Justin Taylor - Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever

“I don’t think it honestly matters,” Bruce says.

You can pretty much always swim in the ocean in Florida. Even when it’s as cold as it gets it’s still not nearly as cold as it is here.

“Why are you doing this?” I ask Bruce. “You’ve got this place to go be and you want to be there, I mean you put all this effort into getting there, but now you want to be here.”

“Why shouldn’t I want to be here?” Bruce says. “You’re pretty and we’re having fun. You know, you haven’t even asked why I’m going home.”

“Why are you going home?”

“I’m not telling you,” he says. “It’s nothing good, that’s for sure, but it’s also nothing that can’t wait a day. Does that make sense?” He’s packing another bowl as he says this.

Does that make sense? Does it not make sense?

Doesn’t it have to be one way or the other one?

Well — does it?

I’m a late sleeper. I always have been. I heard Bruce stirring and though he was quiet I heard the door open and click shut behind him. I did not rouse myself. I drifted back down.

As a parting gift, I see now, he left me a single expertly rolled joint on top of the pad of hotel stationery on the nightstand. Sweet, sweet boy. I get dressed and go to the sea.

I’m wearing two sweaters. It’s about noon and icy and gray.

I have the joint with me but no lighter or match, not that either would stand much of a chance against this wind coming off the water. I sit down in the sand. When my rear gets too cold to sit anymore I stand up, brush the damp sand off myself, then wander down by the edge of the water and look at the anemones clinging to the sides of rocks, the little fishes trapped in tide pools and the crabs. They scuttle up out of the sand, then over it, down in again somewhere else.

I turn away from the sea, cross the dunes, go around the side of the hotel, and come to the Cannon Beach main drag, such as it is. I walk. Most everything is closed, except convenience stores attached to gas stations. Oh here and there a shop is open, but there’s nothing I need or that so much as interests me, at least until I come to a little place I am sure is the right one.

It’s warm inside and musty, packed to the gills with — stuff.

I had pictured the sort of establishment that deals in well-kept relics, things people knowingly overpay for because they’re just perfect for that empty space on the wall opposite the guest bed, or the mantel over the fake fireplace. This isn’t that at all. What this is brings the word rummage to mind. There are weird recovered castoffs in various states of completeness. There are wooden baskets full of paperback bodice rippers, covers stripped. Unmatched dishes and glasses, beat-up pots. Bolts of fabric that look at least a decade old, priced not by the foot but by the bolt. On a low shelf, about waist high, a wooden stereoscope rests atop a pile of cards for it. I don’t lift the thing up to try it out for fear of breaking it, but the top picture — two pictures, really, but identical — is of Portland around the turn of the last century. Beside it stands a ceramic figurine, maybe a foot tall: a crow with a jaunty smile and a black top hat that matches his feathers. A bow tie below his chin turns his folded wings into the suggestion of a tuxedo jacket. I think I will buy this for a present for Jack.

This is the first I’m mentioning Jack. I know that. He’s the guy I’ve been seeing since a few months after Steven left. He’s a strong, tender lover and a good man. I have this problem where whenever he’s not around I forget he exists, until some random moment when I remember that I’m not just a wronged lonely woman and in fact am loved by somebody, somebody in every way better — anyway, better to me — than the person I lost. The heart can be funny but the mind can be even funnier.

Funny is almost certainly not the right word.

I put the crow down on the counter next to the register. I ding the little silver ser vice bell. “One second,” calls a voice from the back room, and then a tallish woman emerges from behind the curtain. She has long graying red hair, masculine shoulders, and wears a pair of horn-rimmed glasses she might well have found among her own stacks, unless she bought them new, say thirty years ago.

She keeps one hand on the figurine as she rings me up, and strokes it gently, the way you would a small tired dog. I put my hand on top of her hand and give it a squeeze.

“You’re Bruce’s mother,” I say. Her eyes go to slits even as they zero in on me.

“Who are you?” she says.

“Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to surprise you. I’m a psychic, actually. When our hands touched I knew you had a son named Bruce.”

“You expect me to stand here and take this?” she says. “Who the hell are you?”

“I’m sorry,” I say. “I shouldn’t have said anything. But it’s hard being psychic. You get these bursts of true insight and then nobody believes anything you say. I know I’m right. If I wasn’t right you wouldn’t be looking at me like that.”

“Well, if you’re so psychic what else can you tell me?”

“It doesn’t work that way. I can’t just — well, there’s something bad that’s happened in your family recently and Bruce has been deeply affected. He’s trying to be strong for you but he isn’t sure if he’s strong enough. You should be patient with him, and kind. Does any of that make sense?”

“None,” the woman says. “I don’t have a son named Bruce.”

Back at the hotel, I smoke the joint like you would a cigarette: just keep taking drags until the whole thing is gone.

I get myself into a lot of trouble, going overboard like this.

Sometime after the last glints of sunlight slip below the horizon I realize I’m bored staring out at dark water, and then I realize that this is actually a normal, coherent thought, and this makes me think maybe the worst has passed. I think I’ll go down to the restaurant, order something not too greasy and a coffee, then check out and start back home. A nice night drive. Become nothing but a pair of headlights cutting swiftly through the silken dark. Mmm.

What can I eat that won’t be too greasy?

Some kind of sandwich, which would also go well with the coffee. I want lots of mustard, so much spicy brown mustard that everybody in the place can smell it and they all gawk, and if there are no other customers to gawk then only the waiter will, and I am more ready for this coffee and sandwich and drive than for anything I have ever been ready for, even as I feel myself slipping off to sleep, curled up in the chair there with the bed so close but also far away and the last thing I realize is having not decided between smoked turkey and roast beef.

Bruce is in the room with me. He’s over by the bed, pack slung over one shoulder and his whole form — body, clothes, everything — is incandescent, flickering like old film. “Hey,” I say. “I thought I saw your mother today.”

“I don’t have a mother. I’m not even a college student, just a traveling kid. Here’s what happened: I woke up early this morning, took forty dollars out of your wallet — you can check if you want — then walked back to the highway and started hitching again. A man in a light blue ’89 Dodge van with no windows picked me up, took me to some lonely place he knows about, messed me up pretty bad, and then left me there. I died. Also, my name isn’t Bruce it’s Malachi.”

The ghost gives me this look of ultimate affection and some pity, like he’s sorry how fucked up this is but it’s all in perspective, or would be if you could see it from where he’s standing.

“Of all the people to visit,” I say, “why me? Or is it more like you’ve got some list and I’m pit stop number whatever.”