by Alden, Luke
And so I’m on top of Dylan before he can process what’s going on.
He didn’t expect to see me today, this much is obvious.
I push him to the ground and pin him with all my weight.
I bar my forearm against his throat.
He struggles but I don’t let up.
Everything inside of me is white hot.
Everything inside of me is on fire.
And through the blood in my ears, I can hear Evaline screaming.
I can hear her screaming, but I can’t seem to care about it.
I push harder.
His face goes red.
My cheeks are burning up and I can feel my muscles struggling against my skin.
He’s kicking his feet up.
He’s trying to knock me off of him.
‘You motherfucker.’
The words come out of my mouth without much thought.
The words come out of my mouth with silent rage.
And I’m not sure why I’m doing this.
But I do feel that it’s what I should be doing.
My body starts to shake from the adrenaline.
And then I feel Evaline’s hands on my shoulder. Trying to pull me off. Trying to snap me out of this insanity.
‘Ellis!’
And she’s screaming.
And all I can think is that this man has spent far too much time with my wife. All I can think of is the fact that this man stole Evaline from me.
Dylan, he tries to speak.
Sound ambles out of his mouth in a choked stuttering.
He can’t say anything.
And finally, Evaline, she pulls me off.
I tumble backward.
My head crashes on the ground and I find myself staring at the lights above me.
I’m exhausted and I take the moment to try and work out what to do next.
My chest rises and falls with a heavy depth.
And my lungs, they struggle.
And my heart, it races.
I don’t move.
My eyes start to burn.
The adrenaline exits my body but leaves me shaking on the floor.
And I sob.
I let it out.
Years of anger and frustration and whatever else I’ve kept bottled up within me, I let it out.
I think of Franklin. My parents. Alicia. Loneliness.
My thoughts race through my mind as I explore everything that I’ve gone through and everything that it has left me with.
And in the end I’m left with the realization that I don’t know what was real and what wasn’t.
I don’t know much of anything.
My head hurts.
I see Dylan getting up off the ground.
Brushing himself off.
He looks confused and he looks angry.
I tell him to leave and give me a moment with Evaline.
Then as he exits, Evaline crouches down next to me.
I see my memory of her flicker in and out.
And Evaline, the real one, the love of my life, she tells me that we have to talk.
5
We walk at a slow pace.
We walk as if we have all the time in the world.
And while we may have one day had time; this is no longer true.
There is an end date.
There is an end date and it causes everything else to feel that much more compressed. It causes everything else to feel that much more real.
The sun is shining.
It’s fall.
The leaves are falling.
We hold hands.
I feel her loose skin as our fingers tangle up.
This moment, it will have an end, just like everything else.
She looks at me with a smile.
‘This is nice.’
And I find myself nodding in agreement. Because it’s true. I took things like this for granted in the past.
We spend the next few minutes in silence before I open my mouth.
‘You know, Franklin almost had me convinced that you had joined some sort of southern death cult.’
I laugh as I say this.
She smiles.
‘Why southern?’
‘You know…I have no clue.’
My thoughts wander as we meander with a cadence that reflects our conversation.
Finally we start to slow.
I can see that she’s in pain.
Her eyes are at a squint and she’s becoming weak.
We sit down at a park bench.
She leans her head against my shoulder.
We take in the moment. We let ourselves breathe.
She brushes her fingers up and down my arm with a slow drag that causes my body to tingle.
And this feels right.
Like a poem.
Like a song.
She’s the verse to my chorus.
And I ask if we should have lasagna tomorrow. I ask this because I know that it’s her favorite food.
And she doesn’t answer.
She stares out toward the horizon.
Finally:
‘I’m going to die.’
I pause.
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
I breathe.
‘It means I’m going to die.’
I twist my nervous fingers.
‘You mean you’re going to kill yourself?’
‘No, I’m dying.’
Then we let ourselves sit in silence.
She looks at me and I keep looking forward. Watching her out of the corner of my eye.
I feel nauseous.
I feel nauseous because I understand.
We don’t have much time left.
6
‘It wasn’t supposed to be like this. All I really knew was that I had to go. I had to go and I had to find something new for myself. I didn’t feel complete. I didn’t feel like a real person. Everything was dull. I was alive in the most basic sense of the word and nothing seemed to be changing that.’
We’re sitting.
We’re sitting on the curb.
Outside my old office.
The streets are dead.
The world feels quiet.
‘It wasn’t supposed to be like this and I missed you constantly. I really did, I mean, why else would I call you like I did? I wanted to talk to you and to be with you. I wanted to let you know that I was ok. But I couldn’t be with you. And hearing your voice, talking to you, it was all too much for me to handle.’
The world around us is static.
My eyes are focused on her.
I watch as she moves her hands with her words.
They move with gentle rhythms and unsure gestures.
‘I had been ready for things to change for so long, and then one day, they did change. I found Dylan passing out stupid little pamphlets on a street corner. He told me that there could be more. He told me about death. He told me that everything is supposed to die. He told me that without death, without the concept of death, we can never truly understand life. And you know what? It made sense. It was a chance meeting and it changed my life.’
The words shake with reluctance as they escape her mouth.
‘It made sense and I knew that it was the answer to all the empty feelings that I had. And at first, I didn’t understand it. I didn’t understand what endings meant. But then, things changed. I met more people like Dylan. We started to pull strings. We wanted other people to understand what life really meant. We wanted people to understand that death was important to life. We wanted people to understand that endings were important because they gave everything else a meaning.’
Tears escape from her eyes.
They streak down her face.
They reflect in the light from the world around us.
‘I wanted you to understand. I kept watching you from afar. I was going to bring you in but I knew you wouldn’t have come willingly. You wouldn’t have understood. You were too oblivious.’
H
er words sting with a truth that makes my guts feel hollow.
‘And Dylan, he saw that I missed you, and so we devised a way to make it look like your work was going under. There were people at the top of your old job who associated with us. They made it look like you had all worked yourselves out of jobs.’
There’s a pause.
‘We only wanted people to understand what they had in life.’
There’s a sadness in the way that she speaks.
‘I only wanted you to feel things.’
A slowness in the way that she orates.
‘I kept hoping that you’d understand things. I kept hoping that we’d figure out a way to be together. I knew that things had been shit before. I knew that. But I kept clinging on to this idea that if everything was played right, that if you finally understood what it was to be alive, if you finally understood what love was, then maybe we could work things out. I kept hoping that you would understand so that we could finally be together and so that we could start to build something that was greater than what we had before.’
And I think back to what I’ve lost.
My job.
My home.
My best friend.
My mind.
I think back to these things and I feel myself at a loss for emotion.
‘Some people were crazier than others. I was too. When I first started with these people, I knew that I was going to let myself die, I knew that much. It was what I needed in my life. It was the missing piece of the puzzle that caused everything else to make sense. And then I lost sight of everything else.’
There’s a weight in my stomach and in my feet and in my soul as I listen to the words that she speaks.
‘We started burning down buildings. We wanted things to be public; we wanted the world to understand. We were radicals with a bunch of ideas that we didn’t know how to express. And I guess part of me just wanted to do these things so we’d get noticed, so that you might start to understand what was going on. I guess I just hoped that all our insanity would be like some sort of signal to you.’
She pauses.
Looks at the ground.
‘And then you started taking those drugs. You started taking those drugs and you started seeing Alicia and I started to give up. I couldn’t take it anymore and I wanted to let go, but I also wanted to fix things.’
She looks up.
She chokes on her words and her tears and in the silence that engulfs us, she starts to shake.
‘I begged them to just lead you to us. I begged Dylan. And he agreed to do it. He agreed to make you understand. And…’
She sucks in air with a gasp that struggles against the pressure of the moment.
‘And I didn’t know what he was going to do to you. I told him to leave you alone. I told him that you didn’t deserve that. I told him these things and I realized that I had to let you go. I realized that I had to move on. I had to move on because holding onto you was only causing pain for both of us.’
She reaches her hand for mine.
I don’t return the favor.
‘You were becoming so far gone. And then Franklin killed himself and everything was crumbling.’
I can feel her heart beat.
‘I had to let you go. And I did. I let you go and I accepted the fact that I was going to die.
And then I was trapped. I was trapped in this stupid little cult. Trapped because I had committed crimes and I was wanted by police and I didn’t know what to do.’
Her hand comes closer.
Mine doesn’t move.
‘I was scared. I was scared and I still am scared. And now I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do because Everyone else has died. Dylan died months ago and now it’s just me.’
I pause.
I breathe.
I twist my nervous fingers and strain to figure out what my brain is doing to me. Because I was just fighting Dylan. Because he was just here.
She keeps talking:
‘Everyone else is gone and all I want is to spend my last years with you. That’s all I want. I don’t even care if it’s miserable. I don’t care because I know that I’ll feel it and that’s what I need. And I know that you need me. I know that you need me because I know that the drugs have damaged you. I know that things aren’t getting better for you. We need each other.’
And those words, they have meaning.
We need each other.
It catches me in the gut.
It catches me and it sucks all my oxygen from my lungs.
We need each other.
We’ve both been through so much.
We’ve both lost everything and gained something that we never could have conceived of before.
We need each other and I know that it’s true.
7
Her skin is soft to the touch.
My lips press against hers.
There’s a soft song on the radio.
I don’t know how long we’ve been together, but it’s been a while.
I haven’t been able to get her out of my head since the first time I saw her.
And now, here we are in my bed.
There’s a sweat between our bodies as we tangle the sheets.
There’s a whispered moan.
She chews on her lower lip.
And then it’s a drawn out pause with arched backs and tensed muscles.
She collapses down onto my chest.
Her head is next to my head and we’re both smiling with clouded eyes and hearts that beat against our ribs like some sort of primal drum.
‘Did you…’
I laugh.
‘I’m pretty sure that’s what that was.’
And I feel a nervous sort of lump in my chest.
‘What about you… did you… well… you know…’
She laughs and kisses me on the forehead.
‘I love you.’
I smile and squeeze my hand into hers.
‘I love you.’
We lay next to each other with blankets at our feet and pillows beneath our heads. I look up at the ceiling and my mind, it wanders to the future.
8
We’re both laying in bed.
I can see the light of the stars as they creep through the window and lay across my chest.
I haven’t been able to sleep all night.
My mind won’t stop moving.
Something is wrong.
At some point Evaline starts to stir.
She struggles to push herself up and out of bed.
I don’t say anything.
I only watch as she lifts her body up from the bed.
She walks across the room. To the bathroom.
It’s a lumbering walk that lets me know she’s in pain. It lets me know that she’s struggling with every step and every movement.
She’s struggling because the weight of time, the weight of life, the weight of everything that this Earth has thrown at her, it’s all caught up to her.
I don’t say anything; instead I remain silent and wait for her to come back to me.
I don’t know what time it is, there are no clocks in our room.
Seconds turn to minutes.
Silence is everywhere.
Then I hear a crash.
9
Entropy.
The tendency for all matter and energy in the universe to evolve toward a state of inert uniformity.
The inevitable and steady deterioration of a system or society.
10
Her skin is white and pale as she lies in a heap on the floor.
I feel my hands shaking.
And I don’t know what to do.
I kept telling myself I was ready for this moment.
I kept telling myself that I could do this.
But I was wrong.
She’s limp in my arms.
I feel my insides go limp.
I feel my insides as they tie themselves up in knots upon knots.
My body is shaki
ng.
I shake her.
I shake her because I want her to come back to me.
I want her to know that she can come back because I remember how to love her.
But she won’t come back.
She’ll never be back.
She’s gone.
Forever.
And I can’t do this.
My mind races.
I don’t want to live like this.
I want to be with her.
I want to be with her because I don’t know what goodbye means
And then my head starts to throb.
I’m sweating.
My hands tremble.
The walls, they pulsate.
I start to panic.
I want to stay with her.
And then time, it moves sideways.
11
My name is Ellis Jackson. I’m 2038 years old. I didn’t meet the love of my life until I turned 578. Her name is Evaline. She has pale skin and collagen injected lips. Like everyone else that lives forever, most of her body is fake.
I love Evaline even though I barely remember why. I just know that I do. I’m relying on the fact that I’ve said it so many times that there must have once been a reason for my love.
But isn’t that how we always go through life? Relying on our words to justify our actions? Whatever happened to justifying our words with our actions?
