Iain Reid: I'm Thinking of Ending Things

“Even when it’s cold like this, if it’s clear,” Jake’s saying, “I don’t mind. You can always bundle up. There’s something about the deep cold that’s refreshing.”

“Summer’s better,” I say. “I hate being cold. We still have at least another month before spring. It’s going to be a long month.”

“I saw Venus without a telescope one summer.”

Such a Jake thing to say.

“It was one night around sunset. It wasn’t going to be visible from Earth again for more than a hundred years. It was this very rare planetary alignment that coordinated the sun and Venus, so you could see it as a tiny black dot when it passed between Earth and the sun. It was really cool.”

“If I’d known you then, you could have told me about it. I missed out.”

“That’s the thing; no one seemed to care,” he says. “It was so strange. A chance to see Venus, and most people were watching TV. No offense if that’s what you were doing.”

I know Venus is the second planet from the sun. I don’t know much about it beyond that. “Do you like Venus?” I ask.

“Sure.”

“Why? Why do you like it?”

“One day on Venus is like one hundred fifteen Earth days. Its atmosphere is made up of nitrogen and carbon dioxide and it has an iron core. It’s also full of volcanoes and solidified lava, sort of like Iceland. I should know its orbital velocity, but I’d be making it up.”

“That’s pretty good,” I say.

“But what I like most is that apart from the sun and moon, it’s the brightest object in the sky. Most people don’t know that.”

I like when he talks like this.

I want to hear more. “Were you always interested in space?”

“I don’t know,” he says. “I guess so. In space, everything has its relative position. Space is an entity, right, but also limitless. It’s less dense the farther out you go, but you can always keep going. There’s no definitive border between the start and the end. We’ll never fully understand or know it. We can’t.”

“You don’t think?”

“Dark matter makes up the majority of all matter, and it’s still a mystery.”

“Dark matter?”

“It’s invisible. It’s all the extra mass we can’t see that makes the formation of galaxies and the rotational velocities of stars around galaxies mathematically possible.”

“I’m glad we don’t know everything.”

“You’re glad?”

“That we don’t know all the answers, that we can’t explain it all, like space. Maybe we’re not supposed to know all the answers. Questions are good. They’re better than answers. If you want to know more about life, how we work, how we progress, it’s questions that are important. That’s what pushes and stretches our intellect. I think questions make us feel less lonely and more connected. It’s not always about knowing. I appreciate not knowing. Not knowing is human. That’s how it should be, like space. It’s unsolvable, and it’s dark,” I say, “but not entirely.”

He laughs at this, and I feel silly for saying what I said.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m not laughing at you, it’s just funny. I haven’t heard anyone say it like that before.”

“But it’s true, isn’t it?”

“Yeah. It’s dark, but not entirely. It’s true. And that’s kind of a nice idea.”

— Some of the rooms were vandalized, I heard.

— Yup, paint on the floor, red paint; some water damage. Did you know he put a chain on the door?

— Why did he do it in here?

— To make some selfish, twisted point, maybe. I don’t know.

— He wasn’t a vandal type, was he?

— No, but the strange thing is he’d started writing graffiti on some of the walls. We all knew it was him. People saw him doing it. He denied it, but volunteered to clean it off every time.

— That’s weird.

— That’s not even the weird part.

— What?

— The strange part was that he wrote the same thing every time. The graffiti. Just one sentence.

— What was it?

—“There’s only one question we need to resolve.”

— There’s only one question we need to resolve?

— Yup. That’s what he wrote.

— What’s the one question?

— I have no idea.

“We still have a while to go, right?”

“Yeah, a bit longer.”

“How about a story?”

“A story?”

“Yeah, to pass the time,” I say. “I’ll tell you a story. A true one. One you’ve never heard. It’s your kind of story. I think you’ll like it.”

I turn the music down a little.

“Sure,” he says.

“It’s about when I was younger, a teenager.”

I look over at him. At a table, he often looks slouchy and uncomfortable. Driving, he looks too long to fit comfortably behind the wheel, but his posture is good. I’m attracted to Jake’s physical stature through his intellect. His sharpness of mind makes his lankiness appealing. They’re connected. At least to me.

“Ready,” he says. “For story time.”

I clear my throat super dramatically.

“Okay. I’d been sheltering my head with some newspaper. Seriously. What? Why are you smiling? It was pouring. I’d grabbed the paper from an empty seat on the bus. My instructions had been simple: arrive at the house at ten thirty and you will be greeted in the driveway. I was told I didn’t need to ring the bell. You’re listening, right?”

He nods, still looking out the windshield at the road ahead.

“When I got there, I had to wait for a while — minutes, not seconds. When the door finally opened, a man I’d never met poked his head out. He looked up at the sky and then said something like he hoped I hadn’t been waiting long. He held out a hand palm up. He looked exhausted, as if he’d been awake for days. Big dark bags under both eyes. Stubble on his cheeks and chin. Bedhead. I tried to glance past him. The door was open slightly, a crack.

“He said: ‘I’m Doug. Gimme a minute, take the keys,’ and he flipped me the keys, which I caught like a punch, both my hands against my stomach. The door slammed shut.

“I didn’t move, not at first. I was stunned. Who was this guy? I really didn’t know anything about him. We’d talked on the phone, that’s it. I looked down at the metal key chain in my hands, which was just a large letter J .”

I stop. I glance at Jake. “You look bored,” I say. “I know I’m including lots of details, but I remember them, and I’m trying to tell a proper story. Is it weird that I remember these details? Is it boring because I’m telling you everything?”

“Just tell your story. Pretty much all memory is fiction and heavily edited. So just keep going.”

“I’m not sure I agree with that, about memory. But I know what you mean,” I say.

“Keep going,” he says. “I’m listening.”

“It was another eight minutes, at least two watch checks, before Doug reappeared. He fell into the passenger seat with a big exhale. He’d changed into worn blue jeans with holes in the knees and a plaid shirt. The seats in his car were mottled with orange cat hair. There was cat hair everywhere.”

“Mottled.”

“Yes, mottled to the nth degree. He was also wearing a black baseball cap, tipped back on his head, with the word Nucleus embroidered on the front in white cursive lettering. He seemed better suited to sitting than standing or walking.

“He didn’t say anything, so I started into the routine I’d been practicing with Dad. Slid the seat forward, adjusted the rearview mirror three times, and ensured the parking brake was released. I placed my hands at ten and two on the steering wheel and straightened my posture.