It's Always Something, It's Never Nothing
He’s been waiting a while. But he tries to overlook that now.
The sun turns Bridget’s hair to gold, makes her teeth white-white. Her ponytail swings left, right, left, right, her breasts bop up, down, up, down every step she takes. The skin showing between her shirt and shorts, the U of her half-exposed bellybutton. Denim bunching between her thighs.
A bag in one hand, a dog leash in the other, she kicks her head back, says hello even from this distance. Her voice tangles in birdsong and river-flow.
He waves, pats the grass.
They talk a while. Eat the croissants she brought. Play fetch with the dog.
Then they sit, close. Skin against skin.
She talks about how much she’s been enjoying the time they’ve been spending together. Talks about how she wasn’t looking for anything to creep up on her so fast. Says, “I wasn’t expecting you.”
They kiss while the dog gnaws on a bone, while a crew boat paddles by, while joggers’ sneakers scrape against the macadam path behind them.
And when she pulls her lips away from his, she smiles, bites her bottom lip—a clump of croissant wedged between her front teeth.
On the walk back to her apartment he asks what sort of Spaniel her dog is.
She says, “He’s a mix.”
Passing a garbage can on the corner of her street, he points to the balled up bag in her hand, tells her he’ll toss it.
She thanks him, drops the white paper ball graying with grease into his hand.
While she shakes her apartment key lose on her ring she burps, loud, deep, wet.
She apologizes, her hand on his chest, her eyebrows arched and crinkling her forehead, cracking her foundation. “That was so gross,” she says.
He lies, says no, drags out the end of the word forcing a smile.
It’s a nice place. Comfortable, but small. It’s been done up nice, like she was hoping things would go well enough today for this to happen—but she left out a can of Pledge, left dust on the television stand, overstuffed the closet and pinched clothes between the sliding doors.
It has a smell. Air freshener and dog piss.
She asks him to give her a second, heads into the bedroom alone. Then there’s grunting, metal clanging. She says fuck, rams the dog crate into the doorframe.
She says, “Go on in, make yourself at home.”
He sits on the bed, picks dog fur off his shorts until the barking stops.
She comes into the room smiling, apologizing for the dog, saying he’ll be chewing on a bone for a while.
They roll over onto one another once, twice, three times, all lip gloss and summer breath.
The back of her shirt is damp with sweat. Her bra is wet, leaves red imprints on her ribcage. One of her nipples is inverted—a second bellybutton.
She smiles straddling him, the hunk of dough still in her teeth.
Once they’re both naked, she’s hopping up and down on him, hurting him. Air rakes across his vocal cords with every impact, forces gut-punch sounds from his mouth. The slapping gets louder, makes the dog bark and scratch at his cage from the other room.
The dog losing its mind, her nipple an eye magnet, the box spring crackling under the force of them, he tells her to stop, sits up, says, “Maybe—if you—here.”
She says, “What?”
He says, “Let’s try to—no the other way—yeah, okay.”
Behind her, it’s nothing but her smell. Jean shorts in summer.
When it’s over, side by side, they breathe heavy and smile and tell each other how good the other was. She tells him she hopes she wasn’t too much for the first time. He tells her no, no, no, of course not—he liked it. He smiles again trying to ignore the pain in his hips, the soreness in his deflated cock.
On her side, twirling his chest hair around her index finger, she says, “I think I’m falling for you.”
He stretches a smile across his face, looks her in the eyes—can’t find a single word.
She says, “Nothing?” and smiles—no graying lump of pastry.
“Same,” he says. “I feel the same way.”
They kiss. Long and wet.
After a bit, her head in the crook of his armpit, her breathing slows, deepens.
And with the sun making the curve of her naked hip glow, and her hair shimmer, and the dust they’d kicked up into the air sparkle, she begins to snore.
Loud.
Like when he used to fake it as a kid when he didn’t want to be carted off to school.
He stares at the ceiling a while.
And it’s nothing but the nipple, the smell, and where that piece of croissant ended up. Nothing but the aching pain where should be none. Nothing but a
lack of whatever people feel when something good happens to them.
But nothing else.
Because it is good. It is.
Stare long enough at clean, white ceiling though and the cracks’ll start to show themselves. He follows them with his eyes, watches how they splinter into each other making patterns that can’t be painted away.
It’s not nothing.
Never is.
It’s everything.
***
He logs into his bank account on his work computer during his lunch hour. He does it every time he needs to pay a bill, just to be sure. But the number on the screen proves, again, he doesn’t need to anymore. Not since he was moved from the cubicle to his office. Not since he got an actual desk. Not since he got his password for the executive network—his last name, first initial, a set of numbers derived from his birthday, month, and year.
He pays all of his bills instead of just the one that’s due. Then he leaves his bagged lunch in his mini-fridge, goes down to the cafeteria he’d only heard about from his bosses as they’d walked by his cube saying things like Delicious, and Stuffed, and Better than Sex.
He never returned any of Bridget’s texts. Blocked her number after she called four times in a row. After he listened to the messages about how she thought she meant more to him than just a fuck.
At the sushi station he asks for a Philadelphia roll.
The juice bar, a banana blueberry smoothie.
A slice of coconut custard pie at the dessert counter.
The nice old lady at the register asks him if he’d like a cup for a fountain soda. He smiles, asks for a large.
His bosses—peers—call for him to sit with them.
Michael’s teeth match the price of his suit.
David calls him buddy, pulls a chair away from the table.
Bill wipes his glasses with his YSC tie.
They talk about the Eagles, how Jeffrey Lurie is fantastic businessman, but terrible football franchise owner. They talk about the Sixers, the rotation in which the four of them will divvy up the company’s floor seats this coming season. They talk about the new parking passes that are going to be assigned to make sure they all have the spots closest to the elevators in the parking garage.
Then Bill says something about “Filthy fucking liberals.”
And Michael says, “Filthy fucking immigrants.”
And David says, “Who’s coming to the titty bar with me tonight?” He holds up a hand, points to his ring, says something about his wife flying out to LA to visit who-gives-a-shit.
Then it’s just the sushi. The chopsticks and the best way to pretend how to use them. The hair coiled on top of cream cheese.
He picks it off and lets the rest of the guys at the table blather on.
He sucks a wad of blueberry into the back of his throat, coughs, sprays his tray with purple. Then he excuses himself from the table, choking through the words. Leaves the pie, film forming on the custard.
The specks of smoothie don’t come out of his shirt, leave the white gray with a spot of juice in the center.
He spends the rest of the day taking calls from the marketing department, the customer service specialists, the other executives. Most of them are angry at someone or something, this or that, and he’s kind over the phone.
He says, “I apologize for the inconvenience.”
And, “We will do better to give you more notice, but really could use the assist this one last time.”
And, “Everything will be resolved within the next twenty-four hours, I assure you.”
He ignores the notification about his paycheck’s direct deposit while he googles breathing exercises for anxiety. While he runs his fingertips in circles on his temples. While he leans back in his chair, sits up straight, breathes and then figures that everything on Google is crock of shit.
He checks his account just before he heads out for the night.
Another big check. Triple the amount he used to get working in his cube next to Sandra the Foot—the lady who slips off her shoes to air-out her corns. Next to the men’s room that Stankin’ Franklin would destroy every day after lunch. Across the hall from Reality Anne who would use up most of her day reading celebrity gossip sites only to email links of nip-slips and viral videos to everyone on the team.
He passes them as he heads to the elevators.
He smiles, says goodnight.
No one says anything.
In the elevator, David calls him buddy again, says, “So? Titty bar?”
“I think I’m coming down with something. Going to take it easy tonight.”
“Come on, don’t be a bitch. You aren’t even married.”
He fakes a smile, says that’s true, asks what club David’ll be haunting.
“Platinum Penthouse, out in the burbs. Gets pretty wild. Good thing we just got paid, know what I mean?”
A deep breath, a five count, an exhale.
And in his car, leaving the parking garage, he gets on the west-bound side of the highway trying to keep up with David’s taillights speeding away.
***
The first beers go down fast and the women start calling him baby faster.
He mimics David, crumples up dollar bills at the stage and aims for asses. Smokes cigarettes for the first time since college, hacking, gagging a little. Taps shot glasses onto the bar before throwing them back, trying to push through the burn without beer so David stops calling him bitch.
They sit in plush seats in front of the stage.
He watches David slip money into dental-floss-thin underwear, toss clumps of it into the air, pinch bills between his teeth for the girls to take with their breasts.
He tries to keep up. Fails.
Peaches, nude and shimmering, plops herself onto his lap, pulls the cigarette from his lips, smokes it, blows it in his face, and says, “How about a dance?”
In the backroom she shows him her piercings. All of them.
She leaves glitter all over his suit coat, her breath in his nostrils.
Back at the stage, a stripper calling herself Lust drains his beer, tells him he could get a dance with her and Brazil at only twice the price.
He’s only ever seen what the two of them do to each other inches from his face on the internet. But they make When Harry Met Sally sounds. Rehearsed and laughable.
At the bar, David says strippers aren’t people. Not really. Gave their humanity away when they took this job. He says, “You’re too timid, man. You need to let go. Enjoy yourself. They’re here. Use them.”
He doesn’t tell David to fuck himself.
Doesn’t finish his beer and leave David with the bill.
He pretends to laugh, says he’ll try, and orders a beer for himself and his boss—colleague.
It doesn’t go down as fast anymore. Tastes more like ash than light beer. Gets warm in his hand while he waits for David to come back from the Champagne room.
A woman—tattooed, called Phee—sits next to him, says something about a long face.
He says, “Hmm?”
She says, “Not having fun?”
“Oh, no, sure I am. Lots of fun.”
She tucks a rope of purple hair behind her ear, smiles, says, “You look really nice, you know that? Not like the other guys that come in here.”
He knows that’s not true, not anymore, says, “Yeah? Why’s that?”
“Just have a feeling.”
She leans in, puts her lips to his ear, says, “I’ll cheer you up in the bathroom for two hundred bucks.”
And then it’s David standing between them telling Phee not to give—he calls him This Guy—any attention. He says, “How about you, me, and that smackable ass of yours get some Champagne?”
Phee and David walk off giggling, leaving him to his warm beer and stack of singles.
He doesn’t see David again.
Phee is left out of the on-stage line-up.
And when the lights come up a bouncer taps his shoulder, calls him Buddy, tells him it’s time to go.
So he goes.
To his car.
To his apartment.
To bed.
Only to stare at the white ceiling he can’t see in the near dark.
***
His mother’s the only person with his new number.
The phone is more toy than anything else. Came in a bubble package glued to a cardboard sleeve.
He told her he was going away for a while.
She said, “Where?”
He named a place she’d heard of before.
She said, “Why?”
He told her whatever she wanted to hear.
She said, “Have you ever even gone camping before?”
He lied, said of course.
As he hammers the last tent peg into the ground, checks the instructions just to be sure he’s not missing something, she texts, says she’s just making sure he that he made it.
He tells her he’s where he wants to be
The sun splintering into spotlights through the trees is better than his office. The static of water rushing over rock is more pleasant than the nasty voicemails left for him by David, and Michael, and Bill, and Bridget. The birds peeping across the caverns between branches, squirrels using piles of leaves as crash pillows, and—the quiet.
Different than the silence in his apartment. The non-sound.
This isn’t loneliness. It’s solitude. A thesaurus of elegant alternatives to Alone.
He laughs, can almost see the sound waves ping-pong from tree bark to rock ledge to exposed roots and back into his head.
He’s nothing but Whitman walking, naming trees and rocks, marking them for later so he can get back to his car.
Eventually.
He props his pack up at the side of the tent, builds a fire in front once the wind catches a chill. He tosses more wood on to the flames once the light fades. And when the fire stops warming all of him he wraps himself in a blanket to keep his back warm.
The pot of baked beans doesn’t cook right. A layer of Pam didn’t stop a brown crust from embedding itself in the metal’s atoms. The top layer of beans is cold.
But he eats everything he could slop into a bowl, fills the pot with water and his backup bar of Irish Spring. He still has a pan for his eggs, but the other cans of beans would go to waste. He wouldn’t eat them at home.
He never really liked baked beans anyway.
The inside of the tent does nothing but shift in the wind. Vinyl scraping against metal poles that attacks the space where his skull meets his spine. Nails on a chalkboard—only ever done in movies and by kids after watching stupid movies.
He can’t sleep.
Doesn’t.
Every snapping twig or shifting pile of leaves pops his eyelids open so he can stare at nothing but black. And the world is black. Not like three in the morning at the apartment with the digital clock across the room, the street lamps through the window, the text messages waking up his phone. This is the void. What death is, maybe.
Death is supposed to have that tunnel at the end, though. That’s what people say. A speck of white that expands into a lone headlight into an opening into—whatever.
There’s no tunnel.
Just sounds.
Something ripping, tearing on the other side of a millimeter-thick sheet of bullshit pulled over a wire skeleton.
His pack. His food. Everything he brought left outside. He blames himself this time, not Google. He’d read something about hanging his food from trees or keeping it in a cooler in his tent.
But he does nothing now.
Can’t do anything now.
He waits until the thing snacking on his peanut butter cracker sandwiches and his toothpaste and his allergy medicine drags the rest of his pack away into the night before he moves anything but his eyes. Then he sits, stares into the space between his folded legs—a heart of tent floor. All jagged, fleshy and hairy around the edges as the sun comes up. The more light that burns through the tent, the more his heart numbs his legs, the more the rising temperature makes him smell himself through his boxer-briefs.
Get close enough to anything, it stinks.
***
The sound down the river a ways makes him hide behind a tree to strip. Frantic, jerky movements. He’d laugh if the waterfall didn’t remind him of highway sounds. If he didn’t feel the need to scramble from the tree to the water, his dick and balls flopping, afraid someone from a car window would point, laugh.
But there’s no highway.
No cars zigzagging through the trees.
No people to watch the show.
But he curses anyway. He calls the water temperature a motherfucker, knee-deep. He calls the whatever stole his shit in the night a cocksucker while the water flows into his bellybutton. Bill and Michael and David a pack of assholes. Bridget a clingy bitch. His mother a meddler. The sky, looking up, drifting through the water, a—sight.
Light blue with wisps of white.
He takes a breath.
Closes his eyes.
Lets the air go.
Then he rights himself, plants his feet into the sludge under the water.
He doesn’t recognize the trees. Can’t find his clothes pile, the scrape marks in the leaves where his feet dragged through.
He turns and turns and turns.
Until there they are.
He has to squint, stand facing the current.
Laughing, he didn’t mean the things he said. Not any of it.
But maybe he did.
A little.
Widening his stance, spreading his arms, he lets the river wash away his stink. Or at least replace it with the water’s nickel.
He has to take a step back. Then another. And another.
Keeping himself standing makes his breathing heavy. Makes his forehead pimple with beads of sweat. Makes him angle himself toward the bank. Makes the volume of the falls a ways away behind him increase. Maybe. He could be hearing things out of, what, fear. Seeing things because of, probably, nerves.
Like when he searches for visible pores on a beautiful woman’s face.
Or dredges for the deepest, blackest shit inside people searching for reasons to walk.
But it could be that that’s what’s called settling. Sticking with awful things until they’re not so bad, until they’re sort of nice.
He leans back, feels the water take him, stares at the sky.
The sun dries the water on his chest. His exposure stiffens him a bit. The sounds of the falls get louder, deeper, more intense.
He kicks his legs, spins through the water, feels it beating his hair to his head.
And then it’s the sky.
The sun.
The mist-white haze.
Through the light bouncing off the water in the air, there’s nothing to see but bright.
He watches, floats, drifts.
He’ll wait another second to right himself. To stand, head for the bank.
Another second.
And another second.
And another.
The sun turns Bridget’s hair to gold, makes her teeth white-white. Her ponytail swings left, right, left, right, her breasts bop up, down, up, down every step she takes. The skin showing between her shirt and shorts, the U of her half-exposed bellybutton. Denim bunching between her thighs.
A bag in one hand, a dog leash in the other, she kicks her head back, says hello even from this distance. Her voice tangles in birdsong and river-flow.
He waves, pats the grass.
They talk a while. Eat the croissants she brought. Play fetch with the dog.
Then they sit, close. Skin against skin.
She talks about how much she’s been enjoying the time they’ve been spending together. Talks about how she wasn’t looking for anything to creep up on her so fast. Says, “I wasn’t expecting you.”
They kiss while the dog gnaws on a bone, while a crew boat paddles by, while joggers’ sneakers scrape against the macadam path behind them.
And when she pulls her lips away from his, she smiles, bites her bottom lip—a clump of croissant wedged between her front teeth.
On the walk back to her apartment he asks what sort of Spaniel her dog is.
She says, “He’s a mix.”
Passing a garbage can on the corner of her street, he points to the balled up bag in her hand, tells her he’ll toss it.
She thanks him, drops the white paper ball graying with grease into his hand.
While she shakes her apartment key lose on her ring she burps, loud, deep, wet.
She apologizes, her hand on his chest, her eyebrows arched and crinkling her forehead, cracking her foundation. “That was so gross,” she says.
He lies, says no, drags out the end of the word forcing a smile.
It’s a nice place. Comfortable, but small. It’s been done up nice, like she was hoping things would go well enough today for this to happen—but she left out a can of Pledge, left dust on the television stand, overstuffed the closet and pinched clothes between the sliding doors.
It has a smell. Air freshener and dog piss.
She asks him to give her a second, heads into the bedroom alone. Then there’s grunting, metal clanging. She says fuck, rams the dog crate into the doorframe.
She says, “Go on in, make yourself at home.”
He sits on the bed, picks dog fur off his shorts until the barking stops.
She comes into the room smiling, apologizing for the dog, saying he’ll be chewing on a bone for a while.
They roll over onto one another once, twice, three times, all lip gloss and summer breath.
The back of her shirt is damp with sweat. Her bra is wet, leaves red imprints on her ribcage. One of her nipples is inverted—a second bellybutton.
She smiles straddling him, the hunk of dough still in her teeth.
Once they’re both naked, she’s hopping up and down on him, hurting him. Air rakes across his vocal cords with every impact, forces gut-punch sounds from his mouth. The slapping gets louder, makes the dog bark and scratch at his cage from the other room.
The dog losing its mind, her nipple an eye magnet, the box spring crackling under the force of them, he tells her to stop, sits up, says, “Maybe—if you—here.”
She says, “What?”
He says, “Let’s try to—no the other way—yeah, okay.”
Behind her, it’s nothing but her smell. Jean shorts in summer.
When it’s over, side by side, they breathe heavy and smile and tell each other how good the other was. She tells him she hopes she wasn’t too much for the first time. He tells her no, no, no, of course not—he liked it. He smiles again trying to ignore the pain in his hips, the soreness in his deflated cock.
On her side, twirling his chest hair around her index finger, she says, “I think I’m falling for you.”
He stretches a smile across his face, looks her in the eyes—can’t find a single word.
She says, “Nothing?” and smiles—no graying lump of pastry.
“Same,” he says. “I feel the same way.”
They kiss. Long and wet.
After a bit, her head in the crook of his armpit, her breathing slows, deepens.
And with the sun making the curve of her naked hip glow, and her hair shimmer, and the dust they’d kicked up into the air sparkle, she begins to snore.
Loud.
Like when he used to fake it as a kid when he didn’t want to be carted off to school.
He stares at the ceiling a while.
And it’s nothing but the nipple, the smell, and where that piece of croissant ended up. Nothing but the aching pain where should be none. Nothing but a
lack of whatever people feel when something good happens to them.
But nothing else.
Because it is good. It is.
Stare long enough at clean, white ceiling though and the cracks’ll start to show themselves. He follows them with his eyes, watches how they splinter into each other making patterns that can’t be painted away.
It’s not nothing.
Never is.
It’s everything.
***
He logs into his bank account on his work computer during his lunch hour. He does it every time he needs to pay a bill, just to be sure. But the number on the screen proves, again, he doesn’t need to anymore. Not since he was moved from the cubicle to his office. Not since he got an actual desk. Not since he got his password for the executive network—his last name, first initial, a set of numbers derived from his birthday, month, and year.
He pays all of his bills instead of just the one that’s due. Then he leaves his bagged lunch in his mini-fridge, goes down to the cafeteria he’d only heard about from his bosses as they’d walked by his cube saying things like Delicious, and Stuffed, and Better than Sex.
He never returned any of Bridget’s texts. Blocked her number after she called four times in a row. After he listened to the messages about how she thought she meant more to him than just a fuck.
At the sushi station he asks for a Philadelphia roll.
The juice bar, a banana blueberry smoothie.
A slice of coconut custard pie at the dessert counter.
The nice old lady at the register asks him if he’d like a cup for a fountain soda. He smiles, asks for a large.
His bosses—peers—call for him to sit with them.
Michael’s teeth match the price of his suit.
David calls him buddy, pulls a chair away from the table.
Bill wipes his glasses with his YSC tie.
They talk about the Eagles, how Jeffrey Lurie is fantastic businessman, but terrible football franchise owner. They talk about the Sixers, the rotation in which the four of them will divvy up the company’s floor seats this coming season. They talk about the new parking passes that are going to be assigned to make sure they all have the spots closest to the elevators in the parking garage.
Then Bill says something about “Filthy fucking liberals.”
And Michael says, “Filthy fucking immigrants.”
And David says, “Who’s coming to the titty bar with me tonight?” He holds up a hand, points to his ring, says something about his wife flying out to LA to visit who-gives-a-shit.
Then it’s just the sushi. The chopsticks and the best way to pretend how to use them. The hair coiled on top of cream cheese.
He picks it off and lets the rest of the guys at the table blather on.
He sucks a wad of blueberry into the back of his throat, coughs, sprays his tray with purple. Then he excuses himself from the table, choking through the words. Leaves the pie, film forming on the custard.
The specks of smoothie don’t come out of his shirt, leave the white gray with a spot of juice in the center.
He spends the rest of the day taking calls from the marketing department, the customer service specialists, the other executives. Most of them are angry at someone or something, this or that, and he’s kind over the phone.
He says, “I apologize for the inconvenience.”
And, “We will do better to give you more notice, but really could use the assist this one last time.”
And, “Everything will be resolved within the next twenty-four hours, I assure you.”
He ignores the notification about his paycheck’s direct deposit while he googles breathing exercises for anxiety. While he runs his fingertips in circles on his temples. While he leans back in his chair, sits up straight, breathes and then figures that everything on Google is crock of shit.
He checks his account just before he heads out for the night.
Another big check. Triple the amount he used to get working in his cube next to Sandra the Foot—the lady who slips off her shoes to air-out her corns. Next to the men’s room that Stankin’ Franklin would destroy every day after lunch. Across the hall from Reality Anne who would use up most of her day reading celebrity gossip sites only to email links of nip-slips and viral videos to everyone on the team.
He passes them as he heads to the elevators.
He smiles, says goodnight.
No one says anything.
In the elevator, David calls him buddy again, says, “So? Titty bar?”
“I think I’m coming down with something. Going to take it easy tonight.”
“Come on, don’t be a bitch. You aren’t even married.”
He fakes a smile, says that’s true, asks what club David’ll be haunting.
“Platinum Penthouse, out in the burbs. Gets pretty wild. Good thing we just got paid, know what I mean?”
A deep breath, a five count, an exhale.
And in his car, leaving the parking garage, he gets on the west-bound side of the highway trying to keep up with David’s taillights speeding away.
***
The first beers go down fast and the women start calling him baby faster.
He mimics David, crumples up dollar bills at the stage and aims for asses. Smokes cigarettes for the first time since college, hacking, gagging a little. Taps shot glasses onto the bar before throwing them back, trying to push through the burn without beer so David stops calling him bitch.
They sit in plush seats in front of the stage.
He watches David slip money into dental-floss-thin underwear, toss clumps of it into the air, pinch bills between his teeth for the girls to take with their breasts.
He tries to keep up. Fails.
Peaches, nude and shimmering, plops herself onto his lap, pulls the cigarette from his lips, smokes it, blows it in his face, and says, “How about a dance?”
In the backroom she shows him her piercings. All of them.
She leaves glitter all over his suit coat, her breath in his nostrils.
Back at the stage, a stripper calling herself Lust drains his beer, tells him he could get a dance with her and Brazil at only twice the price.
He’s only ever seen what the two of them do to each other inches from his face on the internet. But they make When Harry Met Sally sounds. Rehearsed and laughable.
At the bar, David says strippers aren’t people. Not really. Gave their humanity away when they took this job. He says, “You’re too timid, man. You need to let go. Enjoy yourself. They’re here. Use them.”
He doesn’t tell David to fuck himself.
Doesn’t finish his beer and leave David with the bill.
He pretends to laugh, says he’ll try, and orders a beer for himself and his boss—colleague.
It doesn’t go down as fast anymore. Tastes more like ash than light beer. Gets warm in his hand while he waits for David to come back from the Champagne room.
A woman—tattooed, called Phee—sits next to him, says something about a long face.
He says, “Hmm?”
She says, “Not having fun?”
“Oh, no, sure I am. Lots of fun.”
She tucks a rope of purple hair behind her ear, smiles, says, “You look really nice, you know that? Not like the other guys that come in here.”
He knows that’s not true, not anymore, says, “Yeah? Why’s that?”
“Just have a feeling.”
She leans in, puts her lips to his ear, says, “I’ll cheer you up in the bathroom for two hundred bucks.”
And then it’s David standing between them telling Phee not to give—he calls him This Guy—any attention. He says, “How about you, me, and that smackable ass of yours get some Champagne?”
Phee and David walk off giggling, leaving him to his warm beer and stack of singles.
He doesn’t see David again.
Phee is left out of the on-stage line-up.
And when the lights come up a bouncer taps his shoulder, calls him Buddy, tells him it’s time to go.
So he goes.
To his car.
To his apartment.
To bed.
Only to stare at the white ceiling he can’t see in the near dark.
***
His mother’s the only person with his new number.
The phone is more toy than anything else. Came in a bubble package glued to a cardboard sleeve.
He told her he was going away for a while.
She said, “Where?”
He named a place she’d heard of before.
She said, “Why?”
He told her whatever she wanted to hear.
She said, “Have you ever even gone camping before?”
He lied, said of course.
As he hammers the last tent peg into the ground, checks the instructions just to be sure he’s not missing something, she texts, says she’s just making sure he that he made it.
He tells her he’s where he wants to be
The sun splintering into spotlights through the trees is better than his office. The static of water rushing over rock is more pleasant than the nasty voicemails left for him by David, and Michael, and Bill, and Bridget. The birds peeping across the caverns between branches, squirrels using piles of leaves as crash pillows, and—the quiet.
Different than the silence in his apartment. The non-sound.
This isn’t loneliness. It’s solitude. A thesaurus of elegant alternatives to Alone.
He laughs, can almost see the sound waves ping-pong from tree bark to rock ledge to exposed roots and back into his head.
He’s nothing but Whitman walking, naming trees and rocks, marking them for later so he can get back to his car.
Eventually.
He props his pack up at the side of the tent, builds a fire in front once the wind catches a chill. He tosses more wood on to the flames once the light fades. And when the fire stops warming all of him he wraps himself in a blanket to keep his back warm.
The pot of baked beans doesn’t cook right. A layer of Pam didn’t stop a brown crust from embedding itself in the metal’s atoms. The top layer of beans is cold.
But he eats everything he could slop into a bowl, fills the pot with water and his backup bar of Irish Spring. He still has a pan for his eggs, but the other cans of beans would go to waste. He wouldn’t eat them at home.
He never really liked baked beans anyway.
The inside of the tent does nothing but shift in the wind. Vinyl scraping against metal poles that attacks the space where his skull meets his spine. Nails on a chalkboard—only ever done in movies and by kids after watching stupid movies.
He can’t sleep.
Doesn’t.
Every snapping twig or shifting pile of leaves pops his eyelids open so he can stare at nothing but black. And the world is black. Not like three in the morning at the apartment with the digital clock across the room, the street lamps through the window, the text messages waking up his phone. This is the void. What death is, maybe.
Death is supposed to have that tunnel at the end, though. That’s what people say. A speck of white that expands into a lone headlight into an opening into—whatever.
There’s no tunnel.
Just sounds.
Something ripping, tearing on the other side of a millimeter-thick sheet of bullshit pulled over a wire skeleton.
His pack. His food. Everything he brought left outside. He blames himself this time, not Google. He’d read something about hanging his food from trees or keeping it in a cooler in his tent.
But he does nothing now.
Can’t do anything now.
He waits until the thing snacking on his peanut butter cracker sandwiches and his toothpaste and his allergy medicine drags the rest of his pack away into the night before he moves anything but his eyes. Then he sits, stares into the space between his folded legs—a heart of tent floor. All jagged, fleshy and hairy around the edges as the sun comes up. The more light that burns through the tent, the more his heart numbs his legs, the more the rising temperature makes him smell himself through his boxer-briefs.
Get close enough to anything, it stinks.
***
The sound down the river a ways makes him hide behind a tree to strip. Frantic, jerky movements. He’d laugh if the waterfall didn’t remind him of highway sounds. If he didn’t feel the need to scramble from the tree to the water, his dick and balls flopping, afraid someone from a car window would point, laugh.
But there’s no highway.
No cars zigzagging through the trees.
No people to watch the show.
But he curses anyway. He calls the water temperature a motherfucker, knee-deep. He calls the whatever stole his shit in the night a cocksucker while the water flows into his bellybutton. Bill and Michael and David a pack of assholes. Bridget a clingy bitch. His mother a meddler. The sky, looking up, drifting through the water, a—sight.
Light blue with wisps of white.
He takes a breath.
Closes his eyes.
Lets the air go.
Then he rights himself, plants his feet into the sludge under the water.
He doesn’t recognize the trees. Can’t find his clothes pile, the scrape marks in the leaves where his feet dragged through.
He turns and turns and turns.
Until there they are.
He has to squint, stand facing the current.
Laughing, he didn’t mean the things he said. Not any of it.
But maybe he did.
A little.
Widening his stance, spreading his arms, he lets the river wash away his stink. Or at least replace it with the water’s nickel.
He has to take a step back. Then another. And another.
Keeping himself standing makes his breathing heavy. Makes his forehead pimple with beads of sweat. Makes him angle himself toward the bank. Makes the volume of the falls a ways away behind him increase. Maybe. He could be hearing things out of, what, fear. Seeing things because of, probably, nerves.
Like when he searches for visible pores on a beautiful woman’s face.
Or dredges for the deepest, blackest shit inside people searching for reasons to walk.
But it could be that that’s what’s called settling. Sticking with awful things until they’re not so bad, until they’re sort of nice.
He leans back, feels the water take him, stares at the sky.
The sun dries the water on his chest. His exposure stiffens him a bit. The sounds of the falls get louder, deeper, more intense.
He kicks his legs, spins through the water, feels it beating his hair to his head.
And then it’s the sky.
The sun.
The mist-white haze.
Through the light bouncing off the water in the air, there’s nothing to see but bright.
He watches, floats, drifts.
He’ll wait another second to right himself. To stand, head for the bank.
Another second.
And another second.
And another.
Nick Gregorio lives, writes, and teaches just outside of Philadelphia. His fiction has appeared in Crack the Spine, Hypertrophic Literary, Maudlin House and more. He is a contributing writer and assistant editor for the arts and culture blog, Spectrum Culture, and currently serves as fiction editor for Driftwood Press. He earned his MFA from Arcadia University in May 2015 and has fiction forthcoming in Zeit|Haus and Corvus Review.
