It Didn't
a short story
It seemed like the world was gonna end for a day or so and then it didn’t, which was pretty annoying. For twenty four hours–well, more like twenty seven, a decidedly less sexy number–all the boundaries of reason dissolved and stuff got weird; I got weird in ways that I swore up and down I would never get. Me, a rational and level-headed person who had, sure, once been prone to bouts of hysteria and the sort of sullenness that used to get women sent to the seaside for their health, but I’d achieved, and was even comfortable in, a three year streak of stability which was how a person could convince themself they would stay stable forever. Latest evidence is the best evidence. Or something like that.
And then everything was bad for twenty four to twenty seven hours and the evidence got updated. Stuff like: holy shit I have to be sober for the rest of my life, I have to carry that onus for like the next sixty(?) years of my existence if I’m lucky/unlucky while everyone around me keeps getting green tea shots at the club and then bottomless mimosas at brunch and then the nightly two to six glasses of white wine with reality tv and for some reason this isn’t a problem for them or they don’t want to confront the problem so badly that all of us are pretty convinced they’re just doing alcohol better and more consciously than anyone else while drinking just as much; that idea got squished like a slinky within the first hour and I was like, well what was the point of five years of sobriety, then? All the shitty mimosas I’ve missed! If it’s all gonna end anyway, I might as well get really fucked up, give my liver something to remember, offer myself the body memory of what most of my short life had felt like stumbling through fields of intoxication, which never really stopped having its allure but suddenly there was no reason not to run headlong into the tall grass and get lost until the earth swallowed me like a bug.
So I drank a bunch because of the reasons I just mentioned without thinking much further about it, casting aside the mechanism my counselor called playing the tape through which is basically where you acknowledge the impulse to drink but then look past it not just at the drunkenness and the comedown but the guilt that follows and the point in the coming days where you have to realize that it wasn’t worth it—following the impulse was not worth it. But if I played the tape through on this, it wasn’t really a matter of worth or guilt but how much apocalyptica and nuclear winter I could endure without some measure of fire stinging my veins to offset the whole ordeal. There was no possible happy end to this tape so I tried to beat it to the punchline.
You were disappointed in me, which was fair but annoying and I said as much. That’s fair but you’re being pretty annoying, I said. Is now really the time to get up on some moral high ground? Shouldn’t we be headed for a different, less metaphorical high ground? And you said There’s no ground high enough to get away from this, and I said What about Everest? That’s pretty high, I bet nothing is gonna happen up there, and you said You’re drunk. And I left the room because it was true but annoying. Like, please just let me have this. I can have my booze relapse and you can go fuck as many men as you want without telling me, I’m sure there are plenty of ill-coping bottoms looking to send the world off with a quick and somewhat pleasurable anonymous fuck. Born without a name, die without a name. Or something like that.
But this was both annoying and unfair to say because you were whatever they call anonymous sex sober and hadn’t cheated on me in almost a decade, we’d healed from your infidelity or something like that, so I didn’t bring up this retort until hour six when I was well off my rocker on canned beer—my least favorite drink, but it’s all we had–or you had, I guess. I’ve always been a little bit annoyed that you kept drinking when I got sober even though you’re one of the people who manages an actual healthy relationship with the stuff; it’s like, where’s the solidarity? But I’m past that because at least it meant there was something in the house to set about my combustion. Beer is awful to my refined palette but it does provide one of my favorite forms of drunkenness, a dirty veil draped over everything, brain submerged in muddy water making my body as gross as the rest of me feels. Such an awful experience, I love it in how much I hate it. You understand.
So anyway, I got drunk enough to antagonize you–which, let’s be honest, that’s the real drug I’ve missed like a long dead dog or like cocaine. The point isn’t the drinking but the thing it turns me into and mostly that was someone who could get real quiet like a storm when you tried to look into my heart for ‘whatever is going on’ asking the silent question is it about that one thing that made a shell of you when you were a kid or the other thing when you were an adult and should have known better and after a certain amount of looking I’d snap like a bolt of lightning tearing the bark off a tall, lonely tree just to see you flinch.
Hurting someone you love is a fucking shot of adrenaline. In a breath, all the boozy haze clears and I’m reminded how much evil is twisted up in my fibrous nerve endings, that beneath the drink it’s still just me calling the shots—and I prefer a heavy pour. It’s a form of edging, doing the thing that pushes you away over and over and yet you never leave all the way because I’ve got my hooks in you, baby.
And so I ran back into the living room where you were sulking to say the thing about the ill-coping bottoms born without a name, die without a name etc, and you got dark like the tv screen which doesn’t make that fuzzy sound that all the tv’s made when we were younger, the lasting warm static right after being turned off so you could press your cheek to it and almost feel like it was alive, like you were resting against your mother’s warm breast. Our tv is big and modern and once it turned off, that was it, the thing went stoic and lifeless as a captain at the bow of his ship sucking sensuously on a cigar like a robust penis, peering into the gurgling ocean waiting for something to happen, something only he knows will happen and you can see it on his face but it’s way too scary to ask someone who actually knows the future what the future looks like. Nobody wants to know that shit.
You went dark like that, like the captain or the sleek tv screen or both since they were each scorned prophets in their own ways, and it was that point when I realized I was the ill-coping bottom who wanted some cock like the drunkenness wasn’t enough, like anything could ever be enough to make me feel that my short time, sixty years shy of that lucky/unlucky number I envisioned, was at all worth it. I sat stupidly on your lap and did the thing you like with my tongue in your ear but it was drunk-sloppy and the smell of my own foul breath convecting into my own nose made the whole thing gross and ugly, which I wanted and you seemed to sort of want it too like maybe it could be fun to hate each other again in a horny way, like what I was saying earlier about body memory how even if it’s a terrible thing that is shameful to remember it at least returns you to a point in time that is not the unbearable one your body is currently in.
But then you pushed me off which was fair but annoying, RE: will I ever get what I want, will I ever want what I get? Something along those lines.
Down on the floor where I’d thrown myself as if the ground was a fainting couch and I the Victorian woman with my girdle too tight—the girdle of your rejection—I kept small so you might feel the power of your scorn, which I’d basically asked for. I pressed my face into the rough shag carpet which is still around in abundance if you’re too poor to change it out or if, like us, you started peeling it back hoping there was some gorgeous original hardwood floor beneath but there was only mottled concrete and we’re not the brutalist chic modern kinds of gays. So we still had the shag is the thing and it stung like steel wool against my cheek, held my feverish heat and pushed it back into me. Down there, the dirty desolation of the world beneath the couch taunted me like a scale model of how much shit it’s possible to ignore. The sleeve of a Gatorade bottle peeled off and discarded like pocket change. A tube of very cherry chapstick. Used napkins like kids in sheets with cut-out eye holes. Actual pocket change.
Clean me, the dust bunnies and anonymous crumbs begged without mouths to which I retorted no freaking way, dude, I’m drunk as a drunk guy. haha and you watched me sort of sadly like oh, yikes, he’s talking-to-himself-on-the-floor levels of fucked up. Nothing embarrassed me any longer so I stayed down in the shag observing the accumulation of history to kill the time until time killed me.
We sat/reclined/draped in silence for a long while, each thinking to ourselves Is the end of the world really this quiet? When will it start looking the way I always imagined it? And it was sort of comforting to know we were thinking the same thing without having to say it, even if my train of thought kept getting diverted by the gushing aqueducts of drunkenness, an intoxication that was starting to make me sad but still weirdly horny so I was calling myself a pervert in my head just to find something to feel bad about. But we were eight hours into the end of the world and against my will the tape was playing through a bit too late so I was getting hit over the head by fair but annoying thoughts like was it worth it? was it worth it? was it worth it? And things of that repetitive nature.
I found the whole feeling redundant or a word close to redundant but not quite. Like, I know this tape, I’ve hate-watched it a million times and what a shitty way to spend your short time on earth hate-watching anything. The realization that I’ve already realized this a hundred times before made me darker but not inaccessible. Just a little cracked open. My cheeks still fuzzy with static.
Which brought us back to the old body memory habit where you were peering into my heart for ‘whatever was going on,’ seeing it was obviously about the thing that happened when I was older that I might feel shameful about until I’m dead and instead of getting stormy and throwing lightning bolts at your soft bark, I beckoned you down to the floor with me where we pressed our noggins together and I pointed at the unkept world beneath the couch and said That’s what the inside of my head looks like, and you said Let me get the vacuum, which I understood was a joke or a metaphor and instead of getting a real vacuum you opened your wet mouth and pressed your lips against my forehead and made sloppy slobbering sounds like you were sucking the dust bunnies from the untidy folds of my brain, eating pocket change like a greedy gumball machine, swallowing loose plastic for me. And despite the silliness of it, or because of the silliness, I started crying. Big, bloated tears too thick to swallow so they flooded the shag carpet which must have looked like a biblical sort of flood to the wrappers and dust bunnies but all they could do was watch with no higher ground from which to escape my dramatic melancholy. You kept on slobbering until I was all cleaned up and the tears all done and dried and I said Damn. This is stupid and you said If there was ever a time.
And the both of us laughed.
It was a tiny exorcism but I kept on drinking the day into the gutter anyway and you kept being disappointed in me but it was loving somehow and the loving made me less horny which was probably a good thing. The hours whittled away the way we normally whittled away hours by doing near-nothing in close proximity and at a certain point it was like okay, it sort of seems like the world isn’t ending which is exactly what you might think right before the world ends so we stayed up on our toes until the twenty seventh hour when the tv was resuscitated from death—which was scary because that made it a zombie tv—so we were startled from couch-sleep by the potential horror but all the news anchors were back like they’d never left (duty to the country and the integrity of journalism and all that) assuring us that our tv’s were not zombies though the world definitely and actually had been about to end but it didn’t.
Which was annoying because I’d just gone through a whole thing about it. Like a personal journey kind of event. But that’s just everyday, I guess. The world almost ending and then not is just another thing like all the other stuff and I react to it because I don’t really have any other choice. Like, it’s a new day now and the tape is played all the way through and it’s pretty incriminating vis a vis the horrible things I said to you, my committed refusal to sweep under the couch (metaphor), the weird nostalgia about tv’s, and of course the sour beer burning holes in my liver. But I don’t feel too awful about it the way you’re supposed to feel apocalyptically bad about a relapse. Nothing has to be so concrete. I’ve been bad sometimes and I’ve been good too if I think really hard for specific examples and this is a pretty okay rhythm I could follow for the next sixty years or so, I probably have to follow it whether I want to or not. No point in getting all riled up about it or whatever. At least it didn’t kill me.
This is fucking incredible.
The way you write about hurting people you love, the recurring motifs and phrases (“fair but annoying”), the way the story conflates harm and comfort.
I think I need to read this agin.
The carpet and the under-sofa got to me. Who hasn't, at some point, had some kind of moment like that one? When you feel abjection and you have to get literal with it, right there on the floor?