A Matter of Life and Death or Something

by Ben Stephenson

  I closed my eyes for a second and manufactured some courage. She had her back to me and was looking towards the woods. I tapped her on the arm. She turned around really quick and I panicked inside my brain.

  “Your husband died of cancer,” I almost screamed. I turned paralysed and swallowed so hard that it felt like it cut my throat. My feet scrunched up in my boots and my eyes shivered.

  Rosie just looked at me. She was still smiling.

  “Yes, he did.” she said.

  “And he was the true love of your life.”

  Rosie nodded. When she noticed that my eyes were starting to cry a little bit, she unhooked her waist straps and knelt down and gave me a hug. She was being very nice. She even said “Thanks for helping pull Icebird. It gets heavy sometimes.”

  The thing was that even though she was being so nice, I knew I was a complete moron. I hadn’t helped her pull Icebird at all, really, and even if I did it was for about thirty seconds. I blew it, and she was just trying to make me feel better. I couldn’t even ask her a question. She was hugging me because her husband died of cancer, and that didn’t even make any sense. And she still knew nothing about Phil, and who knows if she was my grandmother. I still wanted to get her autograph, but I sure wasn’t going to then, when she was hugging me like a baby.

  I stopped hugging her and quickly got rid of my tears with my sleeve as best as I could. At least it was raining.

  “You’re a good kid. You’re an absolute star,” she said. “Everything’s going to turn out fine.”

  “Thanks,” I said, but I couldn’t tell her about how nothing would ever turn out fine because Phil was dead and that was a real thing that happened and I couldn’t make it not happen no matter how hard I tried, and I couldn’t say that even if I was a star I was just one single tiny star in the middle of a whole universe of darkness, and that I thought maybe if I met her I would get bigger or brighter like her but of course I wouldn’t. Because she was just one tiny person too and I couldn’t believe I didn’t know that until I saw her and she was real. Because she had to tie her shoes and wear her raincoat and get exhausted and cry like everybody else, and I was an idiot because I thought she was more special and brave than everyone but really I was just less.

  I didn’t tell her that we had something in common which was that someone we knew everything about died, and now we were going to places we’d never been before trying to find something that didn’t exist. I didn’t tell her that we had something not in common which was that she was actually good at it. I didn’t ask her for help.

  I just stopped hugging her and I said “Goodbye” and turned around towards the car. It was close to us which was weird because Simon must have been driving behind us really slowly the entire time so we could see better.

  “Is that your dad in there?” Rosie asked.

  I didn’t tell her how my real dad is not my real dad.

  “No,” I said, and I ran back to the stupid car.

  SMALL

  When it happens it’s like I all of a sudden get this feeling of deep deep dread and I notice I’ve only been watching myself live. I looked it up, it’s a symptom of stuff—so much time passes me unnoticed—hours or days or even whole months without having one moment of full consciousness, I’m not in control, there is a main character but it’s not me, I’m not myself, I’m a list of every characteristic of me and other sub-lists and histories of Why I Came to Be This Way and How I Try to Fix It, and life is one long detachment, a reading of the list, and my consciousness is just like a tallying-up, an accounting-for of this precise meaningless sum of myself.

  Then I get this sudden jolt of a moment—some crisis or some blessing rattles me all the way down into a new complete presence of my body, I realize and know my age with complete gripping terror, can remember each and every day and feel all their moments and I’m under the precise weight of all that has passed, the days are enormous, and in my gut are all the days still to come. And I panic and my only panicked desire is to learn to start existing IN THE DAYS and to never forget again—

  And when it happens Phil zooms so far out and he shrinks and now he’s so so tiny, the top of his head is not five inches from the grey carpet. He walks around his apartment and his little life completely horrified in his new size, he already had enough and now this boundless detachment of mind and shrinking—what will crush him? It won’t need to be much—an empty milk carton will easily topple and finish it all—a cereal bowl abandoned in the sink will be more than enough to drown inside, when he’s this small death is SO CLOSE IT CROUCHES AND WAITS FOR HIM behind every chair leg it leaps down on him from every shelf he can’t see it because it’s EVERYWHERE. The gigantic world corners Phil out of nowhere until there’s nowhere to hide but farther and farther inward and so he shrinks to cut the world off in its closing in—but now it’s so enormous it’s even more horrifying but there is space so much space if he could just get to it and someone once told him when an animal thinks it will die it panics but when it knows, when it is within inches bleeding to death and it knows and it is waiting, then it is so calm, it lies still, it can feel the space around it so vividly, it knows—it’s almost high, euphoric—it’s like that, and when E was his she responded immediately, she knelt down and opened her palm. She laid the back of her hand against the rough carpet and held it flat and Phil would step up onto one of her soft fingertips and walk towards her palm, stepping over the first then second pink creases on the belly of her thin finger then over the warm sterling silver bands on the borders between finger and hand. Her skin is so different from this viewpoint, so many more folds and lines moving in all directions making a stark texture under Phil’s small shoes. In some ways it is like walking on the smallest desert planet but in so many ways it is exactly like being in the hand of the only person who took the time to really know him. Her magnified hand with its strange lines overwhelms him with its intricacy, a delicate perfection, he IS NOT ASHAMED to call it that. As he shrinks she only grows more perfect.

  She lifts her hand from the floor and raises it slowly, carefully keeping her palm and her tiny lover upright, until the side of her pinky comes to rest against her collarbone, and Phil jumps up and grabs hold of her shoulder and pulls himself up. He sits there on her shoulder, on the soft furry terrain of that camel-brown sweater she wore so often, the one that matched her. He reaches and pulls some of her golden hair close to him and wraps himself inside its curl, and he sits and waits out the panic and the smallness. E puts on a movie and sits on the couch. She puts on something funny, or something beautiful or sad, and they watch. She says nothing about his shrunkenness, she doesn’t make fun or ask why. They sit and watch and of course the movies are all about them and Phil casts them in the roles of the characters. When the movie gets too tedious—as movies do—they turn it off and brainstorm ending after ending and act them out, until they come up with an ending more fantastic and ridiculous and devastating and resonating than the dumb movie would have ever come up with. They make the very best endings—it’s as if it’s what they’re really meant to do.

  But now he shrinks and there’s no hand to climb into and no warm shoulder—there’s the cold white linoleum of the kitchen floor, endless violent things in all directions, him hugging his knees curled up against the baseboard foetal, tortured, still inventing ending after ending, and all of them dark and huge and close, him waiting. And my larger self somehow remains. My larger self walking around the kitchen hideous scrambling eggs and dropping knives in the sink, and Small Phil in this post-hysterical calm and mangled in the mousetrap and not yet killed but waiting and he is mystified by everything I do. Look at the way he walks, with his head hanging, does he actually pick his nose so often? Does he really not return June’s call from last week, can he really not bear to even put the phone so close to his face, does he realize it’s been five days since he said a word out loud?

  And when I fin
ally get to sleep Small Phil climbs to the top of my head and sits there looking off into the void and when watching himself among the hugeness grows too much to stand Small Phil crawls inside my ear and it’s lightless and full of loud dull noise like a distended thud of a drum with no beginning no end—and he’s in the stacks, he is passing through dark rows of bookcases yanking out the unfortunate books crushed and flattened at the bottoms of the stacks and dragging them back to the top. It’s extremely difficult in his size and it takes hours, finding a heavy doorstop to wedge in the stack and wiggling and tugging and kicking a poor book until it budges and can finally be slid out. Then with all his strength he totters and heaves the broken book upward balancing it precariously onto a protruding edge of one higher, climbs up and moves it a bit farther by the same method, bit by bit, one gargantuan book and one miniscule inch at a time, until every underdog and loser and overlooked and underestimated book has its shot.

  Then he gets on his stomach and slips under the library’s back door and he’s back in the blinding fluorescence of the warehouse, filing and refiling. He writes a new user’s manual to the warehouse for me, mumbling and scratching at paper, he is outlining a simpler way, a hopeful way, a way that’s realistic, possible. He repaints the filing cabinets and polishes them with a scrap of rag.

  And when he’s done he crawls back out and sits on top of my alarm clock and waits for me to wake up. He gets impatient and steps on the buttons setting the alarm an hour earlier. He drags my pills out into the middle of the hallway floor so I can’t miss them. He goes through my mammoth notebook crossing out words.

  And God smiles down on this tiny saintly Phil and Small Phil kneels, he has such warm faith and he is so certain in his blind calm, waiting for me to wake, he puts his small hands together and says a small prayer for huge me despite his knowledge and despite himself and despite the sureness and gentle crushing of everything he prays for me and for my mind and my heart and for the huge things I won’t ever learn and can’t be taught and all I haven’t done, he prays for some end to everything. He asks for my soul to be spared, he asks for it to return to my body, he asks it to exist

  He sits talking with God and waiting and he says to himself He’s going to be OK. I know it. Soon, he’s going to be just fine.

  And God says Of course. Of course.

  GONE

  Then she was leaving. She’d talked about leaving all summer, we both had, but then she was really doing it. In a few weeks she’d be gone and there would be no more needy half-reunions, no more vicious contests. There would be no more laughter, or moments of sudden understanding, nothing tender.

  He kept his distance because he had to. She was so busy. There were worlds of things she had to do, and no more worlds for them to drift to, no more space. Time was the denominator of every situation they found themselves in, good or bad or anywhere in between: he pretended to hate her, how she could and would and wanted to disappear so easily, they smashed each other to pieces, or they came together and slid into a desperate tough spot where everything became so unclear and honest again and they loved each other so completely and cautiously, not because things now made sense, but because every day was the last day. But it wasn’t love, this last time. It was time.

  Just fucking tell it like it IS. You went by her house tonight.

  It’s not even her house anymore, and you had to walk five blocks out of your way in one direction and then four in the other, and it was the coldest night yet but you went there anyway because that’s just the type of thing you would do.

  When you got close you pictured yourself just walking by like it was any other house on the street, and for about twenty seconds you’d actually convinced yourself that was something you were capable of.

  Just don’t make it up! It’s pathetic but own it and say it anyway! It’s all there is, you stopping and standing under her window and leaning on the tree. You thinking about how the light feels the same, the twilight, how twilight is right between day and night—how it’s the start of an ending. You standing thinking about that for so much longer than you should have. Standing precisely in the last place you ever saw her. When she left so immediately. Unreasonably. Not even telling anyone exactly which day—and you climbed the stairs that night and knocked and she was just gone. Who does that? Who just disappears?

  YOU DON’T EVEN KNOW HOW TO TALK TO YOURSELF ABOUT IT. You don’t even know who you ARE. Stop hiding! Who is “Phil”? You don’t know who you’re talking to!—you haven’t decided if you are listening!

  And she was so much still there, beside the tree, the streetlight shining yellow through the leaves and her hair, she was so there that it showed you one more time how much she isn’t. How the city is a parody of itself, a husk. How many times will you have to remember? It’s WINTER now. IT’S NOT EVEN THE SAME SEASON NOW. Soon it won’t be the same YEAR. It’s not the same ANYTHING.

  But you went anyway! You stopped on the sidewalk and looked up at her window and it was lit up and you pretended no one else lived there now because how could they?—how could anyone else live in the room you used to spend half your life in—maybe more? The room where you were thrilled and comforted, blessed, where you were heard, where you finally felt safe. The only room you belonged in. That warm room—how could they have thrown out her plants, and why didn’t you ever remember what they were called, and how could they use the same white curtain?

  You walked home crying but that’s normal for you, it’s a 50/50 gamble these days whether you’ll be in tears before you make it to the door or after.

  Then you checked her email. Because you still know her password because she hasn’t changed it. You read the message from her brother, from her dad, from her best friend. Her ex-boyfriend had not written. A new boyfriend had not written. (This didn’t make you feel better.) There was no mention of you in any of the messages. You searched your name and a sentence from an ancient message came up, with the word “philosophy.” “Philistine” came up. “Pedophile.” But not you. You marked the messages as unread. You started to write her a message from herself telling herself to please change her password, but you didn’t send it. You deleted it. (Emails are easy to delete. Other things aren’t.) (If only you could ask God to find every place someone existed in your life and delete them all one by one. Or every moment you existed in your own life—

  GONE.

  Like two weeks before you vanished I went to visit you at work—you were filling in for a friend at the store—and I went to find you on a slow Saturday. The place was deserted except for you. When I came in the door you jumped up and ran out from the desk and hugged me. We weren’t together but we weren’t not together, and you weren’t cold. You were warm. How could we ever hug in any acceptable way, in any civilized or neutral way? Our hugs even now—especially now—were too tight, too long and too close, and my chin always wanting to touch the soft skin open on your shoulder and it does—the hug that too many times and too easily turns into a hug full of sparks, and a gravity and a pulling close, and you putting your cheek against mine and the tiny blond hairs glowing all over our skin at the near-microscopic level brushing and our noses touching, us kissing, gently and slowly like we always tried, it was unspoken, giving, and our legs getting tired from standing for so long, then sitting on the edge of your bed when I only came over to ask you something, to just make something clear, but then look at us: lying there untogether, and holding unclearly for so long—

  In the store we talked about our days like always, like we used to when we would every day, we became archives of each other’s days, we had catalogues of each other’s past year stored inside, and would remember every day of each other and share it all, and that was really one of the best parts—everyone knew that. But now day- and week-sized gaps were passing unaccounted for, so much time I couldn’t picture you inside: what did you do yesterday, or the day before? What did I do? Anything?

 
We talked. About whatever. We talked about the music. We talked about the sun, other things. But we were pretending to stand so far from each other. I could feel myself growing stubborn, could feel myself splitting, slipping into a darkened mind, wanting—I could feel some place inside grow, and I didn’t want to go there so I left. I said I should go and I went out the door. You were probably mad, but I had to go. Maybe I was even proud of myself for leaving. Seeing you now was watching a family carrying all their belongings out of the house and into the trunk of their station wagon. It was watching things get packed away in brown boxes, hearing a door close in some other room. It was a drive to an airport and it was waiting for a flight to take off. It was all of these things but it was none of them because it was something real and it was really happening to me, and it would make me cry walking down the street because this ending had no sense of public or private or tact and it found me everywhere. And maybe I can’t believe I left you that day or that I’d ever leave you or refuse a minute with you, but it was impossible. It was impossible to pretend you’d still be in my life—impossible to keep pretending I was ever really in yours. You’d be gone.

  WHY

  WHAT BEING ALONE SOUNDS LIKE

  CLUES:

  –How you can’t possibly think of anything else.

  –How even when you think you’re not thinking about it anymore you actually are.

  –How it makes you really angry but you know angry is the wrong thing to be so you get even more angry.