Was it because he took another Xanax, or that third vodka and soda poured heavy into my rocks glass after work before all this? I’m not drunk, but I can’t tell. Not drunk yet, I can tell. Now we’re stuck playing Pokemon Go in a gondola at the apex of the St. Louis Wheel.
“Babe, any good raids going on?” His voice comes out Benzo flat through his mask, and I boil at that pet name when he sounds like this. Not all the time. Not when we’re being gross and tossing it back and forth in some game, playing babe-badminton.
“We’re sitting right next to each other, trapped at the top of a Ferris wheel, we see the same fucking things,” close my eyes hard enough to see pinwheels before opening them again. He sniffs. It’s an icebox. The ride is supposed to pause for a bit at the top so you can enjoy the scenic view from a carnival ride no one wanted in the city, me extra so, in the back parking lot or what used to be St. Louis’ “grand” Union Station. The trains don’t come or go anymore. The ride is supposed to pause for long enough for you to take pictures. Union Station is one of those almost-ghost-malls now renovated and sold thirty times, now trying to re-brand itself as a destination in the middle of a pandemic that’s killing and killing and killing. They have black light paintball, a new incredibly overpriced aquarium, and a few upscale stores unyet shuttered because of Covid, an attached Hilton, and a two hundred foot tall London Eye knockoff with scenic views of a decaying riverfront, office buildings abandoned months ago to rewild now crawling with Legionnaires disease in their ventilation systems, and that terrorist federal building. This giant white dick with columns stuck under its dome that just scream that they’re shards of toothpicks shoved under the glans of a stubby cock.
The view out the other side of the gondola is flat lights and buildings like pimples scattered out to the suburbs, an engulfing blue-black darkness that I hate.
I can see Arsenal’s lit up dome from here, the state psychiatric hospital. It’s the highest point in the city. Once Rack sent me a vintage postcard with a picture of it in black and white at peak asylum on the front. On the back he had written in his perfect slanted cursive, “hey, at least we’ll always have a place to retire.”
“Are you catching anything good?” He asks the same questions again and again when he knows I’m seething. Somewhere buried I know he means well, but his voice is love flattened by pharma.
“What did I just say? I’m spinning stops for more balls, everything around here is shit,” and I spin a Pokestop.
We’re never on the same page. If I wanted sushi yesterday, he’ll make me a steak today. When we first started dating it was never this bad. There was a charm to it that didn’t make me grit my teeth. If all I want is encouragement because I’m trying to get into painting to relax, he can’t just be nice and encouraging, he turns into an art critic, then when the painting is done and he loves the thing it just sounds like so much sucking up. One presidency later and in the middle of a pandemic in the winter and his surprise solution at the end of a long week is to treat me by going out when I’m not hungry for anything but grape tomatoes and a cucumber, and fifteen dollars to get stuck at the top of an amusement park ride fucked into the parking lot behind a repurposed train station. I assume this is officially stuck from technical difficulties or operator error or God hates me after a twelve-hour shift. When the ride lurched to a stop with a jerk and creaked under some strain it sent us plinking against the glass and walls. When he hit the door it made that noise, the one when your car door isn’t all the way closed, but it’s shut just enough so you have to open it back up and slam it.
That was when I took the first swig from my flask. God’s hand had just flicked us with one finger to remind me that he hates us, but he hates me in particular.
When the ride stopped with us up here my phone’s battery was full. I’m down to 50%.
When the ride trapped us I reached across him to see if I could open the door and then slam it back shut, but I couldn’t.
“Are you going to jump out or something to get away from me?” he asked.
“You’re fucking stupid,” I said.
Now at 48% Rack pulls a pill bottle out of his jacket and opens it one handed, pours a tiny white Lego into his mouth and chews, caps the orange bottle and puts it back in his jacket. Seen him do this one handed Benzo dive enough times that the dexterity and speed it happens with doesn’t impress me anymore. Doesn’t impress me when his mouth tastes like a chemistry set when we kiss and chewed up pill grit gets in my mouth.
I do my version of the same thing in mimic, but with a flask full of 190 Everclear mixed with a little bit of soda water.
We quit harping on each other about this stuff years ago, but.
“You just needed another so you can just not panic, numb up, and be calm all the time” I’m not slurring my words. “You think that makes you special. How many have you even had today?”
Rack shrugs and nods at me, “is that everclear and soda, or vodka tonight? Do you want a bite of Xanax to calm down?” The audacity of this motherfucker. He knows I have a bad reaction to Xanax, and he saw me pour the everclear into the flask and asked me if that seemed like a bit much BEFORE we left the apartment.
“You know,” I start, but he reaches over and lays his hand on mine. Rack’s huge, tall and broad, fills a doorway. Statues carved big as gods are smaller than him and even more when he’s hunched over in his seat in a one size fits nobody his size gondola. His hand covers both mine and my phone. I Look up and he’s turned at me, messed hair from when I ran my hands through it before the anger started to burn. Even his stupid fucking eyes are one milligram Xanax football blue, his quarantine beard has six grey hairs in it that I pluck every time they grow back in, and I can see each one of them sticking out from under his mask.
“Babe, do you remember what we’re fighting about, or do you just want to fight?” he asks.
“God, I hate you sometimes,” I say, but don’t know, not really . “Did you put something in my fucking drink?” He wouldn’t need to though, black out a lot and just keep going, ask what happened later. He’d never put something in my drink. Blacking out though, that’s how I’ve missed most of the best sex of my life with him. How I’ve forgotten whole sincere conversations and said I wish I could remember while he makes that almost cry but can’t Benzo face. Reserved, calm, polite, kind, vengeful, fuck with me and I will kill you, but self-conscious. I took the videos he told me. I said I was blacked out and boundaries. Still stewing over it. Overthinking my overthinking. We both grew up chubby and abused. I didn’t believe it until he played me ancient phone videos and showed me pictures he keeps hidden.
My father beat me with a broom. I think this is a South East Asian thing really. No friends. Beat me into being successful while mom watched. He suffered through a string of his alcoholic mom’s boyfriends that beat him and almost got him repossessed by the Commonwealth of Kentucky. Early on in that romantic phase where you’re moon fucked for each other we would both randomly bring something horrible up from our childhoods then high five and go “trauma bonding, yay!”
Betrayal. Never betray me. Was that this fight? Videos of us in bed that I might have taken while drunk? “You keep betraying my trust.” There’s a lot of easy targets because he’s a fuckup with a panic disorder. The creative bohemian with a shady past who side hustles everything to try to keep up with the pharmacist who did everything right and wants a partner because I’m practical, I love, I’m loyal, I’m filled with rage, but I’m not a sugar momma. Smack his hand away and continue to catch cute digital cartoon bullshit that doesn’t exist. This and walking and an eating disorder, my three hobbies.
It was not like this, was not like this with him before he fucked that one bitch, that one pretty skinny bitch before we were “official”, but after we’d both said the L word. We’d been together for a Pusheen calendar and he fucked this bitch, then he whined. “We’re not official. We’ve never discussed boundaries. You’re still technically married.” Whatever, dog, filth, asshole, slingshot arguments. Cease fires. Therapy. Excuses. How can you say you love someone and fuck someone else? “A fuck can just be a fuck,” he said back then. Three trips around the sun later and he knows I am bad at forgiveness, I hold resentment as in lockjaw from rabies, and for no reason we’re still together. It’s not all bad, I’m just trash. He’s trash, but he can’t admit it. He’s inconsiderate trash, but he’s working on it. He’s an asshole, but he loves me. I love him most of the time. We’re both in therapy.
My phone is at 30%. “Babe, there’s a Larvitar right on top of us.” My favorite Pokemon evolves from this cute little green thing into the Pokémon equivalent of Godzilla. I hoard them. He never doesn’t point out something I already see.
“I see it,” I tell him while catching it. “And it’s garbage,” when I check its stats. Rack shrinks away from me but our legs are still touching, even with him huddling close to the door. If I made a drinking game out of every time he states the obvious, tells me something I already see, or just parrots what I just said back to me because that’s how he’s an “active listener” I’d be dead by now from alcohol poisoning in this fucking gondola.
“Yeah, I see it. We both see the same Pokes. You’re just annoying me now. And we’ve been up here for too long.” If I don’t get 30k steps in on my Fitbit a day to go with my three hours of sleep during the work week it is impossible for anyone to put up with me except the other pharmacists. Haven’t eaten anything all day either. Double tap the fitbit on my wrist. 12k steps. “You really fucked this one up.”
“Yeah, I know,” he says, the trained and beaten tiger in the circus act. “I’m sorry,” he’s said the word so many times that it has lost all meaning in the past three years, and there is no placeholder in my brain for what it actually means now. “I just thought you’d like to get out and walk some and relax at the end of a long week. You always want to get out. We walked here all the way from Tower Grove and it’s only twelve k steps? How is that possible. And the restaurant. I just want to make you happy. I love you.” It’s word vomit that has been said again, and again, and again in different iterations and different situations, but never stuck at the top of a goddamn Ferris Wheel through a facemask in the dead of fucking winter.
Cursing a lot, not slurring yet. Forgetting would be ideal so take another mouthful swig from the flask.
“I don’t think you love anything.” When in doubt, attack to shut him up. Sounds fake anyway. Everyone says that’s just how he talks. The problem is he knows too many fucking words.
“Do you notice the Team Rocket Balloon?” he asks at 27% charge.
I take a big drink.
He takes another pill or two. Can’t tell. May not remember any of this later. May wake up cuddling. May not be able to tell if the whole gondola is swaying, or just that I’m drunk.
He inhales and it’s so crisp I shudder. He breathes loud. It bothered when we first got together. Now Rack breathes shallow, only even hear a whisper of breath if he’s asleep. Doesn’t snore. Either wraps himself around me or sleeps flat on his back. I called him a giant’s corpse once, Prometheus, then straddled him and bit at where his liver is.
No, fire. All happiness is burn, burn, burning. Throw entire reels of film, SD cards, photo books, on the fire. Delete everything in Google photos. Set the first edition copy of his favorite book I got him that he could never in his life afford on fire and piss on it. Fuck you. This not fun. Keep blinking. Bang my head against the back of seat. Like a lint roller plush but on hard plastic. Punch myself in the gut three times, grab at myself, you’re fat, you’re fat, you’re fat. I walk and starve myself to eat. I binge. I hate him. I hate the dinner we had. Spent half our meal making IG post of the plate to fuck with him because idiot won’t eat without me. Fuck you, eat cold food. Fuck you, you fucked that skinny pretty bitch. You knew that would hurt me so fucking bad and you did it anyway and all you have are excuses. Now therapy, not couples, probably too late, you dumb fuck. And then his hand wraps all the way around my wrist. Can’t move it tight. Scary strong. Scary mad. Scary mental. I growl, look up at him, know my eyes are black holes.
“Let go, I’m punching myself because I’m fat and angry, an you have to see it,” I say, snarl, crooked bottom teeth bared. “I’m fucking mad at you anyway idiot.”
“You’re not fat, you have body dysmorphia, just like I do. You starve yourself and it’s not your fault that your cousins are your age and all look like twelve-year olds,” he says. Fuck my Asian family for all this trauma. Fuck Rack for knowing me and saying something right. Fuck validation, effective communication, and his smooth brain voice, calm but not deep enough to be sexy like I always want. “Now if you just calm down and listen to me for like, two minutes. I have something to tell you.” I can’t read his face. His bone structure is so severely Slavic I always say he should play professional poker. His beat circus tiger eyes say this is what he needs from me, to listen.
Fuck “amygdala soothing exercises.” I’ll die mad.
“I’m still mad,” but unclench every muscle that can and fall slack against the plush and hard ass numbing seat. Lights outside the gondola double. Drunk. Hate how he can calm me down just enough when I’m just here with just some stupid words. When you think about it, the gateway arch is just one big stainless-steel pussy sticking up out of the ground sorta, doubled. These fights cycle. Since quarantine and COVID, time your watch by them. Fuck. He’s the one always saying that shit, time doesn’t exist like before. By the end of this, in the morning, before I pour my first drink and look for clean scrubs, fight won’t matter. We’ll probably fuck. We’ll probably make up. I’ll probably black out and want him so bad, but fuck Rack for that too. Oxytocin is a lie.
“Story,” he says. “Just a few minutes babe.”
I jerk, angry child shrug, and he starts doing that thing where he pets my fucking hair, pushes loose strands behind my ear. Don’t like it but want it. Is this the fade to black for the night? Behind these masks are our mouths. Part of me wants his. Why do I want him? “You better hurry up and tell it before I black out,” say it like the trash bitch I can be.
He’s still petting my hair, but grabs one of my hands with his other. He loves my hands. I love his hands but hate him. I hate his hands but love him. Blink to focus. Fuck you Rack. I want to fuck you Rack. Being stuck here Rack. All these here’s. They balloon out past the top of this Ferris wheel. Stuck in all these here’s.
Holding that hand, he rubs it like I like, and we play finger spiders, touching finger pads together then clasping hands then fuck.
“Are you here, babe, are you listening?” he asks. I nod nod nod nod don’t nod out blackout.
“I’m here. Just keep holding my hand,” Fuck.
He kisses me on the forehead then leans back, close enough to feel the wind of his words and his whisper exhales.
“So, in this apocalyptic future me and you are wandering through the flat ground up ruined expanses of Kansas along highway 70. This is after Covid kills half of everyone and anthropocentric climate change devastates the globe. Crop failures because winters go haywire, it’s 140 degrees in Arizona all year round, water wars turn into a thing all over the globe, the birth rate continues to plummet until everything about humanity is shrinking while everything that’s not us is thriving. The rewilding of the suburbs and even the cities goes into overdrive because humanity, take the current population and cut it in half.
“In the start Amazon makes robots to cover for the lack of stable workforce because of endemic and constant new zoonotic viral vectors and to care for what’s left of the US gerontocratic failed plague state run by corporate Gods and a handful of aging oligarchs that all look like they’re 35 forever. Google makes better robots, who cares. War is perpetual, domestic terror is stochastic, or organized, the divisions in the country only smoldered into a crackling civil war that leaves more of the rabid dispossessed youth bombing houses that fly the blue lives matter flag proudly in suburban enclaves guarded by preppers and private security companies, or drones, or worse, black market combat droids from China or India or Russia or smuggled out of National Guard armories in the middle of the night with the American Flag laser etched on one shoulder and the Google G or the Amazon Star Smile logo on the other.
“And us? We’re both dirtier than you will ever let yourself get now, white light sober, rangy, healthy, fit, nothing to grab on your belly, no fat, only muscle from pain, built on a bedrock of the starvation you already put yourself through and the impossible urge you have to keep going. And in the burning heat under the climate fucked sun I’m almost as tan as you.
“We scavenge houses and cars, steal from the dead, eat when we can, and I never have a panic attack because I always have a reason for my hypervigilance. We sleep rough, pick through houses in little towns, houses full of skeletons, pretend to be those bones until we’re out of food and move on. We head west. Rumors or lies of coastal sanctuary towards BC or Washington or they’ve built a Thunder Dome on the Oregon coast, on the beach, I don’t know, neither of us cares.
“We have the best sex of our lives, and you remember it. You calm down and your affection is palpable because your dream has come true, life boils down to a binary of survival. You live or you die. You eat or you don’t. You love or you’re alone. You fuck or you cry because the world ended. We sleep in barren fields on cooling dirt staring up at the stars and talk about how things were before. How we’d never imagined anything like this would really happen. We talk about how it was a fever dream, couldn’t happen until it did, share a cigarette every once in a while and you never complain that it smells
“One day off 70 in this Kansas we find a Wal-Mart Super Center with the power on, roof caved in, half blown to rubble on one side, but with that rarified commodity of in building grid connected and running electricity. So, we go inside, and we run to the freezer aisles in grocery to see if there’s anything with an expiration date that will probably outlive us still worth picking over or eating
“And inside one of the cases behind the glass door, right next to your favorite never goes bad who knows what it’s made from Halo Top ice cream, there’s a fuckin’ dead combat android in the freezer. We debate until we decide that we should investigate. Fuck the risk, you say. So, we open the freezer door and it falls clattering on the floor covered in frost. You get your Halo Top ice cream out. It’s freezer burnt and you start to eat it with your hands. You kick this humanoid thing while you eat, blaming it for fucking everything up when you really know it was all of us, that thing on the floor is just a side effect of a cascading systems failure that started before we were even born.
“You kick and kick and blame it until there’s a cellphone noise. Bwee, like a laptop booting, and the thing rolls over. We’re both in shock but it rolls over onto an elbow and puts a hand up, arm shielding its face, and says it’s sorry. I pull out a pistol to send it to Google’s Inferno Silicon Valley hell or wherever, but it just keeps that defensive posture and says, don’t shoot. Please, can I come with you? I’m not for combat anymore.
“And somehow it has my face, my height, sorta looks like me. We deliberate with me pointing a gun at its head and decide yeah, we could use the company, maybe it can play Spotify still or has wifi, can charge our dead phones, whatever.
“The point is we let it come with us across Kansas through all these little shit towns, doing everything we do, visiting every dead highway tourist trap, pretending to eat, powering down at night. We think it watches us fuck, maybe it’s jealous, who cares? Can a robot even be jealous? We’re way past ethics at that point. Meat is meat, and robots aren’t meat, have no hearts, don’t breathe, and this one was built to kill.
“You just call it robot. I don’t address it. It starts to wear some of my clothes that it stole from my pack sometime, but we can’t put a finger on when. It carries both of our packs. The Spotify thing was right. Robot plays us Ghost and Father John Misty and all these songs we haven’t heard in years. And we dance. We get so drunk on spoiled wine and vodka. Then somewhere along the road at night after we’ve passed out dead drunk and happy this robot murders me in my sleep. Cuts my head off with my own machete in two smacks, throws my head on the fire and curls up next to you. The fucked-up thing is you don’t even notice or care. I die drunk in my sleep with not a second to make a noise but a gurgle, then it’s cuddling you while the fat in my face barbecue melts and my hair sizzles with that rancid smell you can’t name. The burnt hair smell doesn’t bother you by then you’re so desensitized to it from years of burning bodies.”
“Baby, this is a strange story,” Now I’m fading.
“Shush, and for some reason you just accept it, and by the time you hit the imperceptible sloping foothills of the Rockies that used to be bright green but now even in high summer are dull yellow, headed to whatever is left of Denver, right at Kanorado on the border leaning against an overturned excavator, you realize it’s really, really not me, that thing. Robot. And it never will be. It doesn’t talk like me, it doesn’t fuck like me, it doesn’t put up with your shit like me, like you want it to, it didn’t stay there while you abused it and fought with it like me, it didn’t know you before it knew you, it didn’t care about you until it mimed everything about me. It’s just a fucking robot. It’s a military grade dick that can protect you, that you can project anything on. And in this future, you fucking cry. You start to fucking cry and you never stop.”
Fading.
“Love you babes,” he says.
The story is done. He leans over. Kiss me on lips. I bite his. Snarl but I’m not mad. Be cute. Bad story but feel it warm. Fatalistic. I hate people. Love him. Hate him. Lets go of cold hand. No hand petting head.
He turns to his side of a tiny blurry gondola, slams body against the door and it pops open thunk. He jumps out into the night sky, hangs a blink, and he’s gone down, down, down, leaving a view of clouds, the arch, his soap smell mix with his perfume mix with the alcohol on my breath.
Wait.
I panic inhale myself sober in one deep, deep, deep, sharp breath, sharp enough my insides burn like I’ve been swigging lava all night and I feel knife slashed across my chest. Wind whips hair into my face and my Fitbit says my heart rate is tachy. What just happened. “RACK!” I yell. The gondola is still empty and the door is still open. I’ve pressed myself against the opposite wall. No more double vision. My hands go so cold. He loves warming up my hands. “Rack?”
Crawl to the edge of the open gondola door. 200 feet up. Anxiety wraps around my heart like a Brazilian Rainbow Boa making every heartbeat faster, smaller, until I peek my head over the edge of the open door, look down, and…
Nothing.
Nobody. No Body down there. There’s no body of Rack. No Giant splattered on the ground. No blood. Nothing. When the bile and alcohol comes up it’s bright orange and goes all down my tits and soaks around my torso and sputters and falls out into the night air because I’m almost biting the edge of the bottom of the gondola door. I don’t even fart in public, but I vomit without any problem in this second while tears start to run and I’m having a heart attack. Don’t aspirate on your own vomit, you’re a medical professional. This is when I do pass out, but not just because I’m drunk.
Two years ago in our apartment I asked babe if she knew what the Everett Hypothesis of the many worlds interpretation was in the middle of an argument where she was calling me stupid just to be a defensive dick about it. The argument didn’t stop there, never stopped there, and I was beaten into place eventually.
The sun is brighter than any I’ve ever seen as I take a breath into new flesh and feel everything as distant tactile static reverberating through me like a tuning fork gone haywire. “Babe” she’s been crying, “you don’t have to pretend to breathe.”
“Wait, what?” I ask. And that’s one click off from my voice. She’s listening to Queens of The Stone Age, The Vampyre of Time And Memory, low, and the sound is coming out of me but I’m not singing.
“I said you don’t have to pretend to breathe Babe,” she says. I’m walking behind her down the middle of a section of Highway 70 that I know I should recognize but it’s foreign. Smoke in the distance. Houses I remember from traveling years ago have disappeared or look like rubble heaps. Tarps flap in dead trees to our north, slapping blue plastic bird wings in a hot wind.
She’s carrying a pack that’s worn and patched, something that was probably like, fifty thousand dollars at an REI a million years ago. Her life is strapped to it and hung from it. “Babe let me carry that for you?” I ask.
“Could you just shut up, I said I wasn’t letting you carry my pack anymore,” she says. I have a pack on my back. Look down and BDU’s I would never wear, a kimono over a hoodie. My bare arms are black, jointed oddly, and everything feels so much harder than skin. When lungs don’t expand while breathing panic sets in.
“Where are we and what’s going on and what the fuck?” I ask. “Where are we?”
“Did you fall and scramble your wetware you hunk of shit, we’re going to Colorado,” she yells without turning around. “We’re going to Denver and I don’t even know why.”
“I just jumped out of a fucking Ferris Wheel,” I say. “Am I dead? This is a story I made up.”
“This isn’t a story you piece of”—and she loses the words in her throat.
“Yeah, I’d been planning this for days, maybe weeks, but it just happened. I killed myself,” I say.
Her shoulders jerk up and down in that rare whole-body physical laugh she carries in her and exhales a crying laugh, “Oh, yeah, you sure the fuck did kill yourself. You cut Rack’s head off with a machete and I just kept on going because everything is shit and we’re all going to die. I hope you kill me next. At least you can’t fit into my fucking clothes.”
No.
“scattered out to the suburbs, an engulfing blue-black darkness that I hate.”
I feel this line greatly. When looking out over any night sky, it’s the patches of darkness that make me feel sad
Twisty knotty joy... this is what The Last of Us could have been, and that's saying something because The Last of Us is great (IMO). Emil manages to be more real and scarier than Kings The Stand while showing any Marvel Hack exactly how un-annoying (made-up word #41) a multiverse story can be when written like he hates all of the worlds he can think. Bloody loved this... Might be my Fav Emil story I've read.