by Jesse Jordan
James had to force his coffee past a clenched throat.
“I’m glad I’m alive, and I wanted to say thank you. To officially say it.” She pulled James’s hand up and kissed it. The slightest moisture lingered as she set the hand back on the table, and James smiled, and it was like a giant period at the end of the sentence.
The tension dissolved, and they continued to talk, though the topic stayed near her suicide attempt. She told James that she now took an antidepressant and saw a therapist twice a week. She said the therapist, Dr. Dolsi, was a kind woman with old-money manners, and what they did was something called cognitive therapy, which was where you tried to become aware of the way your mind worked and change it. She told James that was a big part of anxiety and depression: her brain took small things and snowballed them into end-of-the-world affairs. So she’d been learning to recognize when she was doing it. She even had a mantra: “Your brain lies to you.” That’s what she told herself when she caught her mind catastrophizing.
That was around the time they left the Funky Bean and began walking back to her house.
James had had no idea. It was a little terrifying, if he was honest, that there was such a depth of messed-upedness behind even those who seemed so successful. Oddly, the suicide attempt hadn’t prepared him for this. This, the nuts-and-bolts reality of regulating her emotional distress, was harder. That was an action; this was her. What had he thought, though? Some melodramatic operatic reason? Surely if someone like Dorian Delaney tried to off herself, there was a good reason. I could know her the rest of my life and I’d still be learning new things.
It was a short walk back to her place, but that day’s heavy-heavy heat was an assault. Sun and sweat coruscating, their lungs tired from pumping the humid air in and out. Dorian slumped down on her shade-covered front steps, and James followed suit.
“I still think about death a lot, though,” she said, and James wondered if she ever ran out of things to say. It was wonderful, and when she got going, it relieved him of almost all pressure. It was as if a dam had opened, and while the river sometimes roared and sometimes trickled, it never stopped. “This one time—only a few months ago, so y’know, after the . . . thing at school, my mom and I were talking about the future, and I just told her, I said, ‘I have this weird feeling like I won’t live to be old,’ and she just slapped me. No, I know, but I wasn’t mad. I mean, at first, but then I was like, hey, idiot, you’re totally freaking her out. I apologized and told her I didn’t really think that, I was just being stupid. But I do. I don’t know why. I’ve just never been able to picture myself as an old woman. Isn’t that weird?”
“I don’t know,” James said. “I guess I can’t picture myself as an old man either. I never thought that meant I was going to die.”
“Yeah, it’s probably just ’cause I’m like obsessed with it. Sometimes I—no, never mind. Too embarrassing.”
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“No, come on. You can’t do that. You can’t start like that and then not say it.”
She squinted as if trying to apprehend a bluff. “You promise you won’t laugh?”
“I will not laugh at you.”
That canine bit down on her bottom lip again. “Sometimes,” she said, “I lay in bed and pretend I’m dead. I close my eyes and cross my arms over my chest and pretend I’m in a casket. I’m dead, but I can still hear everything everyone says about me. At my wake, y’know? I’m laying there and people are coming up and . . . I can’t.”
“They’re saying what they always really thought of you, aren’t they?”
Her eyes went wide, as if he’d just recited a line from her diary.
“The ones who secretly hated you or secretly loved you, right?”
“Do you do the same thing?”
“No.” Look away, silence. Cheeks hot. What are you doing? “I mean, I don’t do exactly that.”
“What do you do?”
“It’s . . . mine’s way more embarrassing.”
“What?” she said, smiling. “What is it?”
Too late now. “Uh, sometimes I’ll pretend I’m laying in a hospital bed, like in a coma. But it’s always because, like, the school was taken over by terrorists or something.”
Laughing, but without a drop of mockery or cruelty. “Wait, no, wait. What?”
“It’s always something where, like, terrorists take over the school and then I sneak up on one of them and steal his machine gun—”
“How?”
“How?”
“Yeah. How do you steal his machine gun?”
“I don’t know.”
“Yes, you do.”
“I . . . well, usually the first one leads a group of us to a separate place and either I smash him over the head with something or sometimes there’s something sharp and I, y’know, kill him.”
“Wow.”
“Okay, that’s it. I’m not—”
“No, no. Come on. I wanna hear it.”
James let a weary sigh out. He did not acknowledge how much he was enjoying this or how terrifying it was to say these things out loud. “So then I have his machine gun and, and he’s either tied up or dead. Then I, I lead a quiet . . . rebellion, I guess. Y’know, the kids follow and we find the next terrorist and either tie up or kill him, too. Then I give that machine gun to someone else, so we’re becoming—this is really embarrassing.”
“No, it’s fun. Who do you give the second machine gun to?”
“I don’t know. Different people.”
“Oh, come on. Who’d you give it to last time?”
“Uh . . .” Ken Lakatos. Don’t you dare say that. “I can’t remember. I don’t really focus on that part.”
“Okay. Where am I in all this?”
“It’s not like everyone is . . . I mean . . . I guess you’re probably usually in the last group we find, with the main terrorist guy, the Hans Gruber.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“From Die Hard.”
Nothing.
“Anyway, anyway, so we fight the terrorists and at some point, y’know, they become aware and there’s a big gunfight and I save everyone and kill Hans Gruber, but I’m always injured.”
“Hence the coma.”
“Right.”
“And when you’re in the coma, everyone comes to your hospital room and tells you they love you.”
“Well, everyone doesn’t tell me they love me.”
“But it’s all good,” she said. “Nobody comes and tells you they hate you?”
James tried to think of some way to turn this last bit, but there was nothing. “No.”
“Yours sounds nicer. I like it.” She leaned into the space between them. “What do I say at your bed?”
James opened his mouth, but no deflections came to mind. He’d muscled through the embarrassment of his fantasy, but he’d die before he revealed this.
Thankfully, she commuted it with a crooked smile. “Are all your fantasies action movies?”
“The ones that aren’t porns.” What? Why did you just say that?
Eyes wide, mouth open, Dorian didn’t say a word.
Way to go, creep.
But then she laughed, again, and slapped him on the arm. “No comment,” she said, springing to her feet with invisible effort. “C’mon. Let’s get something to eat.”
After Dorian had eaten half a turkey sandwich and James had taken down one and a half of his own, they found themselves back on the couch, in their old positions. The light in the room was more orange than yellow now as the afternoon inched along. James could hear the air-conditioning fans, could hear little kids outside and, a block or two away, an ice cream truck. They talked about their families. His: what it used to be and what it was now—absence, distance, et cetera. Hers: parents divorced, both already in serious relationships with other people who seemed like cartoon enemies of their former spouses, mom pushing when she was around, dad pushing when he was around.
James told her she said it way better than he could. He thought then that there were a bunch of different kinds of alone, but he couldn’t figure out exactly what he meant, so he didn’t say anything.
Dorian said, “I was talking to Lem one time—”
“Your old Russian?”
“Right. I was talking to him about this, about like feeling lonely, and he told me the greatest story. Sometimes I just tell it to myself and it makes me feel better.”
“What is it?”
Dorian repositioned, readying herself for the telling with her feet tucked up so that she was sitting on them. “Okay, it’s really, really old. It’s from World War II, but it’s like a really famous old story in Russia, I guess.”
“Okay.”
“Alright so, in like the ’30s, in Stalingrad, Russia, there’s this sad, lonely guy. He doesn’t have any friends and he lives in a tiny apartment, okay? Anyway, around that time the first-ever Russian phonebook comes out. So this lonely guy, he gets the phonebook and he starts looking through it, reading it, and he comes upon a man named Mr. Rooster—whatever’s Russian for Rooster, y’know. So he has this idea. He goes to his phone and he dials the number. It rings a bit and then a man with a very deep voice picks up and he says, ‘Hello?’ And the lonely guy says, ‘Yes, may I speak to Mr. Chicken,’ and the other man says, ‘There’s no Mr. Chicken here. This is the Rooster residence,’ and the lonely guy starts laughing and says, ‘Oh, I’m so sorry,’ and hangs up.
“But the thing is, he’s still lonely. He thinks about the joke, about the call, and it makes him happy. So a few weeks later, he dials the number again. ‘Hello. Is Mr. Chicken there?’ And again, the man is very polite. ‘No, I’m sorry. There’s no Mr. Chicken here. This is Mr. Rooster.’ And the lonely guy, he laughs whenever he thinks about the calls. They’re like the only time he ever talks to another person, so he keeps doing them. Not every day or every week, y’know, but a lot. Every once in a while he’ll call up Mr. Rooster and ask for Mr. Chicken, and every time Mr. Rooster is totally polite. He just says, y’know, ‘No, there’s no Mr. Chicken here.’
“But then World War II breaks out, and the lonely guy has to go off and fight. And it’s years. He’s away for years fighting and it’s just, like, the worst war ever. The Germans and the Russians are slaughtering each other and starving and going through these horrible winters, but after, I don’t know, like four years, the war ends and the lonely guy has survived. So he gets to go home, right? But the thing is, when he gets home he finds that Stalingrad has been almost completely destroyed. There was a battle in Stalingrad that lasted for years and the Germans bombed everything and buildings are leveled and whole streets have been destroyed.
“So he walks to his street and finds that his building is one of the ones still standing. He goes up to his apartment and finds it empty. Everything’s pretty much been taken, but at least it’s still there, waiting for him. So he sits down and he thinks, ‘Okay, I survived. Now what?’ There’s literally nothing and nobody in the world for him. He’s just sitting there, and then he sees the phone. He goes to the phone and he picks it up, and after a second he gets an idea and smiles to himself. Then he dials the number, and after a few rings someone picks up. It’s the man with the deep voice, who says, ‘Hello?’ Then the lonely guy says, ‘Hello. May I speak to Mr. Chicken?’ And Mr. Rooster says, ‘You son of a bitch, you’re alive! Come, friend! You must come and drink with me at once!’ And so . . . he did.”
James was filled with this odd notion that he was some sort of programmable thing, where a series of inputs which made no sense, if entered in the right sequence, could create a response. He could feel the smile on his face. “I love it.”
“I know, right? I don’t get what it is, but it makes me so happy.”
Neither of them said anything for a while then. Dorian turned back to the TV and switched to a show with a bunch of stand-up comics doing little five-minute sets. James was half listening. Mostly he pictured the small, empty apartment, the phone sitting on a small table. He pictured the guy slamming down the phone and pulling on his coat, running out and forgetting to pull the door closed behind. He didn’t follow him, though. James stayed in that empty apartment. He didn’t want to know anything else about the story, because it was so perfect at that moment, with him running off to meet his friend for a drink.
An hour later, Dorian said her mom would probably be home soon and talked about how crazy she was. The implication that Ms. Delaney would be somewhere beyond upset to find a boy in her house was clear. It was funny to James. It’d been such a simple, chaste day. But parents never believe that—They always assume we’re so much better at this than we really are. James stretched. He didn’t want to leave. For the first time in weeks he wasn’t consumed with the coming War, with nightmares of what lay ahead. He could breathe. It had been a wonderful, wonderful day, and he wanted it to last another fifteen minutes, another hour. He sat in a little wooden seat by the front door as he put his shoes on and thought that he should say something. Do you wanna hang out tomorrow? Can I kiss you? Was this whole day some kind of pity thing? Do you like me? Even if you say yes, I’ll never believe it. Can we please do today over and over and over again? But instead he just retied his left shoe, stalling for time.
As James stood, his left elbow bumped the little glass table by the door and a small frog figurine teetered. James reached out to grab it at the same time Dorian did. He managed to snag the frog but only by barreling through her dainty hand, a thwack as their knuckles met, and she shook out the hurt as he righted the frog.
“Sorry.”
She looked up at him, moving only her eyes. Once again her teeth found her bottom lip. There was half a smile, and something else . . . nervousness?
“You have to kiss it,” she said, extending her hand to James.
James didn’t think. He didn’t analyze or stammer. He leaned forward, took her right hand in his, and kissed the knuckles of her index and middle finger. Her smell filled him, lips to her skin, slightly cool, and the hand in his felt both frail and able.
“You wanna know something embarrassing?” Dorian looked at him, but the bare toes of her right foot worried at the floor like a drill. “When I was little, my dad and I used to play a game where if you hit someone you had to kiss it better. I’m sure it started from an accidental hit one time, but it became a game, too. So, like, I’d punch him in the knee and then kiss his knee and he’d punch my shoulder and kiss my shoulder, like that. Anyway, this one time, I remember I punched him square in the, y’know, in the nuts. And I could tell he was kinda hurt and mad, so I told him I was sorry and I went to kiss it better. And he wouldn’t let me. I remember—god, this is so embarrassing—I remember I started crying because he wouldn’t let me kiss it, ’cause that’s what we did. I’m sure he remembers it, but I’ve never mentioned it to him.
“Isn’t that stupid? Saying it out loud it’s really . . . stupid. I was always too embarrassed to mention it to him or anyone, really, ’cause it sounds weird and creepy, but it wasn’t. Why should I be embarrassed? I was a little kid. It was innocent. I really hate how, as we get older, we keep turning everything uglier and uglier.”
James felt as if anything he could say would land somewhere between meant-well-but-clumsy and tone-deaf moron, so instead he just reached out, slowly, to take her hand. Just before his fingers reached hers, though, Dorian’s hand flashed up. Quick and light, it was at his face before he could do a thing, stopping, then landing a soft tap on the corner of his mouth.
Dorian stepped into the space between them. She put her hands on James’s shoulders, stretched up on her tippy-toes, and kissed the corner of his mouth with delicate precision. He turned his face and caught her mouth—meeting, opening quick, nervous darting tongues. James put his hands on her hips as if he was holding her in place. Move them up? Down? To her but
t? What is expected here? But then it was over, and James had the terrifying feeling that he’d missed it. Wait. No. Again.
“Call me,” Dorian said, because that was the only and perfectest thing to say.
James nodded.
James walked out.
James smelled grass and charcoal briquettes and engine exhaust. He looked back as he mounted his bike, and she smiled and waved and disappeared inside. James rode home, slow and ambling, cutting figure eights in the pavement as “Habanera” played in his head.
49. If you’re unfamiliar with “Habanera” from Bizet’s opera Carmen, feel free to bring it up and listen to it now. The story will be here when you’re ready.
50. Except for the fact that his eyes had welled with tears as he listened. He had no intention of telling her that.
12. The Abduction
From above, it was impossible to tell what James Salley was dreaming about. Unlike the spasming, torquing, twisted-up-in-the-sheets, covered-in-sweat mess that James became when gripped by his now-recurring nightmares, whatever dream held him this morning, it had a very different effect. The covers lay on the floor beside the bed, while his head and chest pushed up. His hands before him, massaging the empty air above the bed as if he held a ball.
Then it was like a charge burned through him and he was awake and stumbling from the bed to his desk, tearing off a half-covered sheet and violently tossing it aside. Hurry, hurry, before it’s gone. James sketched out the face as quick as he could, and the whole time it repeated in his mind: Eliza, Eliza, Eliza. No doubt, this was her. He moved from generalities to specifics, feeling the image seeping out of his memory, returning to the world of dream. Hurry up. Get it down!
There. There it was. Without a doubt.
Eliza.
James felt the full-body release of discovery—glorious relief, along with a clean and weightless sort of joy. He told himself that he was being silly, that it wasn’t a big deal—But that’s her! It’s finally her. James was drunk with the breakthrough. He jumped from his desk and whooped. He slapped his bed and paced his room, his gaze returning again and again to Eliza’s face on the paper.