Enjoy Me

by Logan Ryan Smith

  My Xanax sits atop the TV that I never turn off and now shows news of a bridge collapse in the Midwest. Distracted, I hear the news anchor say, “…diverted money from bridge maintenance to….” I pop a couple pills and swallow them dry. “Yes, that’s right, Hannah. Possibly thirty or more trapped in the forty-degree water under the rubble.”

  It’s eight-thirty a.m. It’s my thirtieth birthday.

  At the window, three stories up, I stand in just my boxers and watch traffic roll down Leavenworth and Post streets. My apartment building is located at the bottom of Nob Hill and above a café filled with red velvet couches, red velvet curtains, and lots of open space. It’s what’s known as a “soft foundation” for a building and I know I’m destined to die in a quake when the earth shakes and sends a cartoon-like snowball of people, cars, and buildings from the top of the hill down to slam right into my solitary confinement. I expect to live for up to seventeen hours underneath it all, suffering through whistling breaths of crushed lungs and the pain of a pulverized pelvis and dismembered left leg. Two days after my neighbors and I are dug out and later buried, cars will traffic the street again, and while not everyone forgets, everyone gets by and, as they pass the intersection of my painful death, they’ll briefly recall the rubble and bodies that recently laid here but quickly push it all aside as it makes their morning coffees taste like gas fumes and it’s all just too much to think about.

  Now, I move my gaze from my future death and a perfectly busy downtown intersection and look up to see the old woman that lives across the way watching me through coyly parted curtains. She’s in a white robe, her hair wrapped in a white towel, looking like a mummy coming unwrapped.

  Making eye contact with the nosy old bat, I slowly slip my hand down my chest and my stomach, lift the elastic band of my boxers, reach in and grab my cock and start tugging. Her eyes widen and I blow her a kiss and really give my morning wood a meaningful yank for the wrinkly wench, hoping to shock her enough to leave the window or die from a heart attack. Only thing is, she’s also giving herself a good wank so I put a halt to all proceedings, pivot away from the window, whistle casually, and put a pot on the small electric two-burner to boil water for my morning coffee.

  When I turn back around a few minutes later to look out the window I see nothing, fortunately, but a peregrine falcon perched on the fire escape of the old penis-woman’s building. There’s a pigeon trapped in the falcon’s talons. Every few seconds, with a mechanical, jerky plunge, it snaps its sharp beak into the pigeon, ripping feathers out one by one, dropping a tickertape parade of lice- and flea-infested feathers to the sidewalk below. There’s nothing I can do but watch.

  My cell rings. The screen reads “Mom” and I let it ring. The bridge on the TV is not getting any better and it looks like no one knows what to do with the situation. Just a bunch of helicopters flying around and some lights flashing, but, really, nothing much happens besides people drowning in the river, unconscious within their busted up cars.

  That bridges can collapse, just like that, fills me with way too much anxiety and I try to remember that I already took some Xanax but can’t keep myself from going back to the TV and popping another one. And then another. “We’re hearing there was a school bus on the bridge when it collapsed… can you confirm that for us, Jim?” the news anchor asks. And maybe just half of another, which I bite off and chew.

  In the bathroom, I fish some Advil out of the medicine cabinet and pop four of those. In the mirror of the medicine cabinet I see there’s a red mark on my chest and some scrapes, scratches, and discoloring, and I wonder what the fuck I could have been doing to myself in my sleep.

  I’ve hurt myself plenty in my sleep before. I’ve woken up slamming my head into walls, walking into doors, and I’ve been told by girlfriends that didn’t stick around too long that I often would pummel myself in my sleep with both fists while weeping profusely and calling for my brother. It especially confused and scared them because I don’t have a brother. But this looks like I was clawing at my chest as if I was trying to tear out my own heart. Perhaps if I’d done that while sleeping next to my past girlfriends they would have found me romantic and stuck around.

  The cell rings again. The screen reads “Lowry” and I pick up.

  “Happy birthday! You ready to see the ponies?” Lowry asks.

  For a second I’m confused. “Pennies?”

  “Horses, man. The horsies!”

  “Lowry, the bridge collapsed.”

  “Huh? The bridge? What bridge? The Bay Bridge?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What the fuck are you talking about, man? No bridge collapsed.”

  “If you try to get from here to there, you need a bridge. And it collapsed like it was never there in the first place. And it killed people—children, even. But not immediately. They all had to suffocate first by filling their lungs full of river water. It hurt. A lot. I was there. I was there with them. It fucking hurt, Lowry.”

  “I don’t know what you’re on this morning, Luke, my man, but you’ll have to share some when we meet up.”

  “Oh, yeah. Yeah, um, just… give me a minute. I just woke up. I feel like shit.”

  “What’s new, Luke?” Lowry says and guffaws.

  I guffaw back and hang up.

  Thirty minutes later I’m in a cab with Lowry heading toward the CalTrain station where I’m told there’s a bar so we can grab a couple bloody marys and meet everyone else before heading out to Bay Meadows Racetrack in San Mateo.

  Lowry goes on and on about his dreads, his ex-girlfriend, his near-romantic love of some Giants pitcher, how his skateboard has new wheels that roll “like hell,” and how he’s got so many women in his back pocket now that he’s a free man that it’d make Chamberlain look like a chump.

  I smile then feel sick to my stomach as I try to forget the black rat in the shower this morning that crawled up my leg and sank its fangs into my inner thigh before I could swat it away—I try to forget how I fell over in the bathtub, grazing my head against the water spout as the shower curtain broke away from the rod with the weight of the rat’s body and crashed down to the floor. Then how that wet thing wrestled its way out from the translucent shower curtain and ran out of the bathroom and down the short hallway into the main room. There was nowhere for it to hide but I didn’t find anything in my little studio.

  The inner part of my left thigh, now, is bright red, but not bleeding. I rub it for a bit until I notice Lowry giving me a weird look, so I stop.

  After an unbearable amount of time wondering how I choose my friends we finally end up at the CalTrain station only to find out that the bar doesn’t open up until the afternoon. So, Lowry and I walk up toward the Giants ballpark to find a new bar and my sister calls and I don’t answer and then my voicemail alert beeps and I listen to my sister singing me “Happy Birthday” and then I put the phone away and tell Lowry that if we don’t find a bar fast I will lose my mind and he says not to worry and before I know it we’re sitting in an elaborate Irish pub with gorgeous dark wood fixtures and beams and Lowry buys my first bloody mary and says “Happy thirtieth,” and, feeling a tidal wave of anguish and gratitude, I have to hold back from crying. Then I say thanks, clink glasses, and enjoy this bloody mary at nine-thirty in the morning.

  After a few more drinks and Jim Beam shots I’m feeling in control, so Lowry and me head to the train station where we greet my friends who look less than enthused, obviously tired, hungover, drugged out, and mostly bored.

  We take some celebratory group photos where I pretend I’m dead and my friends grieve over me. Other pictures are full of ass-slapping (not my idea) and lewd gestures—lots of middle fingers and tongues sticking out and one, I think, of a baseball bat being swung hard against my head, my brain jutting out in chopped up bits through my mouth, my eyeballs bulging and my hands out in an it’s-a-party gesture.

  On the train, my head throbs. It rolls too slow, or too fast, or just not the right way, and turns my stoma
ch. Kevin, with his curly hair and gangliness, looks at me and laughs, says, “Luke, come on, buddy. It ain’t the end of the world,” and he throws me an MGD from his backpack. And because Kevin makes everyone feel better just because, I feel better for a second. I crack open the MGD and take a sip and try to keep feeling better.

  When I look out the window of the train now going way too fast, I see a nuclear bomb exploded in the distance, but then think it’s probably just steam from a factory. Then I get a call from Wilson, who’s usually pretty good at coming through in the end, despite his inability to answer a single question clearly or make definite plans; however, I don’t pick up, don’t hear a voicemail beep, and eventually get a text that he’s not making it out to the track with us—that he’ll buy me a drink later after the horses have finished circling my thirty-year gallop toward death.

  Lowry and Kevin talk and I look at Sanchez who hasn’t said much since meeting up and he looks at me, looks around the train, takes a brief glance out the window, then back at me, sticks one finger into his mouth, and mimics vomiting.

  I look back out the train window to a quickly pulled zipper of nuclear explosions opening up the land.

  Russ—a rather large guy with a rather small lesbian girlfriend—is complaining about being up all night fucking.

  “She’s just insatiable, man,” he says, looking down, rubbing his forehead perplexedly, sighing and seeming altogether worn out. “But her pussy is just too good! I can’t say no.”

  Lowry leans across the aisle, gives him a high-five and I try to imagine Russ and his girlfriend having sex and I can only imagine that Russ is the only one actually getting fucked in that scenario.

  The scenery outside the train window is of rolling hills, green pastures, blue lagoons, some views of the Pacific, trees, and absolutely no life. Nothing, outside of the earth, is moving out there.

  Big puffs of white mushroom in the distance.

  Russ and Kevin sit across the aisle from me, Lowry and Sanchez sit in chairs directly across from me.

  “What’s going on, asshole?” I ask Sanchez, kicking him in the shin.

  “Don’t fucking kick me, asshole. OK?” Sanchez says.

  “Hey, fuckwad, it’s my birthday, you know? I can do whatever I want.” Then I kick him in the other shin, hard, and he almost gets up out of his chair like he’s going to kick my ass, but thinks better of it.

  Something dark scuttles down the aisle past my foot. Sanchez goes on about his ex-wife, which I find hilarious, since they were married all of seven months, and that marriage happened in a drunken brainstorming about eight fucking months ago that lead them to Vegas. Her name was Jasmine but she looked like Cleopatra. He goes on about the abortion and how he talked her into it, how he should have had the kid with her, not pushed her into the decision, which caused the breakup and her to move to L.A. He says he’s worried she’s become a junky and doesn’t know what to do. He says he wants to be a family man.

  “She felt the need to leave San Francisco to become a junky? Are you fucking kidding me?” I ask, thinking of how many needles I have to pull out of my arms before getting on the bus in the morning.

  His eyes water. White light fills the train car before it starts to pull apart at the seams and disintegrate in scalding ripples.

  “Seriously?” I ask, trying to sound more sincere and interested and as if I could actually care. Sanchez doesn’t answer, just sighs and averts his eyes. More often than he should, he smoothes his pencil ‘stache with thumb and forefinger.

  I look over to Russ and Kevin yukking it up, having a grand old time as bright lights flash over and over again through the windows behind them.

  “Hey, Russ, you’re kind of fat. Why don’t you stop eating for a week or so? A month, even,” I say.

  Russ stops in the middle of telling a humorous story and looks over to me, halts his own chuckle, and says, “What?”

  “You’re fat, dude. You make me sick,” I say, nearly spitting.

  Russ, a sad, confused look on his face, looks over himself and asks again, “What?”

  “Nothing,” I say. I look at Kevin, reach over the aisle into his backpack and grab myself another MGD then walk back toward the bathroom. I hear a bunch of “what’s his problem” kind of stuff behind me.

  My phone rings again, vibrates in my pocket. It’s Aunt Annie. I haven’t heard from Annie in ages and I actually can’t remember if she’s my mom’s sister or my dad’s or if she’s just some lady that lived down the street when I was a kid. I do remember her sneaking me sips from her glasses of Tullamore Dew when I was six and always feeling warm from that. I also liked that it was one of many secrets we kept from my mom and dad.

  Distracted, the train car fills with white light when I realize Aunt Annie is telling me about San Diego and how she’s been sky diving and playing billiards at the neighborhood pub and meeting plenty of nice older gentleman.

  “I’ve got rats,” I say.

  “What’s that, sweetheart?”

  “Rats. They’re everywhere. I think one bit my thigh earlier in the shower. A bridge collapsed. I’m not really sure about the structural soundness of my building. But I’ve definitely got rats.”

  “I met the nicest man just the other night—”

  “And my chest hurts.”

  “…and he knew all about—”

  “I’m not sure if they’re actually there. It’s my birthday, by the way.”

  “…different kinds of vaginal problems, because he’s a gynecologist, it turns out—”

  “I’ve got rats,” I say and hang up.

  I think about how much I can’t remember. I think about how much I choose to remember. I think about how it’s my birthday and I can do whatever I want.

  Suddenly, I recall that I was on this same train when a woman jumped in front of it. Before I can feel sick about that I’m overwhelmed with understanding, empathy, and an unfamiliar sense of longing, love, and lust. I want to feel that woman’s warmth against me before and after the train ripped her to shreds.

  Then, in the tiny restroom of the CalTrain, I down a can of MGD while pissing and choking myself to keep from crying as I recall the terrified and sad look on the engineer’s face when he came running toward the back of the train after hitting the woman. It took a long time before we rolled on to the next stop because her body was in the way of our train. People were confused and upset and tired and bored while a body with its chest torn open was being peeled from the tracks, its bones sticking to them, her brain all over the stones and entangled in the grill of the train.

  I pop another Xanax while at the toilet when a sharp pain in the back of my neck ignites. I drop the pill bottle into the toilet, let out a yelp, pivot around and see this huge, wet, diseased black rat with back arched, one foot much larger than the other, hissing in the corner of the small room. I jump up on the toilet but there’s no lid, so one foot lands in the toilet and the other on the rim, and I scream, again, embarrassing myself as it happens, and the rat keeps hissing, and then it’s up on its hind legs and lunging for me and I shield my face, turn away, slip hard off the metal toilet. I hit my lower back against it and fall to the floor, slamming against the close walls of the restroom with a hollow thud as I do. Then, sitting there on the floor, dazed, with one elbow up on the rim of the toilet, I crumple up, repress the urge to vomit, and cry a little into my hands.

  Somehow the rat must have squeezed under the door or jumped into the toilet and wiggled its way down into the train’s septic tank, because it’s not here now.

  Back at my seat across from Sanchez and Lowry, I massage the back of my neck and just try to get comfortable and remain calm. Neither of them notice my right pants leg is soaked and smells like piss.

  Sanchez and Lowry are having a conversation about baseball statistics, pussy, and how they plan to make money at the horse track today. Russ and Kevin play a game of Rock Paper Scissors and complain about the long forty-five-minute trip.

  “Lowry,” I sa
y.

  “Yeah?”

  “You got a cigarette?”

  “You’re smoking one, dude.”

  I notice that I am. “I mean, another one. I’m out after this.”

  He adjusts his dreads, gives me a quizzical look.

  “It’s my birthday,” I say.

  “I know. Yeah, here you go.” He hands me a Kool and I try not to grimace or give him a dirty look.

  “Smoke with me,” I say and motion to the back of the train.

  Tasting mentholly shittiness hit the back of my throat, I say, “I don’t know what’s going on.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Is the world ending?”

  He pshaws me, takes a drag and looks around.

  I stare at him. Lights flash behind my eyes. Black rats pour in from the other train car.

  “Jesus, Luke, turning thirty is not the end of the world.”

  I pull my shirt down from the neck and show him the marks on my chest. He grimaces and steps back.

  “What do you think that’s from?” I ask.

  He looks at me. Takes another drag.

  “Do you think I did this to myself?”

  He feigns a smile, pats me on the shoulder and walks back to his seat.

  “Wait…” I say, too quietly, then head back to my seat, leaving the menthol behind to burn out on the train’s carpeted aisle.

  The inner part of my thigh flames up. The back of my neck pulses. My lower back throbs. But not as much as my chest aches, and while the light keeps flashing, even though it’s daytime, I keep wondering what time it is. I keep thinking about the lady this train, this very train hit, and how she might have talked. I imagine an accent, but one you can’t quite put a finger on. I imagine a flowing sundress and long, sun-bleached hair. I imagine a mouth like a crescent moon showing in an autumn day. I imagine pressing my lips to that mouth before she would ever have thought of jumping in front of a train. Then I imagine pushing my lips against hers after she had, trying hard to breathe life back into them, and instead how I would pull her lips free from her face and how they would stick to mine for at least a week until finally chapping and falling off in black flakes.