Me Being Me Is Exactly as Insane as You Being You

by Todd Hasak-Lowy

  Darren was now sweating, because Saturday was warmer than Friday had been and he had been walking a lot and because, for some reason, he sometimes sweats when he’s hungry, and he hadn’t eaten a thing yet and it was already almost noon. None of which was helped by the fact that there was about a third of a poppy-seed bagel on a plate next to Nate’s computer.

  “You want it?” Zoey asked him, but not really offering it to him. It was more like she was wondering, “If I let you eat it, will you promise to stop staring at it like it’s a one-hundred-dollar bill or something?”

  So Darren looked up from the bagel and right at Zoey, in particular that spot on her top lip, which, again, unless he had dreamed up the whole thing, had spent part of last night attached to his left ear, something that he knew he didn’t dream up, because about an hour earlier, after removing his underwear, he sat down on the toilet in Nate’s apartment and (with great effort) bent his head down toward his left thigh. Which unquestionably smelled like, well, it didn’t smell like his left thigh had ever smelled before.

  It was hard for Darren, at that particular moment, to know if he loved Zoey. And not only because he wanted to scream and maybe even grab her shoulders and shake her. But he most certainly loved that spot on her top lip, and not in the way you might say you love some small, beautiful thing like a butterfly or a cool signature. He loved that spot on her top lip because during the previous twenty-four hours or so, it was the place he had been storing everything else he liked and maybe even loved about Zoey. Meaning when he looked at that spot on her top lip, he was sort of seeing a bunch of things, including all sorts of stuff you couldn’t even see, like her decision to join him and how she drew on his arm and the way she sang when she finally let herself sing and her smell and the sound she made into his left ear at the very end.

  But all she did was say—she actually said this—“Your brother’s got problems.” Darren must have made a face that demanded an explanation, so she turned the laptop to face him, which was open to Nate’s e-mail. Darren, who was still standing, froze a little bit more, so Zoey said, “He’s on academic probation or something.”

  Darren finally convinced his arm to move, which he extended to forcibly close the laptop, the shutting of which made more noise than he expected. This noise allowed him to say, “What the hell?”

  And she at least looked right at him for a second, but then she turned away and reached up for the piercing that went through her eyebrow.

  Darren said, “Zoey.” Which he said because he was pretty sure he had never said it in order to get her attention as someone he had a special tie with, and because he wanted to say it the way he maybe would have said it at the beginning of a long sentence about how amazing last night in the tent was and how, if she wanted to be, he would be psyched if she’d be his girlfriend. So he sort of half said her name that way, but he mostly also said it the way he would say “please,” as in: “Please don’t.” Or the way you would say “hey,” as in: “Hey, asshole, I’m standing right here.”

  Just then his phone rang. Darren knew by the ring that it was Nate. “Yeah,” Darren said into his phone.

  “Dude, where the hell are you?” Nate asked.

  “In a café, just down the street,” Darren answered.

  “Hey, did you take my laptop, you tool?” Nate asked.

  “It’s here, yeah,” Darren answered.

  “Okay, wanker,” Nate said, “why don’t you and my laptop come back so we can come up with a plan?”

  “Sure,” Darren said.

  “Hey,” Nate said, “if Lady Z is there, bring her with you.”

  “Okay,” Darren said, and ended the call.

  Zoey stood up, grabbed her bag, and said, “I’m going to the bathroom.”

  Just before she turned away she looked at Darren, really looked at him for the first time that morning, so that he knew last night had happened and that she liked it as much as he did and that she wished she weren’t such an absolute, four-alarm freak and that she was sorry about the laptop and so please wait until I come back because maybe not everything is lost.

  3. JUST LEAVE ONCE AND FOR ALL, RIGHT THEN

  Zoey took a step toward the bathroom, but suddenly turned around, took two steps toward Darren, and hugged him. Really tight. Plus her fingers raced up to the back of his head, and the next thing he knew she had pulled his ear down toward her mouth.

  He could feel her lips moving against his right ear, but they weren’t kissing him, at least not at first. It sounded like she was saying something, or at least starting to, because about three times he could swear he heard actual syllables. Things like “pleh” and “dar” and “yuh.” The whole right side of his body sprouted goose bumps and he hugged her tight, so tight he could feel her chest heaving a little bit. Or maybe it was his chest, because he really felt like he was about to pass out by this point.

  Then she did kiss him, in the ear, her breath perfectly warm, and it felt so good that he figured everything would have to be okay now. Because how could there be a world that allows that kind of kiss to coexist with anything even a little bit painful, including especially the feelings you have for the person giving you that kiss?

  4. RETURN

  After she let go and went to the bathroom, Darren sat down, ate the rest of the bagel, and opened the computer. And read a couple of e-mails and closed the computer. And studied the top third of the mark on his arm and thought about where they’d go for lunch and used his index finger to pick up all the poppy seeds that had fallen off the bagel. He assumed every sound he heard was Zoey coming back, meaning he looked up eagerly every two or three seconds. Until after maybe four minutes, when he picked up the computer and walked back to where the bathroom was.

  But the bathroom, which was right next to a door leading out of the back of the café, was empty. Even though he knew there was no point, he opened the door and looked out into an alley, which seemed horribly empty and clean.

  And that was the last time he saw Zoey.

  3 Surfaces Coated with the Color Crimson That Briefly Converge Just Before Darren Takes Two Pills from His Mom and Swallows Them

  1. His mom’s mug

  2. His mom’s fingernails

  3. The pills

  2 Messages Darren Reads or Rereads in His Bedroom Before Grabbing His Backpack and Heading Downstairs

  1. Facebook message from Rachel Madsen: Morning, Sweet Stuff! Can’t believe today is the day!! I’ll text u the second I get to Krista’s! So excited!!!

  2. Message from Zoey, written in black ink inside the back cover of that When Things Fall Apart book: Darren, I had to go. I’m sorry. But I didn’t forget about together. It’ll happen. It will. And then we’ll go somewhere far away. I promise. Just don’t change. I’m serious. Don’t. —Z

  11 Questions His Mom Asks Him during the Six-Minute Ride to School

  1. How are you feeling?

  2. You sure you’re up to going to school?

  3. You ready for that test?

  4. Do you want me to pick you up after?

  5. What do you have planned for this afternoon?

  6. A girl from camp?

  7. Does she have a name?

  8. Would you like to invite her over for Shabbat?

  9. For the challah: Breadsmith or Harvest Time?

  10. With or without raisins?

  11. Do you know I love you?

  4 Causes Explaining How It Is That Darren Almost Doesn’t Recognize His Mother When He Looks at Her One Last Time Before Getting Out of the Car

  1. She’s getting older. There are some new lines around (and especially below) her eyes that he noticed when he came back from camp. They’re most visible in the morning, maybe because of sleep and maybe because she doesn’t put on any makeup before she works out.

  2. Her workout clothes just really don’t look like something she’d wear. Until, like, a year ago, she never really wore workout clothes that are so obviously workout clothes. In fact, his mom used to not care
a whole lot about what she wore in general, and now she’s the kind of person who does, even or especially when she’s exercising.

  3. She’s still his mom and everything, but between all her traveling and all the time Darren spends at his dad’s, well, he can just sort of tell now that sometimes when they (Darren and his mom) are together, one or both of them kind of forgets about the whole mother-son relationship they supposedly share. Because they share it less regularly than they used to.

  He first noticed this once when he got dropped off back at the house after five days with his dad. The packing up of his stuff (again) and getting dropped off (again) and just kind of preparing himself to switch parental gears (again) bummed the hell out of him, so maybe he sort of decided to ignore his mom for a while. Which he could tell she noticed, and could tell upset her a lot. So he tried, in the future, not to do that to her.

  But then the weird thing is that even though she never does exactly the same thing to him, he can still tell (because sometimes she just sort of stares off into space, or takes longer to answer his questions, or goes down some e-mail rabbit hole for an hour when she said it would only take ten minutes) that she’s getting a lot of practice these days living her life without any kids around. And so Darren can tell she’s been gradually learning how to do that pretty well.

  She probably had some kind of whole life without Darren before the divorce and everything, but all the stuff that’s happened since must have given her no choice but to make her without-Darren life much bigger. Who knows, maybe Darren just notices things better than he used to. All he knows is that sometimes, like right now, he looks at her and kind of can’t believe she’s his mother. Not because he thinks his real mom is somewhere else, hiding or whatever. More because somehow the whole thing just seems kind of unlikely at this point.

  Or maybe there’s a simple physical reason. Because since when is her hair almost reddish? And how did her teeth get so damn white?

  4. He’s over five feet seven now, so he looks at her from a slightly different angle than before.

  13 Faraway Places He’d Like to Go to with Zoey Once They Finish Their Task

  1. Paris

  2. Barcelona

  3. Rome

  4. London

  5. Brazil

  6. The Galapagos Islands

  7. Costa Rica

  8. Alaska

  9. China

  10. Thailand

  11. Tokyo

  12. Wherever they have safaris

  13. That planet they first came from

  4 Places Darren Spent the Rest of That Saturday Back in April

  1. NATE’S APARTMENT

  Darren tried to convince Nate to help him look for Zoey for a while, but Nate was exceedingly hungover and Darren eventually had to agree that if Zoey didn’t want him to find her, which she pretty clearly didn’t, he wasn’t going to. Nate had to take a nap after being awake for only about two hours, so Darren just spent a lot of the day on the couch, mostly screwing around with Nate’s guitar, staring out the window, and feeling a little like he might puke.

  2. CHINA PALACE RESTAURANT

  Just before they were getting ready to go grab some pizza, there was a knock at the door. It was their mom, who had flown into Detroit and rented a car. She didn’t seem mad or anything; in fact, she was so calm that Darren and even Nate were sort of powerless around her. The three of them went out to dinner, where they managed to talk about not a single thing of importance. Somehow, no one so much as mentioned their dad, thereby making him the gayest, most prominent ghost that had ever haunted that particular Chinese restaurant. Right from there Darren and his mom drove home. Nate just walked back to his place.

  3. HIS MOM’S RENTAL CAR

  Almost as soon as they got on the interstate she started asking Darren tons of questions, all of which together told him in no uncertain terms that she was pretty pissed about the whole thing. But she stayed calm, even after he made it kind of clear that he wasn’t going to give her any long explanations about anything.

  Darren fell asleep before they got to Kalamazoo but woke up around New Buffalo. Without moving, he stared at his mom for a while in the strange, shifting light coming from the car’s interior and the occasional passing car. NPR was on, but he could tell she wasn’t listening. He asked, “When did you know about Dad?”

  She turned her head toward him and said, “Morning, sleepyhead.”

  “When did you find out?”

  His mom looked back at the road. “Do you remember when you and Nate went to see that movie on Christmas? When he was back from school after his first semester? We had sushi and then you went to see a movie. Some comedy about drug dealers, I think.”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s when.”

  Darren sat up and kind of rearranged himself. This mostly involved trying to do something about his underwear, which unfortunately was starting to feel exactly the way you’d expect underwear that you’ve been wearing for thirty-six hours to feel. He tried to remember that weekend. What his mom was like. What his dad was like. But he couldn’t remember anything being suddenly different about them. Or really anything about that weekend at all. Jesus, how the hell did she remember what movie they saw?

  “You didn’t know before?”

  His mom put some hair behind her ear. “Not the way I knew after that night.”

  “What does that mean?”

  But she didn’t say anything for another five miles. Darren almost repeated his question about ten times, but something told him not to. Eventually she said, “I knew your father—” Her voice caught for a moment and Darren could tell she was crying, or trying not to cry. He tried to figure out which, but the light kind of sucked. All he could make out was the weird way she was holding her mouth, so he looked down at his knees. “I knew that he was . . . that he found some men attractive. I knew”—she cleared her throat—“other things.”

  Darren was trying to scrape a stain off the knees of his jeans, which might not have been a stain at all but just some sort of shadow. “What other things?”

  “Nothing.”

  “What?”

  “Darren, honey, you’ll need to ask him about the details of his past. I don’t—” She was definitely crying now. “I don’t really want to; I shouldn’t be the one to do that.”

  “So, what, he was gay and then wasn’t and now is again?”

  “Not exactly. It doesn’t work like that.”

  “Well then, how does it work?”

  “It’s complicated.”

  “Is it why you got divorced?”

  She turned the radio off, even though it was barely audible to begin with. “Yes, in the end. Yes. But it wasn’t . . . It wasn’t exactly why we first got separated.”

  “What are you talking about? He told you on Christmas. You decided to get separated in March, I remember. He didn’t move out until April.”

  His mom blew her nose in this weird way of hers that makes absolutely no noise. “We decided to get separated in November. We—”

  “You did?” Darren put his feet up on the dashboard.

  “Don’t put your feet there.”

  “It’s a rental.”

  “Please don’t.”

  He kept his feet where they were. “Why’d you wait so long? To have him move out? And to tell us?” Now she started crying more. Or at least louder. He put his feet back down. “Why?”

  “We already knew it wasn’t working.”

  “What wasn’t working?”

  “Darren.”

  “What? What wasn’t working?”

  “A million things.”

  “Such as?”

  But she didn’t answer. Now he could see that her cheeks were pretty wet, so for a few minutes he decided to leave her alone.

  “So then why’d you wait?”

  She blew her nose again. This time it made noise. “Bugs had just moved that summer.”

  “So?”

  “And we wanted to let Nate move o
ut first.”

  “Why?”

  Nothing.

  “Why?”

  “So—” She exhaled really loudly. “So he could be gone. So he wouldn’t . . .”

  Darren turned the radio on. Found a rock station that wasn’t too static-y. Turned it up a bit.

  A couple minutes later his mom turned it down. “I’m sorry, Darren,” she said.

  “Whatever.”

  “I’m so sorry about all of this.”

  He didn’t say anything.

  When they crossed into Illinois, his mom tried asking him questions, this time about him and his dad. Darren wasn’t exactly forthcoming. He just answered “I don’t know” to most of her questions. But maybe it wasn’t really a matter of his being forthcoming or not. Maybe he really didn’t know. Not what he felt about his dad’s announcement and not who he planned to tell and not if he thought him and Nate would ever really talk about it. He also didn’t know what he thought about the fact that he would have gotten, like, an 11 percent on a multiple-choice test about his own fucking family and its history over the past two years, assuming someone gave it to him before Thursday morning.

  The other thing he didn’t know (not that she asked him about it—how could she, seeing as how she knew pretty much nothing about it) was what it meant that his dad’s love (if that’s what it could be called) for men somehow led (even directly, maybe) to Darren’s love (if that’s what it could be called) for this one particular, recently disappeared girl.

  They were back in Chicago by this point, and there were cars everywhere on the highway. They weren’t in a traffic jam, but probably couldn’t go more than fifty, either. Darren kind of felt how it might be easier to make sense of all this in a quieter, less crowded place. Like Ann Arbor, if Nate was someplace else and none of this weekend had happened there. Because he felt how he had no choice but to try to make sense of all this overwhelming stuff. Even though he had a hunch that he wouldn’t really be able to.

  What’s weird is that there was almost something satisfying in knowing this. That he had to try and fail to make sense of everything. And that he’d have to do this for a while. It was almost like his life had a point now, even if it wasn’t exactly the kind of point he would have wanted it to have back before he thought much about his life having a point or not.