Justin Taylor - Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever

David and Estrella carried him inside and helped him to the couch, talking — not quite bickering — about who would drive Snapcase’s car to the ER. They ignored Roger’s protests. Snapcase was asleep. They could wake him up, see if he’d do it, or just give over the keys.

“But isn’t he sleeping one off?” David said.

“Yeah, but maybe he’s better now,” Estrella said.

Estrella told Roger he should ice his foot and he said okay, but then they didn’t have any ice. David filled the trays up, came back to the living room. Roger kept insisting he was fine. He hadn’t hit his head, right? He’d landed on his feet, mostly the left one, which currently could not bear any weight whatsoever, which was why he’d been crawling. He said that meat was amazing — how weird it was to be made of something.

The wine, whatever was left of it, was still on the roof. They sat around and had some beers, smoked a joint — nothing too heavy. Estrella thought Sammy had Percocet but he was out somewhere.

“Think you’ll sleep now?” Estrella said.

“Oh yeah, yeah for sure,” Roger said. The rush of the jump seemed to have cleared his head. He was no longer talking crazy. Maybe it had neutralized the acid. (Who knew how these things actually worked?) Soon the beer and pot would take care of the adrenaline and he would get some rest.

They helped him into a better position on the couch. He was good and stretched out, his foot elevated on a stack of pillows. (They forgot to check on the ice they were making.) David tossed a blanket his way, and he and Estrella retired to their separate rooms.

Later, Estrella padded past the living room on her way to the bathroom. She wore boy boxer shorts, her black hoodie with the Hüsker Dü backpatch, and a pair of oversize plush Homer Simpson slippers that someone had scored from the Dumpster at the bottom of frat row. She stopped in the doorway and looked in on Roger. “Y’okay?” she whispered, hoping he’d be asleep.

“Yeah,” he said sleepily — then, “love you.”

“Night,” she said, and shuffled across the linoleum, slippers whispering. She let herself in to David’s room.

In the morning, passing through the living room on his way to the kitchen, David saw that Roger was still sleeping. He called Roger’s job and said Roger needed the shift covered — family stuff, emergency. A grandma. David still didn’t like soy milk in his coffee. It usually separated and got gross. But Estrella was vegan lately, so there was no real milk in the house. He’d have happily stolen some, in order to satisfy his taste without fueling the industrial-agricultural complex, but her reasoning had as much to do with health as economic morality.

He fished around in the cups with his spoon; first his, then the other. No chunks. He’d done okay. He brought the two steaming mugs back to his room.

Roger got a soft cast and crutches. Stay off your feet, they said. He had broken his ankle, the doctors told him, and it had been very stupid of him to wait. If the bone had already begun knitting, he would have to have it professionally re-broken.

They left the ER at sunset, the pink hospital like a part of the sky, a dull spot in the burning pink-orange shot through with blue and some tatters of gathering black. Probably it would storm.

“What am I going to do?” Roger said.

“You’ll stay with us,” David said. It was the right thing and because it was the right thing he wasn’t just saying it, he meant it, too, even though Roger made him feel competitive in a way he could not articulate, for a goal he could never quite specify. It buzzed on his tongue like a sharp mint or a blocked word.

“Of course you’ll stay with us,” Estrella said. Snapcase was driving, a beer between his legs. There was really no question. They were a family. (Nobody had seen Sammy in days. Maybe he’d hitched upstate, or met someone, or gotten busted, except wouldn’t he have called from jail?) Snapcase eased through a red light, then half a block up saw a cop car hiding behind some bushes. It hadn’t seen them. He came to a full stop at the next sign, sipped his beer — in his hammy fist it might have been a Mountain Dew.

At Roger’s follow-up visit, they scolded him about the antibiotics. They told him that alcohol neutralizes antibiotics, so doubling the dose was never going to do the trick. They told him they’d told him all this the first time he was there. Did he want to lose his foot? Roger cast his eyes down and he was very sorry.

He promised to take the drugs and to not drink, but he also decided not to pay for the rebreaking of his bone. If it became necessary, he’d have one of the guys do it, then go over to the hospital and get it set.

Snapcase wanted no part of Roger’s crazy idea. Sammy, who was home again, said he’d do it, but nobody thought he was strong enough. David told Roger he’d think about it. He said it “intrigued” him.

“I mean it’s real violence,” he said to Estrella. They were in bed. “I guess wife-beaters and psychos do this kind of stuff all the time.”

“And cops.”

“Right. But those people are so fucked up they don’t even get it. That it’s like this totally there thing. This leg. A person. Totally nontheoretical. The Real.”

“David, those people live in the Real. And so, in fact, do we.” She drew him into the aura of her warmth. “You poor theorist,” she said.

David tells Roger to put up the cash for the bottle. That’s only fair. The whiskey is for courage, partly, but not really. David is looking forward to this. He wants there to be a bottle because to swig whiskey before swinging straight and true seems proper in a grand sense, like knowing just how to act at a funeral or during a riot.

When the new disc settles into the tray and starts to spin, Roger’s snuffling and hitched breath disappear. Social Distortion fills the world. A guy they know plays in a weekend league and he’s bringing a real bat over when he gets off work, but for now David’s still swinging the mop handle.

After his friend drops off the bat, David sits and holds it, gingerly, as if it were volatile or imbued with magics. He’s imagining Roger’s bone shattering and how it will feel to do a righteous violence. Estrella says Roger seems depressed, and she’s going to bunk out in the living room with him tonight. Okay, David says. Probably it’s nothing. Even if it’s not nothing, still okay. Stretched out diagonally on his bed, luxuriating like a king (when she’s there they sleep in a sweaty tangle), in his mind he deals blows that have Roger screaming through his bite-rag. Like an expectant father with a wife’s overnight bag packed and ready, David has carefully washed a single tube sock. He keeps coming back to what Roger said on the night he hurt himself. That word. Meat. If all goes well he won’t actually see the meat. Still. It is so red and shiny in his mind.

The swelling is going down. Roger says maybe they should wait another day. David says he thinks they’ve waited too long already, but Roger says he feels different, somehow. He’s always known his body’s rhythms. He feels a rally.

Estrella tells David it’s obvious something is wrong. Can he just fucking spit it out already?

“Perhaps,” he says, “it might be I’m jealous of the attentions lavished by women on the nobly enfeebled.”

“Oh Christ.” Estrella rolls over and away from him. “Who’s that? Barthelme?”

“No, but isn’t it pretty to think so.”

“Fucker,” she says.

He grabs her shoulder, pulls her toward him.

“Oh,” she says, still annoyed, but intrigued. “So that’s how you want to play tonight?”

When they take the cast off, the leg is shriveled and the muscle sags. The black hairs press into the skin. He looks like the recipient of a graft. The doctor uses the word miracle . David finds such word choice unprofessional, as well as, frankly, a bit excessive.