Justin Taylor: Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever

“It’s almost not enough anymore,” she says, breaking the silence. Should I ask what “it” is? No, that’s clear enough. She rattles the ice in her mug. “Typical,” she says, meaning my not answering, so I say, “I have to kill my uncle’s cat tomorrow.”

Neither of us is saying what the other wants to hear.

The first time I saw Sara naked we were teenagers. She had small high breasts and I came in my pants when she rubbed against me. Sometimes when we are being cute with each other she reminds me of that, and I remind her that I got another hard-on a few minutes later, which she went to town on, I always say, laughing, and we both laugh, and I tell her she’s still got it and she tells me to prove it to her and then I do. We date and we break up and date, and there have been others, for both of us, sometimes when there shouldn’t have been, but as the years have moved our old friends away, married them off, or put them in their graves, our rediscoveries of each other have lasted longer and longer. Right now, finally, temporarily, again, we are everything to each other.

When I enter the bedroom she’s on her side, facing away from the door, covers up under her armpit, and, as I can see from how she’s breathing, still awake. I take off my shoes and slip my watch and wallet into them. I take my jeans off. I approach her side of the bed instead of my own. I take her hand and pull at her. She slides her legs from beneath the bedclothes, lets me stand her up and turn her toward me so we are face-to-face. She is wearing only an old pair of white underwear, faded from a thousand washings and thin. Her pubic hair presses against the fabric; it looks like a topographic map, perhaps a map of us, if we, this, could be less a thing than a place. I touch her speckled shoulders, graze my fingers down her fleshy upper arms, the light hairs of her forearms, the backs of her hands, until our fingers touch: tips to tips. I lean in to kiss her. We kiss.

I get to Danny’s in the early afternoon, later than he said to come, but it was a rough morning. We went out to breakfast, didn’t talk much, then Sara dropped me off at McCarren’s so I could get my car.

“I’ll call you,” I said.

“No you won’t,” she said. “You’ll just show up here.”

I let myself into the house. Buckles is sprawled, asleep, on an arm chair, the cut on his nose scabbed over, taking in the full afternoon light that sets the fringes of his fur aglow, as if haloed already. He stirs when I take him up into my arms but does not try to get away. I hold him close, as I saw Amanda do, flip the push lock on the sliding glass door, and stand fixed a moment, appreciating the stillness of the yard, a ghost of breeze barely troubling the surface of the lake and the blue, blue pool. I step toward the edge of the water and kneel down, the stippled aggregate pressing into my knees through my jeans. I can feel the little red marks it is imprinting. I slide one hand as gently as I can around the cat’s neck and start to strangle him at the same time that I plunge him under.

It takes maybe a minute. I hold him down another minute to be sure, and then I am sure. As a final act of either defiance or submission, he has pissed in my uncle Danny’s pool. I watch the yellowish cloud dissipate, consider pulling the chlorine bobber over the spot, then think to myself, enough already.

I bring Buckles back inside and lay him down in the guest bathroom shower. I wonder if his being locked in here most of yesterday was even why he was so docile — poor, fucked animal; exhausted, ready. I decide I should check around for any final piles of vomit, to really do this right, and find one in the living room, which I clean up with a tissue and toss out in the kitchen garbage. When I’m done, I’ll put the cat in there too, put in a fresh bag, and take the full one with me, bring it to the dump or something. I check the kitchen, the dining room, the hall. The door to Amanda and Danny’s room is closed, but Vicky’s is open.

I examine Vicky’s windowsills and look under her bed. Nothing. I open her closet to see if she still has that tee shirt I got her. It’s all black jeans and old kiddie clothes and a couple of fancy dresses, Christmas and wedding things. Probably she keeps her tee shirts in her bureau, but in the top drawer I find only socks and underwear, most of which is plain. But a few pieces are surprising, and I am glad the garments are all just stuffed in. If everything had been folded and neat she might notice that someone had been in here, though she probably would figure it was only her parents, spot-checking for weed.

There are a few lacy pieces, blacks and one red, not very risqué, really, just hard to imagine on Vicky. This thong with the leopard-print front, say, is almost unbearably cheesy, but if she were standing in front of a boy, as Sara stood in front of me last night, he would fall to his knees in worship — how could he not? — and maybe Vicky will not miss just a single pair, if it is a black lacy and not the leopard print, of which there is only the one. I bring them to my nose — of course they only smell clean — then put them in my pocket and shut the drawer, thinking it is time to finish cleaning up and get going.

I turn around and there’s Amanda, standing in Vicky’s doorway.

I guess she took the whole afternoon off work, came home after her appointment. I wonder what the results were, and how long she has been here. Was she here this whole time, maybe taking a nap? She has been watching me, silently, and is still silent, though she seems about to speak right now.

It is next Wednesday and my mother is saying, “Why aren’t you over at Danny’s?” and I’m telling her anything, or else I’m walking in to McCarren’s, taking a seat at the far end, and Sara’s ignoring me at first but then coming over, rolling her eyes, bringing a foaming beer for me, saying, “You’re here early for a change,” and I’m giving her that same old smile, the one that barely makes rent, the one that coasts into the station on fumes.

It is not next Wednesday. It is still this moment and that will be true of every moment that follows, assuming this moment ever ends, which, if I am lucky, it won’t. Amanda filling the doorway, silent, us facing each other like friends or like family or like lovers: an eternity of silence and afternoon light. And she doesn’t even know about the cat yet. I will never escape this town.

The anarchists were drinking victory shots and making toasts because even though they’d never met with success before they surely knew it when they saw it or it found them. Snapcase, his beard effulgent with spilled drink, was sure that school was out for ever . He’d tossed Jessica’s survey of art history, his own Norton Shakespeare, and somebody’s copy of Derrida’s The Gift of Death into the fire pit they had dug in the backyard. The shallow hole was surrounded by salvaged chairs and shaded by a blue canvas canopy they’d stolen from some resort because property was always already theft anyway, and plus they had really wanted that canopy. The books were doused with whiskey from a bottle of Ancient Age. Snapcase lit a hand-rolled cigarette and then tossed his still-burning match into the shallow pit. It went out in the air, so he lit another and placed it gingerly in a little pool of whiskey. It snuffed there. Someone said something about lighting three matches in a row. Somebody else said no, the expression was no three on a match. And how that expression had come from World War I, because if you lit three cigarettes off one match in your foxhole or trench the enemy in his foxhole or trench had three pins of light to triangulate your location and then he blew up everything or maybe just shot you and your two buddies.