Before You Go

by Tommy Butler

  “Even if I’m going to use it?”

  “Yes.”

  “You said it was selfish.”

  “It is,” she says. “It’s also selfish for me to try to stop you.”

  In the rising light, Sasha grows more substantial. She is barefoot, wearing a tank top and loosely fitting pajama pants, as if she were still asleep in her bed and we were sharing the same dream.

  “I was going to jump from your roof,” I say.

  Sasha’s mouth twists in a wry expression I can’t quite unravel. “You think you could throw yourself into the river from here?”

  A memory of rain and cigarettes, of a computer disk launched into the night. “I’d need room to wind up.”

  “I wrote another one,” says Sasha.

  “Another novel?”

  She nods.

  “I was hoping you would,” I tell her. “Did you submit it anywhere?”

  She shakes her head. “I’m not going to publish it.”

  “How will people read it?”

  “What people?”

  “You know,” I say, but I shrug my shoulders, because I’m not sure if I know myself. “The world.”

  “I didn’t write it for the world.”

  I nod. That sounds about right. About perfect, really, for a woman who sows the fields of public discourse with coded messages—ciphers in plain sight, meant for everyone and revealed to no one. No one but me, that is.

  “What’s it about?”

  “Do you remember the research project?” asks Sasha. “A priest, a monk, and a neurologist walk into a bar?”

  “I thought you were planning your suicide.”

  “No,” she says. “I used to plan it. You convinced me not to.”

  “I don’t remember doing that.”

  “The night we met—when you talked about dancing monsters and sentient trees, and giants, and a world you hoped to get to someday. You reminded me that it’s okay to pretend, to see things that aren’t there. That I wasn’t the only one who experienced things differently from everyone else. That maybe if life doesn’t seem a little weird to you, you’re not looking closely enough.” As far as I was concerned, it was the sound of the crickets. “I realized that if someone like you could be terribly unhappy sometimes, then being terribly unhappy sometimes couldn’t be wrong.”

  I scrape my foot across the tarred roof. “You said you didn’t believe in Neverene.”

  “Maybe I just call it something else.”

  Compassion is perilous. When there is nothing left of you but an empty vessel, a black hole, immune to the blows of life—the loneliness and confusion, the profound disappointment, the anger—it is the kind word that breaches the event horizon, that rips your heart back open, that compels you to once again suffer the concussion of your existence.

  “It hurts,” I say.

  “I’m sorry,” says Sasha. “I can’t fix that, and maybe you can’t either. Sometimes I think it’s supposed to hurt.” Her eyes begin to shimmer. “And if you need to leave, I understand.” The shimmer gathers, concentrating until it falls in silent drops down her cheeks. “Except that I wrote this book,” she says, “and it’s nothing, really. Just a bunch of words. But I’d be curious to know what you think of it, and I was wondering if maybe you’d like to give it a read? Or, really, do anything at all? Before you go?”

  As Sasha speaks, the rush of pain intensifies. My gaze moves to the revolver. The sun has risen in earnest, and the stark lines of the gun’s barrel and cylinder are no longer nebulous, whereas life seems as murky as ever. Maybe I’ll always feel a little lost, a bit apart. Maybe, as Sasha suspects, the heart is meant to burn, and life will always be a question to which I don’t have an answer.

  Yet here in the calmness at the edge of the world, I realize I don’t need one. In this moment, I am not obliged to sit in judgment upon my life, to determine whether it is good, or bad, or worth the effort. In this moment, there is only one question being asked of me, one to which I do have an answer.

  “Yes,” I say. “I’d like that very much.”

  After

  After you die, you find yourself at the end of a very long line.

  “What are we waiting for?” you ask the traveler in front of you.

  “To lodge complaints,” she says. “There’s a counter.”

  You peer down the row of travelers toward the front. There you see a booth with an open window above a counter. In the window, listening patiently to the traveler at the head of the line, is Merriam. She nods earnestly, now and then attempting a smile.

  “That’s thoughtful,” you say. The protracted length of the queue now seems like a blessing. Considering how things ended, you expect you’ll have a lot to complain about. You’re going to need some time.

  You almost don’t know where to begin, so you decide to start with the big stuff. War, you think. War was terrible, as were its less newsworthy variations—clashes and skirmishes, battles and brawls, feuds and fisticuffs. All violent conflict, really. And meanness. Mean people sucked. In fact, people could be complaint-worthy in all kinds of ways. They could be unfair, and selfish, and just plain rude, not to mention pushy, greedy, dishonest, arrogant, self-righteous, pretentious, shallow, materialistic, and willfully ignorant. Whew. You wonder how much time you’re allowed at the counter. You fear you could fill it with grievances about other travelers alone.

  Then there was pain. Pain was, well, painful. Cuts, scrapes, bruises, breaks. That agonizing toothache you had when you were eight. The time you dropped that metal door on your toe, and the nail turned black from the blood building up beneath it, throbbing unbearably for days, until your father finally took you to the emergency room, where they lanced it with a sharp needle, releasing the compressed pocket of blood in a sudden spurt. There was that kidney stone you passed in your twenties. And the harrowing fever you got in high school, forcing you to miss the field trip that all your friends went on.

  Come to think of it, missing that field trip was a major disappointment. That’s another complaint right there. You also never ate fresh pasta in Italy, or heard a lion roar, or looked at the night sky through a telescope. You didn’t become an astronaut when you grew up, or a firefighter, or a pirate. There were enormously wide swaths of reality you didn’t get to see, hear, taste, or feel. A whole host of things you didn’t get to be.

  The line to the complaint counter slides forward, more swiftly than you anticipated, growing ever shorter as your list of complaints expands. You press on with the composition, eventually moving from the weighty stuff to the littler things, no less bona fide for their smaller stature. There was airplane food, and junk mail, and inclement weather, and stale movie popcorn, and twenty-four-hour news cycles. There was traffic and acne and bills and work and mosquitoes and—

  “Yippy little dogs!” you exclaim, not realizing you’ve broadcasted this remark until the traveler in front of you brightens.

  “Oh, I adored those!” she says.

  “Adored?” you say incredulously. “They were awful.” Barely dogs at all, you think, the little runts, tucked incongruously into women’s handbags or circling underfoot with all that ear-piercing yipping and yapping.

  “I loved their tiny faces,” says your neighbor. “So expressive! And their feisty attitudes. A bunch of characters is what they were.”

  “I suppose they weren’t all bad,” you admit. Now that she mentions it, you remember an exception or two.

  “Oh, no,” she says, waving you off with a smile. “They were all wonderful. I loved every single one of them.”

  Clearly, small dogs are not going to be on your neighbor’s list of complaints, which makes you think that maybe they shouldn’t be on yours either. If another traveler could so cherish them, then they can’t be inherently bad, and the source of your complaint would therefore be not yippy little dogs but your perception of yippy little dogs. Yet your perception is part of you, and you can’t very well complain about yourself. It seems fair to say that you w
ere your responsibility.

  You cross little dogs off your list, realizing that, by this rationale, you must also remove anything else that any other traveler loved. Complaining about it no longer seems to make sense, which leads you to suspect that maybe some of your other complaints don’t make much sense either. Can you honestly gripe that you never went to Italy, or that you weren’t an astronaut, or about anything else that didn’t happen or wasn’t true? It feels illogical, and perhaps a bit crazy, to complain about things that didn’t exist. You may as well bemoan the fact—or the fiction—that a unicorn didn’t pick you up for work every morning, or that you never had a wish granted by a leprechaun.

  You cross those items off your list, too, then turn your attention to another category—grievances that were inextricably linked to something you valued. So-called necessary evils. Pain alerted you to danger. Fevers fought back infection. The variety of ways in which people could be horrible was a consequence of human free will. Even war itself was ultimately a result—albeit a tragic one—of people’s freedom to disagree.

  Somehow you know that all of these arguments wouldn’t have carried much weight during your journey—you even think you may have heard them before—but for some reason they now seem more compelling. It’s not that you suddenly consider all of these things to be good. Pain hurts. Crime is unjust. Yet it no longer feels appropriate to complain about them. You winnow down your list until you’re left with a remnant of matters so frivolous that you wonder how they ever bothered you at all. Inclement weather? Please. In fact, you suddenly find it hard to imagine complaining about much of anything. If you did complain, it would likely be to other travelers. Certainly not to Merriam, who is still behind the counter, waiting for you to realize you’ve reached the front of the line.

  “Where would you like to start?” she asks, flipping through the pages on her clipboard.

  “I guess I don’t have anything.”

  Merriam looks up in surprise. “Really?”

  “Yeah,” you say, thinking it over. “I’m good.”

  Merriam lowers her clipboard. Tears begin to cloud her visage. “I’m very glad to hear that,” she says, glistening brightly. “Thank you.”

  “No, thank you.”

  She smiles, collecting herself. “Speaking of that . . .”

  Merriam points you toward an area around the back of the booth, where you find yourself at the end of yet another line. In front of you is the same fellow traveler, the lover of little dogs.

  “Now what are we waiting for?” you ask.

  “To pay compliments,” she says.

  You cast your gaze toward the head of the line, where you can just make out another booth, with another counter. This time, it’s Jollis in the window. He seems to be laughing, though it’s hard to tell, given the distance. This line is much longer than the last one, which surprises you. Not that you don’t have your share of compliments to pay. You just don’t expect it to take very long. There was family and friends (most of the time). Health (in large part). Food, shelter, sunshine. It takes no more than a moment or two to compile your list, after which the line seems to have barely budged.

  “All done?” asks the traveler behind you. You nod. “Me, too,” he says. “To be honest, I don’t have much. Mainly sex and ice cream.”

  “Oh, ice cream!” says the lover of little dogs. “How could I forget ice cream?”

  To be honest, you had forgotten ice cream, too. You promptly add it to your list, along with chocolate, and sprinkles, and waffle cones, and—

  “Haircuts,” says a traveler a little farther up the line. “I used to get ice cream after every haircut. Loved them both.”

  “Yes!” says the dog lover. “And pedicures. And toenails!”

  “Toenails?” you say.

  “Absolutely,” she insists. “They were marvelous. I loved painting them. It was like having little ornaments at the end of your toes.”

  You’re not so sure about toenails, but you definitely liked toes, which make you think of feet, which remind you of hands, and arms, and skin, and eyes, and heart, and—well, as it turns out, there’s quite a long succession of body parts worthy of praise, once you start looking closely.

  You proceed to add them to your list, struggling to keep up, because the travelers around you are all getting into the discussion now, shouting out compliments as soon as they think of them (“tube socks!”), and being reminded of new ones (“road trips!”) every time someone else mentions one of theirs (“campfires!”), all of which results in a chain reaction that threatens to mushroom your scant list of compliments to encyclopedic proportions. By the time you finally finish, you’re at the head of the line. You approach the counter, where Jollis flips through the pages on his clipboard.

  “Right,” he says. “All set, then?”

  For Jollis’s benefit, you run through your list again. He marks it all down, laughing at each new entry, until you find yourself laughing along with him. Too soon, it seems, you reach the end.

  “Does that do it?” he asks.

  “I think so.” You ponder it all one last time, until you realize that there is, in fact, one more thing. But you’re in the wrong line for it. You hustle back to the complaint counter, where the lead traveler is gracious enough to let you cut the line.

  “You have a complaint after all,” says Merriam, a little sadly.

  “Just one,” you assure her. “As it turns out, I had nothing to complain about, and a million things to compliment.”

  “That’s your complaint?”

  “No,” you say. “My complaint is that no one told me sooner.”

  Merriam gives you a kind but skeptical look. “Are you sure?”

  Elliot

  (2018)

  Dark fists of cloud wrestle with a bright blue sky. It is a good fight, a fair fight—the sky cold and high and piercing, the clouds deep and turbulent, their leading edge gilded white, as if inflamed by the conflict. I will always be, proclaims the sky. We will never stop, answer the clouds. The front lines advance and then recede, curling back on themselves before advancing again. I don’t know what moves them—the clouds and the sky. Down here the air is still, the world silent within the heart of winter. From the knoll behind our cottage, I watch the melee. I am forty-six years old. I am lying on my back in the snow.

  A quiet rumble sounds over the ice—not the roll of thunder, but the opening of the sliding glass door at the back of the cottage. I don’t need to turn my head to know that Sasha stands in the doorway, relishing the burst of frigid air but not keen on stepping out into it. Her eyes will scan the white hills, the trees, the bare branches like giant cobwebs, before coming to rest on my prone form at the top of the knoll. A smile will come to her lips, and her head may give a little shake, but she will neither demand nor request that I consider retreating from the cold. She knows that I’ll come in eventually—or rather, she hopes that I will, and will understand if I don’t.

  She only opens the door at all to appease a certain diminutive and somewhat bossy French Mexican Chihuahua. Henri is old now, and hates the snow as much as ever, but he likes to know that he has the option of joining me if he so chooses. Were it any other time of year, he would do so. Spring typically finds him giving chase to a bumblebee that has offended him in some way. Autumn, running down an equally objectionable leaf in the wind. During the long, hot days of summer, he is more often content with simply curling up in my lap, on alert for any hint of storm that might dare to approach without his permission. Now, though, in the dead of February, when the earth is covered in a cold white frost, he leaves me to my musings. As Sasha waits patiently, he considers his freedom, gives a short huff, and trots back to the couch, at which point the sliding glass door rumbles closed again.

  In the time it takes for Henri’s deliberation, the clouds have won the day. Horizon to horizon, a gray canopy hangs low and heavy over a half-lit world. The whole boundless, weighty thing seems about to cave in and buffet the earth—and, from
some slanted part of me, I kind of hope it will. I imagine it pressing down on my restless bones until they finally yield, melting into a leaden softness. Vanishing, even. It took me a long time to realize that this reverie is more communion than morbidity, and not—as that doctor tried to tell me in my youth—the same as wanting to die. I know this because there are other moments, even still, when I want that, too.

  Which is no surprise, at least not to me. The morning after Bannor’s death, all those years ago, I didn’t climb down from Sasha’s roof thinking that I had vanquished the emptiness. I wasn’t thinking much at all, except that I wanted to read Sasha’s novel, and—once she handed it to me, in a blue folder tied with string—that I wanted to collect a few of my things from Jennifer’s apartment. (It was always, somehow, Jennifer’s apartment.)

  “A few of my things” ended up being one suitcase of clothing—and Henri. I let him take one last artful shit at the ginkgo tree, then tucked him under my arm and got on a train for Connecticut. Though it pained me, I had little choice but to prove Dean right—without the job he helped me get, I would be living with my parents. They graciously took me in, without conspicuous judgment, and without questioning me one way or another about the loss of my job, or Jennifer—or anything else, for that matter.

  Moving back home at age twenty-nine, even temporarily, was not the ideal. It did, however, stave off financial crisis, and provide for a quick, clean break from Jennifer. It also allowed me to intercept my suicide note before my parents could read it—or would have, but for the fact that I picked the wrong day to sleep through the mailman’s arrival. Instead, I found the note in the kitchen trash, shredded to illegibility—my mother clearly having decided to destroy the evidence before my father got home. I waited for her to confront me, struggling with whether I should be the one to broach the issue. Two anxious weeks passed before I finally found the courage.