Justin Taylor - Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever

He stirs things up in me, too, that’s true, but I can endure what I feel when I hear his recorded voice in my ear. At this point, the urge only serves to further chasten.

I am something of a stoic, these days, and Steven lives down in Sacramento with the woman he left me for.

Sometimes I wake up in the morning and my first thought is how funny — and funny is the right word — it is that I probably will never see him again.

We will speak, sooner or later. Even though I know I shouldn’t pick up the phone — and to my credit, so far I haven’t, not even once — the fact is that one of these days I will. I’ll pick up the phone and say hello to him and then — what?

But probably we will never again meet face-to-face, in real life.

I mean, if I knew he was going to be somewhere, I wouldn’t go.

Real life. What a funny concept. When I think about it — This is it ! Happening! Now! Andnowandnowandnow! — there’s nothing that can keep me from bursting out laughing, sometimes until my sides ache. If he could somehow see me in that state he’d get a sort of nostalgic look on his face and take this tone he has, the one that on the surface says, “I’m feeling wistful” but really means, “Pity me and submit.” In that tone he’d say, “ I used to be able to make you laugh that way,” and then I’d say “Oh, but Steven, don’t you see that you still do?”

“They call it Rose City,” he said. “This place was made for us.”

I was in Florida, where we’re both from. I was living with my mother for a while and starting to not believe myself when I would repeat my mantra: You are not moving across the country for this man.

“I mean, it’s your goddamn name, ” he said. “How can this not be just perfect?”

I forget whether that was the conversation when I said all right, here I come, or if I didn’t fully cave for a while longer.

Enough. It is a new day, bright and crisp, and I will not waste it dwelling on old bad memories. I drive a car with a top that goes down and I’m getting in it and I’m going. I’m gone.

But I do want to say one more thing about it. Steven is the one who left me. That’s true. But it doesn’t mean I didn’t sometimes think about leaving him, because I did. I had even started to look, in a hypothetical sort of way, at the different neighborhoods in the city and try to figure out which were the ones where I could afford something decent on my own and also not have to cross paths with him much. (This, obviously, was before I knew what his plans were.)

I didn’t once think about going back to my mother’s, or to Florida at all.

It’s March. The sky is clear and the air is still cold. Too cold to keep the top down for long, but I will for awhile. I don’t care. I always hated the hot sticky Floridian wind. Keep your swamps and outlet malls. If Steven did one good thing for me — and there was plenty of good between us, even if I don’t think about it much — what he did was get me out of Florida.

Thanks, Steven.

Right when I wish for a hitchhiker I get one. Maybe it’s my lucky day. I should buy lottery tickets. I see him from a distance and slow down so I don’t overshoot him. I sidle right up, a pro at this.

“Hey there,” I say. “Been doin’ some hard travelin’?”

“I thought you knowed,” he says. I love him already. His black, messy hair mostly covers his ears. He’s wearing dark skinny-fit jeans and a brown tee shirt with a stencil of a broken machine gun on it and the all-caps directive to MAKE LEVEES NOT WAR. There’s a hole in one of the armpits of the shirt. He’s five-seven in his boots.

“Come on, get in,” I say. “There’s a whole mess of discs without cases in the glove box. Woody’s in there if you can find him.”

“Or we could plug in my iPod,” the hitchhiker says. “I’ve got a car adaptor cord in my bag.”

Bruce is nineteen, a student at the visual arts school in Portland, and trying to get to Tolovana Park. All I know about that place is that it’s the next town south of Cannon Beach, which is where I’m headed.

I ask him if Tolovana Park is where he’s from. No, but his mom lives there now. She runs an antiques shop in Cannon Beach that does most of its business during tourist season, which officially kicks off Memorial Day weekend. She sent him money for a bus ticket, but he spent it all on art supplies. Later, after we’ve spent some time riding and sung a few songs together with Woody, he reveals that the school provides him with most any art supply he could ever want and what he really spent the money on was pot.

We’re on the Sunset Highway, US 26 West, half an hour past Staley’s Junction, where I picked him up, so about halfway to where we’re going. Out here, the highway is a two-lane road, cut into the earth in such a way that on some stretches the bases of the huge trees are at eye level on both sides.

Bruce digs around in his pack and produces a little wooden pipe and a film canister. As soon as the canister is open a marshy green sex smell fills my car.

I steer with one hand and hold the pipe to my lips with the other. I let Bruce work the lighter for me. I draw in deep, then break out in a coughing fit that pops the cherry from the bowl and shoots it into Bruce’s lap. He lets out a surprisingly girlish noise and starts swatting at himself. My eyes are squeezed shut tight with coughing and I accidentally swerve the car hard left, wait for the sensation of the crash, remember there is nobody else on the road anywhere near us, then feel a different sensation, from underneath the car, realize that while I am still going more or less in the direction of the road I have now gotten off it entirely and am driving in the grass, which, thankfully, is flat here and not some runoff ditch or something.

I force my eyes open, pull back onto the shoulder, bring the car to a stop.

“Holy shit,” I say. “I am so sorry.”

There’s a small scorch on Bruce’s jeans about mid-thigh.

“Where’s your mom’s shop?” I say. “Is it open? I’ll drop you.”

“You want to have burgers or something?” Bruce says.

We go to the lobby restaurant of the first beachfront hotel we come to and I decide this will be my hotel for the weekend. There are a row of them up and down the beach, most still closed for the season. We are the only people in the place, but I think it would feel vast even if it were full. The ceilings are too high. The windows that look out on the beach must be ten feet tall and half again as wide. I wonder if I’m the only guest. I mean, if I will be after I check in.

We are ravenous and make short work of our burgers. We pour so much ketchup on our fries they get soggy and cold. That’s okay. They’re good that way, maybe better. Two refills apiece of our Cokes.

When the bill comes Bruce goes for his wallet.

“Are you kidding?” I say, and pluck the check up off the table.

“Listen,” Bruce says. “Let me come up to your room with you.”

“Bruce, I think it’s time we get you home.”

“But I’m all gross,” he says. “From the road. Let me take a shower and change my clothes.”

I don’t know what time it is. “Your mom,” I say. Bruce bursts out laughing and can’t stop. I don’t know how long the laughing lasts, only that I’m laughing too. The light in the room is thick like soup. It looks the way pot smells. Pot smells the way it feels inside you. The way it feels inside you is the way you feel in the ocean. The way the ocean feels, all around you. It is still too cold to swim in this ocean. I came all the way out here just to stare. “No,” I say. In my head: Jesus, complete the thought. “I mean, won’t she be worried. I mean, I’m sure she is worried.”