dark beer and a movie on Netflix. This is what victory looks like now.

wormwood, pt. 37

Did you ever wonder why we had to run for shelter while the promise of a brave new world unfurled beneath a clear blue sky?

Winston made a decision when he saw the smoking crater outside. He decided that there was nothing that would make him decide to sit on a boat in the middle of the ocean while the stars were falling from the sky--although, he corrected himself, they weren't actual stars, it was probably just a freak meteor storm. That kind of thing must happen sometimes.

He tried calling Rosalind, but her phone didn't even ring. He decided that she was probably dead, along with Nicole. He decided that he would stay here. When he announced this to his companions, they did not welcome the news.

"Are you crazy, kid? This city's falling to bits. We need to get out of here."

"And hope that was the only meteor falling tonight?"

The man hesitated. "I'd rather be outside than in when they fall. Buried alive is no way to go. And you can see 'em coming."

"Then go."

"Not without this." The man hefted the bag of things Winston had been carrying, along with that of himself and his wife. "As compensation for our wasted time."

"Fine! Take it!" He considered calling Rosalind and mentioning that his companions had robbed him--but the phone would still be dead, wouldn't it? She was probably dead still. That took some getting used to. How could that even happen? "If you're boat's even still there," he said quietly.

The man fled. His wife lingered to add, "I hope you make it. You seem like a nice boy." Then she, too, was gone, leaving Winston with his new companions, who were already moving to take shelter in the basement.

wormwood, pt. 36

Getting there.

Rosalind had made a few decisions before calling Winston. The first was that she would not wait here forever--the second was that she would get out of the city even after he showed up. Nicole had stopped playing and was simply sitting on the hood, watching the horizon, saying nothing. This was up to her, whatever else happened. The more she thought, the more she hated the idea of the boat--it was a trap. She'd have nowhere to explore, and when things went bad, nowhere to run. And she didn't trust Winston's assessment of the situation.

So she told him he had two hours. This was before a meteor fell from the sky and crashed just ahead. The impact toppled a building that had miraculously still been standing since the earthquake. "Gotta go," she told him, and hung up the phone.

Nicole was already on her feet by the time Rosalind ran up to her. "Fuck, what was that?"

Rosalind shrugged. "I think stars falling from the sky are traditional in the end times. So, new plan. Forget Winston. We find shelter--and I know just where. Take everything you can carry, and we run for it. The car's just asking for trouble."

They loaded up everything they could carry and ran through the streets. They found shelter in a transit tunnel, settled down in the dark down there, and listened to the silence. The trains had long stopped running, and these tunnels were just lying empty now.

"What are we going to do now, Rose? There's nothing down here."

"Maybe we can rebuild civilization together?"

Nicole snorted. "I'm not sure that's how it works."

"Well, this is as safe as we'll get in this city. And we can follow the tracks out of the city well enough. We're bound to find a better place out of this pit."

"Yes, but what are we doing right now? Telling knock-knock jokes?"

"Do you have any good ones?"

"No. But I have this bottle of absinthe. Clean, sober living hasn't been doing me any favors lately, so I think I'm going to stop that."

"I knew I kept you around for a reason. Ah, my kingdom for an absinthe spoon."