by Rob Roberge
Donna says, very calmly, “She killed herself.” As she walks down the hill, you look at the dates on the headstone and do some quick math—she wasn’t even thirty years old. You follow Donna back to her car.
You get in and she starts driving. She says, “You know you are the only person in ten years who has heard anything about what really happened to her?”
Again—what are you supposed to say? The tires thump over construction gates and potholes and you pass the giant quarry on the right where you used to swim in the summer until some kid got run over and killed walking home from a party. After that the cops chained it off.
“Why?” you say. You’re not even sure now what you meant—was it: Why are you telling me this? Or, Why lie about it? Or, Why did she do it?
She says, “Because, she was in a car accident.” She smiles and shakes her head. “Ask my fucking mother. Car accident.” She tosses her cigarette out the window and lights another one with the car’s cigarette plug. When she’s done, you push the lighter back in and light one of your own, feeling the warmth from the heat coils as you breathe in.
She says, “Apparently, if you pretend something didn’t happen, then it didn’t happen.”
Things between you get more complicated over the course of your senior year. To stave off suspicion, Donna tells you that you should probably have a girlfriend your own age. You don’t want a girlfriend. You love Donna. This must be what love feels like, though you are not able to say the words to her for fear of what her response might be.
You end up dating Kris. Now you feel, if possible, worse. You don’t love Kris. After two weeks together you realize you don’t even particularly like her. But you feel really awful because she’s just some pawn in this increasingly complex and fucked-up life of yours.
When you start going out, there seems to be some unwritten rule that says a boyfriend drives the girlfriend to school. No one told you about this rule. The first few days, she sings along with some hideous shit like Journey or Starship on the radio. This starts to drive you insane, because she sings off-key and doesn’t know a lot of the words. You start making sure there are tapes playing by the time you pick her up—maybe she only sings along to stuff she knows from the radio. You try Bob Dylan. Lou Reed. Jonathan Richman. Marianne Faithfull. She sings along to all of it, though she doesn’t know a single word to any of them. The next week, you are about to snap, so you play instrumental music—tapes by the Mahavishnu Orchestra. The Glenn Phillips Band. An experimental Glenn Branca piece you don’t even like that sounds like wrecking balls and arc welding and the cries of dying animals.
She sings along to all of it.
After school, you sit at the kitchen table with Donna and your friend. Your friend asks you about the prom. You say you guess you’ll be taking Kris. Donna gets a dark frown and takes her glass of wine and goes to her bedroom, slamming the door. You want to follow her and ask what’s wrong, but you can’t. You and your friend stay at the table.
Later, when you and Donna end up alone in the laundry room, you ask her if you did something.
She seems angry at you for the first time. “I don’t need to hear about you and your fucking girlfriend,” she says.
“She was your idea.”
“Just go,” she says, waving you away with a cigarette between her lips. “Go. Go fuck your little girl with her tight little ass and her perky tits, okay?”
You stand there. You have no idea what’s happening.
“Go!”
You leave.
She stops talking to you for ten days. You feel weak with the fear that you’re losing her. That she doesn’t like you anymore.
One day, you are hanging out at the house and the phone rings. You often hang after school at their house, so you don’t have to go to your own. Donna is at work, and your friend is out picking up something to drink. You figure you’ll take a message.
You say hello and a woman who mistakes you for your friend—she calls you by his name—starts talking. “Your mother is a whore, do you know that?”
“What?”
She uses your friend’s name again. “Listen to me. She’s fucking Harry and god knows who else that slut spreads her legs for. Your mother is a filthy whore.”
You hang up. Harry? Harry is a guy she works with. He has a ’70s porn mustache and a horseshoe balding pattern and he wears brown suits with ridiculously wide ties. The phone rings and you stupidly answer it and the woman is back, her voice a droning menace telling you your mother is a whore, your mother is a whore, your mother is a whore, and you hang up again. The next time it rings, you don’t answer.
By June, Donna totally avoids you. You get the message and stop going to her house. Which means you are stuck at yours. You feel terrible about Kris and break up with her. You are mildly relieved when she doesn’t seem to care much and is quickly dating some other guy and no doubt singing along to whatever the fuck music plays in his pickup truck every morning.
—
1988: It takes you four years to get the courage to go back to Donna’s house. To try to set things right. It was a fucked-up relationship, but you are beginning to see that just about everyone you know is a royal mess. Why should she have been an exception just because she was twice your age? You are still feeling guilty about the whole thing—that your friend, to the best of your knowledge, has never known about any of this.
You call first and ask if she’s alone and if you can come over and she quietly says yes to both questions, after considering them for an uncomfortably long time.
It’s freezing. You knock and it’s so cold your knuckles hurt from rapping on the door. After a minute or so, she opens it, but blocks your entrance to the house.
She sounds young—more than you ever would have remembered—when she says a quiet, shy-sounding “Hi.”
“Hey,” you say. “Can I come in?”
She looks down and seems to step out of the way. You open the screen door and it catches on your sweater. You’d hoped to play this like an older, more mature version of you who could sit with Donna and you could talk like two adults and have this end on the right note. Instead, you are an idiot stuck in her door.
While you are cursing her screen, she turns around. She looks at you—and it will bother you forever, even though you know it does not matter, that the last time she sees you, you are tangled in her screen door. So much for the older, more mature you. You feel like you might break down on the porch and you look away from her eyes because you think you’re crying.
She says, “I can’t talk to you,” and closes the door. You are still awkwardly stuck in her screen door as you hear her walk upstairs toward what you know is her bedroom. The lights go out, including the porch light. You finally pull yourself free from the fucking screen and you start to walk away, realizing that you’ve been cut from her story. Now you didn’t happen, either.
—
2013: You are telling this story of Donna from such a distance. You’ve told it to close friends. You have altered it over time, to make it more effective. To try to have it resonate with your friends the ways it did and does with you. You’ve changed it around so much, you can’t remember how it really happened. But what you’re telling now, this story about being stuck in Donna’s screen door, is—no matter how much you may have altered the timing or chronology—the truest version of the story you will ever know.
1971: Your parents are fighting. They’re in their bedroom, but you can always hear them fight, partially because they yell, partially because your father hangs his dry cleaning over their bedroom door so that it never fully closes. They usually fight about money. You are young, but you know that much.
This fight, though, seems to be about you. It will take you many years to realize it was about them, but that’s not how you understood it.
Your mother says something about how much trouble you are. How hard you are to handle.
You father says, “Do you think I wanted kids in the first place?”
<
br /> Your mother, at least for the moment, stops arguing.
—
1988: Chet Baker, trumpet player and singer, dies from a fall from an Amsterdam balcony while under the influence of cocaine and heroin.
—
SEPTEMBER 1993: You have a second seizure a couple of days after your first, not long after you quit drinking. It’s not as bad as the first one, but still harrowing enough to have you curled in a fetal position for hours after you regain consciousness. You spend six hours staring at the far corner of your bedroom, staring at the shadows of the leaves on the far wall. You don’t remember those six hours elapsing—you only know it is six hours because you keep a notebook by the bed. You keep checking the digital clock in between staring at the wall and make lines like in the old prison movies, one line for every five minutes, in groups of four vertical and one diagonal. You later count fourteen of the five-line sections and four more vertical lines, so technically it’s six hours and ten minutes. In between several of the five-lined sections, you have written the word “no” more than fifty times.
This is a lie you will tell people for years—the last bit about the “noes.” You actually find thirty-one and only about twenty of them are perfectly legible. The rest you can’t actually read and just assume are “no” since that’s what all the other ones say.
Your head feels like you’ve banged it against a wall repeatedly. The back of your skull is tender to the touch. Your tongue tastes like coins. You remember very little of what happens after your seizures. You have no idea when they will stop, or if they will stop. You live in deep fear of what you have done to yourself.
After six hours and ten minutes, you have no idea what you do. There is nothing else in the notebook and no memory of the time that passes.
—
1990: You and Mary are on vacation on the east coast of Mexico in some small town whose name you will forget. You spend the night at a bar with some expats and Mary tries to get you to dance, but as always you refuse, too embarrassed to dance in front of anyone. She dances with some drunk guy who comes on to her and she laughingly brushes him off.
Later, while you are in bed at a run-down, adorable hotel, you hold each other while the rain starts. Slowly at first, but soon it becomes a storm. You are both drunk, in great moods, and you fuck to the sound of the rain battering the roof tiles.
In the morning, you tell her that you’ll go find some coffee and bring it to her, but you can’t find anyone in the hotel. The entire first floor is under at least six inches of water, and there’s no one to be found at the front desk. You go back upstairs and the two of you head into town looking for coffee. You are hungover, too, and think about having a beer to calm your nerves and get rid of your headache.
The town is flooded and deserted. It’s a warm, beautiful morning—about eighty degrees with a gentle breeze and you feel the sun on your face and Mary’s hand in yours and you start to walk around the town square. There is so much water that you can’t tell when you’re on the sidewalk or in the street until you take a step and your foot sinks another six inches. Then you are up to your knees until you find your way back to the sidewalk.
The whole town is like a scene from On the Beach. It’s like someone dropped a bomb that left the buildings standing and took away all the people.
Over an hour later, you will finally find a café that’s open and the owners will tell you that there was a hurricane the night before. That you have been out walking in the eye of the storm, and you need to stay with them while the hurricane passes through again.
But for now, you are alone, together, holding hands and in love and feeling like the last people on earth on a beautiful day. You will remember thinking it’s impossible to be as happy as you are with Mary, but you are. The two of you wander the abandoned, flooded town square. Palm trees, almost naked from losing their fronds in the storm, quietly sway above you in front of a brilliantly blue cloudless sky.
—
2012: Junior Seau, an All-Pro football player with CTE, kills himself. Gunshot to the chest. You add him to your list of people with CTE and people who kill themselves.
—
1985–1993: You get bills from hospitals a few times a year. You have no idea why you were in these hospitals. Sometimes a friend knows. Sometimes you ask a roommate and they look at you and say, “You don’t know if you were in a hospital?”
“Well, I think I must have been,” you say.
And you must have been. But you don’t remember why. And after the first bill, you don’t try to find out why, because trying to find out means talking to the very people to whom you owe tremendous amounts of money. Money you don’t have. Money you think may exceed your life’s earnings when everything’s tallied up and you shift tense.
You will tell lies to explain it. Part of this is because you don’t know what happened. But you also like a good story. Mostly you worry that the world hates you as much as you hate yourself and you had better invent a character who’s more interesting than you. It’s the only way you expect anyone to want to stick around for long—convincing them that you are someone you are not. You don’t lie, like some people, out of any desire to make money or get ahead materially—you lie, like some other people, because you are very afraid of being alone. Of anyone knowing the truth. If no one ever really knows who you are, you—the real you—can never be rejected.
—
1955: The novelist Gabriel García Márquez is working as a journalist for a newspaper in Bogotá. In February, he covers a shipwreck off the coast of Alabama, in the Gulf of Mexico. Several crew members drown. One crew member, Luis Alejandro Velasco, manages to get to a life raft. He survives ten days at sea, fighting off sharks, without drinking water. He claims to, during a hallucination, eat the leather of his shoes. After he is rescued, he is welcomed as a hero, until the tide of public opinion turns and he is condemned as a liar. People say his story is so far-fetched that it can’t possibly be true—he never could have survived the way and for as long as he claims. The last line of The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor, the book García Márquez writes in Velasco’s voice, reads: “Some people tell me this story is a fantasy. And I ask them: If it is, then what did I do during my ten days at sea?”
—
SUMMER 1985: Your girlfriend Sasha is the most sexual woman you have been with. Not that you’ve been with many people in your nineteen years. You are loaded every day and begin to have trouble keeping up with her, so you start on what passes for a health kick for a drug addict. You’re taking massive amounts of vitamins—sometimes getting injections from a guy known, depending on who’s referring to him, as “the band doctor” or “the junkie doctor.” At this point, you are naïve enough to think he’s an actual doctor. You say this to a friend, who laughs at you and calls you a simp.
Sasha grew up in the south of France and looks like Jeanne Moreau fresh off the screen from Elevator to the Gallows. You hear Miles Davis’s astounding soundtrack from that film pulsing and rushing through you every time you look into her eyes. You are still young and somewhat nervous about sex—that the person who wants you might stop wanting you ten seconds later if you do the wrong thing. She laughs about this and calls you “my little American,” and if it were chemically possible, you would, in fact, melt when she says this. “Such a shy boy, my little American.” You are shy. The only time you talk to strangers is when you are loaded. Though, you are always loaded.
The night you meet at a party, Sasha tells you she does not believe in monogamy. She does not believe in labels, like heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual.
She says, “I like to be honest here. No surprises.” And you feel a rare swelling of pride, so you tell her you’re an addict and a drunk. I am as liberated and honest as Sasha, you think.
She makes a face, ignoring your confession. “Heterosexual. Homosexual. Bisexual.” She shakes her head. “I am Sexual.”
No debate there.
You and Sasha fuck in the small bedroom
in the apartment you share with your friend Concetta. You like Concetta, you care deeply for her, maybe love her—but this is during a long period of your life when you mistake needing people for loving people. You mistake your constant desperate need for being romantic. At any rate, your attraction has no reciprocation, as Concetta most certainly DOES believe in labels—labels such as lesbian.
You and Concetta talk at breakfast sometimes after Sasha has gone to work.
“That is one amazing fucking woman,” Concetta says.
You nod.
Concetta kids you about how great Sasha’s blow jobs must be.
“How would you know?” you say.
“You think I’m deaf? I hear you. When you fuck, I hear her. What a fucking voice that girl has.” Concetta stops. Sips her coffee. “I think about fucking your girlfriend. I hope that’s okay.” She lights a cigarette. “Anyway, when I don’t hear her, all I hear are the loudest and the fucking goofiest and most pathetically grateful orgasms I have ever heard.”
“Since when are you an expert on the sounds of guys’ orgasms?”
“I have heard plenty of men come,” she says. “I have even—I hope to fucking god for the last time—made men come. Not that it’s the most difficult thing on the planet.”
After a week of taking huge “treatments” of B12 and various other vitamin shots in the ass, you are sleeping more often from the sedatives the quack doctor gives you. You are actually looking and feeling better than you have in a long time.
This is a little remarkable, really, since you are still drunk and loaded every day. Prior to the “treatments” your liver seemed to be backing up with toxins. Your skin was the color of an elephant’s hide; your eyes were bloodshot and you couldn’t breathe through your nose. You’d messed up the membranes too much to snort your drugs and you had to use other methods you really don’t prefer. Now, for you, anyway, you feel incredible. The only downside is that this health kick does put a dent in your drug money. Still, you think the vitamins are a pretty great discovery.