by Dan Dalton
A road sign points to the twin cities of Agony and Bliss.
In the weeks before the bubble burst, Sophia starts acting strangely with her phone. She puts it down when I walk in the room. Replies to texts when she thinks I’m sleeping. There are nights when I don’t hear from her at all. She works late. Record label shit. But what happens is I start to think maybe it isn’t work. The more I think about it, the more convinced I become.
When she breaks up with me I know it’s because she’s found someone else. A co-worker. An ex. Something easy. Something sans feelings, sans strings. I need it to be true. There’s always overlap. If she’s fucking someone else I can be upset, angry. I get to be the victim.
The alternative, that she just fell out of love with me, is too upsetting to contemplate.
A hand on my forehead. Here, love, drink this. My mum. She tilts a bottle to my lips. I shut my eyes. Mum asks what’s wrong. I can’t keep track, memories slip, shift. I’m tired, Mum, I say. She checks my forehead. You don’t have a temperature, love. Maybe you should get some sleep.
I’m thirty-one, at my parents’ house. Sophia broke up with me three days ago. I got on a train. Needed my mum. She brings me water, checks my temperature. Your dad could use a hand in the garden if you’re up to it, she says. I roll over, stare at my phone. My stomach feels foreign, like a transplant my body is rejecting. Why doesn’t she want me, I say. Mum pats my hand. I’m sure your dad can manage without you.
The break-up was our third. The first two times we didn’t get far. A day or two before we caved, gave in. The first two were in person. We cried, went our separate ways, only to collide again when willpower wore thin. The third was via text. You can’t see tears over text, can’t see hearts shatter. Can’t see how your words, simply stated, can crush completely.
The perma-dusk plays host to a mix of suburban sprawls, all borrowed from places I’ve lived: the high rises of London, the tenements of Manhattan, the terraced houses of my Yorkshire youth, the suburbs of Los Angeles. Buildings contract and swell as we pass, as if they’re breathing. Whole city blocks rise and fall like the metal pins in one of those executive toys.
I’m cold. I find a bag in back, rummage through it, grab a black T-shirt. I pull it on over the other two. It’s a Tomorrow Knights shirt. They had a couple of catchphrases. For a better tomorrow was one. This T-shirt features the other in a neon graffiti font: It’s Knight time.
Paul asks about my brother. He’s good, I say. Jon shakes his head. They don’t talk, he says. Not since you died. He doesn’t take his eyes off the road. I look at Paul. It’s not that, I say. We’ve just been busy. Paul rubs what’s left of his lower mandible. Chinny reckon. That’s what a ten-year-old says when they know you’re lying. In the passenger seat, Jon strokes his chin along with Paul.
My brother was Paul’s friend too. As kids we rode bikes, climbed trees. Chased girls. As teenagers, Paul was the glue that kept us together. Until the crash. I moved to London after that. Pete didn’t have anything to say to me. A month turned into a year, a year into two. He didn’t come to my wedding. He teaches high school English. He’s married, has a kid. He wrote a book.
I’m not sure if he wrote a book because he wanted to be a writer, or if he did it just to spite me.
I slip in and out to stereo sounds, to Jon singing. Suburbs give way to farmlands. Above, satellites twinkle like stars, each a dream, a hope, slowly drifting across the night sky. I think about Sophia, wonder where she is. Out there, in here. I think about how many of those satellites were launched by her. How many moon shots I took that never left orbit.
A song ends and I brace myself for the next. I know what it’s going to be. I made this tape. One of Jon’s. A favourite. The opening chords give me goosebumps still, more than twenty years after I first heard it. He moves to turn it off, but I tell him to leave it. We listen a moment.
I let the lyrics sink in, tears gathering. Shit, I say. You made it sound so simple, you know. I grew up believing this stuff. That if you loved someone enough everything would be okay. Jon turns down the volume. Sometimes it’s that simple, he says. And sometimes a song’s just a song.
As it rises into the second chorus, I watch the volume dial spin, hear it climb louder, feel it vibrate through the speakers in the door. Jon twists it, tries to turn it off, but nothing happens. Around us, satellites fall like snowflakes, sparkling against the night sky, scattering across fields and farms, setting the landscape on fire. Jon swerves to avoid a solar panel in the road. He pulls over, and we watch the light show. The night glows orange around us. It’s raining dreams.
Paul turns in his seat, his lack of face showing something like concern. His shirt is spattered with blood. Pink spittle sprays from his mouth as he speaks. All this is over a girl, he says. I tell him he wouldn’t understand. What you asked earlier, he says. Is it not enough just to live.
I’m thirty-one and Sophia is breaking my heart for the first time. I can barely stand. The words I manage are forced through tears. I don’t have anything without you. She sobs and collapses into a chair. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I can taste salt as she tells me she didn’t mean for it to end like this.
I ask her not to do this. She already has. We hug goodbye. The feel of her body pressed against mine gets me hard. She feels me stir and pulls back. Sorry, I say. Instinct. Hard-ons are mostly inappropriate. I grab my coat. It’s raining out. I make it a block before I break down in tears.
Three days later dinner turns into drunken kissing in the street. We stumble home into bed, stripping, laughing, happy to feel something other than the crippling grief of goodbye.
Paul ejects the tape and the satellite storm ends. Light from the flames flickers across our faces, or our lack thereof. It’s like watching the sun rise, a thousand small fires simulating a star creeping over the edge of the horizon. Turns out hope burns bright.
What I don’t tell them is that Sophia is sitting next to me in back, glowing. Between us, a girl, no more than two years old. Our girl. I blink away a tear, and she’s gone.
Paul says: Try to win her back.
I say: There’s nothing to win.
I’m thirty-one, she’s breaking up with me for the second time. It’s a hot summer night and we’re drunk. I see her phone light up, I get angry. She baulks. I can’t do this any more. I apologise. We cry, console each other, roll to opposite sides of the bed. I fall asleep quickly, exhausted from tears.
In the morning I feel her lips press into mine. She rolls into me, plays little spoon, pushing her arse back, probing. I get hard quickly, pull her face around, kiss her. We smell of sleep and sweat and stale breath. I slide a hand into her knickers, let my fingers hover between her lips. She nods. Yes. I slide my fingers into her cunt, curling them slowly as she sighs and rolls back into me. I pull at her knickers, at my boxers, we push them down, kick them off. She straddles me, flesh on bare flesh. My hands gauge her hip bones, guiding her on to me. I claw at her, digging, gripping, rocking her body into mine. Grunting, wet slaps. She kisses me, bites my neck. I cry in pain, grab a fistful of her hair, pull her head back. I hold her there. Desperate, necessary. Fuck. Yes. Fuck.
She grinds against me, my cock solid inside her, swelling still. I pull her hair, press my hand to her throat. Her face burns red, sweat dripping between us. Friction, clenched teeth: Fuck. I loosen my grip, let her draw breath. She holds it, rocks harder against me, pushing me closer to the edge. My fingers dig into her hips. Her whole body is tense, shaking. Then: I’m gonna come. Her eyes roll back as she bucks, lets fly with a loud, Fuck. I’ve been clenching my teeth, holding back, but her orgasm tips me over. She can feel it. Come for me, baby, she says. I speed up, groan, go rigid, unload inside her. She sighs, slows her hips. Then we’re still, sticky hot, panting. We lie intertwined. I stroke her hair, kiss her softly, watch beads of sweat run between her breasts. Later, over brunch, in the sober glow of morning, we decide to keep things going.
If you really want to fuck someone
up, love them as hard as you can. I loved her so hard she couldn’t breathe. My email should have been five words: I suffocated you. I’m sorry.
I persuade them to let me take a turn at the wheel. Jon reclines in back. Paul rides shotgun. It’s hard to tell if he’s resting or not. He doesn’t have eyelids. Or eyes, really. Just dark holes where they used to be. Blood drips from the sockets like tears. His is a face in mourning for itself.
The car is in cruise. I’m only steering. That’s mostly how people drive, steering themselves down highways, through lives. Paul stirs, asks if I’m okay. I know I said I wanted to go back, I say, but what’s waiting for me out there. Paul shakes his head. Have a day off or something. It’s tiring.
I bite the nail off my index finger in a perfect arc. In my rear view, I see imaginary passengers in the back seat, changing with the blink of tired eyes. My mum now. How many great loves do you think you have, I say. She looks like she might cry. As many as your heart can take.
The highway is built from huge preformed slabs dropped into place like toy bricks. The tyres make a dum dum noise as we roll over the seams between each. I think people are like alloys, my dad says. You make each other stronger. He tells me I’m speeding. What’s the opposite of an alloy, I say. When I look up, Sophia sits where my dad was. She’s looking at me sideways: Do you ever think you’re depressed because secretly, deep down, you want to be.
Dum dum.
My brother’s book was called Excursion. We pass a billboard advertising it. There’s a quote from Stephen King: Better than his fucking brother can do, that’s for sure.
The book is about Paul. Technically it’s about a group of teen misfits, left behind while their classmates are on a field trip, who have to fight off an alien who crashes on school grounds. But it’s based on him and Paul. Mum sent me a copy. I asked her what it was about. Friendship, she said. It sold well enough, was reviewed by a couple of papers. The Guardian said it was competent. The posters said it was The Breakfast Club meets Aliens. Everything is derivative.
Dum dum.
Jon is out cold in the seat behind me. Paul snores, which is understandable. We drive in silence until Sophia suggests a sing-along. She’s not really here, but I indulge her. What do you know, I say. It takes us ten minutes to find the only song we both know the lyrics to: ‘Mr Brightside’. Well, I say. It did start with a kiss. She laughs. It hurts in the good way.
The mixtape for this would be: Songs to Keep You the Fuck Awake.
Mum used to sing to us at bedtime. The first songs I loved weren’t popular music, they were hers. The ones her mother used to sing to her. She’d tuck us in, serenade us to sleep. The one I liked best was about Christopher Robin. I always thought I’d sing it to my kids someday.
When she’d finish singing she’d ask if we were asleep. Sometimes we’d say yes and laugh. Sometimes we’d pretend to sleep, squinting through barely open eyes. She could always tell, but she didn’t mind. She used to say the best way to fall asleep is to close your eyes and pretend.
I asked her to stop singing to me, eventually. I was eight, suddenly embarrassed. Desperate to cast off childish things. I bet it broke her heart. Kids will just about ruin you. Ask your parents.
Someone slaps my arm from the back seat. What the fuck. I jerk awake. Were you sleeping. My brother, Pete. I shake my head. Of course not. His form fades away. I roll down the window, sit up in my seat, flagging, failing, in no state to drive.
Somewhere in my mind, Mum is singing me to sleep. A song she used to sing when we were very young. Back when the best way to fall asleep was by pretending. I let my eyelids fall shut. All is peaceful as the car sails across lanes, the soft ripples of memory in our wake.
Dum dum.
Seventeen
Pennsylvania / Violence
The clock on the dash blinks eights. Each a thud, an echo. I wonder if it’s trying to communicate, if it’s a code I can’t read. Above, the night sky is absent all light. No moon. No stars. The scene is lit entirely by hazard bulbs, strobing orange, a warning for something that’s already happened.
An air bag lies half inflated in front of me. Rousing, I realise I’m covered in blood, broken glass. The windshield is shattered. My face feels numb, my nose tender. I don’t think it’s broken. I try to pull my seat belt off, it gives on the third go. I find my collar bone sore, my neck stiff. Lights and eights blinking in tandem. I feel for the door handle, pull it, eject myself from the van, lie buckled on the glass pebbled tarmac where I open my eyes to see a night filled with stars.
Sometimes what you think is the sky is only the cold metal roof of a family minivan.
I stand up, wrench the back of the van open. No Paul. I stare through the shattered windshield. Even through foggy thoughts I can do the rudimentary maths. I walk to the front. The van is nestled up against the barrier, front end caved. The car we hit has done a one-eighty, drifted across two lanes. It faces the wrong way, so that at a glance it appears nothing is damaged.
Sheepshank stomach. Half-hitch heart. I know what I’m about to see. My eyes adjust. Paul’s body lies prone forty paces past the crash. I stumble over. I’m almost in touching distance when I realise I’m walking in the remnants of his face: blood, bone, bits. I jump to the left.
I’m twenty-two, looking at my best friend’s body. I can’t find his face, I say.
I’m twenty-two. Dad is picking me up from the airport in London. Paul is two days dead. Dad doesn’t say much. I went away his boy, came back a stranger. I apologise. He talks about the weather. We’re different after this. He couldn’t help it. Paul was a person, not a carpet.
Here, now, I sit next to Paul, take his hand, say sorry. I never got the chance last time. I didn’t know how to say goodbye, then. I sat, shocked and silent. Tongue-tied. Tearful.
After three days of traversing my own mind, it’s not a huge surprise when he rolls over, sits up, takes his hand back. Stop being a mopey cunt, will you, he says. It’s not over yet. He puts his hand back out. While you’re here, smell my fingers. He laughs, blood dripping all over the sheet.
Traffic starts to stack up behind us. I can’t see the cars, the drivers. Only dipped headlights and darkness. A chorus of horns punctuate their own futility. In the distance, sirens. You’re never far from a siren in America. Here they echo over the curve of the earth. Closer, an alarm rings between my ears. I’m on the clock. It’s day four. I need to keep moving.
Guess this is where you leave me, I say.
It was always going to end here.
You didn’t get to see the end.
Another time, maybe.
Another time.
Gurgle.
Cough.
He turns over. Unface down. The way I left him a decade ago.
An ambulance arrives, blue light flashing between orange flickers. Amber and teal. I watch the paramedics lead my twenty-two-year-old self, shocked and shivering, to the back of the truck, a foil blanket wrapped over my shoulders. I look like I’ve just killed my best friend.
Maybe I killed myself then too. Maybe it just took a decade to realise.
Behind me, a loud bang as the side of the minivan slides open. Jon climbs from the wreckage. Or falls from it, depending who you ask. Shit, he says. Two crashes in two days. You’re killing me. After a beat he adds the word literally. He rolls his neck, his shoulders. I hear the pop and crack of air escaping his joints. He asks if Paul is dead again. I nod. Shit. Guess he’s used to it by now.
Keep moving. I turn heel, stride away from the crash, from the traffic. Jon follows along. A swelling crowd of memories have abandoned their cars in the tail back, deciding to walk rather than get left behind by the plot. A highway full of broken promises on a last-chance mercy drive.
Jon says: Is a road trip still a road trip if you finish it on foot.
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I hold my notebook, rolled like a baton. It feels heavy, burdensome. I haven’t written in days. T
here is nowhere to put it, no one to hand it off to. Books were a refuge, once. This one feels like a prison. A story I’m trapped in. Most writing is avoiding writing, Jon says. You’re doing great.
After the break-up I couldn’t read, couldn’t write, couldn’t concentrate on much of anything.
The way I got back into reading was I started buying children’s books. Books with big print, simple themes. My favourite is Not Now, Bernard. It’s about a lonely kid who becomes the monster that haunts him. Any book is a self-help book if you read it right.
Smoke billows across the highway from the burning expanse beyond: plains or meadows or small towns. I don’t know. The smog, caustic, acrid, has cut visibility to a few feet. I pull my T-shirt over my nose, blink tears from my eyes. Jon ties a bandana around his face. We look like we’re about to hold up a gas station. His fuse is running short. He gets bumped and goes full New Jersey. Hey buddy, I’m walking here. He turns to me and grins. Always wanted to say that.
In the crowd my brother and I barge between bodies, pushing, scuffling, laughing. We used to be so small. We bounced, then. Before life made us big and fragile.