Big Lonesome

by Joseph Scapellato

His mother buzzed from downstairs.

  The veteran moved in with his buddy, who wasn’t a veteran. His buddy kept his size the size it’d always been, no adjustments, hoping that doing so would prompt the veteran’s size into growing or shrinking back to where it used to be. They ordered pizzas and sandwiches and Chinese food. They played video games and board games and poker. They drank beer and liquor and smoked cigarettes and pot, and they burped and farted, and recalled the times they’d famously burped and farted in high school. Depending on their state, his buddy asked about the veteran’s not-fitting, or the war, and the veteran would respond with words too loose or too tight, stories or statements that didn’t match what it was that was between them, and the next day this exchange would seem embarrassing or inaccurate or meaningless, and only ever half-remembered.

  He drank a glass of cold water in his buddy’s kitchen. It was the middle of the night—the middle of the night in the glass of water, on the kitchen’s tiles, and on the grimy window that faced another apartment’s grimy window through which it was also the middle of the night, a night as shapeless as the sameness. He set the empty glass on the cluttered counter. His buddy played video games in the other room, talking trash to opponents hundreds or thousands of miles away. It was the sameness that wasn’t the same, he decided.

  He called his mother.

  The veteran moved into his own apartment. He needed to decide: he didn’t fit, or the sameness didn’t fit, or both, or neither.

  Or something else, he decided.

  Or he didn’t.

  Or he did.

  Or he watched TV and movies and porn, and himself masturbating.

  Or he drank alcohol and energy drinks, and smoked cigarettes and cigars and joints.

  Or he called family and friends and other veterans, veterans who had it better or worse.

  Or he went out with exes and girls he knew from high school and girls he met in bars and on websites, and prostitutes.

  Or he joined gyms and intramural sports and jogged and cycled and hiked and camped.

  Or he painted and wrote and played instruments, and attended rallies.

  Or he attended and left places of worship, and paid for psychologists and psychiatrists, and checked in and out of rehab, and was hired and fired and quit jobs, and became homeless, and committed suicide.

  And whatever he did the sameness was not the same.

  And he drank glasses of cold water in kitchens, where he waited for the time of day to turn up.

  And he said to himself, Go home.

  It Meant There Would Be More

  The girl I’d moved to Texas with sat beside me on our creaking feel-through futon. She squinted, thinking. I handed her a taco from the bag she’d brought.

  She put the taco down and said, “Look here. I’m moving back to Illinois.”

  This was in our one-bedroom apartment, which for the last month had been my my-bedroom apartment. She’d been sleeping a block away with her books and her clothes and her papers, at Sujata’s. My only demand, which we’d discussed, was lunch together when we weren’t working. Hers, which we hadn’t discussed, was “Look here” instead of “Hey honey” or “Oh sweetie,” or the one we used to use when we used to take off each other’s clothes, “Old bootsies.”

  “Old bootsies,” I said. “When?”

  She unwrapped the taco she’d put down: the foil, the steam, the smell of the meat. I knew she wouldn’t eat it. I knew what she’d say, what I’d say, and the big feeling I’d soon be feeling. This big feeling I hadn’t felt in a decade.

  “Tomorrow,” she said.

  I quivered, but not with fear.

  “Early in the morning,” she said, as if saying, You’re not sad about this, are you.

  I said, “Tomorrow is my birthday,” and then I felt it—the big feeling’s fuzzy all-over tugging, pulling at my head and my spine and my heart, pulling until the pressure seemed to gently triple me, lifting me, placing me in what felt like equal wholes behind myself and upon myself and beyond myself.

  She said some things I hardly heard. The futon creaked. I might have laughed.

  “You aren’t sad,” she said, standing at the door with her purse.

  My three whole selves and me looked at her at once. Through them, in her, I saw three months of sad shared space crushed by one month of hopeful separation into anger, an anger being ground right then by guilt into surrender. Able to stand, I stood. I touched my chest. I said that how I felt wasn’t ever how I looked.

  She left: the door, a blade of light, the door.

  In me my three whole selves watched, waiting.

  I cleaned. I scrubbed the kitchen sink and counter and bathroom sink and toilet, I took out the garbage, I vacuumed, I stripped my bedsheets and bagged my laundry, I showered—I peed and blew my nose and jerked off into the drain—I dressed, I brushed my teeth and flossed, I opened the fridge: a blade of light, a box of light, three cans of beer. I took the three cans of beer to my desk. My desk faced three windows that faced the apartment complex’s small courtyard, a courtyard that was mostly dirty pool and banana trees. The windows, half-covered from above in canted wooden shutters, were unopenable. I opened all three beers. I drank them one by one as my neighbors, nonflamboyant gay men whose invitations to get together I regularly declined, gathered to lounge in the courtyard’s plastic chairs, share cigarettes and joints, toss balls to their pit bulls and Chihuahuas, and tell stories I heard through my door’s imperfect sealing in which the tellers proved to be heroes who nobly revealed the idiotic words, actions, and desires of idiotic others. None of this was what my three whole selves watched for. What my three whole selves watched for were omens. Omens were what their being there foretold. Night happened: the figures of my neighbors faded, then their talk. I quit the desk, shed my clothes and boxers, and fell onto my sheetless bed. Sleep poured into the spaces between my selves. I strained to stay awake; I strained to see past the omen-vigil to the two times that all of this had happened before, once in high school when my brother had nearly died and once in college when my brother had nearly died; I strained to see to tomorrow morning, to the girl I’d moved to Texas with knocking on my my-bedroom apartment’s door and saying, Way before we moved to Houston.

  With each other we can’t be who we are.

  But under that that’s love.

  That’s love, under that?

  That’s why we waited and that’s why we tried?

  The overloaded cardboard boxes.

  The long black road.

  The rackety crash in the bathroom—I blundered naked out of bed, dream-struck but awake, sure that the sound had happened. It had. The bathroom ceiling panel had fallen out of its slot, dented the shower rod, and clattered into the tub. My toes touched splintery bits of wood and flakes of plaster. I picked up the little panel. With its knob-like handle it looked like the door to a forgotten fairy-outhouse. Above me, what it had covered: a dirty nest of pipes and ducts in a space too small for a shoe.

  This was omen one. It meant there would be more.

  Pleased, my three whole selves shook hands. They turned away in smiling triumph. As they vanished, the big feeling in me shrunk—buzzing with exhaustion, I staggered through darkness to the futon to sit, to feel its pointy frame through the mattress, to wait for the girl I’d moved to Texas with to knock on my door. My eyes closed. She knocked on my door.

  “I’m naked,” I said, waking. Blades of light bristled in the shaded windows.

  She knocked again, not hard.

  “Naked,” I said, looking at myself. I stood. “In the buff. A-dangling!”

  At my name I opened the door. She didn’t want to laugh but did, and she took my hand and led me to the sheetless bed. We sat. She looked at the ceiling and then at the floor. “Way before we moved,” she said. “We knew this.”

  I said that she was right: with each other we couldn’t be who we were. We’d tried. We’d waited.

  “You have a boner,” she said, and touched it.
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  She kissed me and I kissed her back, and she pulled off her clothes but shushed me when I said “Old bootsies,” and we went down on each other, and the sex we had stumbled from gentle to dirty-mean to sad. Neither of us came. We touched each other’s sweating faces.

  “This has nothing to do with love,” she said.

  “This,” I said, indicating our embrace, “or this,” I said, indicating the apartment, by which I meant our recent move-in and her right-now move-out.

  She shook her head, meaning, You can’t see it.

  “Does it have to do with Sujata?” I said. “For you, I mean. For me it doesn’t.”

  She kissed my forehead like a mom.

  We loaded her station wagon with everything she hadn’t already taken to Sujata’s that would fit, which meant she left the bed, the futon, and the mostly empty bookshelf. We stood in the tenants’ numbered parking spaces just over the courtyard’s low fence, the pavement warm in Houston’s casual February sunlight. Short-sleeves weather. I tapped the hood. “That’s it?”

  She handed me a wrapped box and for the second time that morning wished me happy birthday. “Don’t open this until I’m gone,” she said.

  She said, “I’m going.”

  My chest condensed—I told her that the bathroom ceiling panel had fallen, that if I’d been showering it would’ve cut my head and knocked me out and I might’ve nearly died.

  She said she’d call me when she got to Little Rock.

  I told her to call my brother when she got to Chicago, he could help her find a place in Logan Square again, and while she was at it could she see how he was doing, how was he doing, I wondered?

  She’d been touching my arm until right then. “Look at you.”

  I looked at her. She was the sort of woman you felt in your throat, lean and strong in any light, her face a field of brightness. I took her hand, the one with the keys. I talked about what we were and what we could be.

  She took back her hand. “When you talk about us you don’t mean what you say.”

  “I mean it now.”

  “Exactly. That’s it, that’s all.”

  She dropped her keys on accident. I bent to grab them as she bent to grab them. She was crying, I was crying. She closed the door. She backed the station wagon into the street and onto a bottle, pop-crushing it, grinding it when she shifted to drive. None of these were omens. An omen is sensed with more than one sense in more than one place at once—the present, yes, but on top of that the past, a perch from where you’re sure that everything beneath you is the future.

  Across the street, hidden pigeons cooed in leafy live oaks. A man in a leather jacket and gym shorts walked an impatient dog while listening without speaking to his cellphone. Acorns skittered and crunched. I turned back, through the rusty black gate and into the courtyard.

  Warren, my above-me neighbor with whom I shared a ceiling-floor, sat in a chair on the narrow porch-like space just outside his apartment. He lived on the second level of our two-level complex. From up there he’d watched every moment of the move-out. Every day, for hours, he watched every moment of as much as he could, and once a week he’d invite me up for lunch. “You don’t eat lunch,” he’d started saying.

  I waved. He waved back with a travel mug.

  When I got to my door it was locked. I’d locked it out of habit on the last load, which meant that a slice of me thought I was going with. The thought of a slice of me thinking I was going with hurt worse than hearing, “I’ll call you when I get to Little Rock.” I jiggled in the key and turned it. It broke.

  I weighed the jagged half left in my hand. Omen two.

  I tried the handle, which was still locked, and patted my pockets for my phone, which I’d left inside. I pinched at the key-shard in the lock. I patted my pockets. I tried the handle.

  Warren said, “Angelo, do you like breakfast?”

  He stood behind me in the courtyard, having come down the steps. A tall man tilting day by day into gray middle-age, lean except for a saddle-sized belly, which sagged. This close, I saw what was off about the way he stared: before and after speaking, he looked one second away from a wet belch.

  I told him my key had broken in the lock and my phone was inside, and could he call Charlie?

  He nodded purposefully. “Come with me.”

  I followed him up the stairs, past the porch-like space and through his apartment’s open door. He phoned Charlie as we went. His place mirrored mine, with the same three windows and coarse carpeting and cutaway breakfast bar, but the arrangement of his matching furniture and paper-stuffed file cabinets segregated the space in such a way that it looked wholly unfamiliar, a different complex in a different city in a different state. Warren went to work behind the breakfast bar, the source of doughy-golden smells. I studied the series of framed charcoal sketches spaced out along the walls. All depicted meditative cowboys: cowboys alone or lonesomely together, cowboys before herds and canyons and cookfires. I got close to one of a roughed-up cowboy sitting on a crate in a cellar. He’d picked up a cracked guitar.

  Warren caught me looking and smiled. His smile relieved him of his belch-face.

  He said, “The city was the worst thing to happen to the cowboy.”

  “But the cowboy helped the city happen, didn’t he?”

  “That might be true where you’re from.”

  We sat outside, the plates in our laps piled with blueberry-and-almond-piled waffles, everything gleaming in syrup. Warren told me he’d made the waffles from scratch and sliced the almonds himself, that the blueberries, syrup, and almonds were from Texas, the plates from Argentina. The more he spoke the more he sounded like a young man. I thanked him and chowed down.

  “I have to tell you,” he said, pointing at me with his fork, his elbow oddly high. “You look just so much like an old friend of mine. A very dear old friend.”

  By the way he said it, his dear old friend had been gone a long time. I imagined Warren as a young man holding another young man’s hand in the middle of a dusty field, or beneath the long and reaching limbs of a live oak, or on the peeling seats of a stalled-out muscle car. I told him I was honored: I’d yet to look like anyone’s dear old friend. The waffles were pasty, the syrup low-sugar, the almonds stale, and the blueberries frozen on the inside. I ate fast. I watched the parking lot, like Warren did every day, not for omens but for anything that might make me feel anything other than what I was feeling. I was feeling full of old cement.

  Warren said, “Teresa looked like she wanted to stay.”

  I tried to hide my surprise at the fact that he knew her name by agreeing.

  “From here, anyway,” he said.

  “What did I look like?”

  “Like you were wondering what you looked like.”

  Charlie’s truck rumbled into the two parking spaces marked MANAGER.

  Warren took my plate, which I’d cleaned, and stacked it under his, which he hadn’t touched. For the four months I’d lived there, Charlie’s truck looked like it’d t-boned and been t-boned by two lesser vehicles, perhaps simultaneously, the dents somehow not deep enough to call for repair. I headed down the steps.

  Warren waved the gift in his free hand. “Angelo, don’t forget your . . . ?”

  I told him what it was and went back up to take it.

  “It’s your birthday,” said Warren, smiling.

  Charlie shook my hand at my door. A white-bearded old man, he moved as thoughtfully as he spoke, his words dunked in West Texas twang. He drew tweezers from his shirt pocket and crouched at the doorknob. A man-sized gnome.

  “Damn sorry about this,” he said. “Predicament.”

  I said it was a minor inconvenience, no trouble.

  “If you need to, you break lease. I’ll fix it right for you.”

  By the time I realized he wasn’t referring to the snapped key, he’d already extracted it, popped in a spare, and unlocked my door. I don’t know how I didn’t start crying again.

  He straightened
. “You try and have a nice day now.”

  “It’s Angelo’s birthday,” said Warren as I closed my door.

  My phone lay facedown on the coffee table between yesterday’s bag of take-out tacos and the one that had been unwrapped. The tacos smelled as if they were trying hard to still be good. Teresa had texted, Sujata had texted, my brother had called twice.

  Teresa’s text read, did you open it?

  Sujata’s read, i am so sorry. do you want to talk? we talked too much maybe. but. come over if you want, okay?

  My brother hadn’t left any voicemails.

  I sat on the futon and stared at the mostly empty bookshelf. I stared at the particleboard table we’d bought at Goodwill, at the drawer-less desk we’d found on the street, at the framed poster-sized photo of Lake Michigan she’d shot and developed herself, the water calm and long and blue, summer-shimmering. If I covered my face I could feel its cool breath. I covered my face. I thought, Maybe she left it behind on purpose. Maybe everything left behind is left behind on purpose. My phone buzzed—it was my mother—and as I declined the call, I heard brakes and barking rubber and an awful crunch.

  I rushed outside, to the courtyard fence. Charlie’s truck had been rear-ended by a U-Haul, the tailgate crushed up in an ugly kiss with the grille. An omen inside an omen.

  Charlie climbed out steadily. He patted his pockets, like me.

  “You all right?” I shouted.

  He turned and bent to search the cab.

  The U-Haul driver didn’t leave his truck. He hid his face in his hands. Either his head was shaking his hands, or his hands were shaking his head. Sunlight razored off his silver watch.

  “I’m calling the police,” said Warren, pointing at his phone, calling the police.

  Charlie found his phone and made a call.

  In my apartment I listened to my mother’s message. She sang happy birthday. My stepfather said to her, “Now?” then said loudly to the phone, “Going to spend your birthday shoveling snow, that’s your present.” My mother said it’d been coming down all night and seemed to have the nerve to come down all day too, just like the day you were born, if only you’d been born in Texas. She took that back. My stepfather said something I couldn’t quite catch about trying to shovel snow with a lasso. Give a hug to Teresa, said my mother, I hope those buffoni at her job stop giving her the runaround, at your job too, and if not, don’t worry, you won’t be temping forever. I pray three times a day. If your brother forgets to call, call him.