Cayley, the waif, the half-and-half bag of seizures and sleep, remained motionless during transport. The moment I laid her down on the couch, however, she woke up.
"Do you have frozen waffles? And syrup?"
Coincidentally, I did. "Yes. I’ll bring some."
Grabbing out food items and setting plates on the counter made me feel like a goddamn chef. I stacked our waffles. I slathered the margarine. I flooded those receptacle grids. I microwaved the microwavable bacon.
Cayley gave a review while chewing. "This. Is. So. Good."
"Thank you," I said.
We faced each other. I sat on the edge of the bed. She sat on the floor, propping her back on the couch.
"What’s your name?"
"Greg."
"Okay, Greg. Tell me. About. You."
She pointed at me with her fork, impaling my apprehension on the tines before stuffing a bite of waffles into her mouth.
"If Ruth never talks to me again, I’ll probably kill myself."
Cayley chewed, swallowed. "Why just probably?"
"Because although I’m not enthusiastic about living--perhaps, at times, even dreading the enterprise altogether--that’s very different than wanting to die. And similarly, wanting to die is very different than aspiring to actual suicide. Promoting that ‘Probably’ to a ‘Definitely’ all depends on how much I hate myself. Just a little bit more could have me gathering pills or practicing knots."
"Whoa. So why do you hate yourself?"
"I’m not sure. Something big pushes me to do it. Big and out of frame, with the inertia of an axiom. Basically, at my healthiest, I have two modes, tolerance and hate. I don’t like who I am, therefore the best I can do is, well, tolerate. I tried augmenting myself with hobbies, but I never got good at anything, and being a shitty piano player, being a shitty Ral Partha figure painter did not endear me to me. Everything I did was a discouraging waste of time. So, yeah. If I lose Ruth, my lone source of joy in the cosmos, my self-hatred might become strong enough for a thirty-eight to the brain. And, really, no one will care. My parents might be sad for a while, but they’ll recover. Trust me, they’ll be relieved, in a way, no longer having to wonder if I tell bad stories about them. I’m not cynical. Nobody cries about the same dead person every day, nor should they. Seriously, my life has no effect on...life. I’m not destined to make anything, like invent a machine or medicine or process that betters mankind. I can’t discover anything, because I don’t fucking go anywhere. I’m not smart, I have no in-demand skills, and I refuse to increase the population with my DNA. Which spares the population, obviously. Watching TV and reading comic books and being governed by sociopaths who are completely disconnected from me has been okay, but I can’t picture it lasting much longer. ‘So designate your own meaning, that’s what you’re supposed to do, right?’ Well, I did. I put the entire meaning of my existence on one thing, and it got fucked up, so now I have to find a replacement reason to participate in the world? That’s ridiculous, I don’t feel like it. And it’s not selfish. Selfish is when a person won’t give something up. Someone can take my job, my apartment, my car. People can leave work to attend my funeral, maybe get sympathy leniency for a few days. That’s pretty good. And also, if you think about it, I’m not just taking myself out of everyone else’s life, I’m taking them out of mine. The world loses me, but I lose the world. So the moral high-grounders ought to remember that when they talk about the people who get left behind. Because it barely counts."
Cayley stared at me, blinked a few times.
"You saved me from getting stabbed to death. I’m glad you’re alive."
"And while I appreciate that, I hate myself an un-lowered amount."
I chomped a bacon strip immediately after as though doing so somehow accentuated my point. Cayley laughed, then yawned.
"Thank you for breakfast, young man. May I pardon myself to lie down?"
"Yes, of course."
Within a few seconds, I could hear the gentle tempo of Cayley sleep-breathing.
When I woke up later that morning, I felt extra warm, and there was an extra weight on my chest.
"What are you doing?" I asked the top of someone’s head.
"What? Oh. You didn’t leave me a blanket, and I got cold, so I crawled in here with you."
"Well, get out."
"Out of the bed or out of--"
"Greg?"
The door opened. I stopped breathing. My bladder shit its pants.
"Who is that?"
The question belonged to Ruth. After squinting really hard then discovering that Plan A--"Crush the world in my eyelids"--was impossible, I tried to answer, to settle the whirlpool of alphabet soup in my brain. "She liked the food I made for her."
Ruth--prettier than Cayley, I decided--wore a white t-shirt and blue jeans. The red in her face deepened to such a degree that if a heat beam had discharged from her forehead, I could not have claimed a lack of warning.
"That answers it. She’s your kindred fucking spirit."
Before I could be the one who made things worse, my bedmate kicked off the blanket, shook out her hair, then hopped onto the floor to introduce herself.
"I’m Cayley. I bet you’re Ruth."
Cayley had a demilune scar on the small of her back. I knew this because, evidently, she preferred to sleep without the encumbrance of clothing. I’m not sure which dermal feature Ruth noticed on the suddenly appearing naked woman.
"We have an argument, and you fuck someone else?"
I scooted myself out of bed, standing to more widely project my indignation. "Why would you automatically assume--"
Ruth sighed while looking at the area below my waist. "And what is that?"
"That...prevents necrosis," I said, referring to the erection pushing against my boxers at a forty-five degree angle.
Cayley gave her opinion. "Nice cock," she said, pulling up her underwear, then her skirt. She addressed Ruth after pulling on her tank top. "We didn’t have sex, by the way. I got cold--"
"Actually," I interrupted, sitting back down on the bed to hide my bulge, "this crazy guy was going to stab her, so we came here--"
"So you could stab her? In the vagina? With your penis?"
"Ha, clever, but no. Anyway--"
"You dabble in heroics now, Greg?"
Just then, someone else entered the room. A massive, comfort-displacing guy, with a mane of hair that was undoubtedly the prize for besting Satan two-out-of-three in arm wrestling. He also wore a leather jacket, which, due to my knowledge of 1980s action movie tropes, scared me to death. Maybe he worked for the phone company, or was doing some scheduled maintenance on the apartment that my roommates didn’t tell me about. Please have nothing to do with the current situation, I thought.
Cayley gave him a name. "Cody. Oh, hi."
"Gregory?" he asked, staring in such a way as to replicate his prior success at telekinetically exploding a man’s brain.
"Um, yep. That’s me."
"What is he doing here?" Ruth demanded.
"I don’t know," I said, perhaps with no sound.
Someone had called him that morning then hung up, Cody explained. He figured it was Cayley trying to find out if he was home or not. He figured that the name displayed on the Caller ID, Gregory Something, might be listed in the phone book. Then, he figured an ambush.
"This is why you ran off last night? To fuck this guy?"
"I didn’t fuck anyone," Cayley said.
Her statement failed to persuade him. The truth did not--in defiance of the moralizing claims made by adults throughout my childhood--instantly solve my predicament.
The giant studied me for several seconds, inconclusively pondering the mystery of why I even existed. Then, convinced of his own authority in my room, he decided something.
"Get up," he said.
So, maybe there’s a list:
1. Get up, as Cody demanded.
2. Crash the Moon into the Earth by merely gesturing.
3. Necromancy.
And maybe, there’s no telling in which order of difficulty these items have been presented.
"Get up and say you fucked her. Say it to my face."
I stayed on the bed, wary as a mongoose of motion from Cody.
"But that’s a lie. Unless you want me to say those words independent of any accuracy."
He took a step closer. "Are you making fun of me?"
I could feel the guttural vibrating of his intent, could picture his cords of muscle quivering like pre-strike viper tails. His size amplified everything--each movement was an event. Until then, I was never able to look at someone and determine that, unquestionably, he’d bashed in a man’s face then re-purposed the mangled concave as a bowl for Split-Pea and Orphan Tear Soup.
Come on, just like last night, my brain whispered to my body. Jump off the bed, knock him over. Then you can leave. This guy doesn’t even have a sword. Okay. Get ready. Now!
I sank farther into the bed.
"Fuck it, stay there. After I’m finished half-killing you, you’ll be set for your white sheet test."
I regarded "half-killing" seriously but needed clarification for everything else.
"Test?"
"You want me to explain it, stupid fuck?"
"Yeah. Yes. I do."
Cody touched his own forehead as though formulating the next words pained him. "If I sprayed your blood on those sheets by punching your face over and over again, the elders, the people responsible for doing sheet inspections, would believe that a woman had lost her virginity on them."
A ripple in my expression--a tilt of my neck told him--that his explanation, his threat, required a bit more.
He sighed. "Because the blood would appear to have been caused by a penis tearing a hymen..."
The words evaded my focus, tracing convolutions toward a lesson on culture that I would never care about. Phrases like "unruptured maidenhead" and "physical proof of chastity" floated by me as I fought to fix my attention. A pre-beatdown lecture meandering along the scenic route really epitomized his contempt for my mortal finitude.
"Which I am not defending as a practice," Cody was saying, "and not every woman bleeds her first time. Various activities--"
His rambling was an incantation, magically enervating the room. Awkwardness replaced danger.
Cayley asked an important question. "How much blood do you think a hymen produces? Also, Cody, what the fuck?"
He gestured at me. "Because, obviously, he's a bitch who I'm going to make bleed on the sheets."
My curiosity was an escape artist, could not be contained. "And that’s who pumped his hard cock inside your girlfriend? Penis. Penis. Penis. Thrusting--"
And then...Cody happened. He didn’t move, he didn’t step, he--as a facet, an avatar of destiny--happened to me, seizing my shirt then lifting me off the bed. Tensioned fabric originating from his fists cut flaming furrows into my skin.
"So, you admit it?"
His breath, the history of coffee and hashbrowns, pummeled my nostrils and open, vulnerable eyeballs.
"No. I’m pointing out--"
Another voice cut in, employed a real strategy.
"Um, Cody? Nobody...no fucking went on between these two. I was here the whole time. Some guy was going to stab, um, Cayley, and so Greg brought Cayley here. And I was here, and the three of us...watched movies all night."
My heels met the floor as I was no longer forced to be en pointe by someone wrenching my t-shirt.
"Okay. Well, thanks for helping her," Cody said, switching from enraged Nephilim to big, cranky-in-the-daytime lug.
I nodded. As The Ruffian and The Waffle Eater passed me to leave, Cayley kissed herself on the hand then tried patting the front of my boxers with it. My hips deftly negotiated a mere glans-grazing.
Relief flooded the space Cody left behind. I closed the door to my room.
After that, Ruth and I sat without speaking, would every so often squirm or sigh, wrapped in the wet, shrinking rags of deliberate silence. I’m not sure how much time passed.
"So you do believe me," I finally said.
"I don’t know about that," Ruth responded, thinking out her next words. "Actually, I’m going home."
She started getting up. I had to keep her from leaving.
"No no, Ruth. Please wait. I have to tell you something."
After a few seconds, she sat back down, detecting in my tone that she was about to hear a shimmering divulgement, a proclamation guaranteed to bejewel both memory and the future.
"What, Greg."
She’s staying. People never stay. Here’s my big chance...
"Okay, there’s only one way to say this. Basically, all I do is work, watch TV, and see you. What I realized--"
"You fucked her, didn’t you? I fucking knew it. What’s wrong? Tell me. Tired of the same routine? Working and coming here and seeing me?"
"Whoa, wait. Let me explain. Okay? I...hate my job. Okay? I’ve hated every job. I hate being around people. And that includes me, I hate being around myself. But you make it worthwhile. I’m happy enduring all that so I can be with you. You’re my only source of joy in the cosmos."
There was a shift in Ruth’s ontology, an aural change that globed out layer after layer of indifference. A tornado would have stubbed its toe, entropy would have peeled its fingernail on such a force field.
"Okay. I’m the reason you do a bunch of stuff you’d rather not do? Thousands of hours of hating life, dedicated to me. Your martyrdom is not flattering."
My mood: Hobbyist inventor whose homemade passenger balloon craft has taken flight. Her response: Angry villagers mistaking buoyancy for witchcraft. Javelins appear, get thrown, pierce everything.
Ruth stood up again. "You’ve talked enough. Don’t explain. And don’t--I’m done," she said. Walking to the door, she added, "I should have let that guy half kill you."
Chapter Seven