Kristopher Jansma - Why We Came to the City

George set the lamp down on the ground and looked around the room, to the extent that he could without moving his head. Clarence and Franklin, his two brothers, weren’t in view — presumably they’d taken the bed in the next room. And Sara’s sister’s boyfriend George-Harrison, whose idea it had been to go out for a few more after the rehearsal dinner, had his own room down the hall.

Which left only Jacob. Had he gone home, or was he around somewhere? George still couldn’t shake the feeling that Jacob was only acting as if nothing were wrong, but maybe nothing was wrong. Supposedly he was turning over a lot of new leaves. He was taking night courses at Pratt on Tuesdays and Thursdays to earn his master’s in art therapy. Sara claimed he was writing again; she had been badgering him to read something at the wedding, but he insisted he had nothing new.

Taking a deep breath, George lurched up from the couch — just like ripping off a Band-Aid, he thought. As with a Band-Aid, he immediately felt a searing pain. It was behind his eyes, in his ears, and climbing up his brain stem. The entire room pulsed and blurred. It took almost everything he had to keep himself from lying back down again — but no, he had to get up. This was his wedding day . Everything would finally change. Sara would ease up on the interval training. He’d be able to focus his energies on the future — their real future — and make mornings like this (was it morning?) a distant memory. Tomorrow they would be on their honeymoon, and afterward these yesterdays would be well behind him.

Yesterday. What an odd kind of hell that had been, to return from three sweaty hours in traffic on the Garden State Parkway, smelling vaguely of the baby powder that the strippers (apparently) used to keep themselves from sweating on the poles, finding glitter that had once been attached to the nipple of a woman named Roxxxy and was now somehow (he knew how) in side his left nostril. Man truly was a disgusting animal. He’d never felt more so than he had that afternoon, changing in the moving car in front of George-Harrison and walking directly into a Michelin-starred restaurant to dine with his parents, for whom a racy evening was watching a Robert Redford movie on cable, and all his soon-to-be in-laws, and to look the woman he loved right in her lovely, dark eyes as she asked with a knowing smirk just what exactly he’d gotten up to. Bless her. Absent any shred of doubt that the debauchery would mean anything to him. Knowing that whatever occurred couldn’t touch what they shared.

He watched a purple feather creep along the ceiling and get caught in a downdraft near the balcony and go surfing down the drawn shade toward a corner on the floor. He took a deep breath and tried to walk. Amazingly, he didn’t fall over. Now he could see the clock in the kitchenette — and that he had just under forty minutes to clean himself off and get to the roof for the photographers. He grimaced. Not a lot of time — but he just needed to put one foot in front of the other. Sip some of the ginger ale from the minibar. Maybe eat a cracker if he could. Keep a couple of aspirin down. Get to a shower.

As he set about these tasks, he felt sick in every conceivable way. He was used to hangovers, of course, but lately they had been different. Now the hangovers started during the fun. It used to be that only with the coming of the morning did he have any regrets. But steadily the distance between the during and the after had collapsed. Now he regretted things even as they were happening or even before —knowing that they would happen, because he lacked the will to stop himself.

George hunted for the remote control but couldn’t find it, so he eventually walked over to the TV and turned it off by hand. No mystery as to what he’d been trying to watch, drunk and butt-naked in the middle of the night, cuddling with a lamp. He’d left it on Televisión Española, which aired three reruns of ¡Vámonos, Muchachos! every night beginning at one a.m. The girls had discovered the show on their own, years ago, though back then he had never really understood the appeal. It was a multicamera sitcom featuring a group of six twentysomething friends in downtown Mexico City. Nobody else he knew seemed to have ever heard of the show. It didn’t even broadcast in HD, further contributing to George’s sensation that he was traveling back in time by watching it. It felt unmistakably like a 1990s show, in the vein of classic NBC Must See TV. Mostly the Muchachos characters seemed to have no jobs to prevent them bantering at the spacious Torrefacto café, with its pink and blue mod-style couches and patterned orange walls.

The muchachos were Santiago, a nerdy orthopedic surgeon who had trouble talking to women, despite being a born romantic; his handsome roommate, Tomás, who worked at Torrefacto (though he was rarely seen actually working); the beautiful Constanza, a high-maintenance TV weathergirl who was in a tumultuous relationship with Tomás; Isidora, the architecture graduate student who shared Constanza’s loft, an utter and charming mess of a girl, perpetually disorganized and overwhelmed by life; her brother Aarón, who played guitar with a struggling band called La Palabra that was always about to get its big break; and Renata, by far the quirkiest of the gang, a speech therapist with her own sporadic practice, though she was so childish at heart that George wondered how she stayed in business. She and Santiago had a will-they-or-won’t-they tension that couldn’t really be characterized as sexual. The humor was all very PG: gags involving talking parrots and lost purses and cases of mistaken identity and sinks overflowing and letters being misaddressed. Someone was always getting locked out of an apartment while wearing nearly nothing. They were all always running out of minutes on their cell phones at just the wrong time. There had to be hundreds of episodes, and from what little George could find online about it, the show was still being made, airing in Mexico a year before rerunning in America.

George had first come across it while trying to clean up the DVR. Sara had left the series on the record list, and over the course of the first six months, they’d amassed fifty hours of episodes. She couldn’t bring herself to watch it anymore and had asked him to delete them all, but George found himself unable to. Instead he began watching them, late at night, alone. He guessed he was sleeping only three or four hours a night, most times. He didn’t see how it was possible to still be alive on so little sleep, but he managed to get through the day, bleary and exhausted, only to get into bed and find himself wide awake. He would lie there in the dark until sound-sleeper Sara was out, and then get up and wash dishes, make himself an Old-Fashioned, reorganize the books and DVDs, water the houseplants, and watch an episode of ¡Vámonos, Muchachos! while drinking a second Old-Fashioned.

Trying to settle his stomach, George chewed some stale crackers he’d found in the hotel kitchenette. His phone was ringing on the counter. A miracle he had drunkenly managed to plug in his charger. Allen’s face appeared on the screen, and George rejected the call. He couldn’t believe Sara had insisted on inviting him. Not only that, but she’d also made Rob bring him to the bachelor party!

It was during that evening, when George had drunkenly done all the things that passed for bonding — playing blackjack together, stopping at Gary’s SuperLiquor to buy enough Pabst to drown a team of oxen — that Allen had asked him point-blank if he’d ever been with a woman other than Sara. (Where was Jacob when you needed someone to throw a little cold water on the situation?) George had been too obliterated by cheap beer and the relentless throb of the synthesizers to lie. Knowing it was all over his face, he shook his head.