by Alex Leslie
Short
And that’s when Kendra gets up on the table and announces she has a game for us all to play.
“The name of the game is Is Life Long or Short!” she shouts like a kindergarten teacher directing a field trip. Someone baboon-hoots disconsolately from one of her sagging wing chairs, jammed into a corner to make room for all the grief pooling in the centre of the carpet.
“Get down, Kendra!” someone yells.
I don’t recognize the voice but something in me rallies to their request. Get down. Looking up at her is viscerally tiring to my eyes. My new glasses feel heavy, pressing my forehead back as I look up at her, her arms raised like a prophet’s. “The game goes like, everyone says whether they think life is long or short and why,” she continues to holler.
The same person yells, “This isn’t funny, Kendra!”
Someone else says, “That isn’t even a game. Games don’t have one rule.”
A bunch of people murmur in agreement. Laughter.
“Nononononononono!” Kendra says. I’ve played this game before and it’s really fun!” Kendra is the kind of person who would wear a Wu-Tang Clan crop top to a funeral to honour the deceased’s musical preferences.
I feel sorry for her. She’s losing control of the crowd. So I stand up.
I sway. I’ve been drinking all afternoon, since before the church thing, and the group sad-shuffle-dances over to Kendra’s place and throughout the extended rotation of Chinese takeout and freezer sausage rolls and SuperValu baked brie with canned cranberry sauce tipped on top, Hallowe’en costume gore.
I hear my voice soar outside of myself: “Short.”
Kendra’s eyes flare on me. I’m normally pretty quiet in a crowd.
“Thanks, Soma! Uh. Why?”
I can see that she didn’t really expect anybody to answer.
Faces turn to me. I know most of these people, but haven’t seen a lot of them in years. My mind reels back to camping trips as a kid, flat on my black, watching the stars until I lost consciousness. All of their wide-open, observing faces. At rest, ready for someone to speak. Cognac paddles sloppily through my blood looking for somewhere firm to throw a rope. We’re all here for Elijah, and so it’s time for me to speak.
I say, “Because. Look at this. Look at it. It’s over for Elijah. Short. It’s short. It’s short.”
You’re so drunk, Soma, sit down, the fierce, anxious twin inside me whispers. Faces slope and couple, the starlight from my eyes rippling over them. A grumble of agreement rises under my boots. I really need to buy new boots. These ones have long narrow cracks in the rain-tarred leather, right foot still icy. This season in Vancouver when nothing ever gets dry. Bog city. Tidal pools in the gutters, water always wearing down the cement, coming up through the cracks in everything. I hate this party and wanted to leave hours ago. Why did I even come? Knew staggering down the chipped concrete path to Kendra’s side entrance that it was a point-of-no-return moment, mind galloping ahead to texting my brother drunkenly hours from now, avoiding his replies, sleeping bent between couch cushions, hangover backache, the internal bruising of chosen mistakes. I tried to kick off my wet boots and could not get free, so I stayed on the couch and here I still am. I’ve been here for years.
I stand up and the faces are upturned, waiting.
Slow-clap of the freezer door opening and closing, bottles dragged off hook-toothed ice.
“So your answer is, it’s short.” She nods at me, trying to get me to sit down.
“This is an exorcism!” I scream. My arms out, holding the room steady. Kendra takes a step backward.
“Thanks for sharing, Soma.”
“Long or short! Yeah!” someone hoots.
Long
Right now somebody is talking about that moment, I tell Jim three days later. That moment when I screamed the word exorcism like a fucking maniac. Right this instant, somebody is talking about that.
He unfolds his hands, skin like waxed Pink Lady apples. “And what would they be saying?”
“That I’m...” I search my mind, full of faces. “Crazy.”
“Crazy people are sometimes correct.”
“That’s not the point.”
Jim shrugs. “Then why worry about it?” He holds his lit cigarette out the window.
“Because I care.”
“Could you care less?”
“No.”
He laughs. “Then care some more.”
“Fuck off.”
“You paid for my cappuccino,” he says. “It’s your time to waste.”
Around us in the dim coffee shop that occupies that first floor of our apartment building, students pound away on MacBooks. We’ve been coming here a couple times a week since we met while moving into neighbouring apartments two years ago. The first time I saw Jim I wondered what had happened in his life that someone as old as him was renting a tiny apartment identical to mine. His shoes were too beautiful to belong to my neighbour. Wingtips with tiny white holes bored in the leather.
His high laughter circles my ears as I hold my forehead against the tabletop. Then he drums his fingers on its edge. “Soma. You do this to yourself.”
“No. Something has happened.”
“Something has happened?”
“Something has happened.”
“What has happened?”
“A death.”
“A death has happened.”
“Yes.”
“Yes. A death has happened,” he repeats. “You didn’t tell me everybody was talking about Elijah’s death. You told me everybody was talking about you and the drinking game.”
“It wasn’t a drinking game.”
“No?”
“No, it was a game while drinking.”
“Well. There are games we are more prone to play while intoxicated.”
“A drinking game is a game where drinking is part of the rules.”
“No. According to you and your sophomoric friends, that’s a memorial.”
Long
I got the event notification a week before the memorial/party and clicked “Maybe Attending” so that I could keep an eye on it. It would just stress me out, getting notifications needling at me to make a decision. Those tiny red numbers follow me around like a swarm of insects. So I have this system to pre-manage events as they approach. Deleting the invitation for Elijah’s memorial party (after the brief church thing) would make me feel too guilty—what kind of person avoids a memorial on Facebook? Also the way Kendra wrote the event description—hey guys so a bunch of us have been talking about how to support us all in remembering Elijah and my place is pretty central so I’m just going to bake some brie (yay Costco! lol) and put out some bread and you guys can bring whatever else you want to eat, this is nothing formal and everyones welcome bring your partners and drinking is allowed BYOB but no blacking out at my place I’m way too old for that shit—and on and on like that. To support us all in remembering Elijah—the way we’d swallowed that language, pasted it onto a person we actually knew, like a self-help liturgy. And, worst of all, pasting it onto Elijah, who would have rolled his eyes, hissed, “Bitch, please.” Master of self-improvement. People started posting on the event page right away, about being out of town, about Elijah, and photos of Elijah from our years in undergrad where we met and his scattered shitty jobs, one of Elijah naked on Wreck Beach being held aloft by three skinny guys, and one guy thanked Kendra for “taking one for the team.” A photo of Elijah flipping burgers at Wendy’s. A photo of Elijah lying face down on a sunny lawn, arms out. I’ve known Kendra since I was eighteen. Salt of the earth. When you die, she will put brie in the oven and put out the piles of empties the next morning and send condolence cards to your family who she’s never met in person, your family you swore you’d never go back to, the ones you never stopped running from.
Short
Elijah’s problem was that he had no filters.
The problem with hanging around with people with no filters is that you have two options: listen to all their unfiltered crap, or become the filter.
Being someone’s filter—that shit is exhausting.
I can’t be your friend if it’s too hard to listen to what you’re saying. I don’t mean this is too hard for me right now, but physically I can’t do this with my body right now. If I listen to you for one more minute, I will start to bleed from my eyeballs.
It isn’t fair to say these things after the fact, but here we all are.
Sometimes you just have to tone it down for the sake of people around you. You know?
My strongest memory of Elijah, for no particular reason:
We are sitting on the filthy concrete steps that go down into the basement of a building on campus. We’ve been drinking all afternoon and he starts pulling at his clothes, repeating, “What is this? What is this?” and I don’t know what to do, so I sit there naming things for him: “That’s a sweater, those are pants.” I forget the rest of what happened.
These are your pants, this is your sweater—you can say these things a thousand times to a person, but it will never be enough, if you’re just the filter, waving your fingers in front of their eyes while they look at the sun.
Drop your hands. Proceed calmly.
Long
After I yell the thing about the exorcism, Kendra’s Is Life Long or Short game fizzles out. We all know where Elijah came from, and I sit there like a human bad joke. My cheeks roast, and I think, you assholes, I did more for him than any of you even tried to. She gives me a look, like I’ve ruined things for her. I stare back at her, telegraphing: you tried to turn around a memorial with a drinking game about life and death—I don’t think I’m the problem here. At the same moment, we both look away.
I sit for a long time beside a guy who smells like an old fridge with its door left hanging open. He talks unprompted about his thesis writer’s block for a long time. What is it about PhD students and their Stockholm syndrome? After he’s switched conversation topics to the intimacy problems in his long-distance relationship, someone sitting on the couch across from us drinking straight from a pot-bellied bottle of Chianti says, “How long have you known each other?” and when I answer, “We just met,” the other person starts to laugh, then cry, and I get up and walk to the other side of the room. Too much crying over in that corner near the Chianti.
Kendra confronts me in the kitchen. “An exorcism?” she hisses. “How are you holding up?” The way she says “holding up” means “you are a liability.”
“I don’t need a babysitter,” I snap back, my mind skipping ahead, loosened by alcohol.
“I don’t want this to get messy,” Kendra says.
“Is life long or short?” I half-yell. It is hard to get un-drunk, in the moment. And then, “Oh my god, did you just shove me?”
“I didn’t shove you, just don’t be weird tonight.” She takes her hands off my shoulders.
We stand, staring at each other, and she gathers me into her arms.
I can tell she cleaned her apartment for Elijah. She smells like Comet cleaner and brie grease. She’s wearing a maroon dress with a clashing purple scarf because she doesn’t own any black clothes. Had her hair done. Holding her, I feel the years of our friendship. The friendships of my twenties have been a series of misfires and explosions, but Kendra has endured, indifferent to the deep pendulum rhythm of my moods. When her mother died two years back, she called me and I drove her to the small town in northern BC where she was from, called in sick to my job at the restaurant, spent three days taking her around the town, finding a coroner, sitting with her relatives, washing and folding her mother’s bras and chunky sweaters in the laundromat below the movie theatre. Her uncles brought buckets of KFC to her mom’s place and we ate in a circle on the living room couches. We slept in the same bed and I wanted to take home every too-thin dog I saw at the side of the road. A van parked behind the church was where people got dental checkups. The town she’s from is bisected by a highway and neighboured by a hydroelectric dam, but none of her relatives talked about their jobs. Her mom’s memorial was in a tiny proper funeral home that was like a cross between an IHOP and a bingo hall. I drove us back down to Vancouver and we both went back to our jobs the next morning as if nothing had happened. She sent me a text message: eating sushi bad rnb playing after were dead bruno mars will keep playing in sushi places.
She holds me now and rubs my back in wide, soft circles.
Walking away, she says over her shoulder, “Try not to be like him tonight.”
Long
About a week after the party, Jim knocks on my door with a bag of doughnuts and two Americanos. He steps over the clothes and books covering the floor of my apartment and puts the cups down on the windowsill.
“Jim, is life long or short?” I ask.
He drinks. “I don’t want to answer that question.”
“You have to answer!”
“Why?”
“Because you’re the only old person I’m friends with.”
He laughs softly and holds his palm against the window.
“There’s nothing to understand, Soma.”
“What do you mean?”
“No doctor will tell you this, but depression is a terminal illness.”
Outside, wind sucks meat from the bones of the bare trees.
When my eyes return to his face, he’s blowing hot white circles on the glass. “You should clean your windows, Soma.”
“Whatever.”
“Seriously. It’s disgusting in here. You’re a disgusting pig.”
Jim’s apartment next door is austerely clean: two pine bookcases full of alphabetized records and a low marble slab table holding up glazed turquoise bowls full of glass fishing floats. Over the course of my many visits there, the door to the bedroom has never been left open. It’s possible he sleeps on a wooden plank like a penitent gay monk. After he got the payout from the government for his botched transfusion, he did a “radical downsize” and decided to live out his fatigue as simply as possible.
“I’m too tired,” I tell him.
“You might feel better if you weren’t sitting here festering like an old bag.” He blows more circles on the window, the steam matching the white of his dense stubble. “Come, Soma,” he says, and I follow him around my tiny apartment, sorting clothes into piles and loading stray plates and cups into the sink. When we’re finished we go next door to his apartment and he boils noodles and stirs them with eggs and ham. We drink glasses of white wine and then green tea, and I fall asleep on his couch before he leaves for his mid-afternoon walk. I dream about Elijah running through an empty field, legs cycling as he tumbles through space, the burnt summer grass glowing and bristling behind him.
Short
The strangest thing about Elijah’s memorial party is that he’s here. The way he holds his glass—limp, loose, like he’s about to let it slip and go crashing down. He always finds a wall to stand beside and he holds his glass just this way. Sometimes, looking at him, I can tell he’s forgotten where he is. Here, where he’s surrounded by people, a veil comes over him, a quietness between him and everyone else. When people speak to him and he’s unplugged, he smiles with fond disinterest. Everybody should stop trying so hard, that smile says to me. It’s such a shame we have to try so hard with each other. I remember feeling that way when I was seventeen, nineteen, a sense that it was all a charade, we were all just going through the motions of becoming humans. It takes a while to grow a person. But at some point, we all outgrow that charade feeling, don’t we? Or pretend to. But you can tell Elijah never lost it—you can see it on him. He wears it. It makes people wary. He isn’t the kind of person you can say that to, though.
We hadn’t talked in a few weeks whe
n I heard the news. I would never say this out loud, but when I heard he jumped from the Lion’s Gate Bridge I wasn’t surprised. Kendra called me to break the news. I couldn’t have predicted. A part of me knew that he wasn’t in it for the long haul. He looked at all of us as if we were optional.
I can’t tell you the colour of his eyes. I think of him, hold him right here in my mind, and I think of his watchfulness, a gaze with no colour. Light laid on shallow water. Barely perceptible movement. Just passing through.
At his party, I watch him. He witnesses the whole thing. He’s there, standing in the corner, in the shelter of the wall, watching all the people he’s known over the course of his twenties drain the black and copper bottles that crowd the counters and tables. Bored, he watches me fade in and out of a dozen conversations with people I’ve forgotten, people who knew me only as Elijah’s friend, the one people always assumed would pick Elijah up from the hospital when things got sketchy and he dropped out of the world for periods of time. He watches me drink and drink and drink, argue with Kendra, he watches the young men in black suits from his home arrive and reduce the room to silence, he still hates them, but all our bodies together in the same room praying and drinking, there is something in that worth hanging around for, and he watches me go home with a woman at dawn.
Long
At some point in the ageless pale hours of early morning, someone reprises the game. The leader is a friend of Elijah’s from the comic-book festival he worked at for two summers. Misha, with a stop-start way of speaking, a head of red leaves. They fucked for a while, on and off. Elijah cared less. The top and bottom buttons of his shiny purple dress shirt undone. Elijah had a talent for collecting people. One time I told him he was the most non-judgmental person I’d ever known. He looked at me archly and answered, “It isn’t that I don’t judge, it’s that I don’t care.” He looked disappointed in me, as if I’d missed some very obvious point.
Misha raises his glass. “Long,” he says.
Kendra, still moderating through the monocle of an amber glass: “Why long?”