The Argument

When you ended things I needed to rationalize things. I looked up and tried to reconcile. I needed things to make sense, and so I craned my neck towards the sky. The sky was blue. This was my anchor. This was my constant. I am alone now. And the sky is blue. It's over, and the sky is blue. This is the end and the sky is blue.

But this cannot be the end. Thus, the sky cannot be blue.

Because the sky changes colors it is not a single shade so much as it is an occurrence.

Because to the south of me exists molten rock and eventually the surface of the continent of Asia, and because to the east and west of me are horizon, the sky isn't so much a color as it is a direction, and just like Heisenberg says: precise inequalities that constrain certain pairs of physical properties, such as measuring the present position while determining future momentum; both cannot be simultaneously done to arbitrarily high precision. How can the sky be blue if it is also above me?

It is subjective. To a colorblind person the sky is actually a sea-foam green, or a sad, dull gray.

The sky is no more blue than it is black at night, a sheet punctured by the stars, a thin sheen that reminds us that in the grand scheme of things, nothing will remember who we are.

The sky is not blue because colors are not inherently dangerous, and the sky is not a color but a womb, a place where tornadoes and lighting are born, there, in that cold apple skin of atmosphere.

The sky has been a god, in the past, an ambiguous deity, and so, according to the Christian doctrine, the sky is not a color so much as it is an abomination.

The sky is not blue but instead the sky is chromatics, physics, electromagnetic radiation; more than anything the sky is really just light, which is not color but energy.

The color blue is really just a measurement of wavelengths and therefore not the sky but a series of numbers. 470, 638, 2.13, 2.64, 254. I could associate these numbers with the number of times I've thought about you since I began to de-rationalize the existence of the sky as a set function of everyone's everyday everything. Why should they get the sky if I get nothing?

The sky is only a unit of infinitesimal particles, not a color but a collection of layers, an atmosphere.

The sky, as far as I'm concerned, is not blue, but an opinion.

The sky is upside down. Cognitive perception flips the images we see right side up, and so if the sky is really inverted than we are underwater, at the bottom of the ocean, and so who can say what color the sky really is, if none of us have been there? And, if this is the case, and we are really underneath the surface, then, just I suspected, I can't breathe, and I am drowning. I am drowning. We all are.

Hello lovely, hello lovely, hello, was how he referred to them, all of the women, which were many, because he was consistently confused and madly in love with every woman in the world, always. He often felt like Irwin Shaw and Woody Allen only in the absence of eloquence or good humor, and though he was clever, he was not intelligent, and it was easy for women to see through his intentions, or at least what they thought were his intentions, because his love for them was genuine, just not focal.

My first day as a substitute I went to the wrong school. I remember my hands slipping off of my steering wheel as I turned into the parking lot next to the tall brick building. I slunk in through the side door because I was late to my first class, scouring the empty halls for the classroom that matched the numbers on the napkin I had used to write down my instructions. I remember my footsteps sounding like gunshots with all of the bodies in the classrooms, nothing to absorb the sound of my heel bouncing off the tile floor. Just black, metal lockers. When I finally found the room I thought I was looking for I walked through and loudly announced that I was sorry I was late, and found myself in the middle of a woodshop class. An older gentlemen, a Ghallager look alike at the front of the room, pulled his safety goggles off and balanced them atop his bald head. Can I help you? he asked. And I felt my phone buzzing in my pocket — in contrast with the spinning saw — and knew it was the administration of P.S. 111 wondering where I was.

I missed first period and made in time for the last half of second. In the desk I found the regular teachers instructions. My students are to take a test today. No talking. If they do, don’t hesitate to take the test away. I have preemptively written John Henderson of my fifth period class a referral for disrespect. He will earn it without fail. Just a forewarning. When the third period class filed in I handed them the tests and wrote the answers to the test on the chalkboard. I said, No talking, and watched. The class suspiciously copied down what I had written, even though most of my answers were wrong, and some of the smarter kids knew that, but it didn’t stop me from collecting their sheets and filing them into the teacher’s manila folder.

When the last test was handed in I opened my briefcase and pulled out a VHS of the 1930′s “King Kong” and then told everyone to take notes. One of the kids in the back said, smartly, Shouldn’t you be teaching us something? I wrote him a referral and laid it on his desk. I didn’t get this job to teach, I said. I’m just here to watch movies. I took a seat behind the teacher’s desk and did just that. I watched.

Fortune

My little Argonauts, she called them, her two sons, though they had no idea what it meant, nor she, as her pregnancy with Thomas (her eldest) had occurred when she was only sixteen, resulting in her dropping out of high school, the importance of learning definitions of peculiar words waning each day with the growth of her belly, and so she was forced to misuse them instead.

There they go, she said, my little Argonauts, as they ran out the door to go play. She watched them digging at the end of the front yard from the kitchen window of their trailer, in that low dancing heat that made her boys shimmer in the background like mirages, while she washed plastic dishes clean of the boy’s macaroni and cheese lunch; one red, one green. Mulling the term over  in her head, she decided that it meant to be some kind of explorer, perhaps one who travels explicitly on foot, one who purposely avoids the sea or the air, a fitting term for her two sons who were grounded by the poverty that they were, for now, blissfully unaware of. They had only an idea of the absence of things, like possessions, or a father.

She pictured her boys as two such travelers, explorers of the world all around them, and she allowed for herself, briefly, the romantic notion that their home, that grounded and thinned out metal tube, was really a vessel missing one small part, one key component. She imagined that their tenancy in the trailer park was only temporary, that at any moment a large bearded man with black fingers would come in through the front door wiping his hands off on an old spotted rag and say, It’s all fixed up, ma’am, and she would call in her two sons, and they would soon be halfway across the world, the view outside their windows, blurs of colors and sounds, everything once keeping them fastened to the earth disappearing behind them.

However, Jess, now twenty-four years old, was coming to an understanding that fantasies such as these  did more harm than they did good. She was better off keeping her head level with the window, her feet planted firmly to the ground, recognizing the horizon for what it was, a dangerous drop off at the edge of the world.

It was at this moment of consideration that Brian, her youngest, began to squeal, a screech that first sounded like one of pain, but, as Jess snapped out of her languidness and back into a state of motherly awareness, she saw her two boys running toward her with an eagerness that suggested having never experienced disappointment, the sincerity of children, both of them shouting, Treasure, mom! Treasure!

Thomas, his feet pounding  furiously against the pavement with his fist held out in front of him had a look of seriousness on his face that his mother would eventually come to hate. First when he would tell her that he wanted to meet his father; again when he would inform her that he had gone and joined the army; and again, the worst time, when he would wake her up at four in the morning and ask her to have a seat in the kitchen, where he would explain to her very slowly that Brian had been killed in a car accident by a drunk driver, where he would say that he was gone forever, that he was never coming back, that it was just the two of them now, that she was that much closer to being entirely alone, that nothing would fill the hole he had just created.

But before these moments would unfurl there was now, this moment of optimism, this bizarre feeling of hope fluttering alive inside of her like a white dove, as Thomas burst in through the front door of the trailer and ran to where she stood, dirt trailing in behind him, while Brian, coming in after his older brother out of breath, began dancing and spinning, his arms flailing up and down while he yelled, Treasure, mom! Treasure! In his high pitched warble, while Thomas stood still in front of her panting, red faced and sweating, staring wide-eyed and hopeful at his closed fist with such an intensity that one would think he was able to see through his fingers to the treasure he enclosed there.

Jess, her heart still racing, the hair on her arms and neck raised like it was listening, knelt down to the same height as her son and placed her hands around his own and prayed, Let it be something. Let it be one of hundreds of gold coins, or the tooth of some prehistoric creature, or the tip of the mast of some long forgotten ship, the beginning of an ark; an answer to their prayers, anything at all.

Show mommy what you found, she whispered. Show mommy what’s in your hands.

Thomas finally broke his gaze and looked up at his mother with his girlish brown eyes -- his lashes so long for a boys -- and he nodded in understanding about this secret that they were about to share, the two of them, while in the background Brian giggled with sparrowish delight and sang, Show her, Tommy! Show her! And Thomas released what he held and in that instant his hands opened in his mother’s she understood that whatever it was that he found held little to no value at all, she felt what little weight there was between the dirt he dropped in her palms, something small and insignificant, and with the disappointment already showing on her face she opened her hands and saw the dull, brown coin there, a farthing, old British copper worth only a fraction of a penny, one of the few things she remembered from her history class sophomore year, pictures of old British currency in the margins of her textbook, and with this knowledge floating around hopelessly inside of her, Jess began to cry, and then the only noise in the kitchen was the sound of three people breathing and a small distinct ‘pink’ on the plastic tile floor of the kitchen, and Brian quieted, and Thomas finally spoke, and he said, What is it, mom? And with the back of her hand Jess wiped her cheeks and gave the coin back to her son and said, It’s nothing, Thomas. It’s nothing at all. And she rose, to walk past them, to her bedroom, full of vagueness, full of nothing, toward what felt like, for her, inevitability.

The Cactus

"But metafiction isn't even cool anymore," says my friend, rolling a cigarette. "That shit hasn't been cool since Vonnegut died in '06." he licks the paper and twists it into a tight bundle before he presses it between his lips. He lights it.

"He died in 2007," I say. "And he wasn't the only one who did it. I gave you that Kundera book." My friend inhales and looks at me. "Fuck that guy," he says, and spits near my shoe.

"How am I supposed to write about the word mint without making it self-referential?" I ask. "If I talk about people in a bar it's cliche. If some guy roofies some girl it's cliche. If some girl roofies some guy it doesn't make sense. The only things left are mojitos and mint chocolate chip ice cream."

My friend scratches his face and then runs his hand through his hair --the one not holding the cigarette-- to create a kind of static lift. He does this whenever he is thinking.

"Ok," he says. "How about this: the story could be about a guy. This guy's name is - is - is fucking Dave, or whatever, right?"

I nod.

"Ok," he continues. "Dave is gay, right? But he's married and has a kid, so, he decides that, one day, he can't take it anymore. He gets really drunk. On mojitos. He makes himself like seven mojitos in his nice backyard in his nice house on a nice street in a nice neighborhood in a nice part of town and then leaves to pick his daughter up from school. He makes a mojito for the road.

I nod again.

"So --swerving through traffic and shit-- he picks up his daughter and drives her to an ice cream shop where he buys her two scoops of mint chocolate chip and tells her that he has to go away for a long time, that he might never come back. And the whole time he's telling her this he's chewing up mints like fucking crazy. Yea, mints, because his breath smells so bad, like alcohol, just handfuls and handfuls of mints into his mouth, crumbs of them dripping down his chin.

"He leaves. He gets into his car, this mint colored Cadillac from the fifties, and then he leaves her in the ice cream shop. Just fucking leaves her there. This girl is in fucking kindergarten, right? And then he drives to Mexico. They live in San Diego or some shit and have a house made out of coral.

"He drives and doesn't stop. He can't stop. If he stops, something will catch up with him. He can't explain it, he just knows he has to keep driving, eighty, ninety, a hundred miles an hour, to escape this feeling. He makes it through border patrol, and keeps driving.

"He gets lost. He has no idea where he is. He pulls over at a bar. He ends up getting wasted because he feels so guilty, he just wants whatever it was that he was running from to catch up with him, and so he's waiting. Just waiting. There's all of these locals at the bar. Some of them speak English and they invite him over to come sit with them. They drink. They order mojitos and mint chocolate chip ice cream and tequila and they're laughing and drinking and eating ice cream and clinking glasses and spilling alcohol all over their dry, dirty fingers while the ice cream crusts against the corners of their mouths, and then someone drugs Dave. He passes out. They strip him naked. They drive him to the middle of the desert and leave him there to die.

"In the dim light of the moon, Dave wakes up and wanders through the desert past the tall rows of cactus that line the earth. They glow a soft mint color in the night. Pretty soon the cactus start looking like people. Reminders of the abandoned. He runs his hand over them, carefully. The spines of the cactus brush against his fingers. He thinks about how fitting this is. Like, how, even when he touched his wife, his daughter, his family, his lover, this affair he had with this other man, it's like they were never really his -- like he was never really touching them at all, like he had never touched anyone in his entire life. He hears a coyote in the distance. This is what he's been waiting for, you know? This is what's been trying to catch up with him. Not the actual coyote, but, the sound, an omen. Like he's arrived at himself. And so he walks, naked, through the desert, towards oblivion. And like, that could be the end. That could be it, you know? Why don't you write about that? Why don't you make that your story?"

I look at my friend and don't say anything. I wear my disapproval on my face. I shake my head "no."

He spits on the ground again and stamps out his cigarette, which he has finished smoking in the time it took to tell the story. "Fine," he says. "Fuck it. Don't write about it. Write about some other fucking people putting drugs into their drinks so they can fuck each other like awful, dying animals. Here's a story for you. I tried quitting smoking once. Chewed on mint toothpicks until my gums bled. Why don't you write about that? Why don't you write about that dumb shit instead?"

I shake my head. I do.

Stretch

She was so tall I wanted it to be illegal. I hated her for it, and I wanted them to take her away. I wanted to see blue and red lights reflecting off pale skin as they tilted her into the back of the police cruiser, hands cuffed behind her, face somber, eyes still. Too tall to sit up, she would curl into a ball and lie sideways on the backseat where, I imagine, she would cry quietly onto the cushions, more out of embarrassment than anything else. But I would miss her. I would miss her if they took her away like that. I wanted her close. I Wanted to protect her from other men. From the officers who held her arms back. From men who were better suited for her. Healthy men. Men with five o' clock shadows. Men who wore basketball jerseys. Men with better taste. Men who could identity blackcurrant fruit in expensive bottles of Pinot. Men with rhythm. Men with deep laughs. Men with bigger penises. Men who had large, white teeth and argyle socks. Other men. Men who were, more or less, just like me.

I pictured us together, dressed, a cocktail party anticipating, her already towering above me and asking would it be all right if she wore high-heels. My response would be to stand on a phone book so that I could kiss her on the lips, and I would say, The taller the better, my dear, and I would brush her hair out of her eyes and call her My Little Skyscraper, which is an oxymoron, which she loves. She was so tall. She was so tall I wanted to climb to the top of a thick tree and shake its branches; shake its branches and yell crude, obscene things at her so she would look around and see me and say, What a curious boy. Or, What a strange boy, or, What an interesting boy. Any of those things, so long as she was looking.

I tried to picture us; a well-adjusted couple. A couple who held hands, conversations. Who had a dog. A short-haired dog who shed too much. My great, big, redwood of a woman would brush the hair off of her jeans and say, Where does it all come from? and then she would throw her head back and laugh. A laugh so big and tall it would break up the clouds. We would take the dog out to eat with us, the three of us, outside, and people would try to pet the dog, some would try to scratch it behind the ears. And they would always looks at you and ask about the dog. Always you. Always.

But I cannot picture us as this kind of couple. Something tragic needs to happen. The dog has cancer. No, she has cancer. No, we all have cancer, the three of us, all of us, shedding and shrinking and sickly. We met at a cancer support group and fell in love. We adopted a sick dog because we knew that we could nurture it back to health with all of the extra love we had to give, which was so much. We had all kinds of cancer: brain and skin and lung and finger, but we fought on, the three of us, eating scrambled eggs and Denver omelets and extra bacon that we fed to the dog under the table. It was the three of us, eating while our diseases ate away at us from the inside out, and it was ironic, and dichotomic, and contradictory, and an oxymoron, which she laughs at; which she loves.

Art Feet

I was growing my hair out. On my face and on my head. It made everything itchy. I knew I couldn't stay this disheveled because I needed to work, needed a job, needed to finish my resume, but, in the mean time, I was growing my hair out. I'll clean up when I get the job, I thought, if I get the job.

Halfway through the resume I realized I didn't know what I was doing. I drove out to my mom's house, though, technically, a trailer, where she was sitting out back rolling a joint. I sat next to her on plastic lawn furniture and we passed it back and forth while I asked her questions. "What exactly do I need to put down?" I said. "What exactly are they looking for?"

"You're asking the wrong person," she said. "Ask your father."

I thought about my father, living in Dallas, driving his Corvette with his new wife, her hitting the ignore button on his I-phone when she saw that I was the one calling. I decided to ask someone else.

But there was no one else, and so I found myself driving through town high as fuck in my small, beat up car that shook like it was laughing whenever I tried to stop too fast. $1,200 to fix it, the mechanic had said. I'll get it fixed when I get the new job, I thought, if I get the new job, but only if they don't drug test. I'll quit smoking pot if I get the new job. Where was I?

I was at my ex-girlfriend's house. Her dad would help me with the resume. He still liked me. I got out of my car and rang the doorbell, saw him trotting in from the living through the front window. "Nate?" He said, when he opened the door. "Mr. O'Hara," I said. "I need help. With a resume." He looked behind him to the living room, where, against the wall, two sliding glass doors opened up to the back deck. Valerie, my ex, was sunning on the patio with her new boyfriend. I could almost hear Mr. O’Hara’s brain turning. "I just need look at one,” I said. “Only for a second." This was the same man who taught me how to set a table; taught me how to tie a tie; taught me how to drive a stick shift. This was all before his daughter. This was before I through a brick through her widow. "All right," he said. "Come in quick, to my office. But don't let my wife see you."

I barely remember the office. I remember being overly aware of my hair growing out. I remember feeling hot and crowded, that Goddamned itchy feeling spreading from my face to all over my body. I remembered that my mom sometimes laced her pot. I remember Valerie's dad asking me if I was OK while he pulled up the Word doc., and I remember sweating and saying, No, no I'm not OK, and then pulling off my shirt and running down the stairs. I remember him chasing after me. I remember Mrs. O'Hara in the kitchen screaming, the sound of something breaking. Glass, I think. I remember taking off my pants, my underwear, being naked in their dining room and feeling that fire all over my body. I remember seeing the pool and running for it, hearing Valerie scream "Jesus Christ!" while her boyfriend pushed himself up from the deck chair and shouted "What the fuck?" at me, right before I dove into the pool. I remember opening my eyes from the deep end and then looking up, looking up at that turbulent blue reflection of the world outside, at everything all around me. And then, underwater, when I decided that I couldn't stand it any longer, I opened my mouth and screamed all of the air out that I could, like an undomesticated, wild animal.