Justin Taylor - Flings - Stories

Danny wanted Ellen to come to them, call a cab, but she was barely listening to what he said. There was no way she could wait patiently, give directions, sit back and watch streetlights roll by. She was in meltdown mode and someone had to get to her. Kat fired up the computer while Danny kept repeating, “It’ll all be okay.” Ellen hung up on him midsentence and he was suddenly worried that she might do something. The bus schedule was a nightmare — it was too late in the evening, there were too many transfers. Everything was wrong.

Danny called Rachel. Only he knew where she was, and she knew he knew; therefore if she saw it was him calling, she would know it was important because she would know that he would know that she’d kill him if he was calling her for no reason — or, worse yet, to check up.

Her phone rang, then went to voicemail. He wondered if she had broken her promise. He called again. The third time, finally, Miles picked up. Fucking Miles! “Hey, man,” he said. Presumably he’d recognized Danny’s name on her phone’s little screen. Danny told him to put her on. “She’s kinda…” he said, and then Danny started screaming at him. No idea what he was even saying. Miles told Danny to chill out and then he put the phone down. Danny heard voices, but he couldn’t tell what was being said. A couple minutes passed.

Minutes. It was excruciating.

“What,” she said, finally, in a blank voice that set Danny’s guts churning. He launched into a garbled apology for having bothered her. “I’m hanging up,” she said, but then before she could he blurted the news. “Oh no,” she said, emotion seeping through the drug screen and into the two hushed syllables.

He wanted to apologize again but was scared to. Another epic silence.

“Okay,” she said.

Half an hour later Rachel was banging on Ellen’s door. Her nausea had mostly passed, but her hands were shaking. There was sweat on her forehead. She had chills. But they were there for each other. Ellen and Rachel forever! Friendship would carry the day where love had failed. Hours passed, crying and screaming, and then Ellen on the phone with her mother while Rachel — thrilled for the distraction — snuck outside and painted the rosebushes blue, a rejection of the Gatorade she’d chugged on the way over.

(Later, Rachel would tell Danny that Miles had gotten his hands on some seriously cheap shit. She’d drifted in a warm gray-on-gray la-la land for about twelve minutes; then the sickness had set in. Miles had called her to the phone from out of the bathroom, where she’d been huddled. All in all, she said, the biggest disappointment since the Matrix sequels.)

Danny sat slouched at Percy’s kitchen table, swirling a wineglass full of Old Crow, his magnum opus splayed before him. His work was a disaster. He saw that now. His ostensible monument to Rachel was in reality a fairly astute but immensely boring exposition of his own most regrettable qualities and aggressive failures. His narrator was unreliable, unlikable, and calculating: a cipher for his worst self, a conniving sneak with a pornographer’s eye for exploiting sentimentality, matched only by his penchant for producing actual pornography. Every sex act was recorded, but not as a memory or emblem of love; more like evidence entered into the record at a trial.

He finished the glass of bourbon and lurched about the apartment, flipping light switches off, closing shades.

The pioneer cemetery on Southeast 26th was a designated historical site, easily mistaken for a park and protected only by a chain-link fence. He hopped it, plunged headlong into the blizzard of shadows cast by the great oaks, silence booming like the sea in his ears. He realized that what the occasion required was music. Music consecrates everything and this was a holy moment, or it would be soon.

He picked a spot near — but not on — the grave of one Mollie Fletcher, 1832–1845. Poor kid. He piled the notebooks on the ground, then turned his attention to his iPod, a first-generation model about the size of a pack of cigarettes. He scrolled down to Rilo Kiley’s Take Offs and Landings because Rachel had first turned him onto them, back three years ago when she’d been a bright-eyed indie rock girl. And because the first song on the album starts out “If you want to find yourself by traveling out West / Or if you want to find yourself somebody else that’s better, go ahead.” So it was pretty much perfect in every way. He turned the volume up as loud as it would go, knelt before his little pyre like Hendrix in that photo where his guitar’s burning, hit the play button, stuck the device in the breast pocket of his plaid snap-button shirt. He coaxed a flame from his Zippo and held it to the pages of a spiral-bound Mead with a blue cover. It took. The cover curled up from its corner, revealing its white reverse side even as that whiteness blossomed into an orange that was already browning, the brown almost as quickly again becoming white-gray ash borne away on the breeze. He watched the fire take on a life of its own. Jenny Lewis’s high, honeyed voice swarmed all the space between his ears, and everything she sang was the most important thing he had ever heard before, though he’d long known all these lines by heart. By the time he got to that song with the chorus that goes “These are times that can’t be weathered and / We have never been back there since then,” his great work was history and he was singing along with her. Cocooned in noise and self-pity, Danny felt like a pure spirit, righteous, the king of his own broken heart. He never heard the police approaching, or their shouts for him to get his goddamn hands in the air.

What could he have looked like to those night shift beat cops? A Satanist, perhaps: yowling on his knees before a fire in the old cemetery at close to the witching hour. His hands were in the air now, a lazy arrhythmic sway, but he still couldn’t hear them, so they tasered him and he writhed on the ground in an ecstasy of suffering. His pants went piss-dark; the earphones flew free of his whipping head. From his new dirt-level vantage the wimpy fire looked scary and right. Then a second zap sent his eyes up into his skull.

Everyone came in the morning to bail him out. It was like the day he’d flown in, only Rachel was there, too, and everybody looked somber and fatigued. Danny was hungover, ashamed, rotten on Portland — fuck his court date; all he wanted was to leave town. They talked him down over breakfast at the Cricket — the same place he and Rachel had lunched the day before, lifetimes ago now. And what had the whole thing been about, anyway? He wouldn’t say, only forked apart sopping pieces of the house special, his hand shaking as he raised it to his mouth. They let it go.

Not much changed between him and Rachel. They kept things status quo while her internship wound down; then she decided to go back to Schmall, not explicitly to get back together with Marcus but everyone knew it was in the cards. Percy’s job moved him to Eugene and he didn’t invite Kat along. She was bartending downtown and doing great for herself. She took over the lease at Rachel’s place. Ellen got hired on at the film company but was just killing time. She wanted to go to law school, she thought.

Danny had a problem — he was homeless, almost broke, and needed to stick around town to finish his community service, or else live the rest of his life with a bench warrant out on him in the state of Oregon. He got a job doing shitwork for Greenpeace. Hey, you got a minute for the whales, the seals, the trees? He wore a blue windbreaker, held a brown clipboard, stood smack in the middle of the sidewalk. Ellen had more space than she knew what to do with out at her place and was glad for the company. She helped him buy a secondhand Trek bike to ride to work. It turned out that Danny and Ellen were the ones who were right for each other all along. Weird world. Weirder still for everything Ellen knew about Danny and Rachel, which was, well, everything.