Fracking

a short story

In the silty water below, unimportant clumps of seaweed are dancing a funky two step, is what I think, but then again as someone who has never left New England I don’t really know what a two step looks like. Probably wouldn’t know where to put my feet even if someone grabbed hold and moved them around for me. It’s just a thought I had. The sun is so bright I have to keep squinting even with my back to it, maybe on account of the way it's stabbing at the crests of every wave like it’s gotta be everywhere at once, the sun like a Wasp mom, so much to do so little time. She’s multi-tasking, is what I think. I don’t know why I keep ascribing people-meaning to non-people stuff. Maybe because it’d be nice to stop being a person for a while but I know I’ll keep thinking about all my people problems even if I’m a plum or dirty sidewalk change. I’m too full.

I was on the phone for a bit before I came out here and the conversation went along awkwardly the way phone calls sometimes do and then one of us pressed the button that kills the connection so even though we’d both said bye it was still only one person’s decision to finally call the whole thing off. Even after the goodbye, we could have kept going doing the high school sweetheart schtick: you hang up no you hang up or maybe just listening to one another breathing or even boldly deciding to start all over as if we don’t know each other like: hi I’m this person with this name that I carry around like a set of rings I wear each day so I can feel definable, concrete. What are you? All of that would have been tough to get into and set rules about or whatever, like why are we starting over? How could that possibly work? There would be too many lies to commit to. So she just hung up like the convention calls for and that was that.

Now I’m sitting on a concrete wall by the harbor with the tips of my shoes almost kissing the water with the sun so bright it hurts in a stabby way, but I think I already said that. There’s a sort of desolation circling my heart, cold and circuitous, but I can see all the way down to the barnacle encrusted rocky bed holding up all the whole ocean and, I don’t know, it’s not necessarily reassuring but it is more sure about itself than I am about me so it’s something to look at.

She called to tell me–and I’m hard-pressed not to joke that this call could have been a text message–that he made an attempt. A failed attempt, and so that’s good if it’s possible to pass a moral judgment on something like this, and people have been trying since the beginning of time to make it a moral thing so why not throw my own hat into the ring? It’s good he didn’t die; I told her that. I asked for details—like, what he actually did—because I didn’t really know what else to say and she said well, it was a sort of combination of things like if you ordered a suicide attempt at McDonald’s and there was a price conscious combo deal if you picked out a bunch of options. That’s not funny, though. The thought of it actually hurts, him staring at a menu of options big as a billboard and thinking oh, let me be bad. I’ll try a little bit of everything. The image squeezes my heart in a sharp way like the crazy nightmare coffin with all the nails that they put Matilda in in the movie Matilda–the Pokey. My heart in the Pokey.

Well, I’m glad that he didn’t die, I mentioned that, but it does feel a bit strange to have the whole narrative placed in my hands like it was something I definitely needed to know. The amassing concern she ignored, the banging on the bathroom door so it was rattling in its frame, taking a hammer to the antique glass knob, discerning words through obscure tears on the phone with the police with him limp and wet in her arms. A shivering ride in an ambulance like a spaceship. The emptying of his stomach as if the root problem isn’t an inherited emptiness. All this happened so far from the context of my own body and she seemed to have already removed herself as well, just telling the story like it happened to someone else. Now it’s in my head in enough vivid detail that I could be her. My lap wet with his slack frame like I’d always dreamed of.

This is something I simply did not need to hold. If he’d actually made it work then I’d say sure, please call me to tell me. Hearing her voice and her hearing mine would have been sweet if he was dead. But I hardly heard her at all when she started talking with that reserved tone she adopts in a crisis, I thought he must have done it successfully, which would be morally bad, I guess? But he’d done poorly at suicide, which was good. She had to say it several times, that he was still alive, before the factuality of it really needled its way into my head. He’s not dead and there’s nothing to be cleaned up—besides the glass doorknob which isn’t my problem—and still she sat on the other end of the line waiting for me to say something that mattered but I was and am committed to inaction. 

There are gulls crying out over the harbor. Way behind them there are planes descending into Logan so the distance makes them appear almost the same size as the gulls. Perspective! So many sailboats with their classic sailboat silhouettes bobbing against their mooring and still it feels to me like there should be more, like how can there only be a few dozen sailboats in Boston Harbor, one of those harbors famous for having ships in it, etc. How many people actually own sailboats? Is it a coastal elite thing or can you be a middle class sailboat enthusiast? I’ve never even been on one or known someone who said the words my sailboat so maybe I’m just wandering from the point on purpose to get somewhere else.

The two of us used to sit here, me and him. Maybe not this exact stretch of concrete wall but in the area for sure, we would press our boney butts to the unforgiving ground and take deep breaths like rolling waves. He hardly had the energy to do anything back then so I was always taking him places just to sit around and shoot the breeze—awful marksmen that we were, hardly ever hitting a topic of importance. But it was our bodies in the sunlight not falling apart. Slipping my hand into his and holding it there long enough that we might not be able to discern which of us was cold and which provided warmth like a furnace. Maybe I was only ever slowing the process of decay, but I was good at it. Hands calloused and strong from unimportant menial labor, I knew how to squeeze a person so hard that it definitely hurt them a little bit but in the end kept their rough pieces pressed together. I bet there are still indents all over his body where I held him too hard.

Behind me, stretching up toward the awful blue sky is a sort of cool-looking brutalist high rise apartment building. The thing really is pretty brutal, smooth and indifferent with uniformly neat rows of windows and rounded corners, identical balconies stacked one on the other all the way up to the top. It’s not ugly or beautiful, just serving its purpose but in the brutalist way that requires some sort of opinion in one direction or another. The sky itself is rolling like a dome, the cloud bottoms so flat you can almost imagine the flat field of atmosphere they trample like buffalo stampeding across the globe. Okay, that one was animal-meaning ascribed to non-people stuff, so that’s good to know. I can go anywhere.

And I think I take back what I said earlier about her voice being a comfort. For all the space and time between now and when we were young and hurting each other from a place of weird love, I still hate her a little bit. She got to have him—the good version of him after I smoothed out all his deficits. This isn’t kind to him either but I don’t know another way to think about it. Otherwise all the energy I put into keeping him from killing himself all the time was cruel without nuance. Just a boy trying to impose a sense of control where he had none over his own self. As if me kissing him all the time wasn’t weird and confusing for everyone involved.

He liked it until he didn’t. And I fixed him until he stopped being fixed. Either she doesn’t hold him together with tough hands like I did or he was always gonna break, it was just a matter of who he cracked open on like the hull of ship splitting against a rock.

Ah. Damn. The sailboat thing was him. Rarely did his actual desires ever slip between the pressed seal of his lips but he told me once when we were out here—if our school had a sailboating team I think I’d do that. Get out on the water and end up wherever. People make it look easy because it’s important to act in control all the time but I bet it’s just the wind. I bet there’s not much you can do but get pushed all around and pretend it’s where you wanted to go. Then he tilted his head up at me, holding out his arm to block the sun with the back of his hand against my chest and said, You’d think there’d be more sailboats out there, right? It’s Boston Harbor. You’d think there’d be more.

So I guess that was just a seed he planted in my head. There are always other people falling out of me.

The upright nature of my body becomes too much so I lay flat atop the concrete wall, the merciless earth on one side, the unapproachable ocean on the other. I am caught between two impossible forces pressing in with such strength I find myself too tired to spin it into metaphor or assign any sort of meaning to it all. Her voice is still seeping through my head, pressing apart the pink little folds of my brain, the words hydraulic and dangerous. He’s been asking for you. It would mean a lot if you came out to see him.

Haven’t I been here before? is what I’m thinking. Here, physically, but also here, spiritually, in the habit of coming obediently when he calls. Me, like a dog. Ha ha, full circle moment. Well, at least I hesitated this time before running his way but I basically only came out here to watch the planes fall out of the sky and think about how I’ve got the money for a cheap flight to Santa Fe, how it would be nice to step out of New England, be somewhere I’ve never been before. Wonder if they’ve got any good two steppin’ down there.

It takes three to incoherently tango if you don’t mind me skewering a bad metaphor. And what do you want? I’d finally asked after so much breathy consideration on my part. She went quiet too in the darkly churning way that told me she hadn’t paused yet to consider her own needs in the middle of this whole thing so both of us had to laugh awkwardly through our noses in different states thinking, we’re not so different, are we? It was the sort of revelation that revealed far too much so she never answered the question. I knew anyway that we wanted the same thing and always would so it was best to just end the call before either of us had to get mean about it.

This far away she’s so small compared to the size of me or a plane or a sailboat or the whole ocean being held up by the earth. I can’t even see her from here. I can’t see anything with the hot sun crawling through the holes in my face.

Shielding my eyes from the prying light with my forearm, I peer up at the towering brutalism through a tunnel and think if the whole building just fell over for whatever reason—an earthquake or the crew had rushed the foundation to meet a deadline or for no reason really, just entropy is always entroping and sometimes stuff just falls apart to meet the universe’s demands—I wouldn’t really have any time to outrun its collapse and would probably certainly be crushed by it. Odds are I wouldn’t even try to run because I can almost see how beautiful it would be to watch a structure so solid suddenly fracture and splinter. Something decidedly indifferent no longer being able to hold itself together. It would be cool to watch and so I’d probably just watch it like running would only kick the beauty in the teeth with the same result of death by concrete chunk, a super unsexy death so it’s best to make it as sexy as possible. Just chillax and watch the thing fall apart. Just watch it.

i think i wanna save you / i think i wanna join in

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Further fictions for ur nerve