The Blue Hour

by Laura Pritchett

  Di stood, closed her eyes, took a huge breath, and let it out long and slow. She opened her eyes, looked at Flannery, mumbled a few words of departure. She said she wanted to leave before dark—adrenaline-junkie that she was, she didn’t want to be on the roads at dusk, when the deer would be out. There were limitations to what dangers one wanted to embrace, after all.

  Flannery waited a few days for the call in which Di said, “I just can’t live without you, I need you, we’ll work it out, we’ll find a way,” or anything resembling that, and when it didn’t come, Flannery looked up at her spinning ceiling, uncomfortably drunk, as she’d been every night since the motorcycle day, and discovered her mantra: Okay, universe, you win.

  Then she got up. She was never one for lying in bed, even in the most depressed times of her various depressions; her body just couldn’t stay still for long. Even when moving about, though, she felt heavy. Her chest, without a doubt, weighed thousands of pounds. This fact had to do with a loneliness caused by a tiny weightless virus.

  She continued to get up and go to work, she continued to brush her teeth, she continued to take out the trash from her crappy little trailer and throw it into the bin behind Moon’s Restaurant. She continued to lock the bear-safety lock, even though it seemed like no one else did.

  No one in the little mountain town noticed a difference in her mood. How could they? She was new, after all, had worked only as a very-part-time helper at the vet clinic for a month now, in order to get to know some folks, and otherwise did some web design on the side. But her world was foggy, as if inside many panes of glass. She watched her hands answer the phone, hold a dog on the weight scale, write an appointment. She heard her voice respond to her boss, Ruben, telling him where she’d put the new shipment of antibiotics. She cleaned up dog shit after an old German shepherd lost control. She sold iodine to the meth couple, a huge amount of birdseed to the old man who’d just lost his wife, expensive cat food to the beekeeper woman who looked like she couldn’t afford to eat herself. She stroked kitten ears and purred at them for their human owners, so that they all could feel warm emotion, feel special. She watched as occasional snowflakes sporadically spit themselves around and wondered what it looked like up close, the virus, and if it resembled crystals of snow.

  She saw them on the roads now, the Ducatisti, as they called themselves, the little groups on their motorcycles. Funny how that happened, how once you were infected with knowledge, you saw it everywhere. She knew cyclists of all kinds from down in town loved this mountain road, scenic and deserted as it was, but she’d never paid attention. Now she found herself looking at the bundled-up riders leaning into the curves, how the passenger, if there was one, had a hand bracing for a stop.

  From her car or from the vet clinic, she watched them go by, and her mind would narrate the same narrative it had for years, a little singsongy list that had become an addiction, one that she tapped a finger to note each point:

  It was hard, so-o-o-o hard, to find someone who was

  queer,

  your approximate age,

  interesting and compatible and worth loving,

  at the right place for a relationship—timing was perhaps a stronger force even than love—and finally,

  would not grow cold when you told them about something beyond your control, not like a personality quirk, which could be changed, but something sturdy and huge, something that had enough power to assure its victory.

  It started getting cold and she was not doing okay. This was her first fall in Colorado, and she’d figured it would be much like Seattle, but it was not. She was surprised by the sheer cold of the nights, how short the days were becoming, the strength of the wind. She found herself muttering you win, you win at random times, in a bitter way that surprised even herself, even once said it to Ruben, who said, “What? I win? What do I win?” to which she laughed and made some joke and told herself to stop saying it, both aloud and in her mind. She tried Tinder and Match and PinkSofa again, and expanded the mileage range. “Looking for woman within 2,000 miles,” she typed in once, drunk, laughing with the saddest noise she’d ever heard herself make. She kept going to the grocery store and cooking, although she spent more time looking at the night sky than she’d ever done before.

  Then suddenly there was a blizzard and there was a suicide on the mountain. A nice man, a gentle man, a man who was technically the owner of the vet clinic but whom she’d rarely met because he’d taken time off, leaving Ruben in charge, which is why Ruben had hired her, he not being able to do it all. This man, Sy, was known to have schizophrenia, also something out of his control, and she’d heard he often spoke about the stars whispering to him.

  His death hurt like a motherfucker. She didn’t know the guy, after all. But she cried and cried for him. Perhaps because they were both at the mercy of some little off-kilter thing in the body, perhaps because she’d started considering it herself.

  Now she was saying it all the time: “Okay, universe, you win. You win.” During random times throughout the day, in her sleep, to cans at the grocery store. “Okay, virus. You win. I kept trying. I kept looking. I kept hoping. Now I’m done. Truly done. I give up. Look what you do to everyone. You win. You win.”

  She was sure that Sy had killed himself out of loneliness; most of humanity was suffering an epidemic of loneliness, and clearly, he had finally said to the universe: You win.

  She went to the ceremony, held a week after his death, and wrote it in the snow outside the grange with an ungloved finger before she walked in. YOU WIN. The others on the mountain had spent the week digging themselves out and various cars and trucks were pulling into the parking lot of an old brick building, or over at the parking area for the post office nearby, and people were trudging through the snow, and so in one small sense, the universe had not won, here was evidence of the fight against it. In the larger sense it had, and always would, and worst of all, was indifferent to its success.

  Flannery stood, gazing at her writing in the snow as people started to filter by. A few stopped to say hello or ask if she wanted to join them inside, but she said she’d come in a moment. She waited until they’d all gone inside. Hard new flakes settled over her letters and she decided she’d move off the mountain in the spring. Moving was not the solution to everything, perhaps nothing, but as she saw how fast her marks would be impermanent, she was clear that she had to do something tangible. Her move here hadn’t changed anything, after all, hadn’t led her closer to family or community or love, and so she’d simply move on, to keep from doing what Sy had just done. She couldn’t be rid of this virus. She couldn’t make someone love her. She couldn’t make the universe cause her path to careen into someone else’s.

  What could she do? The roar of defeat was so great that she couldn’t move for a long time. An idea came to her, then. An idea that even made her smile. She glanced at the grange. No one could see her out here; she was facing a bricked wall; the windows and door were on the other side. So she pulled down her tights, held up her black skirt, squatted, and peed. She melted the letters herself before the universe had its chance to cover them up. She smiled the whole time that the urine hissed, and then she stood up and pulled up her tights and smoothed her skirt and looked down at the melting letters. “You win, but fuck you,” she said. Then she went inside, to be among others and to grieve it all. Come spring, she’d pack her bags, load up her car, and drive off the mountain. Perhaps she’d get a Ducati. Although, no, she didn’t want a motorcycle herself. Just something similar, something so sturdy that she could lean toward a danger and be held.

  Chapter Ten

  Boxed Up

  No way around it. Un-hinged. That’s what she is. I’m always having to move, there’s some fuck thing wrong with everyplace, and now she’s ruined the mountain for me. I wanted to maybe even settle here for good and now look. I thought maybe I’d found a relationship and a place that would work. She said she didn’t like the way I tr
eated my dog, but what she doesn’t understand, that unhinged bitch, is that it’s a pit bull. Any way it gets treated is better than its other fate, which would be to be put down. In fact, that’s why I had to leave the last town, now that I think about it. Pit bull ordinance. But also, and most importantly, I treat this dog really well. It sleeps with me at night, cuddled in my arms. We have an understanding, me and this dog; we both love love.

  How I got messed up with this girl, I don’t know. I must not have been thinking correctly and I should learn from that in the future. She seemed nice at first. We had some good times and she was a good cook. Fantastic sex, including third input, which is my fav.

  She said that anytime a dog shits in a house, it means it hasn’t been out enough, that I need to let this dog out, but I’m sorry, Dandelion, in the meadow are things like mountain lions and bears, not to mention an expanse of about a zillion miles in which a dog could, and would, get lost and die of starvation. Talk about suffering then. What she fails to understand, and maybe I should feel sorry for her, maybe I should try to be more compassionate, because she’s so mentally ill—bipolar I would guess, if I had to—is that the dog is just being passive-aggressive. He’s shitting inside on purpose just to show me he’s pissed. Because it gets a rise out of me, sure. I lose my temper. And so BW does it when he wants to make me mad. Can she not see that?

  I’m not kidding. Anyone who has had a pit bull knows how smart they are. The dog gets out plenty. The dog doesn’t partic-ularly like the outside. The dog is an inside dog and is, frankly, just happy to be alive.

  For instance, BW, at this very moment, is looking at me looking at him. Puts his big boxy head right on my lap. What a doofus. I love this dog.

  Before I leave the mountain, I want to get her back. She’s suddenly moved in with her cousin Flannery, one of those gorgeous women who thinks she’s gay but is just a man-hating bitch. They met at the funeral of the dude who offed himself. What I want is for everyone to see who this bitch really is. She’s got them thinking that she’s this sweet, horseback-riding country girl who got mixed up with bad company, and probably everyone thinks she’s lovely, and I don’t blame them. That’s the thing about mental illness. She can be charming, but underneath she’s just a psychopath or something. Sociopath, that’s the word.

  Because she has no emotion. Like, told me she was going to call the police on me if I texted, called, or emailed her one more time and that would be the last thing I wanted, given my business and all. What I was trying to do was work it out. Apologize for some stuff, get her to apologize. Communication is the key to relationships, I told her. And she said to me, stone-faced, totally without emotion, Not when it’s with you, Luce, there’s something really wrong with you.

  This sort of behavior is called gaslighting. Ingrid Bergman and all that. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, then fuck you. There should be justice. Some fairness. I just got to figure out what to do.

  I think she is unstable. Maybe even delusional. She can say things that cut right to the bone. Like, criticizing my dog, when she knows full well that he’s the one thing I love the most. That he’s all I got. Now I realize she was gaslighting me all along.

  Everyone knows I love this dog. That I would never hurt this dog. He’s still on the couch with me, with his tummy up in the air. He loves tummy rubs, man. L-u-u-ves them. So exposed and vulnerable like that, his dick exposed like that. I thought about killing the dog and then making it clear she did it. But that’s an outright lie and I want people to know the truth. The truth is bad enough. I’ll just expose her for the unhinged bitch she is. I got to be very careful here. Because I can do stupid shit, and I don’t want to get arrested.

  What she does is try to dehumanize people. She comes across as being oh-so-human, celebrating humanity, but all she really does is stab people. But not in the back. No. Right in the front, right in the heart. She said we weren’t “a good fit” and she “needed to move on, into something where a future looked not only better, but like it might actually happen.” But she never would explain what that meant. What if I needed more clarity? Well, fuck Luce for wanting more clarity. She’s a narcissist, that’s what she is. Couldn’t even reach out to me for a moment, to just help me understand. To give me some good reasons other than “we weren’t a good fit” and “I don’t like the way you treat your dog, leaving him in that kennel so much, who wants to be in a box?” I think she has borderline personality disorder. I should have written her a note and told her to look it up.

  What I did do was write to her mother. I told her that her daughter was unhinged. I said it all professional, though, emailed and formal. That I had concerns about her mental health and wanted her to be aware of it. That Dandelion had seemed charming and gracious, which is why it was such a surprise to discover she had severe bipolar tendencies.

  I told Dandelion specifically: I am having a breakdown. Like serious. Like I need your help. I’m sorry I was an asshole. I’m not trying to manipulate you. Please look past my recent behavior. If you can find some empathy, please call me. Please.

  But no. Dandelion knows how to stab straight in and then twist the knife. Because she knew she could, and she was good at it. Do I sometimes say the wrong things? Yes. Do I sometimes act rashly? Yes. I am a messy human. But instead of loving that about me, or accepting it, she just pushed me away.

  Well, I boxed up my stuff. Everything’s boxed up and will fit in the car.

  Except the dog.

  I just called my sister, because I got a landline here and I didn’t pay my cell phone bill and I might as well make a long-distance call before I bolt. My sister’s the only one in my goddamn family who is sane, although that is most certainly a relative term, and she said, “Oh, Michael Bradley, moving again? Do you not see a pattern here? Do you not see it could be you?” Then she lost her temper. “You don’t cook. You rely on Dad for money. You don’t do anything for anyone. You don’t go to church—” at which point I lost it and said, “Shut up, you fucking bitch, my name is Luce, and you sound like Ma, and I don’t believe in a god, that’s why I don’t go to church, why do I have to be related to a bunch of wacko religious fuckheads?” and she said, “Maybe it would help you because I don’t know what else will, but my point is, when you think everything is someone else’s fault, that they’re all crazy, maybe you should look in. Look at yourself,” at which point, I hung up.

  What a bitch. I should do something about her as well.

  But I feel sorry for her, and I will find compassion, because we did not, shall I say, have an easy childhood. When our ma died a few years back, I went through her last diary. It said and I quote, I never turned any of my children over to child pornography. Nor medical experimentation. Nor did I abandon them. And I said, Awww, thanks, Ma. What a stellar set of decisions. When I told her about the priest, why I didn’t want to go to church, she said it would keep me from Latching Up, or whatever the kids’ expression is these days, and when I stammered because that was what the priest was doing, it’s like she read my mind and she said, “It’s in the news, how the priests did some ‘fiddling’ around, but we both know those boys were probably messed up anyway and had it coming to them anyway.” That is how her logic worked. As fucked up as fucked can get. So when my ma died, right before she died, while she was on her deathbed, you can better believe that I said, “Ma, I hope your god forgives you. ’Cause I sure the hell won’t. You were a disgusting mother and a disgusting human being. Good-fucking-bye.”

  But first, Her.

  What I want to do is wreck up her life for a bit. Not break her leg or something, although that would be satisfying. It would be nice for her to feel some pain. What a sociopath. The thing I could do that would most hurt her is to leave her with a sense of unease. Like, there’s someone out there, watching her forever. Like a god. I’ll post some things on the Internet and Facebook friend her—under a pseudonym, of course—but something else, something a lot more painful that will kee
p her guessing for her entire life.

  One great movie is Dr. Strangelove and if you don’t know what I’m talking about, then fuck you. There’s that line, We would suffer modest but acceptable casualties. Great line, great line. Plus the precious body fluids thing. That’s my goal here. Modest but acceptable casualties, having to do with body fluids that will leave her uneasy forever.

  Yes. Now I know.

  I just think it’s so unfair. I was born into the wrong family and thus feel like an outcast. I have the wrong kind of dog, and the world makes me feel like an outcast. She says I have an affect, tics, and that makes me feel like an outcast. I move to a little mountain town and my woman breaks up with me and again I feel like an outcast.

  The dog thinks I’m just a charming oddball, in a world full of boring Normies. When you get tricked, I tell the dog, it gets painful.

  She made me think she loved me and then she does something like telling me to either walk my dog three times a day or build it a fence, and then makes me think I’m way off base. This dog doesn’t even like going outside! The dog likes the kennel; it makes him feel safe and secure. Plus, it’s his punishment for shitting in the house. He likes sitting on the couch next to me. He’s basically a baby. A wuss. Look at his fuzzy little dick. Look how trusting he is. Like me. Suddenly this sweet dog turned me and Dandelion into a we’re-over. A bait-and-switch. Because she is unhinged.