In Nightmares We're Alone (17 page)

Of course she changed her mind a few days later when Martin said he’d rather live with her. And I changed my song too. If that was what Martin wanted, we’d done enough damage to him in these months of fighting that we couldn’t fight him on that.

Sitting here at the bistro, the darker part of me wants to tell Martin how Rose initially didn’t care. And that sad fact about myself, that I’d even think of telling him, that’s probably the reason he likes Mom more in the first place. He saw the growths before I did.

I wonder how that part of me got there. Even with pliers I don’t know how to pry that out.

“Well, anyway,” I say, retreating into an emotional turtle shell like our culture taught me to do, “we can still see movies and you can come over whenever you want. We’ll still hang out. We’re just not going to—”

“—make any money anymore.”

So that’s it. That’s the source of the resentment.

“When I was about your age I had a paper route,” I tell him. “That was how I made money. I’m not sure anybody has paper routes anymore with the Internet and ebooks and everything, but there’s got to be some kind of job kids are doing.”

“Yeah, like five bucks for an hour of work,” says Martin. “It’s whatever. I can just get somebody else at school to grab the wallets and we’ll stick to the cash and leave the cards.”

“I wish you wouldn’t do that. I know I sound like a hypocrite telling you not to, but I really wish you wouldn’t. I’m gonna start looking for a job here soon. Something legitimate. I don’t know what yet. After I do, I’d like to help you get a job too if you want. I think we’ve both been going down a bad path and I want to try and fix it before things get too bad for us. I’m gonna get an honest job, stop conning, try to be good to you, I’ve got a nice girl I’m hoping to start seeing…”

Martin bursts out laughing.

“What?” I ask.

“Oh man.” He laughs even harder. “Really?” he says sarcastically, “
You’re
trying to get a girl? You? Really?”

“What is it, Martin? What’s the problem?”

“I was sitting there listening to you talking about getting a job and being a good person and everything and I was like, ‘This is weird. What’s in it for him?’ and then boom. Sex stuff. Always. I don’t know why I didn’t guess it.”

There’s a sinking feeling in my stomach, knowing I’ve set him up with plenty of ammunition over the years, and my eyes leering to the billboard behind him every couple minutes as we talk, maybe he’s right.

“That’s not what I mean. I meant a relationship. I… I’m getting too old to be alone so much. There’s a nice woman I met. She’s got a daughter about your age. Maybe in your class, even. Do you know Macie Giddings?”

“You’re dating Macie’s mom?”

“Not exactly. Not yet. Don’t say anything to her, I mean. I’ve just talked to her a couple times and I… I don’t know…”

He sighs, disgusted. “What is it with you and women?”

“What do you mean?”

“Ever since you and Mom split it’s always about this hot new chick you’re seeing or you’re staring at some jogger’s butt, and ‘Who are the cute girls in your class, Martin?’ ‘Which one you want to kiss under the bleachers, Martin?’ Like, do you know how embarrassing that is? You’re like this old divorced dude and all you ever think about is girls. You gotta get your shit together.”

“That’s what I’m trying to do.”

“Whatever.” Martin grabs his Coke and his sandwich and heads down the steps to the street. He turns with a hurt look on his face that’s there for reasons I’m not entirely sure I understand and he says, “You know, whenever you start turning into a cool dad, you always turn right back around and get really fucking lame.”

He goes.

I think of going after him and trying to force him into letting me give him a ride back to school, but it’s only a couple blocks and I know that I’d be losing even if he let me. Instead I just sit there and try not to cry.

I finger my coffee cup, but it just hurts my hands. I started here, with Martin, because he’s the most important. But I also started here because I thought I’d take less abuse from him than I’ll take breaking up with girlfriends and confessing to clients. I was wrong. Nothing else can hurt like this. Even plants can’t hurt like this.

* * * * *

Come on, Casey. Say it. Say the words.

I don’t want to do this anymore.

Say it.

I need to stop taking advantage of you.

Say it. Say it.

Danielle and I are in bed together, curled up in exactly the post-coital web I told myself I wouldn’t let us end up in. I wanted to do it over the phone, but it’s such a faux pas. The right way to break up is to do it in person. But the right prelude to an in-person breakup isn’t to invite her over and shove her up against the wall by the front door and get inside her before she can take off her coat because the fight you just had with your son made you think you deserved a little pleasure tonight. The segue from fucking somebody halfway unconscious into ‘I don’t think we should do this anymore’ is always clunky.

“I can hear your heartbeat,” she says, pushing an ear to my chest. “It’s so fast. Are you nervous?”

“I’m exhausted,” I say. “You sapped all my energy.”

Sap. Think of the sycamore. The world. Life. The web.

She slaps my face playfully. “Psh. I did all the work.”

“You ladies,” I say. “Just because a man’s on the bottom you think he’s not doing anything. There’s a lot of work to be done down there, Danielle.”

She laughs. “Shut up.”

She lays her head down on my chest again and there’s a long silence as I try to find a way to force the issue but I don’t have it. Instead I end up just saying it.

“I think we should stop doing this.”

Her head cocks up, looks at me without leaving my chest. “Oh?” she says.

“I’ve been thinking about it and I just think this isn’t… It isn’t healthy. Emotionally.”

She shrugs. “I don’t even know what
this
is.”

“Neither do I. That’s the point though, isn’t it? Don’t you want to find something meaningful with somebody? Get married and have kids and all that? This isn’t setting us on a course toward that. It’s steering us away from it if anything.”

She laughs. “You’re not saying you want to marry me?”

“No, I’m saying I want us to stop… you know…”

“Fucking.”

“Right.”

“I’m a grown woman, you don’t have to mince words or make my decisions for me. If you want to be with somebody else, cool. Don’t act all self-righteous and noble like you’re doing it for me though, because I’m fine.”

The throbbing in my fingers and toes. The pain of pressure, of movement just under the skin. When she goes, I’ll sleep and the branches will grow. I’ll wake up aching. But I’m trying. I’m trying to serve the tree. Trying not to make every action about myself.

“I’ve had other women,” I say for some reason. “While we’ve been together, I mean. Lots of others. Sometimes in the same night.”

“Oh God, no. Don’t I satisfy you?” she says sarcastically. “I don’t care what you do with your dick, Casey. Do you think I’m in love with you?”

Hate me, Danielle. Hate me so you can see I’m helping you. Let me know I’ve done something good. Maybe then the pain will stop for a moment.

I tell her about the times I thought of other girls when I was with her, how I can’t keep their names straight sometimes. I tell her how one just turned eighteen, how we planned on doing it at midnight on her birthday but started a minute early for the thrill. I tell her anything I can think of to get her angry but she just shakes her head and laughs at me as she dresses.

“I swear, Casey, I don’t even know whether you’re trying to hurt me or turn me on, but either way it isn’t working. This was never about anything more than sex for me. If you want to do it again, call. If you don’t, don’t call. Easy enough?”

“But don’t you see what a bastard I am?”

“I don’t see a bastard. I see a confused boy trying to fill a hole with sex that sex doesn’t fill.”

A minute later she leaves and that’s it. No anger or tears. Just an awkward conversation and an open-ended exit like she’s made so many times before.

I get out the phone and start calling other girls. I’ll do it by phone. I don’t trust myself in person after this.

Most of what I get is more of the same. In a few cases there’s a mild sense of betrayal, a sort of sad ‘oh’ sound and a lot of silence, but it’s all easier than it should be. Nobody really gives a shit. None of these so-called relationships have any real meaning to any of these women.

Maybe this is just my generation. The generation who stops listing their ages on social media in their mid-twenties because they’ve become old. Women who dream of high school reunions where their awe-struck former classmates marvel, 'You haven’t aged a day!' Youth worship. Willful arrested development. That quarter-life crisis that used to be a midlife crisis and keeps inching its way closer to a sixth. Maybe we’ve so aggrandized the young and dumb that the very concept of maturity terrifies us. Maybe we’re hiding behind cynicism and flippancy, afraid we’ll be ostracized from the Cool Group when we admit to loving or needing or longing. Maybe that’s why so many of us can’t let the party end. All of us still stuck on drugs and sarcasm and casual sex because emotional detachment is 'in'. Because it’s the only way to cope with our isolation without growing. And God forbid we grow. God forbid time does its thing.

At the end of the night, I don’t feel like I’ve done anyone any good aside from maybe myself. I’ve taken a series of relationships I thought existed for purely selfish reasons and ended them for reasons that end up feeling just as selfish. By cutting off all ties, making myself completely alone, I see how alone I already was.

None of it quells the pain in my fingers and toes. If anything it gets worse.

* * * * *

I wake up on the torture rack again, moaning into my pillow and afraid to move for fear of jostling something that doesn’t want to be jostled, afraid to turn on the lights for fear of how much worse I might have gotten. But this time when I do turn on the light and look into the bathroom mirror, I don’t scream. Instead I hang my head and sob.

The plants growing from my fingers and toes are back, just as big and twisted and gruesome as they were yesterday. And two new saplings have sprouted from inside my lower lip at the base of my gums. They protrude slightly from my stuck-open mouth and make me look like a corpse pulled out of a swamp.

Why? Why is it worse? Can’t you see I’m trying? I’ve canceled appointments and told my clients I can’t talk to the dead. I’ve got no plans to go out and fake drownings and steal wallets again. I’ll stop. I’ll get a regular job and help people in some way and I’ll find a way to balance my checkbook and pay my mortgage. I’ll find a wife. I’ll try to bring my son up right. I’ll do whatever you want. Just tell me.

But it’s still me, me, me, isn’t it?
I
will do what
I
have to do so that
I
don’t have plants growing from
my
fingers. It’s always me, me, me.

I position one of the plants between my teeth and bite down hard. It snaps off in my mouth and I gag on the taste of blood and spit into the sink. I scream and ram a hand into the mirror and the sticks on my fingers scratch the glass and I scream louder. I start grabbing at the plants and pulling them, tearing them out of the soil of my skin. With each new surge of pain I grab another plant and pull harder and more blood sprays across the bathroom in bright red dotted lines.

When every sapling is plucked or cut I scream at my reflection and break the mirror with the palm of my hand. I’m a monster. A freak in an empty house.

A root. You’re a root. Always have been.

I run to the window and look down at the tree.

“What do you want!?” screamed the lion to God—God who was all things, including the lion. “I’m stripping off the greed. I’ve sworn never to eat another zebra. I’ve sworn to help others however I can. I’m trying to act in service of life. I’m trying to do right by you. Why am I still suffering?”

“Because you are you,” said God. “And by being you, you serve only you.”

I rush outside without bothering to dress. A gust of wind picks my hair up as I clear the distance between myself and the tree.

“Is this what you want?” I whisper, wrapping a hand around the rigid bark and pressing my body to its trunk. “Standing here in the night, beckoning, seducing me? Is this what you’re after?”

I press my lips to the wood. I run my tongue through the ridges and taste sap and sawdust.

I thrust myself into it despite the pain, whispering into a knot in the bark, “I’ll give you what you want. I’ll give you anything. Just do the same for me.”

“I don’t understand,” said the lion. “I’ve changed. I’ve learned. I’ve grown. I’m trying to help others.”

“Helping others to stop your own suffering is still serving yourself,” said God.

“It’s not just that,” said the lion. “I don’t want to die knowing I did the world more harm than good.”

“Helping others to feel good about yourself is still serving yourself,” said God.

“I want the world to be better!” screamed the lion. “If I can help others to grow, we can all grow together, and we can build a better world. I just want to make it better for all of us!”

“Helping others because it will make you happy to see them happy is still serving yourself,” said God.

“Then what the fuck isn’t serving myself?” screamed the lion. “I’m trying, goddamnit, but I don’t know what to do!”

Covered in blood and splinters and saliva and sap and semen, I push myself away from the tree and gag. I am ashamed of the thing I have become. I don’t even know what the thing is. How did it come to this?

I punch the tree and I can feel my knuckle split open as my fist lands. I punch it again anyway. Then I kick it with my bare foot and I wonder if I’m breaking any of my own bones.

“You motherfucker!” I shout, and a light comes on in the house next door. “What have you done to me? Before I knew you I could have done anything!”

I storm back into the house before the neighbors see anything more. I throw on a bathrobe and go to the garage for my axe.