Justin Taylor - Flings - Stories

Danny, no sap like Kat, understood that he and Rachel would never be “together.” And yet the allure of what they inflicted on each other — the sheer thrill of wounding and the deep satisfaction of licking each other’s wounds clean — was too great to resist. He could not imagine living without it. He felt like he was waking from one of those dreams where when you’re dreaming you think you’re awake, and only when you wake up do you realize that what you thought was your waking life was in fact another tier of the big deep dream — or was it? Like Chuang Tzu and the butterfly, Danny thought to himself as the landing gear groaned and the plane began its descent into PDX. There was no such thing as New York. Danny saw that now. He wasn’t one of Those People. He belonged to this strange town, his best friends. Her. Bedazzling, unaccountable girl who skipped the trip to the airport to meet his plane but turned up at the apartment at midnight for a late drink and to christen the futon after Percy and Kat went to bed.

So Danny’s two projects were one and the same. Rachel was his muse — a word he no longer made the mistake of calling her to her face. Rachel hated to be written about. It made her feel like she was under some microscope, she said, or a zoo animal having its picture snapped by gawking tourists in foam hats. That made things difficult, though in a way it made them easier since he mostly only wrote out of anger, frustration, or hurt. For as often as she was bedding him, why didn’t he matter more?

Ellen and Scott sublet a house in a suburb at the far edge of town. They went hard-core domestic and the other friends rarely saw them. Even Rachel only saw Ellen in passing at the filmmaker’s office, where they were both rapidly learning the extent to which they had overestimated their interest in experimental film. Ellen seemed to take this in stride, but not Rachel. Impulsive and reckless at the best of times, in Portland she was rallying her disappointments into an all-out nihilism spree.

Rachel felt stuck, and neither she nor Danny was sure how Danny fit into the quagmire. Sometimes she clung to him: a nonjudgmental ear, the comforts of familiarity, and as much sloppy drunken sex as she could stand. He cherished these times and, though he did not know it consciously, was usually hoping for her to sink lower, because it was in her weakness that she called on him and he would once more have the chance to play the role of unwavering savior, at least until she got tired of having a savior, which never took all that long. She had come out there to find herself, but here was everything she’d left behind like a fence hemming her in or a bowline tying her to a dock. So she made friends with some townies in the music scene, which even she knew was a Band-Aid on a dog bite, but for the moment at least it would have to do.

While Rachel was out at house shows or watching kids in hoodies wipe out on their boards at the Burnside Skatepark, Danny sulked and wrote an endless, plotless book that was ostensibly dedicated to her but of which she was essentially the villain. Well, he had to work his feelings out somehow, didn’t he? The only other choice would have been to talk to Percy about it, which he hated doing, because Percy related Danny and Rachel to him and Kat, and obviously in that formulation Danny was Kat. So he filled notebooks up with the grand tally of Rachel’s misdeeds, transgressions, insensitivities, shortcomings, and general failure to sufficiently understand the grave importance of their love, which he regarded as a manifestation of capital-L Love in all of its philosophical, political, artistic, literary, existential, and metaphysical connotations and ramifications. Yes, whenever they made love the world was saved. He knew that, and so could hardly help but see that what they had was not a convenience, crutch, or habit but rather a solemn responsibility. It never once occurred to him that even if she’d understood the crazed scope of his vision, said vision still might not have been especially appealing to a girl adrift and unhappy in a world that she largely despised.

Rachel decided to do the stupidest thing she could think of, which was try heroin. Her townie friend Miles told her not to tell anyone about them going to shoot up, but she told Danny because she knew that he’d keep her secret, unlike Percy, who would tell Kat and then it would get back to Ellen, whose older brother had gotten bad into drugs in high school, resulting in a mess that had nearly torn her family apart. Nobody even smoked pot around Ellen. But Rachel knew she could trust Danny because she knew he would do absolutely anything for her except leave her alone. And this way, she reasoned to herself, he would feel nominally involved, despite the fact that he was absolutely not invited along. They were at the Cricket Cafe, a hipster diner whose specialty was biscuits and white gravy, though it was lunchtime now. The Velvet Underground happened to be on the house radio, and she hoped this coincidence somehow clichéd things to the point where he’d have to stop freaking out and laugh at the absurdity of it all — which he didn’t, as she had known all along that he wouldn’t.

Miles was going to handle the buy and getting clean works, as well as shooting her up and babysitting her. He knew what he was doing, she said; it was all taken care of. She wouldn’t give Danny an address but grudgingly promised to keep her phone on.

Danny hated Miles. He was an unknown quantity, a dangerous usurper — everything, in short, that Danny had been to Marcus — though the few times Danny was allowed to meet him, Miles seemed nice enough. It was really only possible to hate him when he was an abstraction. The actual person just banged his head along with the music and asked if Danny wanted another beer. Miles was a high school dropout who played in a couple bands and had a three-year-old who lived not with him but with his parents, two towns over. He was doughy and soft-spoken, a moptop with hazel eyes and bad tattoos up and down his arms.

Ellen came home from work and found that Scott had left her. He’d loaded up their car with his half of their belongings, written a note about sad things sometimes being for the best, shut his phone off, and split. As Scott drove south he kept thinking that the cars passing him going the other direction were Percy on his way home, but that was because he only had the vaguest (and anyway mistaken) sense of where La Grande was on the map. He continued to entertain this possibility long after he crossed the California line.

When Ellen realized Scott was never going to pick up — and with Rachel MIA as well — she called Danny, who felt terrible having to pretend he didn’t know why Rachel wasn’t answering the phone. The world was wobbling on its axis. This wasn’t supposed to happen. Ellen and Scott were supposed to have been the sure thing — the un-fucked-up and un-fuck-up-able couple, the golden standard against which the other friends could fail and fail absolutely, that task (he thought of Barthelme, who had been thinking of Beckett) standing always before them, like a meaning for their lives.

Ellen was alone out in the burbs, stuck with all the half-empty drawers and the craven, mealy-hearted note. Neither Kat nor Danny had a car with which to go retrieve her. Danny tried Percy, who was on the road home but still hours away. “Man, that sounds like an epic shit show,” he said to Danny. “I’ve got half a mind to stay in La Grande.” They shared a humorless laugh and then said good-bye. In the silence that followed, Percy considered the truth of what he’d said to Danny. It was a massive waste of time and money, all this travel back and forth, and there was a nurse named Jacquelyn with whom he’d become somewhat involved. If he turned back now he could get to her place by midnight, but then what would he say to his friends? Danny already knew he was on the way, so he’d have to make up an emergency. A union emergency? It didn’t make sense. Percy’s was the only car on the road. He imagined his headlights as streaking comets and his car as a dark ghost chasing their tails. That didn’t make a ton of sense either but so what? Road signs flashed in and out of his vision. He didn’t imagine himself at all.