Please Don't Go (11 page)

Jackie slurped on her drink and studied her boyfriend’s face, as he did hers.

“
Crackpot. Crackpot. Crackpot. Total crackpot. What’s with you writing types always going mad? He wouldn’t be the first, ya’ know. Hunter Thompson, Edgar Allen Poe, Sylvia Plath. You guys step a little too close to the flame and bang... you’re on fire,” Jackie noted, slightly slurring her words from the overabundance of gold tequila in her drink. She slipped into silly diatribes with ease in such a state. Though she hardly ever drank, inebriation often landed upon her like Dorothy Gale’s house and her feet would curl up into nothing but empty striped stockings.

“
Thompson was killed because he claimed to know what really happened on September 11
^th
. Poe was a drunk, so he wasn’t necessarily crazy, just immoral with his female conquests. And speaking of drunk,” Zephyr replied, looking to her drink with a judgmental look stuck between his lips, like a dog retrieving a Frisbee. She rolled her eyes at him, then burst into a fit of giggles. Zephyr said, “Regardless what’s going on with this guy, it’s intriguing enough to make for good material. He wants to tell his story, whatever that’s worth. He just wants to get it out there, to flap his lips some. I can give the old timer that much, right? What’s the harm in being a companion to a senior citizen?” Zephyr privately scolded himself for his choice of terminology.
Senior citizen
made him feel a sense of disappointment in society’s acceptable norms, as it was so overly euphemistic to hide the truth of the matter.
Old timer
was preferable to him on many levels.

Jackie chuckled, pushing her drink away from her on the kitchen table, implying that maybe she had had enough and was accepting of her drunken state- including the terrible day that would follow, full of pain killers and Gatorade. “I’m just saying, don’t let him drag you into his psychosis. He’s coming off as one of these conspiracy theorist types, and they can be very manipulative. I had an uncle that used to see invisible entities too. Spoke to them. Even made a place for them at dinner every night. Their breed is very convincing of their own madness. All I’m saying is this: don’t be gullible,” she said, placing her finger to his forehead, pointing at his brain and implying he needed protection from the unhinged writer Rattup. Her finger moved to the side of his forehead. She could not hold it to one spot, a sure sign that she had indeed drank more than enough of her deadly margarita mixture.

“
I know,” Zephyr replied, trying to keep Jackie’s curious mind from wandering into uncharted territory. Looking at the digital clock on the stove, which indicated that it was after two o’clock in the morning, Zephyr noted, “It’s a bit late for you. I think the sleepiness is beating the crap out of your drunkenness. And you’re losing both battles.” The morning, Zephyr decided, would be a cruel, cruel bitch. “Bed? Please,” he said, but she had already plodded her forehead on to the kitchen table, snoring loudly in an obnoxious drunken snore that would wake the neighbors if the walls were thin enough. Zephyr lifted her head by the back of her hair and found that she was incalculably hammered. He put his head on the table as well, since it appeared to be quite comfortable and welcoming. And in that, he realized just how drunk he had become. If it was good enough for her to snooze on their table, it would be good enough for him. “G’night,” he mumbled as his eyes grew heavy inside of his swimming skull.

They awoke, in a pool of their own drool, when the sun came up in the window above the kitchen sink, confused by how they had ended up in such an ugly position, ashamed that they had not celebrated their anniversary with a romp in the sack. Life was hard, and it was harder when one awoke with a raging hangover and zero satisfaction.

11.

Zephyr trudged his way through several days of work and classes, as he always did, without any notable events. The drudgery of adulthood was still fresh to him, but already frowned upon with a comparison of how he would have rather spent his days, though he could not rightfully pinpoint that alternative. Work, more work, and maybe an hour or two of play before doing it all over again. His father had warned him of this sort of life, as though there was a tried and true way to avoid it, that which he himself had never uncovered. Zephyr had found himself trapped in the cruel reality of the fact that it was wholly unavoidable to grow up and commit one’s life to the machinations of work and study.

His particular brand of work was the worst of all possible solutions, if only for his cantankerous peers. Karen snapped her gum at Zephyr. “You staying through the summer? Richter needs to know by the end of the week. I’d rather just take you off the schedule and not give you an option, but he seems to think you’re worth what we pay you,” Karen griped at him, stressing that
they
should be paying him less than the eight dollars an hour he already received. Karen had lumped herself in with the management and ownership of the market, but Zephyr knew from a left-behind paycheck stub that she only made two more dollars per hour than he did. She had been at Richter’s for more than eight years, so that wasn’t speaking too highly of her past pay increases or leaps up the Richter ladder. She talked a grand game, but had little reward to show for it.

Zephyr stared at her, pondering the question as to how long he would stay, wishing that he would not have to provide such finalized information so soon. The previous summer, he had visited his family for two months, taking a temporary sabbatical from his work. Richter, at that time, had been hesitant to grant him the leave. In the end, he had accepted the proposal, tacking on those extra work hours to other employees (very much against their will, of which they would never let Zephyr off the hook for) through that transitional summer break period. At that time, though, Zephyr had not yet been involved with Jackie, and so that changed his prospective summer plans some this year. “I’ve still got six weeks of classes. I haven’t really decided all that yet. But I’d say I’m most likely sticking around this year,” he stated, which he knew would be an unacceptable answer to his bitter co-worker. Karen furrowed her brow at this prospect, as though nothing would have pleased her more than to issue Zephyr his final paycheck and bid him a permanent adieu, even as much as she secretly longed for just the feel of his warm breath upon her neck. Absence made things easier, though she would never admit any of this. “How long until I have to tell you?” he queried.

“
Good Lord. Whenever you feel like it,” she replied with a lion’s share of sarcasm dribbling from her lips, “
Just take your sweet time.
The rest of the world can just sit around waiting for you.” She shoved a large white box of over-the-counter pain killers towards Zephyr, commanding, “Put these in aisle four, if you can handle that much responsibility.” Zephyr eyed the box and then looked to Karen. Behind her, Trudy was clinging at Karen’s growling shadow. Trudy was her unofficial Salacious Crumb, always ready to cackle in response to support the collective sense of bloated egotism that they transmitted from their sad perch in the customer services booth.

Snatching the box from atop the counter, Zephyr winked at Karen in a moment of ulterior taunting. He blew a fake kiss to her as a follow-up to his wink, and Trudy’s mouth fell wide open, agape with the shocking realization of what she had seen. Surely, Zephyr reasoned, Trudy was well aware of Karen’s secretive jealous passion for him. His actions would only serve to titillate their whispering banter.

“
You watch it, you little shit!” Karen blasted him, leaning over the counter to call after him as he walked away with the box of pain killers clutched to his chest. “I’ll put a sexual harassment suit so far up your ass it’ll bleed for years!” When he was out of sight, she grinned to herself, which Trudy noted with a copycat grin of her own. “What are you looking at, bitch?” she asked of her lackey, who slunk away to the break room in fright. Karen’s minion needed a timeout.

12.

Zephyr plopped open his borrowed book to
Breakfast In Galway
for a second go. He had marked the page he was on with a dog-ear in the upper right hand corner, as he always did. Dust kicked out of the binding when he turned the tissue paper pages. They were so very thin, it reminded him of the Holy Bibles from Sunday school, so easy to rip if you were especially rambunctious with your readings of scripture.

He had looked about the apartment for something to distract him and found only the book. Zephyr would not have his first class of the day until after lunch. After that, to work. Then bed. For now, he would read, something that he often wished he had more leisure time to do. He looked forward to mornings such as this one. Though he was bored, it was a good kind of bored; a satisfied brand of nothing better to do.

Jackie had already set off to her beginner Russian class for the morning, and so he had their apartment all to himself. It consistently unnerved Zephyr to be home alone. Their silent abode buzzed at his basic sensibilities, which he was quite convinced thrived on intensity and worker-bee behaviors. It was as though, when in the quiet arms of nothing-in-particular-happening, that his mind toiled too hard, as if to compensate for the deadening silence. He and the lady of quiet solitude were like two lovers on a first date; awkward silence being the killer of their potential future and baby-making. This was, Zephyr noted, unlike Rattup’s fictional work, where the primary characters never seemed to stop yapping. But perhaps that was judgmental of him, for he had never written anything better himself, and probably never would.

Zephyr continued where he had left off, with Aleesha and the narrator, vowing their short time together at sunset in the heart of Galway. She had just broken into tears on the prospect of him leaving her forever on the following day, and he had promised her (though he seemed to regret it in the backwoods of his mind) that he would mull the idea of staying with her for a bit longer. The narrator knew it to be placing a candle in a window where the door would be eternally locked, but something in his need to please her had overtaken him.

We spent the evening speaking of our individual lives, strangers with a relative passion for our social and professional meanderings. Aleesha adored the thrill that came with the creation of her amateur paintings and charcoal portraits, but never felt she had the talent to take her skills higher, to a professional level. On the other hand, I had admitted that I was an adamant writer but had no desire to be a professional in the field. This was another lie, of which I was starting to mount an abundance of as I skirted about her feelings, but I thought that it would make her feel better to hear that I had never progressed with my own skills, especially in that very few people ever did as I had with my desires. I worked days as a financial analyst and report writer, this was true, but my burning, immovable passion lay in the written word. I had never been published previously, but had a story recently optioned by The New Yorker. Had I admitted this to her, it may have discouraged her own passions. Misery, as they say, loves company... and I was beginning to see her miserable side, as much as I adored her.

When she started to veer towards my staying with her longer than I had planned, I would redirect the conversation back to her art.

Her eyes went dreary when she spoke of her failed attempts at selling pieces to a local gallery. What had begun as a glimmer in her eye, on the subject of her artistic expressionism, had descended into a ticker tape parade of pitiful disgust and self-loathing, of which I wanted no part of. “Perhaps I would be better off burning my canvases. Dump my paints in the ocean. I am a silly girl with silly dreams,” she said with a bitter shake of her head. I detected that she was fishing for some sort of compliment, and so I was only a proper gentleman and supported her in that quest.

“
You are a beautiful woman,” I told her, and she broke into giggles, as though I had placed a magical pill beneath her tongue that had instantly cured her malaise. She so easily transformed back into the same lovely lass I had met earlier in the day, and that deluded twitter of laughter felt like home to me. It seemed to me as though we had courted, come together, and found ourselves in the lulling empty years of our lives. All in the course of one day this had occurred, and it seemed absolutely mad to me, I must admit. Lifetimes had come and gone, and we were on the downward spin into resentful love. How had this happened? I once again claimed, in my own mind, that this woman was some sort of mystical enchantress. “Never forget that. Your art may die, but your beauty will live on forever... and you must never forget that.” I was never sure if that was the right thing to say, in implying that her art would be deceased one day. All art dies, given a long enough time line.

“
That would never be a problem if you were around to remind me of my beauty,” she replied to me, casting a shy gaze my way. She was certainly working her angle on a continuous basis and I could only count down the minutes until our next promiscuous romp, if only to silence her shaky heart strings and perpetual mood swings.

We drank heavy scotch in a dark smoky bar, sitting across from a peat stove and playing cards as a squeezebox whined in the background. I had sent over a pint of beer to the ferociously badgering player, and he had discontinued his playing long enough to swig the pint in one shot and cast me a grateful nod before submerging himself into his next playful jig. Soon after, a troupe of young men entered and joined the squeezebox player, all stomping on the floor in unison, shaking the entrails of the bar to its very core. When I took leave to the basement, where the unkempt piss-soaked bathrooms were housed, I marveled at the undersides of the beams, that which supported the upper floors. They shook uncontrollably, looking as though they would snap at any moment, crushing us all while weeing away our lagers. It felt as though I had stepped into a cacophonous house of demons, and that the demons were perturbed by something I had done. Something in this thought sent a shiver through my bones and I had difficulty with my stream.