As if to interrupt the growing rift in mine and Don's own relationship, the swearing and physical brawls, broken lamps and TV remotes, Don's cousin made the leap to split with her boyfriend, and so she asked for a little help getting back onto her feet. She made a home for herself on our couch, confiscated and pressed the remote firmly between her thighs. Don patted her on the back so she'd know she was going to be taken care of. She flinched and winced, and that's when we knew. I asked kindly if she would lift the back of her shirt. We looked at the three oval brown spots that had, according to Jessie, poofed into existence overnight, as a result of her sleepwalking. "Or it's these cheap bras I wear," she said. I felt bad for her, but I didn't like how she expected Don to give in to her when we were the ones who needed help, the ones who needed couples therapy. I had enough on my emotional plate without the intrusion of an external force.
I was an LPN and dealt professionally with an inundation of emotional trauma. I saw wives cry over the emaciated remains of their husbands, husbands indifferently sunken into waiting room chairs, skin as dry as the pleather they sank into. If the patients weren't crying, bored, pulling their own hair with myriad illnesses, then they were pulling my hair, pinching my arms, telling me how much they liked so and so better. Then there were the doctors, who complained about practically everything. Cody, is that a coke you left out there? You know what a hazard that can be? You know how much better it used to be when so and so worked the night shift?
I asked Don, "Did she file a report against him?"
"I don't think she would do that."
"She didn't say?"
"I didn't ask," Don said.
"How long does she plan on staying?"
"I don't know. We'll figure something out," he said.
The whole thing made me nervous. I went to the bedroom, sat in the corner on the floor, and stacked the wooden castle blocks which I kept hidden under the bed.
#
Three days later, Jessie started making jokes about killing herself. She said if we were out of the apartment too long we might come home and find her cold body in the bathtub.
"Can you not look so serious all the time, Cody?"
"I just don't like when you make jokes like that," I said. "I work at a hospital and I'm gone most of the day. You know what I mean?"
"Do you really think I'd off myself in your bathroom?"
"I don't know what you would do. I'm just trying to make sure this isn't like a cry for help. I can't take off from work to keep an eye on you."
"I'm not asking you to take off for shit," she said.
And then came the shutdown, as though my not laughing at her joke had thrown her into a deep, dark well.
#
Don was no help. He'd been going out more than usual. Sometimes, he would come home and lock himself in the bathroom and watch religious programming. He talked about the possibility of going back to church. But he worked at a vape shop and didn't think he would fit in. He left half-eaten Hungry Man dinners for me to clean up and started doing this thing with his nails where he sort of popped them against each other like he had something to say, but never quite figured out the words.
We both had depression, anxiety, and smoked a lot of marijuana. He gave me couch-side speeches, sometimes, implying I was the one with the self-help issues, that whatever I prescribed to Don was a projection of myself.
On multiple occasions, Don tried to convince me that all possible solutions to the riddle of my depression lay within our inability to solve arguments in a more civilized manner. We argued about alone time. He wanted me to show up to his work, on occasion, to give him company. We argued about the way the furniture was arranged (the couch and the chaise, a matching set, were too close to one another), about going back to school, about seeing our families. But it was impossible to be civilized when Don flexed around uncontrollably, when he threw chairs, leapt off the couch and stormed off to his room, slamming both the bedroom door and his bathroom door with great force, as though percussion was our common language. Sometimes he would scream uncontrollably, at himself, in the mirror, head shaking.
I drove to the coast to clear my mind. Don called, and I told him I just needed a little space for a moment. I was going to the coast to clear my head a little bit, that's all.
On the way, I thought of ways to get rid of Jessie. I could trash the living room and blame it on her. I could purposely infest us with bedbugs. If one wanted to cause a sort of biological warfare in the city for cheap, bedbugs were the best way to go about it. I would have enough reason to kick her out, then.
I stopped at an intersection and let the window down to smoke, but I couldn't find my cigarettes. At the corner a man stood wearing a tank top too big for his slender frame. I stuck my head out the window and asked if he needed a lift.
"You gay?" he asked me.
"What?"
"I said are you gay?"
The man's voice had a weary pitch about it, like he was sick of being picked up by men who wanted to fuck him.
#
In the morning when I got back to the apartment Don gave me the spiel about why I should never disappear like that, and I better be thankful I answered the phone because he was about to call the cops.
"Can you even do that?" I asked, in my best calm voice.
"Can I call the cops? You bet your ass I can."
The next day I learned that Jessie couldn't find anywhere else to stay. She didn't know how long she was going to be around, which was nearly worse than knowing it would be a month or longer. It was worse than knowing she would be around six months. It was worse because she was taking advantage of us—eating our food, borrowing money, taking up emotional space. Not knowing how long she'd be around played to her advantage. It made her transient, and therefore we were made to feel sorry for her, and "give her a break," as she so often needed.
"No. Like no. Three days, tops," I said. I was putting my foot down. I was afraid to push the subject further with Don here.
Don said things. I said more things. Then we calmed down and stopped talking about it. We did not reach agreements, but slowed to a crawl, exhausted.
There was Jessie, looking around at the place like she was some kind of ornament that didn't belong anywhere. She took her position on the couch, took off her shoes and dragged down the quilt, covered herself like we weren't even standing there, arguing over her presence. I never understood how people could do these sorts of vulnerable things in front of other people, just sprawl out on a friend's couch and cover their face, knowing they were being watched.
"Where are you going?" she asked as I gathered my things.
"To get some air."
"Cody just like, sits around all day and stares at the wall."
Then he told Jessie that I'd been keeping wooden blocks under my bed, which I stack sometimes to help myself calm down.
I didn't care that Jessie knew about me. But I cared that Don was telling her about me. She was like a knot on the couch with big ears, and despite there not being anyone out there to really talk to about me, that there wasn't anyone who cared anyway, it still mattered, I still felt very at risk and childish.
#
I came home from work and Jessie had torn open several boxes of cereal and was pouring each cereal into plastic containers.
At least Jessie did things around the apartment when she came, whether I wanted her to or not. Next she poured our cereal into plastic containers that were bigger than the original boxes, which annoyed me.
"They won't fit back in the cabinet like that," I said.
"They're not going back in the cabinet," she said. "They're going in the pantry."
"It's more convenient when they're in the cabinet."
"But you just said they won't fit. Do you want me to pour this back in its box?"
She snatched the box from the counter.
"Don't do that," I said.
"Why do you do this whenever I'm around? You know I already have trouble as it is and you don't have to criticize me. I was just trying to help."
And she threw a cereal box into the sink. Then she threw a plastic container full of cereal into the sink, causing yellow pebbles to explode into the air.
What I did when Jessie lost her mind like that was go to my bedroom, close the door, and sit on the corner of the bed, I'd count my fingers over and over, I'd flatten them out on the bedsheets, I'd go to the mirror and examine the veins in my eyes, study patterns in the ceiling, how sometimes you could find a face splattered in the paint, I'd stack my wooden blocks and turn on a DVD and listen to the menu loop as I fell asleep. I'd wake up in a sweat, I'd think about going to the kitchen to cook breakfast food and drink hibiscus tea. But there was this dull pain in my head, sleeplessness, a weight which hung under my eyes in my skin like bags of pond water.
I went to the beach, where nobody knew what I knew about being out on the sand, freezing cold water running over your feet. I refused to talk about the smell of the beach, how dead fish rotted in the weeds, and it was never quite hot enough to intensify the smell, but that when a boat whizzed by, more dead things would wash up, and if you were feeling particularly good you might take a dead fish by the mouth, using a stick of course, and chase your older brother with it. And there were plenty of happy stories in regards to the ocean, most of them having something to do with clams: my father unearthing them with a posthole digger, my brother digging with his bare hands. And there were the clams that we dropped onto the sand—I watched one escape into the mush, one end disappearing, devouring the sand in front of it, its other end blasting sand out. It looked like an efficient way to bury oneself and hide, if not for the little dimple they left behind, which is how my father and brother identified their whereabouts to dig them up.
When I returned home, it was the middle of the day and Don had gone out. That was fine. It was his business that he was out, and I couldn't help believing he was on the road to becoming a phantom, someone I used to love who died and now haunted the apartment, leaving trash on tables and broken shards of ceramic on the floor.
There was Jessie on the floor wrapped in a bath towel, crying. I was painting my pinky nail, nervously. The sound of a person crying reminded me of families crying in waiting areas and outside patients' rooms. I didn't even ask whether it was possible that I'd started to care for Jessie for the first time in a long time. This was a real, visceral cry, like she'd lost someone close to her. I asked if she needed a blanket.
"I don't need anything," she said.
"What happened?"
"Nothing, I'm fine." She smiled and lay back against the couch, rolled over onto her side, and balled up her legs. She merged with the body of the couch.
"Look—if you need something, just let me know. I know I can be hard to deal with. But I don't want to see you hurt anymore than Don does."
She didn't respond. But within moments she was standing in my doorway, still holding the towel around herself.
"Can I get a ride? I need to deposit a check."
So, playfully, I told her to get her ass dressed. We could deposit her check and ride around for a bit if it would help her to feel better.
Now the sky was overcast. Wind moved the treetops. Jessie looked out the window on the way to the bank. She handed me the check when we got to the window and I gave her a deposit slip. She filled out all the necessary information and, glancing at the check, I saw that it had been made out by her mother. The tube zipped up into the ceiling.
"I need you to take me to Phil's."
"You want me to go with you to Phil's?"
And a twinge of irritation came back. I didn't want to get involved with her and her ex-boyfriend. It worried me. Jessie scratched the flesh under her nose, held her forehead with her fingers.
"Please," she said.
Phil's place was on the heel of a cul-de-sac, a tiny brick duplex with a white knee-high wall next to the drive. Some kind of ivy ravaged the back fence and the next house over, which was made of a chalky white layer of bricks with yellow insulation puffing through the seams. Foil had been placed over the windows. Something knocked as the wind blew, a light rain sprayed against the sidewalk. I didn't want to go inside. I was out of my body for a moment. I felt cold in my chest. Then Jessie knocked and Phil came to the door and let us in. Phil, tall and muscular with cheekbones that jutted out like rocks, had shaving cream on one half of his head. He brought us in and sat us on the couch and told us to hold on.
Two other guys came out of the back room. One leaned against the bar, the other sat on a wooden chair by the television. Both of them were skinny, tall, and stoic. Eventually he came back with half a clean head.
"Who's this?"
"This is my best friend Cody. He gave me a ride here."
"This is sixty," Phil said.
"Okay."
"So in total that's one-eighty."
"Okay," Jessie said.
Phil gave her a little bag, balled up so tight I thought it was trash.
Jessie told me to hold the bag. I looked at it a moment and looked at Jessie.
I asked, as though we had plans, "You ready to hit the road?" But she'd already followed Phil to the back. The guy sitting by the television came and joined me on the couch. He turned the television on. The other guy sat at a barstool and propped himself on his elbow.
"You want some water or something," the guy at the counter said.
"I'm good, man."
We watched some kind of cop drama.
Outside, the gravel popped, a car door slammed.
In walked three more guys. One of them wore cargo shorts, had a fat pistol sticking out of his right pocket.
We sat around the living room watching television while Jessie did whatever Jessie did in the back room with Phil.
The guys in the living room talked, and I tried to keep my hands out of my pockets. I didn't understand what they were saying. They opened drinks. It was okay, them talking, me not saying anything, because they seemed not to notice me. The guy with the pistol kept lunging, blowing his face up in my direction like he wanted to spit at me, but I think it was because I was involved in his story, and this was an act, and I had no right to think that this guy wanted to spit at my face. And then they started talking in random spurts, ignoring me again for the most part, until one of them asked if I had a daughter.
"What?"
"You got a daughter?" He pointed at the blue polish on my pinky, freshly dried.
"Yeah," I said. "Five-year-old." And as I curled my finger under my palm I wondered if I looked old enough to have a five-year-old.
I caught bits and pieces of what they were saying:
"When I told him yeah, there was yeah. He looked like my bro from well…"
"Pop him in the fuckin jaw."
"I socked him in the fuckin jaw. Hung off by the fuckin skin."
Phil joined us in the living room. He squeezed onto the couch next to me. There were other things I learned as they talked. There was an impromptu shooting range out back, through the dumpsters. No noise complaints. In the washroom there was a freezer box full of guns. I learned that Jessie was in the bedroom asleep. I glanced back to see her pants hung over a chair. Phil, while he had a quasi white-nationalist background, had left all that because he'd been fired from his job. He'd been here at the cul-de-sac for a long time, he owned a boat, most of his t-shirts were black, he had a Bullet-Bill tattoo on his ankle obscured by hair. He reached down to his ankle and adjusted his socks.
"What's your name?"
Phil seemed irritated with me. I didn't know why.
"I'm just here with Jessie."
"You're just here with Jessie."
"She just told me to give her a ride."
"You listen to everything she tells you?"
"Oh, hell no," I said, because he had this look on his face like he couldn't stand the thought of Jessie being friends with a guy.
Then he told me to get up and go with him. Because there was something he wanted to talk about. It was something important, and he had this glazed look on his face now like he'd never been irritated by me. We walked out back, Phil's hand on my neck. We went through the gate and stopped at a drainage canal with green, muddy edges. Phil lit a cigarette. Then he shook his head and threw the cigarette down and stamped it with his boot.
"I want to marry Jessie."
"Okay," I said. "But didn't you just break up?"
"I need to talk to her father."
"I don't know her father. You want to talk to him?"
“Yeah," he said. "That's what people do."
We looked at the green, muddy edges.
The other guys were still back at the house, doing whatever guys do when they're alone in the house. But I expected them to come out and join us. I was nervous, and I looked around for ways I could get back to the car if I needed to, and I hated Don, and I never wanted to see him or Jessie or anybody I knew ever again.
Phil looked at the water, hands in his pockets, a deep sort of look indicating maybe he didn't bring me out here to hurt me. The ditch had a rotting smell to it.
"I just never saw myself as much boyfriend material."
"Me neither," I said.
"Really though. Be honest with me about her. I want to know what she's like when she's not with me."
"Honest with you how?"
"She said you're her best friend."
"I'm not."
"Then what the hell is she staying with you for?"
"I can't stand her," I said. "I know that's not what you wanted to hear. I'm just helping her out."
"You wouldn't marry her?"
I thought he was going to cry. His forehead was turned into a deep, red V. I'd gone too far. I wanted to tell him I wasn't boyfriend material, either. Would I marry Don? No. I'd be kidding myself if I thought that would work. I wanted to go home, I wanted to be in bed, I wanted to worry about all the old things I used to worry about, going to work the next day, seeing Don's friends, calling my parents.
"Goddamn," he said. "I'm stupid. Yeah. Hey. You're alright. Thanks for letting me dump my shit on you for a minute. I don't even know you. Hey, I know you don't like her, but I'm going to marry her. That's what I want to do."
"That's good," I said.
His eyes were practically bloodshot, like some drug-filled sack had just burst in his stomach and attacked his insides. Phil took the world's biggest drag on a cigarette and flicked it into the canal. "Come here," he said.
He stepped over the edge and lowered himself into the canal.
"What?"
“You want to see something? Come down here and look at this big fucking alligator."
I went down.
We were in the canal. Then Phil walked ahead of me. He walked towards the bridge, into a dark little hole where the sludge built up around the rim, the mouth running out water. His feet splashed. He didn't even care about his feet. He ducked down into the lip of the tunnel and looked back at me, a few yards away.
"Come on. I want to show you this thing."
I stuck my hands in my pockets. Phil gestured for me to come into the tunnel with him. But I turned tail and headed back to the house, not quite running, but not looking back, either.
"What the fuck, man? It's just an alligator, man. What the fuck?"
Phil was still in the tunnel when I started my climb out of the canal. He was like a mirage hunched over, shrinking, in the pipe.
I didn't bother going to the door. I needed someone to tell me what to do. I realized with sincerity that I didn't want to leave Jessie at this place. But I also knew that she would be fine, and that I'd wanted to be rid of her, that Don and I might be able to resume things—that once the fight was over, we might be able to resume things. On the way home, I told myself that I was not a horrible person. I was a good person. And I realized what I had done was wrong.
When I got back to the apartment, Don asked whether I'd seen Jessie. He didn't ask where I'd been. I wanted him to ask where I'd been, but the fear of losing him only lasted a moment, because I knew I wasn't trapped here, there were a million places in the world I could live. Wherever that was, there was no place for Don, and I could see myself being reasonably happy.
"I think she found a place," I said.
#
She never even called, so there must have been some truth to it.
"You left her with Phil?" he said.
"She was completely okay with it."
Don grabbed his coat and ran out the door. I listened as he echoed down the stairs, the final push onto the parking lot. Then I heard a car door open. Eventually there would be talks, and I would be able to talk, and it would be just the two of us, or the three of us. And if we had just the right kind of fight, I could get the hell out of this apartment, once and for all.
But Don was already back in the doorway, leaning in like some sort of cave diver: "That's fucked up, man. I just don't..." I didn't recognize his face. And I was about to say something intelligent but he had already closed the door.
Garrett Ashley's recent work has appeared in Reed Magazine, Moon City Review, DIAGRAM, Sonora Review, Grimoire, and Asimov's Science Fiction, among other places. "Boyfriend Material" is part of a novel in stories. He lives in Hattiesburg, Mississippi.
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