by Jeff Zentner
I toss the card on the passenger seat.
“Can I get your number?” Darren asks.
“I’m late.” I roll up the window. Darren gives me a you’re-making-a-mistake look, as though I didn’t know I already had.
Acid bubbles up and scalds the back of my throat as I drive to Blake’s house.
Blake Lloyd is surely the only student in the history of Nashville Arts who secured admission on the strength of his public farting. Okay, not just public farting, but that was by far the most popular part of his oeuvre.
Blake was a minor YouTube celebrity. He made comedy videos—skits, observations, impressions, etc. He’d thicken his accent and country it up. What really got people’s attention, though, was his willingness to embarrass himself publicly. He’d trip himself at the grocery store and take out a display of cereal boxes while his pants fell down (he always cleaned up his messes). He’d step in dog poop barefoot. He’d walk into Green Hills Mall, the snootiest mall in Nashville, shirtless (and he did not look like he worked out).
And then there was the public farting. In movie theaters. During a quiet scene. Puuuurp. Then a pause. Then another one. Longer. Priiiiiiiiiip. He always kept a straight face. One of his most popular videos was one where he rips ass at the library and he hasn’t even gotten the whole thing out yet when the librarian bellows, “EXCUSE YOU.”
In the months before the Accident, though, he had upped the ante to public farting in midconversation. So he’s talking with a prim hobby-shop clerk, acting the perfect young gentleman, and midsentence, he cuts one. The lady tries to be polite, because we all make mistakes, but she can’t help an involuntary grimace. But then he goofs out another—it sounds like a pig’s squeal. Brrrrrrrp. And now she’s certain it’s no mistake.
“Do you need the restroom?” she asks icily.
“Ma’am?” Blake says.
Now this may not seem the sort of portfolio that would get you into a competitive arts school (please note: if you say “competitive arts school” fast, it sounds like “come pet at a fart school”). But Blake was smart. He studied comedy. He listened to people talk about it and pick it apart, analyzing it on podcasts and in essays. He knew his craft and was serious about it. He knew how to intellectualize it and frame what he was doing to make it attractive to the admissions committee. So he wasn’t a bored kid farting in public for laughs on the Internet. He was a performance artist, actively violating the social contract and confronting those in public spaces with the reality of bodily function. He was challenging people, forcing them to question the artificial barriers we construct between ourselves and our bodies. He was subverting expectations. He was sacrificing himself; laying it on the line. He was creating art.
Plus, come on. Farts are always funny. Even to admissions officers.
I get to Nana Betsy’s house and let myself in. There’s a laptop set up as you walk in the front door, and it’s playing Blake’s videos. So amidst the somber hush of conversation, you hear the occasional flatulent toot emanate from the laptop speakers, followed by chuckling from the groups of two or three people alternating standing around the laptop.
The photo of Blake that rested on top of the casket now sits on the coffee table. The house is warm in the way of confined spaces full of people. It smells of potluck food and the aftershave and perfume that men and women get as presents from grandchildren.
I pause in the living room for a second, unsure of what to do. Nobody acknowledges my presence. A gust of guilt buffets me, so powerful it makes my leg bones feel like they’re resonating to some low frequency. You filled this house with mourners. You created this occasion. I have that feeling when you think everyone is staring at you even though you can see they aren’t.
I spot Nana Betsy in the kitchen, talking with her brothers. Our eyes meet and she motions for me to come in. I enter the kitchen and Nana Betsy, without interrupting her conversation, points me to the adjacent dining room, where steaming slow cookers, casserole dishes, and disposable aluminum pans crowd the table. Cold grocery-store fried chicken. Squash casserole topped with Ritz crackers. Turnip greens with chunks of pork. Little smoked sausages swimming in BBQ sauce. Mac and cheese with the top baked brown.
It’s strange that this is the best we can do. We don’t even have a special ceremonial mac and cheese to mark someone’s passing from this world. We only have the normal stuff that your mom feeds you on any given day when someone you love hasn’t died.
I pile food precariously on a paper plate, grab a clear plastic fork and a red Solo cup of sweet tea, and find a corner of the living room. The couch and most of the chairs are taken, so I sit on an ottoman and eat, trying to make myself invisible, carefully balancing my cup on the carpet. I have to force down each bite through a constricted throat. Hungry as I am, my body is telling me I’m unworthy. Replaying my conversation with Darren in my mind every few minutes also doesn’t help.
People bump into each other, interacting. Fish in an aquarium. The men wear wrinkled, ill-fitting sport coats and sloppily tied ties. They look uncomfortable, like beagles wearing sweaters.
I finish and I’m about to stand when Nana Betsy shuffles in. A woman rises from the rocking chair, and she and Nana Betsy share a long hug and kiss on the cheek. Nana Betsy bids her farewell and tells her to take a plate of food for the road. Then Nana Betsy drags the rocker beside me and sits with a soft groan. She looks bone weary. Her eyes normally dance. Not today.
“How you doing, Blade?”
Nana Betsy was the only person on Earth outside of Sauce Crew who called me Blade. The nickname tickled her to no end.
“I’ve been better.”
“I hear you,” she says.
“Blake’s funeral was beautiful.” I’m saying it without conviction. I’m not even fooling myself. A beautiful funeral for your best friend is a species of drinking a delicious poison, or being bitten by a majestic tiger.
Nana Betsy sees right through me. “Oh, baloney,” she says gently. “A beautiful funeral would have been Blake making everyone laugh once more. One his mama was at.”
I hadn’t wanted to ask about that. But Nana Betsy says it with a certain yearning, something she wants off her chest but she needs someone to ask her about it.
“Do you know where she is?”
She blinks away tears. She folds her hands on her lap, prayer-like. “No,” she says softly. “I don’t hear from Mitzi but once every couple years. When whatever man she’s taken up with leaves her high and dry again and she needs money to feed her habit. She’ll call from some motel in Las Vegas or Phoenix on a disposable cell phone. I have no number for her. No address. No way to reach her. On top of everything else, I guess I’ll have to hire someone to track her down so’s I can tell her Blake is gone.”
“Man.” What do you say to that?
“Thing is, she’ll be devastated even though she’s never been interested in being a mother to him.”
A weighty silence. A blessed fart from the laptop. Nana Betsy laughs through her tears. “I miss him so much. I don’t know how to live without him. I’m not even sure how I’ll weed the tomato garden with my knees bad as they are. Blake always did it for me.” She produces a handkerchief and wipes her eyes. “I loved him as my own.”
It’s several seconds before I can speak; I’m swallowing the sobs trying to claw their way out of my throat. “I don’t think I’ll ever laugh again.”
Nana Betsy leans over and hugs me. She smells like dried roses and warm polyester. She doesn’t seem to have a single sharp edge. We hug and rock side to side for a second or two.
“I better keep making the rounds,” Nana Betsy says. “You’re a good friend. Please don’t be a stranger.”
“I won’t. Oh, my mom and dad wanted me to tell you again they’re sorry they couldn’t come. They tried to make it home from Italy, but they couldn’t in time.”
“You tell them I understand completely. Bye, Blade.”
“Bye, Nana Betsy.”
&
nbsp; Before I leave, I take a last look around. I remember the occasions Blake and I sat in this living room planning his next video. Playing video games. Watching a movie or some sketch-comedy show.
I wonder if the actions we take and the words we speak are like throwing pebbles into a pond; they send ripples that extend farther out from the center until finally they break on the bank or disappear.
I wonder if somewhere in the universe, there’s still a ripple that’s Blake and I sitting in this living room, laughing ourselves silly. Maybe it’ll break on some bank somewhere in the vast sky beyond our sight. Maybe it’ll disappear.
Or maybe it’ll keep traveling on for eternity.
When I get home, Georgia greets me at the door with a huge hug, squeezing the breath from me.
“How was your day in the scented candle mines?” My heart’s not remotely in the joke—one of our regulars—but I make it as a halfhearted nod to normalcy.
I feel her half smile on my cheek. “If I pretend that’s still clever, will it cheer you up?”
“Maybe.”
She pulls back and takes my hands. “Hey. You hanging in there?”
“Define ‘hanging in there.’ I’m alive. My heart’s beating.”
“Time’s the only thing that can touch this.”
My sister is only a little older than me, but she’s sometimes wiser than her years. “Then I want to go to sleep and wake up a decade from now.”
We stare at each other for a second. My eyes well with tears. It’s not sadness or exhaustion this time. It’s Georgia’s goodness. I’m a total baby in the presence of unalloyed kindness. I choke up when I see YouTube videos about people donating a kidney to a stranger or saving a starving dog or something.
“I know you miss them,” Georgia says. “I’ll miss them. Even Eli constantly trying to look down my shirt.”
“Once Mars drew a picture of you in a bikini as a present for Eli.”
She rolls her eyes. “Did you at least defend my honor?”
“Of course. I mean, it was a really good picture, though. Mars was good.” I choke up.
Georgia gives an oh-you-poor-thing wince and hugs me again. “There’s some lasagna left.”
“I ate at Blake’s.”
“Mom and Dad called while you were at the funeral. They were checking up on you. Call them.”
“Okay.” I hesitate before spilling. “So—a reporter ambushed me after the funeral.”
Georgia’s face sours. “What? A reporter wanted to talk to you after the funeral of your best friend? Are you shitting me? The hell?”
“Yeah. He was superpushy. Like”—I imitate Darren’s voice—“ ‘Well, Carver, I gotta write about this, and the news doesn’t wait for grief, so if you wanna tell me your side, you better.’ ”
She rears back, folds her arms, and does that pissed-off thing with her lips that absolutely only girls of a certain age can do. “What’s this dipshit’s name?”
I know the look on her face. It’s the look she used to get every time I told her about kids picking on me in middle school, just before she went to “sort things out.” “Please don’t. I guarantee it’d make things worse.”
“For him.” (She isn’t wrong.)
“For me.”
We stand at an impasse. She sniffs at me. “Speaking of news: you kinda stink.”
“I was wearing a suit all day and it was superhot, but whatever.”
“Go shower. You’ll feel better.”
“I’m despondent and I apparently smell like gross balls. How could I possibly ever feel better than I do now?”
Georgia’s right; I’m improved when I get out of the shower, dry off, and flop naked on my bed. I stare at the ceiling for a while. When I tire of that, I dress in a pair of khakis and a button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up.
I open my blinds, letting the peach-hued dusk cast long shadows in my room. I sit at my desk and open my laptop. Glowing on the screen is the story I’m working on. Any illusion I have of losing myself in that, though, quickly vanishes.
I live in a part of Nashville called West Meade. My street has an unusual characteristic: a train track running behind it on a raised berm. Trains come by every hour or so. In the distance, I hear a train whistle. I watch the setting sunlight strobe between the train cars as they pass behind the 1960s-era houses directly across the street from mine. I pick up my phone to call my parents, but I can’t. I’m not in the mood to talk to anyone.
And suddenly I have the overwhelming sensation of swirling down the drain of a bottomless melancholic boredom. Not the please-kill-me-when-will-this-class-be-over sort. The sort where you realize that your three best friends are, at this very moment, experiencing the afterlife or oblivion, while you sit on your ass watching a train pass as your laptop screen darkens and goes to sleep.
Darkens and goes to sleep. That’s what happened to my friends. And I have no idea where they are right now. I have no idea what’s become of their intelligence, their experience, their stories.
I’m a casual believer in God. My family goes to church at St. Henry’s maybe four or five times a year. My dad says he believes in God enough to make himself suffer over it but not enough to make anyone else suffer over it. My belief has never been tested in this way. I’ve never had to examine myself to decide whether I truly believe that my friends are currently in the presence of some benevolent and loving God. What if there is no God? Where are they? What if they’re each locked in some huge white marble room with blank walls and they’re there for eternity with nothing to do, nothing to see, nothing to read, nobody to talk to?
What if there’s a hell? A place of eternal torment and punishment? What if they’re there? Burning. Screaming in agony.
What if I’m going there when I die for killing my friends? What if Nana Betsy has no power to forgive and exonerate me?
I feel like I’m watching something heavy and fragile slide slowly off a high shelf. My mind swirls with mysteries. The eternities. Life. Death. I can’t stop it. It’s like staring in the mirror for too long or saying your name too many times and becoming disconnected from any sense of yourself. I begin to wonder if I’m even still alive; if I exist. Maybe I was in the car too.
The room dims.
I’m tingling.
I’ve fallen through ice into frigid black water.
I can’t breathe.
My heart screams.
This is not right. I’m not fine.
My vision narrows, as if I’m standing deep in a cave, looking out. Spots form in front of my eyes. The walls are crushing me.
I’m gasping. I need air. My heart.
Gray, desolate dread descends on me—a cloud of ash blocking the sun. A complete absence of light or warmth. A tangible, mold-scented obscurity. A revelation: I will never again experience happiness.
Air. I need air. I need air. I need air. I need.
I try to stand. The room pitches and tosses, heaving. I’m walking on a sheet of Jell-O. I try again to stand. I lose my balance and fall backward, over my chair, thudding on the hardwood floor.
It’s one of those nightmares where you can’t run or scream. And it’s happening to me this moment in the dying light of this day of dying. AND I AM DYING TOO.
“Georgia,” I croak. AIR. I NEED AIR. My pulse thrums in my temples.
I start crawling toward the door. I can’t stand. “GEORGIA, help me. Help me.”
I hear Georgia open the door. “Carver, what the shit? Are you okay?” She sounds like she’s calling down a well. Her bare feet slap on the floor as she runs to me.
Her hands on my face. I gasp. “Something’s wrong. Something’s wrong.”
“Okay, okay. Breathe. I need you to breathe. Are you hurt? Did you do something to yourself?”
“No. Just happened. Can’t breathe.”
“Did you take anything? Drugs?”
“No.”
She stands up and presses her hands to the sides of her head. “Shit. Shit. Shit.
What do I do?” she says, more to herself than me. She kneels beside me again and slings my arm over her shoulder. “Okay. We’re going to the ER.”
“Nine-one-one.”
“No. We’ll get there faster if I take you. Come on. Up.”
With a grunt, she helps me to my knees. I’m seeing double.
“Okay, Carver, I need you to try to stand and I’ll support you. You’re too heavy for me to lift.”
I make it to my feet, where I sway drunkenly. I put one foot in front of the other until we’re outside. Georgia sits me in the passenger seat of her Camry and runs inside for her phone, her wallet, a pair of sandals for her, and a pair of shoes for me. I want to puke. I close my eyes and try to breathe through the nausea.
While I wait, I wonder if it’s annoying God to be missing the last member of Sauce Crew in his collection. I wonder if dying right now wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world. It would certainly solve a lot of the problems I foresee in the immediate future.
When we arrive at the St. Thomas West Hospital ER, about ten minutes from our house (with Georgia exceeding the speed limit by twenty-five miles per hour), I’m breathing easier and I’m less queasy. My vision has opened up a little, my heartbeat has slowed, and in general, I’m a lot less certain I’m going to die, which comes as a strange disappointment.
I’m able to walk into the ER on my own. While I’m filling out paperwork, Georgia pulls out her phone and starts scrolling through her contacts.
I pause mid–check mark. “Are you calling Mom and Dad?”
“Of course.”
“Don’t.”
“Carver.”
“What? Don’t worry them. Plus it’s probably the middle of the night in Italy.”
“I know you aren’t stupid.”
“I’m serious. Just…we’ll tell them when they’re home.”
“Okay. We are sitting in the ER after you fully had some weird deal. I’m calling Mom and Dad. End of story.”
“Georgia.”
“We are not, like, debating this. I wonder if I can legally give consent for you to be treated. Fortunately, they don’t seem to care about parental consent at the ER.”