Justin Taylor - Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever

“You’re the one who wanted to be psychic,” Bruce says. Now he’s laughing at me. “Look Rose, I’m sorry I made up that story. I’m not really dead.”

“You promise?”

“Oh yeah, for sure, though the thing about my name is true. What actually happened was after I left your place I tried to shoplift some breakfast from a gas station candy rack but the cashier saw me and there happened to be a cop nearby and when they searched me they found some other stuff I didn’t tell you about, and now I’m in county lockup, two towns over, and even though you’re not a psychic, it turns out that I am. I’m visiting you via astral projection, which sort of makes my body look like it’s having a low-grade seizure on my cot, not that anyone’s checking. Anyway, I’ve come to tell you I accidentally left my iPod in your car and I’d really like to get it back, though I guess they won’t let me have it while I’m in here so I don’t really know what to say.”

I give the ghost my phone number. If he ever calls I’ll know this wasn’t a dream.

“Thanks, Rose,” he says. “You were really good to me.”

“And yet you left without so much as good-bye.”

“Rose, don’t make this about Steven.”

“I didn’t tell you about Steven.”

“Yeah but ghosts know everything.”

“But you’re not really a ghost, right?”

“Well, I’ve got the psychic thing going for me too, now. It’s complicated. Look, I didn’t ask for any of this.”

I remember now how young Bruce is, ghost or no, psychic or no. And I’m not calling him goddamn Malachi. “Nobody asks for anything,” I tell him. “Every day of your life is getting something you never asked for.”

I wake up and my mouth feels like it’s stuffed with old wool. It’s dark, but I don’t know what time it is.

Late or early.

The phone’s ringing. That’s what woke me.

Bruce?…Steven?…Jack, actually. Worried, I’m sure, or maybe just a bit put out, since we haven’t touched base in a few days.

I wait until the ringing stops. When it does, I shut down the phone. It chirps out its little good-bye song.

The problem is now I’m awake.

I put the TV on and some all-movies all-the-time channel is showing Touch of Evil . Commercial-free, no less. (Lottery tickets.) It’s at one of the parts where Janet Leigh is alone in the room at the motel in the middle of nowhere.

Instead of drawing obvious parallels, I take the longest shower you can imagine. Hottest, too. I leave the bathroom light off but the door open and the TV on. Marlene Dietrich tells Orson Welles his future is all used up.

I turn my face into the stream and feel the drops beating against my eyelids like rain on windows. I open my mouth and let it fill with water and swallow and then do it again. I shut the water off, wrap myself in a towel, sit down on the edge of the still-made bed, and watch the rest of the movie. It’s the last scene, where Charlton Heston is walking through the river, holding the tape recorder up to keep it dry and then Orson Welles hears his own recorded voice echoing off the stone arches of the bridge, then the big shootout.

Dietrich again: “What does it matter what you say about people?”

She has all the best lines in this movie.

“But I didn’t tell you the last part yet,” I say to Jack.

“Okay,” he says, “hang on real quick while I load the drier.” It’s Tuesday night. We’re back at his place after a nice dinner, and it’s looking like I’ll stay over. There are some things I left here on another occasion that I can wear to work tomorrow. Jack tossed my items in with some laundry of his own, so they’ll be fresh and clean.

I’m telling him all about my weekend away, except for a few things about Bruce that I don’t tell.

“Okay,” he says when he returns from the other room.

“Okay,” I say, and give him back his spot on the couch so I can snuggle up to him once he’s settled. “So I’m on the way back home.

“I don’t really need to stop but I guess I just want to. It feels more like a trip when you do, and otherwise the drive isn’t that long. I’m sipping on a strawberry soda I bought from the machine at the rest pavilion, sitting on a picnic table — not on the bench at the table, but actually on the tabletop itself, with my feet on the bench.

“Maybe ten feet away there’s another picnic table. They’re both poured concrete, gray, with dried bird shit and old graffiti and everything on them. Anyway I’m alone at my table but this other one’s full. A whole family. Mom, dad, three kids, plus another adult. An aunt I guess, mom’s sister or else dad’s. That’s what I decide while I’m watching them. Oh, and also that one of the kids is hers, though I can’t tell which. They’re all six of them eating sandwiches and spooning out chicken salad and potato salad from these plastic containers, passing things around, eating cubes of watermelon from a big Tupperware. It’s warmer off the coast, but still pretty chilly. They’re all in jackets and sweaters, having this kind of summer picnic while dressed for fall in the middle of this cold spring, and I think that’s part of why I like watching them. They’re apple-cheeked but getting through it. Nobody is even complaining that I can see.

“Now the one woman is wiping the kids off and loading them back into the family minivan, which looks like a rental. The man is helping, so I decide he must be that one’s husband. The other woman is cleaning up the lunch things all alone. She stacks up the dirty paper plates, gathers up the plastic utensils and puts them on top of that stack, then pops the lids back on the containers of food.

“The garbage cans are up at the pavilion, so she has to walk past my table. I’m finishing my strawberry soda, holding it straight up to get the last of it. She pauses before me. I put the can down on the table.

“‘You want some chicken salad, ma’am?’ she asks me. ‘There’s quite a bit left over.’

“I’m looking at her, silent, like I’m thinking, and I am, but what I’m thinking isn’t about her at all. I’m thinking to myself that when I get back on the road I can either go back to my life or I can turn out of the rest stop into the northbound lane of traffic and just go. I know you don’t like hearing it but it’s true, that’s what I was thinking. There are so many places I’ve never even seen.

“‘It won’t keep,’ she says. ‘We’re not taking it with us. It will go to waste.’

“It actually looks like good chicken salad, and I am hungry, having left the beach late that morning without eating first. All I have in me is strawberry soda.

“‘I saw you watching us,’ she says. ‘We’re good, clean people and I know this is what you want.’

“And she’s right, but I still don’t move to take the food. I don’t know what it is, and I guess I’ll wonder about it for a long time. I mean, I’m not scared of germs, strangers, or anything. So why can’t I let myself say yes?”

+

Summer, 2004

+

I loosen my grip on Andrea’s neck and tell her, If you were with me I’d only hurt you when you wanted me to and she says, Then what would be the point? Her voice is a shred. She clenches around me like a raised fist when I cut her air supply again.

A different day:

I’m thinking about that song “Debaser” by the Pixies and repeating the chorus under my breath while I work—“debaser, debaser, DEBASER, debaser”—which I guess doesn’t sound like much, but you’ve got to imagine it the way I do, which is with a melody.

Or that’s what I hear whenever Brendan walks into the store. Chords fill the air, ooze like oil from a slab of deli meat. It isn’t like angels singing and little pink hearts floating around my head or whatever. It’s more like I’m imagining his theme music. We both hate the classic rock that 101.9 plays, but it’s the only station our crappy radio gets. And that’s a lame thing to hate, probably, but it’s what we have in common, and it is good, finally, just to pass minutes with music — any kind — because in silence you fall out of time. No. It’s the other way. You don’t fall out, you fall in. You get stuck, like running through a field and you twist your ankle on a rock. And you just lay there.